In Breaking the Bowls , the sequel to Paradoxes of Gender , Judith Lorber shows the cracks, anomalies, and resistances that are breaking down the gendered social order in Western post-industrial societies and lays out how we can take this process further by deliberate degendering. Lorber argues that it is time to rebel against gender as a social institution—to challenge its basic processes and practices. Feminists have tried to restructure and change the dynamics of interaction between women and men, but they have not pushed their agenda to the point of calling for the abolition of gender boundaries and categories. Breaking the Bowls explores why undoing gender must be the ultimate feminist goal and how that goal can be reached.

Breaking the Bowls is part of the Contemporary Societies series , Jeffrey Alexander, Series Editor. This series marks the coming of age of a generation and a discipline. It has been half a century since the world's leading sociologists engaged in a collective effort to make their cutting-edge thinking and research so concise and so widely accessible. What has changed in the meantime? Just about everything! Theoretical hegemony has given way to plurality. Disengagement has given way to relevance, and a provincial focus on America has opened up to the currents of globalization. Running through all these transformations has been the cultural turn, the recognition that meaning dynamics-codes, narratives, metaphors, values, and beliefs-remain central features of even the most contemporary societies. In this series, the world's leading sociologists show how these developments have transformed their specialties. They do so by engaging a genre that has almost disappeared from the social sciences today-the essay. Well-written, clear-minded, and elegant, these brief compositions are major creative endeavors in their own right, even as they bring the ideas of the world's most advanced thinkers into the world of the lay reader.