Davis, Kathy, Dr.

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

Kathy Davis is senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting chairs and research fellowships at Wellesley College, Columbia University, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University (United States) as well as the Maria Jahoda Chair for International Women’s Studies at Bochum University in Germany.
Her research interests include: contemporary feminist approaches to the body, the beauty culture and cosmetic surgery; biography as methodology, travelling theory; intersectionality, and transnational feminism.  She is the author of Power under the Microscope (1988), Reshaping the Female Body (Routledge, 1995), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) as well as several anthologies: The Gender of Power (Sage 1991), Negotiating at the Margins (Rutgers University Press 1992), Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Sage 1997), and The Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (Sage 2006) with Mary Evans and Judith Lorber.
Her most recent book The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Duke, 2007) was the recipient of several prizes: the Distinguished Book Prize for 2008 from the American Sociological Association Section Sex and Gender, the Eileen Basker prize from the American Anthropological Association, and the Joan Kelly prize for women’s history from the American Historical Association.
She is the editor of The European Journal of Women’s Studies (with Gail Lewis).

GEXCEL PROJECT
Wetlands:  postfeminist sexuality and the illusion of empowerment

This project explores the success and importance of the recent international bestseller Feuchgebiete  (Wetlands) among young, middle-class white women.  The book provides a graphic, confrontational, and, some would argue, pornographic narrative of a young woman’s explorations of her body and sexuality.  Using the book as a case, Davis shows how notions about women’s bodies, sexuality, and sexual agency  have (and have not) changed  since seventies feminism first put sexual empowerment on the agenda.  She shows  how young women’s struggles with the legacy of feminism and the emergence of postfeminism are played out in their search for sexual empowerment.