Amazon.com: Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (9780896085763): Sonia Shah, Yuri Kochiyama, Karin Aguilar-San Juan: Books

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Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire [Hardcover]

Sonia Shah (Editor), Yuri Kochiyama (Preface), Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Foreword)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)


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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Asian American feminism is a political hybrid linking very different cultures. "We all share the same rung on the racial hierarchy and on the gender hierarchy," asserts Sonia Shah, the editor of this appropriately diverse collection of writings. In it, Shamita Das Dasgupta and her daughter, Sayantani Das Dasgupta, comment on both raising and being third-world activists in the American Midwest, teetering outside the approved boundaries of largely white feminist groups and the Indian community. Margarita Alcantara, editor of the zine Bamboo Girl; Leslie Mah, lead guitarist of Tribe 8; and oxymoronic moderator Selena Whang explode model minority images with a freewheeling round robin on issues and events facing self-identified queer, punk Asians. Community activists Bandana Purkayastha, Shyamala Raman, and Kshiteeja Bhide expound on their agency SNEHA, which embodies the contradictions faced by Asian American feminists trying to empower women while respecting cultural traditions. Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire is raw and powerful. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 241 pages
  • Publisher: South End Press (July 1, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0896085767
  • ISBN-13: 978-0896085763
  • Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,615,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sonia Shah is a science writer and critically acclaimed author whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere. Her latest book is "The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years" from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (July 2010).

Her prize-winning 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients (New Press), has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a tautly argued study...a trenchant exposé...meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence," and as "important [and] powerful" by The New England Journal of Medicine. The book, which international bestselling novelist and The Constant Gardener author John Le Carré called "an act of courage," has enjoyed wide international distribution, including French, Japanese, and Italian editions. The Library Journal named it one of the best consumer health books of 2006.

Her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories), was acclaimed as "brilliant" and "beautifully written" by The Guardian and "required reading" by The Nation, and has been widely translated, from Japanese, Greek, and Italian to Bahasa Indonesia. Her "raw and powerful" (Amazon.com) 1997 collection, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, still in print after 10 years, continues to be required reading at colleges and universities across the country.

Shah's writing, based on original reportage from around the world, from India and South Africa to Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia, has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, as well as on the BBC and Australia's Radio National. A frequent keynote speaker at political conferences, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. Her writing on human rights, medicine, and politics have appeared in a range of magazines from Playboy, Salon, and Orion to The Progressive and Knight-Ridder. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she's consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK. Shah is a former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.

Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and their two sons Zakir and Kush.

Photo by Joyce Ravid.

 

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Makes you ponder significant issues, January 12, 2003
By 
From Blue Jean Online

by Melisa Gao, Teen Editor

As soon as I picked up Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, I knew I wanted to read it. The originality of the book's title and its unconventional cover immediately attracted me. And I was curious: just how many Asian-American feminists are there, anyway?

As I began reading, I was caught off guard by the style and complexity of the writing. Dragon Ladies is a collection of essays written by various Asian-American activists-it's no light-hearted novel that you can breeze through. There's plenty of historical information, which can be dry at times (this could easily be used as a reference if you were writing a paper on feminists). But the majority of the essays contain thought-provoking discussions of serious issues that every young woman should reflect upon.

The contributors take different approaches to their subjects, which range from sexuality to domestic violence to the plight of workers, but they share a passion for their cause that is evident in every word of the book. Having little experience in political activism, I enjoyed reading the women's anecdotes depicting their struggles and successes.

The same conviction that makes the book worthwhile, however, may also turn off some of its readers. Even I, a liberal young Asian-American woman, found some of the essays too radical to be realistic. But the point of the book isn't necessarily to propagate these beliefs. As editor Sonia Shah explains in the introduction, "...[This book] provides a set of issues, terms, ideas, and stories for folks to talk about-whether it is to debunk and decry them or to transform them into an agenda for action."

Even if the book doesn't inspire you to become politically active, it will at least make you ponder some significant issues and reexamine your own beliefs. Read Dragon Ladies with an open mind, and you will gain from it.

Copyright 2002, Blue Jean Online

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars sistahs in the struggle, rock onn!, March 25, 2005
By 
social thinker in training "Anj" (02138, the most opinionated zip code in America (Cambridge, MA)) - See all my reviews
I read selections from this book for a junior tutorial class called "Feminist Political Thought." This compilation broadens the definition of "political" beyond elections and voting, emphasizing radical thought, thinking outside of the liberal/conservative binary, and grassroots social movements. The essays cover a broad range, from the politics within activist circles and how to deal with the inclusion/safe-space vs. staying true to one's values "paradox" to thoughtful discussions on organizing strategies to globalization's effects on Filipina overseas workers. I particularly liked this book because it was not East-Asian (American) centric in a good effort to reflect the complexities embedded in a collective identity, such as Asian American feminist. If you are interested in writing/social justice, the variety of essays also presents lots of methodologies.
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1 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars its ok but not as romantic, September 16, 2001
By A Customer
its ok but not as romantic as the notion, but its not the best written or organized books but the SM is important
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
Talking on the phone to a friend of mine, another Asian American woman who has worked in both broad leftist political spaces and identity-based circles, I tell her about this essay. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
domestic violence organizations, migrant women workers, homecare workers, battered families, parade organizers
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Asian American, United States, South Asian, New York, Third World, San Francisco, Asian Indian, Hong Kong, Cibo Matto, Selena Whang, South End Press, Yuri Kochiyama, Asian Women's Shelter, India Abroad, Japanese American, Los Angeles, Pakistan Day Parade, Puerto Rican, Shau Wen, African American, Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, Renewal House, Sister Sabine, Chai Fen, Indian American
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