Best of
Gender

2013

Fashioned to Reign: Empowering Women to Fulfill Their Divine Destiny


Kris Vallotton - 2013
    History shows the sad consequences as the serpent continues to deceive regarding woman's role and purpose. But as Kris Vallotton explains, that was not God's final answer. The drive to disempower and deface women was the devil's idea--not God's. Through the cross of Christ, the power of the curse in the Garden was broken forever. Taking the reader by the hand for a walk through Scripture, this leader and bestselling author reveals: - God's true plan for women- simple steps for removing the ancient - patterns of enslavement- Jesus's care for women- the true meaning of the apostle Paul's exhortations about women- various examples of women in leadership as God intended In the Garden, the woman was taken out of the man to stand by his side and co-reign with him. Now the world aches for this partnership to be brought into balance once more. This can be achieved, affirms Vallotton, and it begins with understanding God's most beautiful creation.

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.

Golden Boy


Abigail Tarttelin - 2013
    They are even better at keeping them from each other. Max Walker is a golden boy, with a secret that the world may not be ready for. This novel is a riveting tale of a family in crisis, a fascinating exploration of identity, and a coming-of-age story like no other.

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics


T.C. TolbertE.C. Crandall - 2013
    In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”—reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.Poets in Troubling the Line: Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Aimee Herman, Amir Rabiyah, Ari Banias, Ariel Goldberg, Bo Luengsuraswat, CAConrad, Ching-In Chen, Cole Krawitz, D’Lo, David Wolach, Dawn Lundy Martin, Drew Krewer, Duriel E. Harris, EC Crandall, Eileen Myles, Eli Clare, Ely Shipley, Emerson Whitney, Eric Karin, Fabian Romero, Gr Keer, HR Hegnauer, J. Rice, j/j hastain, Jaime Shearn Coan, Jake Pam Dick, Jen (Jay) Besemer, Jenny Johnson, John Wieners, Joy Ladin, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, kari edwards, Kit Yan, Laura Neuman, Lilith Latini, Lizz Bronson, Lori Selke, Max Wolf Valerio, Meg Day, Micha Cárdenas, Monica / Nico Peck, Natro, Oliver Bendorf, Reba Overkill, Samuel Ace, Stacey Waite, Stephen Burt, TC Tolbert, Tim Trace Peterson, Trish Salah, TT Jax, Y. Madrone, Yosmay del Mazo & Zoe Tuck. TC Tolbert, a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice, is the author of territories of folding, spirare, and the forthcoming Gephyromania. Tolbert lives in Tucson.Tim Trace Peterson is a poet, critic, and editor. The author of Since I Moved In and Violet Speech, Peterson is co-editor of the forthcoming Gil Ott: Collected Writings and lives in Brooklyn.

On Self Esteem and Scholars, Witches And Other Freedom Fighters


Gloria Steinem - 2013
    She expresses herself with irresistible conviction…Steinem sprinkles her talk with wit while offering hope and encouragement that our lives can be better.” -Library JournalGloria Steinem offers her views on the interconnectedness between self-esteem and sexism, racism, politics, and physical and sexual abuse in this entertaining and educating program, recorded live in New York City.Bonus audio of Scholars, Witches and Other Freedom Fighters:This talk by Gloria Steinem is a recording that took place in 1993 in Salem, Massachusetts, in concurrence with the 300th anniversary of The Salem Witch Trials. In this incredibly enlightening and motivational audio, Steinem puts into social and historical context the role of society in the treatment and mistreatment of women.

Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son


Lori Duron - 2013
    Whereas her older son, Chase, is a Lego-loving, sports-playing boy's boy, her younger son, C.J., would much rather twirl around in a pink sparkly tutu, with a Disney Princess in each hand while singing Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi."   C.J. is gender variant or gender nonconforming, whichever you prefer. Whatever the term, Lori has a boy who likes girl stuff—really likes girl stuff. He floats on the gender-variation spectrum from super-macho-masculine on the left all the way to super-girly-feminine on the right. He's not all pink and not all blue. He's a muddled mess or a rainbow creation. Lori and her family choose to see the rainbow.   Written in Lori's uniquely witty and warm voice and launched by her incredibly popular blog of the same name, Raising My Rainbow is the unforgettable story of her wonderful family as they navigate the often challenging but never dull privilege of raising a slightly effeminate, possibly gay, totally fabulous son.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle


Sylvia Rivera - 2013
    Johnson. Introduction by Ehn Nothing. Fantastic zine! -EF

Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter


S. Bear Bergman - 2013
    Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer who travels regularly across North America to speak on trans issues. Bear’s first two books, Butch Is a Noun and The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, are considered seminal texts on the subject of trans life. In his third essay collection, Bear enters, describes, and rearranges our ideas about family as a daughter, husband, father, and friend. In Bear's extended family "orchard," drag sisters, sperm-donor's parents, Sparkles and other relations provide more branches of love, support, and sustenance than a simple family tree. Defiantly queer yet full of tenderness and hilarity, Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter is a beautifully thought-provoking book that redefines the notion of what family is and can be.

Dear Sister: Letters From Survivors of Sexual Violence


Lisa Factora-Borchers - 2013
    You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn't your fault.At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn't . . . . Remember: it wasn't your fault.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing, which often use "experts" to explain the experience of survivors for the rest of the world. Where other books about rape weave the voices of feminists and activists together and imagine what a world without violence might look like, Dear Sister describes the reality of what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, a survivor advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.Praise for Dear Sister:"This chilling, heartbreaking, and necessary collection consists of letters from 40 artists, activists, writers, and students, who are survivors of sexual assault and here offer counsel to 'sister' survivors. Every story is shadowed by the teller’s sense of shame, brokenness, depression, and pain, but at the same time, in anticipation of the addressees’ experience of sexual assault, the letters also offer comfort, solidarity, reassurance, the possibility of healing, and testimony of survival."—Publishers Weekly"There is nothing on earth more changeful than telling our stories honestly, and listening to the stories of others with an open heart. That's especially true for survivors of sexualized violence who've been silenced by shame. These 50 brave Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence will open floodgates of memory, expose body-invasion as the most traumatic of crimes, and show victimizers the roots and damage of their acts. I'm very grateful to Lisa Factora-Borchers for editing this book, to Aishah Shahida Simmons whose foreword sets a high bar of honesty, and to all the voices in it. I think you will be, too."—Gloria SteinemLisa Factora-Borchers is a Filipina writer and editor whose work has been published in make/shift, Bitch, Left Turn, and Critical Moment.Contributors: Aaminah Shakur, Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Allison McCarthy, Amita Y. Swadhin, Amy Ernst, Ana Heaton, Andrea Harris, Angel Propps, anna Saini, Anne Averyt, annu Saini, Ashley Burczak, brownfemipower, Brooke Benoit, Denise Santomauro, Desire Vincent, Dorla Harris, "Harriet J.", Indira Allegra, Isabella Gitana-Woolf, Joan Chen, Judith Stevenson, Juliet November, Kathleen Ahern, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Marianne Kirby, Maroula Blades, Mary Zelinka, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Melissa Dey Hasbrook, Melissa G., Mia Mingus, Michelle Ovalle, Premala Matthen, Rebecca Echeverria, Renee Martin, River Willow Fagan, Sara Durnan, Sarah M. Cash, Shala Bennett, Shanna Katz, Sofia Rose Smith, Sumayyah Talibah, Sydette Harry, Birdy, Viannah E. Duncan, and Zöe Flowers.

500 Tips for Fat Girls


Mary Lambert - 2013
    '500 tips for fat girls' is a moving and strikingly original exploration of body image, abuse, and queer love.Cover art by Crystal Barbre Printed by United Reprographics

Butch Geography


Stacey Waite - 2013
    LGBT Studies. In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay "Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves," Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite's fusion of gender identities: "Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: 'i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body'... This is [Waite's] genius...to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence--to get around English's pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...."

Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat


Wendy Lee - 2013
    Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted. But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women's lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven't read the original work, you're sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.

