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Keira Williams writes book

Keira Williams, a lecturer in CCU's Honors and Women's & Gender Studies programs, has a new book out on the infamous Susan Smith case.

In the fall of 1994, Smith, a young mother from Union, South Carolina, reported that an African American male carjacker had kidnapped her two children. The news sparked a multi-state investigation and evoked nationwide sympathy. Nine days later, she confessed to drowning the boys in a nearby lake, and that sympathy quickly turned to outrage. Smith became the topic of thousands of articles, news segments, and media broadcasts – overshadowing the coverage of midterm elections and the O. J. Simpson trial. The notoriety of her case was more than tabloid fare, however; Williams argues that her story tapped into cultural debates about gender and politics at a crucial moment in American history. In reaction to second-wave feminism and a corresponding "crisis in masculinity" in the 1990s, a distinct code of gender discrimination developed that sought to reassert a traditional form of white male power. In Gendered Politics in the Modern South, Williams uses the Smith case to analyze the "new sexism" found in the agenda of the budding neoconservative movement.

Williams earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Georgia. She is now working on a second book project, a biography of the creator of Wonder Woman.

Gendered Politics in the Modern South is available online as a hard copy and as an e-book:
http://lsupress.org/books/detail/gendered-politics-in-the-modern-south/
or

http://www.amazon.com/Gendered-Politics-Modern-South-Sexism/dp/0807147680/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349182002&sr=8-1&keywords=%22keira+v.+williams%22

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