Zillah Eisenstein papers (Ms.2011.022)

Biographical / Historical

Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York, where she specializes in the politics of class, sex and race, political theory, feminist theory and gender construction. Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the U.S. and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization. She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the US, the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, and corporatist multiculturalism.

Eisenstein has written about her work building coalitions across women's differences: the black/white divide in the U.S.; the struggles of Serb and Muslim women in the war in Bosnia; the needs of women health workers in Cuba; the commitments of environmentalists in Ghana; the relationship between socialists and feminists in union organizing; the struggles against extremist fundamentalisms in Egypt and Afghanistan; the needs of women workers in India.

Books by Zillah Eisenstein include: The Audacity of Races and Genders, A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Campaign (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Against Empire: Feminisms, Race and the West (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 1996); Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (New York, NYU Press, 1998); Manmade Breast Cancers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981); and Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

Biographical information provided by the author courtesy of her publishers; http://faculty.ithaca.edu/eisenste/