From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity


Kyle Harper - 2013
    In this same society, the routine sexual exploitation of poor and enslaved women was abetted by public institutions. Four centuries later, a Roman emperor commanded the mutilation of men caught in same-sex affairs, even as he affirmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. The gradual transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian marks one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center of it all was sex. Exploring sources in literature, philosophy, and art, Kyle Harper examines the rise of Christianity as a turning point in the history of sexuality and helps us see how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.While Roman sexual culture was frankly and freely erotic, it was not completely unmoored from constraint. Offending against sexual morality was cause for shame, experienced through social condemnation. The rise of Christianity fundamentally changed the ethics of sexual behavior. In matters of morality, divine judgment transcended that of mere mortals, and shame—a social concept—gave way to the theological notion of sin. This transformed understanding led to Christianity’s explicit prohibitions of homosexuality, extramarital love, and prostitution. Most profound, however, was the emergence of the idea of free will in Christian dogma, which made all human action, including sexual behavior, accountable to the spiritual, not the physical, world.

Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation


Estelle B. Freedman - 2013
    elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. Redefining Rape tells the story of the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the United States, through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change. In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege.The long-dominant view of rape in America envisioned a brutal attack on a chaste white woman by a male stranger, usually an African American. From the early nineteenth century, advocates for women's rights and racial justice challenged this narrow definition and the sexual and political power of white men that it sustained. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, at the height of racial segregation and lynching, and amid the campaign for woman suffrage, women's rights supporters and African American activists tried to expand understandings of rape in order to gain legal protection from coercive sexual relations, assaults by white men on black women, street harassment, and the sexual abuse of children. By redefining rape, they sought to redraw the very boundaries of citizenship.Freedman narrates the victories, defeats, and limitations of these and other reform efforts. The modern civil rights and feminist movements, she points out, continue to grapple with both the insights and the dilemmas of these first campaigns to redefine rape in American law and culture.

Kindling


Aurora Levins Morales - 2013
    Disabled and chronically ill writer, historian and activist Aurora Levins Morales writes about epilepsy and stroke, the social control of dark skinned women's sexuality and the erotics of chronic fatigue, epigenetics and healing justice, community based science and what it's like to get health care in Cuba."Aurora's writing is itself a kind of alchemy, balancing emotional nuance with rich historical context, simultaneously speaking in an intimate, personal voice and for a collective we. She offers us vulnerable, power-filled lyricism that moves the audience to new understandings of their own lives, as she claims her body's pleasure and pain." Patty Berne, Co-founder and Artistic Director, Sins Invalid. "Medically, “kindling” refers to the way bodies can be sensitized by small, repeated exposures to chemicals or electric shocks. Aurora’s essays and poems about the human body’s responses to oppression describe both the kindling of disease and of consciousness, fragments of tinder that ignite into a blazing awareness of our bodies as sites of struggle and transformation."Casimira Fuentes O’Neill, M.D.

The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender


Sam Killermann - 2013
    It is a couple hundred pages of gender exploration, social justice how-tos, practical resources, and fun graphics & comics.It offers clear, easily-digested, and practical explanations of one of the most commonly misunderstood things about people. Sam dissects gender using a comprehensive, non-binary toolkit, with a focus on making this subject accessible and enjoyable. All this to help you understand something that is so commonly misunderstood, but something we all think we get: gender.The book helps individuals better understand gender themselves (their gender and others'), and is a great resource for folks who are doing gender education work with others.Because gender is something we all deserve to understand.

The Transgender Studies Reader 2


Susan Stryker - 2013
    In 2006, Routledge's The Transgender Studies Reader brought together the first definitive collection of the field. Since its publication, the field has seen an explosion of new work that has expanded the boundaries of inquiry in many directions. The Transgender Studies Reader 2 gathers these disparate strands of scholarship, and collects them into a format that makes sense for teaching and research.Complementing the first volume, rather than competing with it, The Transgender Studies Reader 2 consists of fifty articles, with a general introduction by the editors, explanatory head notes for each essay, and bibliographical suggestions for further research. Unlike the first volume, which was historically based, tracing the lineage of the field, this volume focuses on recent work and emerging trends. To keep pace with this rapidly changing area, the second reader has a companion website, with images, links to blogs, video, and other material to help supplement the book.For more information, visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/stryker

Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale


Heather Marsh - 2013
    If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.

Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran


Afsaneh Najmabadi - 2013
    In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran.Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials--which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being--grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis


Jody Raphael - 2013
    As author Jody Raphael reveals in Rape Is Rape, the more acquaintance rape is reported and taken seriously by prosecutors, judges, and juries, the louder the clamor of rape denial becomes.Through firsthand interviews with victims, medical and judicial records, social media analysis, and statistics from government agencies, Rape Is Rape exposes the tactics used by the deniers, a group that includes conservatives and right-wing Christians as well as some controversial feminists. The personal stories of young acquaintance rape victims whom Raphael interviewed demonstrate how assaults on their credibility, buttressed by claims of low prevalence, prevent many from holding their rapists accountable, enabling them to rape others with impunity.Rape Is Rape is an exposé of those using rape denial to further their political agendas, and it is a call to action to protect the rights of women and girls, making it safe for victims to come forward, and end the acquaintance rape crisis. A resources section is included for those seeking help, advice, or hoping to get involved.

Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty and Gender Change


Ellen Krug - 2013
    As a man named "Ed," she had everything anyone could ever want: a soul mate's love, two beautiful daughters, a house in the best neighborhood, a successful trial lawyer's career - a "Grand Plan" life so picture-perfect it inspired a beautiful pastel drawing,But there was a problem: "Ed" was a woman born into a male body. Finding inner peace meant Ed would have to become Ellen. It also meant losing that picture-perfect life.How could anyone make that choice, pay that kind of price? Then again, how could anyone not? Through what became a "gender journey," Ellen Krug discovered her true self and the honesty it takes to make life-changing decisions."Getting to Ellen" is much more than one person's story about some things lost and others gained. It's a glimpse into the life choices that all of us make --whether or not we're transgender.

Alight


Dominique Christina AshaheedSarah Kay - 2013
    Contains poems from preliminary rounds, the Lit Slam, and Finals Stage.

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots


Brenda E. Stevenson - 2013
    For a week in April 1992, Los Angeles transformed into a cityscape of rage, purportedly due to the exoneration of four policemen who had beaten Rodney King. It should be no surprise that such intense anger erupted from something deeper than a single incident. In The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, Brenda Stevenson tells the dramatic story of an earlier trial, a turning point on the road to the 1992 riot. On March 16, 1991, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, an African American who lived locally, entered the Empire Liquor Market at 9172 South Figueroa Street in South Central Los Angeles. Behind the counter was a Korean woman named Soon Ja Du. Latasha walked to the refrigerator cases in the back, took a bottle of orange juice, put it in her backpack, and approached the cash register with two dollar bills in her hand-the price of the juice. Moments later she was face-down on the floor with a bullet hole in the back of her head, shot dead by Du. Joyce Karlin, a Jewish Superior Court judge appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, presided over the resulting manslaughter trial. A jury convicted Du, but Karlin sentenced her only to probation, community service, and a $500 fine. The author meticulously reconstructs these events and their aftermath, showing how they set the stage for the explosion in 1992. An accomplished historian at UCLA, Stevenson explores the lives of each of these three women -- Harlins, Du, and Karlin -- and their very different worlds in rich detail. Through the three women, she not only reveals the human reality and social repercussions of this triangular collision, she also provides a deep history of immigration, ethnicity, and gender in modern America. Massively researched, deftly written, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins will reshape our understanding of race, ethnicity, gender, and -- above all -- justice in modern America.

Meet Polkadot


Talcott Broadhead - 2013
    Polkadot as well as Polkadot’s big sister Gladiola and best friend Norma Alicia, introduce our readers to the challenges and beauty that are experienced by Polkadot as a non-binary, trans kid. While Gladiola learns how to engage with information that she “didn’t know she didn’t know,” Norma Alicia provides Polkadot with a generous, additional perspective on how identities intersect and how allyship works. “Meet Polkadot,” tells Polkadot’s story from a transgender-liberation and feminist perspective and explores the complexity of identity in gentle and real terms. For ages 3-130!

