Best of
Feminist-Theory

2013

Feminist, Queer, Crip


Alison Kafer - 2013
    Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities


Karma R. Chávez - 2013
    Advocating a politics of the present and drawing from women of color and queer of color theory, this book contends that coalition enables a vital understanding of how queerness and immigration, citizenship and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion are linked. Queer Migration Politics offers activists, queer scholars, feminists, and immigration scholars productive tools for theorizing political efficacy.

Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World


China Mills - 2013
    The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Movement for Global Mental Health are calling to 'scale up' access to psychological and psychiatric treatments globally, particularly within the global South. Simultaneously, in the global North, psychiatry and its often chemical treatments are coming under increased criticism (from both those who take the medication and those in the position to prescribe it).The book argues that it is imperative to explore what counts as evidence within Global Mental Health, and seeks to de-familiarize current 'Western' conceptions of psychology and psychiatry using postcolonial theory. It leads us to wonder whether we should call for equality in global access to psychiatry, whether everyone should have the right to a psychotropic citizenship and whether mental health can, or should, be global. As such, it is ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of critical psychology and psychiatry, social and health psychology, cultural studies, public health and social work.

The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order


Kate Eichhorn - 2013
    These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism. The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections. Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations.A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution


Matt Richardson - 2013
    It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget.Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies-—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson-—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.

Emily Wilding Davison: The Suffragette Who Died For Women's Rights


Lucy Fisher - 2013
    Based on new research and a review of all the available evidence, it shows that there was so much more to Emily's life than a lone act of protest. She dedicated her life to the cause of women’s rights, and eventually, after repeated imprisonment and forced-feeding, paid the ultimate price. In the context of the Edwardian era and rising suffrage movement, Fisher reveals: * Emily was the daughter of a successful businessman who made his young housekeeper pregnant* How she was subjected to water torture in prison* Her previous attempt at suicide* The possible identity of Emily’s “intimate companion”* Her writings about martyrdom* What her intentions were at the Derby* The link between that Derby and the Titanic* The bizarre copycat incident at Ascot, just two weeks after Emily’s death

Seriously!: Investigating Crashes and Crises as If Women Mattered


Cynthia Enloe - 2013
    Each case study highlights the gritty experiences of women in diverse circumstances—in banks, on the job market, in war zones, and in revolutions. The results of taking women seriously are fresh insights into what fuels the cultures of hyper–risk taking, of sexual harassment, and the denial of women’s post-war security.