Introduction

Oppression, and the yearning to escape and rise above it, has been an abiding fact of human life down the ages. Oppression has assumed different tangible forms and been experienced by myriad groups at the hands of varying forces across time and space. But throughout and everywhere oppression has been experienced as a constraint to living more fully, more humanly: constraint born of social contingencies of power; of discursive regulation through interested and contrived social practices carried out so as to privilege some at the expense of others.