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II


Farah Jasmine Griffin - 2013
    Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood’s diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America’s promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era.In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren’t native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Café Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she débuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies—a first for a female African American author.A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

The Skin Team


Jordaan Mason - 2013
    A vomit of lightbulbs. A compass recovered from the stomach, pointing to True North. Teams of boys in the woods get lost and forget their colors. Girls gather in the park, trying to remember what songs to sing. But the horses are too sick to bet on and a map is not the territory. Three skins convulse, three bodies converge. A sickness is shared between a girl and a boy and a boy and a river.Jordaan Mason's debut novel, THE SKIN TEAM, is a story of mesmerized violence and the shape shifting between love and sex and the singing that happens when the power goes out."Reading THE SKIN TEAM, you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason's radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style. This novel is something very rare, and it's about as beautiful as fiction can ever be."—Dennis Cooper

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit


Marlon M. Bailey - 2013
    Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community.

Nevada


Imogen Binnie - 2013
    When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she'd carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly change her forever.

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy


Chris Crass - 2013
    These essays and interviews present powerful lessons for transformative organizing. It offers a firsthand look at the challenges and the opportunities of antiracist work in white communities, feminist work with men, and bringing women of color feminism into the heart of social movements. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies within these areas, Crass’s essays insightfully explore ways of transforming divisions of race, class, and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy, and building movements in the United States today. This collection will inspire and empower anyone who is interested in implementing change through organizing.

Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment


Jill A McCorkel - 2013
    Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social ProblemsCompelling interviews uncover why tough drug policies disproportionately impact women in the American prison systemSince the 1980s, when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, the increase in women's rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. As a result, women's prisons in the US have suffered perhaps the most drastically from the overcrowding and recurrent budget crises that have plagued the penal system since harsher drugs laws came into effect. In Breaking Women, Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US women's prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women's detention centers has been deeply altered as a result.Through compelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals that popular so-called "habilitation" drug treatment programs force women to accept a view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to secure an earlier release. These programs were created as a way to enact stricter punishments on female drug offenders while remaining sensitive to their perceived feminine needs for treatment, yet they instead work to enforce stereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. Theprisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never truly address their addiction as the programs' organizers may have hoped. A fascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds thegendered and racialized assumptions behind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how thecontemporary penal system impacts individual lives.

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality


Elizabeth A. Armstrong - 2013
    Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiance. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it," Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful expose of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.Drawing on findings from a five-year interview study, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton bring us to the campus of "MU," a flagship Midwestern public university, where we follow a group of women drawn into a culture of status seeking and sororities. Mapping different pathways available to MU students, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a "party pathway" anchored in the Greek system and facilitated by the administration. This pathway exerts influence over the academic and social experiences of all students, and while it benefits the affluent and well-connected, Armstrong and Hamilton make clear how it seriously disadvantages the majority. Eye-opening and provocative, Paying for the Party reveals how outcomes can differ so dramatically for those whom universities enroll.

Being a Boy


James Dawson - 2013
    Queen of Teen nominee, acclaimed YA author and former PSHCE teacher, James Dawson, expertly guides boys through puberty from surviving the social scene to learning about sex, how to pull, dealing with spotty faces and everything in between. Witty text paired with over 50 hilarious black-and-white illustrations by Spike Gerrell makes this the essential guide to growing up brutal honesty included.

Pop Corpse!


Lara Glenum - 2013
    Drama. "Father lend me your megabone / & I'll lend u my shotgun mouth." A radiant brew of emoticon opera, fairytale fan-fiction, and chat-room flame war, POP CORPSE! follows a heroine mermaid on her devoutly disarming search for "realness." Along the way, Glenum dismantles pieties of both the left and the right, proposing new models of configuring text, voice, body and species-hood for those who swim in the increasingly fetid waters of the 21st century.

Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador


Jocelyn Viterna - 2013
    Why do women become guerrilla insurgents? What experiences do they have in guerrilla armies? And what are thelong-term repercussions of this participation for the women themselves and the societies in which they live?Women in War answers these questions while providing a rare look at guerrilla life from the viewpoint of rank-and-file participants. Using data from 230 in-depth interviews with men and women guerrillas, guerrilla supporters, and non-participants in rural El Salvador, Women in War investigates whysome women were able to channel their wartime actions into post-war gains, and how those patterns differ from the benefits that accrued to men. By accounting for these variations, Women in War helps resolve current, polarized debates about the effects of war on women, and by extension, develops ournascent understanding of the effects of women combatants on warfare, political violence, and gender systems.In the process, Women in War also develops a new model for investigating micro-level mobilization processes that has applications to many movement settings. Micro-level mobilization processes are often ignored in the social movement literature in favor of more macro- and meso-level analyses. Yetindividuals who share the same macro-level context, and who are embedded in the same meso-level networks, often have strikingly different mobilization experiences. Only a portion are ever moved to activism, and those who do mobilize vary according to which paths they follow to mobilization, whatskills and social ties they forge through participation, and whether they continue their political activism after the movement ends. By examining these individual-level variations, a micro-level theory of mobilization can extend the findings of macro- and meso-level analyses, and improve ourunderstanding of how social movements begin, why they endure, and whether they change the societies they target.

Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil


Keisha-Khan Y. Perry - 2013
    But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador’s city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women’s views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.In Black Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women–led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women’s agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt, Black Women against the Land Grab offers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.

Love, Sex, and Understanding the Universe


Harrie Farrow - 2013
    He embraces the label, but soon discovers how difficult his life is going to be. At age sixteen his formerly liberal parents turn born-again Christian. His boyfriend Rick, who is also bi and has a girlfriend, isn't ready to come out of the closet, and if his parents knew what the two of them were doing in Rick’s basement apartment, they'd never let Jim stay there. In college, Jim takes on hedonistic girlfriend, Amy, but she doesn't seem to want to know who Jim really is. After a traumatic breakup, Jim moves to San Francisco to finally be out and open but instead everything gets insanely complicated. Struggling to be true to himself in a world where no one seems to want him to be who he is, Jim spirals into mental chaos, juggling living between two lies. Then he discovers that love finds its own way, and ends up with more than he’s sure he can handle.

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer


Lisa Downing - 2013
    But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely?In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

Trauma Queen


Luna Merbruja - 2013
    Through the use of multi-genre writing (poems, prose, story-telling, etc), this book is a collection of years of journal/diary entries. Lovemme is unapologetically facing the taboo truths of what it means to be a survivor and how that trauma shapes their life.

Mormon Women Have Their Say: Essays from the Claremont Oral History Collection


Claudia L. Bushman - 2013
    These interviews record the experiences of these women in their homes and family life, their church life, and their work life, in their roles as homemakers, students, missionaries, career women, single women, converts, and disaffected members. Their stories feed into and illuminate the broader narrative of LDS history and belief, filling in a large gap in Mormon history that has often neglected the lived experiences of women. This project preserves and perpetuates their voices and memories, allowing them to say share what has too often been left unspoken. The silent majority speaks in these records.This volume is the first to explore the riches of the collection in print. A group of young scholars and others have used the interviews to better understand what Mormonism means to these women and what women mean for Mormonism. They explore those interviews through the lenses of history, doctrine, mythology, feminist theory, personal experience, and current events to help us understand what these women have to say about their own faith and lives.

Gossip


Samantha Cohen - 2013
    Everyone has a theory- some more complicated than others- about what exactly happened between Ada and Eden. Corset strings, a couch, smeary eye make up and idyllic imaginings happen here along with theories of gender and power, power and fucking, fucking and pistol-eyed longing, longing and communication. Between or amongst bodies lives the history of the world. Purchase & read an excerpt at birdsoflace.etsy.com

Defending Battered Women on Trial


Elizabeth A. Sheehy - 2013
    This book looks at the legal response to battered women who killed their partners in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Elizabeth Sheehy uses trial transcripts and a detailed case study approach to tell, for the first time, the stories of eleven women, ten of whom killed their partners and one who did not. She looks at the barriers women face to "just leaving," how self-defence was argued in these cases, and which form of expert testimony was used to frame women’s experience of battering. Drawing upon a rich expanse of research from many disciplines, including law, psychology, history, sociology, women’s studies, and social work, she highlights the limitations of the law of self-defence, the successful strategies of defence lawyers, the costs to women undergoing a murder trial, and the serious difficulties of credibility that they face when testifying. In a final chapter, she proposes numerous reforms. In Canada, a woman is killed every six days by her male partner, and about twelve women per year kill their male partners. By illuminating the cases of eleven women, this book highlights the barriers to leaving violent men and the practical and legal dilemmas that face battered women on trial for murder.

Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt


Farha Ghannam - 2013
    These events gave renewed urgency to the fraught topic of gender in the Middle East. The role of women in public life, the meaning of manhood, and the future of gender inequalities are hotly debated by religious figures, government officials, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens throughout Egypt. Live and Die Like a Man presents a unique twist on traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, shifting the attention to men and exploring how they are collectively "produced" as gendered subjects. It traces how masculinity is continuously maintained and reaffirmed by both men and women under changing socio-economic and political conditions.Over a period of nearly twenty years, Farha Ghannam lived and conducted research in al-Zawiya, a low-income neighborhood not far from Tahrir Square in northern Cairo. Detailing her daily encounters and ongoing interviews, she develops life stories that reveal the everyday practices and struggles of the neighborhood over the years. We meet Hiba and her husband as they celebrate the birth of their first son and begin to teach him how to become a man; Samer, a forty-year-old man trying to find a suitable wife; Abu Hosni, who struggled with different illnesses; and other local men and women who share their reactions to the uprising and the changing situation in Egypt. Against this backdrop of individual experiences, Ghannam develops the concept of masculine trajectories to account for the various paths men can take to embody social norms. In showing how men work to realize a "male ideal," she counters the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes of Middle Eastern men all too frequently reproduced in media reports, and opens new spaces for rethinking patriarchal structures and their constraining effects on both men and women.

Beauty and the Bitch: Grace for the Worst in Me


Jan Meyers Proett - 2013
    She's also plenty practiced at turning that light on herself. In this bracing and bravely personal book, Proett invites women to face the truth about themselves. And the truth is this: no matter how imperfect, fearful, shameful, and downright bitchy we have been, we can be restored. A life of fear and control can be met by peace and freedom. A heart full of rage can be overwhelmed by kindness. The demands of more can be trumped by gratitude and rest. And the best part—every last ugly, nasty place in our hearts can be made beautiful. Beauty—when we take an honest look at ourselves, that's what we'll find underneath all the stuff we've piled on top.No matter who we think we are or what we've done, there's a beauty inside us, a beauty that defines us, a beauty we've forgotten. Rediscover that beauty and let it tell you who you really are.

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

That's So Gay!: Microaggressions and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community


Kevin L. Nadal - 2013
    Microaggressions are commonplace interactions that occur in a wide variety of social settings, including school or the workplace, among friends and family, and even among other LGBT people. These accumulated experiences are associated with feelings of victimization, suicidal thinking, and higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and other health problems among members of the LGBT community. In this book, Kevin Nadal provides a thought-provoking review of the literature on discrimination and microaggressions toward LGBT people. The generous use of case examples makes the book ideal for gender studies courses and discussion groups. Each case is followed by analysis of the elements involved in microaggressions and discussion questions for the reader to reflect upon.This book includes advice for mental health practitioners, organizational leaders, educators, and students who want to adopt LGBT-accepting worldviews and practices. It has tips for how to discuss and advocate for LGBT issues in the realms of family, community, educational systems, and the government.

Kaddish: Women's Voices


Michal Smart - 2013
    This groundbreaking book explores what the recitation of Kaddish has meant specifically to women. Did they find the consolation, closure, and community they were seeking? How did saying Kaddish affect their relationships with God, with prayer, with the deceased, and with the living? With courage and generosity, 52 authors from around the world reflect upon their experiences of mourning. They share their relationships with the family members they lost and what it meant to move on; how they struggled to balance the competing demands of child rearing, work, and grief; what they learned about tradition and themselves; and the disappointments and particular challenges they confronted as women. The collection shares viewpoints from diverse perspectives and backgrounds and examines what it means to heal from loss and to honor memory in family relationships, both loving and fraught with pain. It is a precious record of women searching for their place within Jewish tradition and exploring the connections that make human life worthwhile.

Educating Muslim Women: The West African Legacy of Nana Asma’u 1793-1864


Beverly Mack - 2013
    Her example as an educator is still followed: the system she set up in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for the education of rural women, has not only survived in its homeland—through the traumas of the colonization of West Africa and the establishment of the modern state of Nigeria—but is also being revived and adapted elsewhere, notably among Muslim women in the United States.This book, richly illustrated with maps and photographs, recounts Asma'u's upbringing and critical junctures in her life from several sources, mostly unpublished: her own firsthand experiences presented in her writings, the accounts of contemporaries who witnessed her endeavors, and the memoirs of European travelers. For the account of her legacy the authors have depended on extensive field studies in Nigeria, and documents pertaining to the efforts of women in Nigeria and the United States, to develop a collective voice and establish their rights as women and Muslims in today's societies.Beverley Mack is an associate professor of African studies at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor (with Catherine Coles) of Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century and co-author (with Jean Boyd) of The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, 1793–1864 and One Woman's Jihad: Nana Asma'u Scholar and Scribe.Jean Boyd is former principal research fellow of the Sokoto History Bureau and research associate of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is the author

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe


Judith M. Bennett - 2013
    The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium.The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.

Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction


Maria T. Accardi - 2013
    Drawing heavily upon the women's studies literature where the concept first appears, Accardi defines and describes recurring themes for feminist teachers: envisioning the classroom as a collaborative, democratic, transformative site; consciousness raising about sexism and oppression; ethics of care in the classroom; and the value of personal testimony and lived experience as valid ways of knowing. Framing these concepts in the context of the limits of library instruction--so often a 50 minute one-shot bound by ACRL-approved cognitive learning outcomes--Accardi invites a critical examination of the potential for feminist liberatory teaching methods in the library instruction classroom. This book is Number 3 in the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, Emily Drabinski, Series Editor.

Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora


Isabelle Thuy Pelaud - 2013
    This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a "leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America."The sixty-two contributors have been shaped by colonization, wars, globalization, and militarization. For some of these women on the margins of the margin, crafting and showing their work is a bold act in itself. Their provocative and accessible creations tell unique stories, provide sharp contrasts to familiar stereotypes--Southeast Asian women as exotic sex symbols, dragon ladies, prostitutes, or "bar girls"--and serve as entry points for broader discussions about questions of history, memory, and identity.

Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia


Valerie A. Kivelson - 2013
    While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

Debutantes: When Glamour was Born. A Celebration of Fashion, Parties, and Timeless Beauty


Diana Oswald - 2013
    A debutante’s dress is anything but a minor detail, and this sumptuous volume delights in one stunning look after another: lace bodices and silver sequins by Chanel; Vionnet’s luxurious silk brocades; the signature white satin gloves and ubiquitous feathers of the ’30s; fluid frocks by Schiaparelli; the heiress-worthy designs of Claire McCardell and Valentina, especially popular with the ladies of the Whitney and Vanderbilt families; tulle and chiffon gowns by Dior and Mainbocher; sleek, one-shoulder styles by Norman Norell; and the one-of-a-kind, custom-made gowns donned by countless celebutantes, such as Jackie Kennedy and Brenda Frazier (whose custom frock earned her the cover of Life magazine).Debutantes celebrates the timeless tradition with gorgeous photography from high-society and fashion documenters such as Cecil Beaton, Toni Frissell, and Slim Aarons as well as never-before-published pictures culled from personal collections. Traversing winter cotillions at the Waldorf, summer coming-out soirees in Newport, and bourgeois banquets in Paris, Debutantes marries high fashion and society with an eternal allure to be coveted by all ages.

Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust


Myrna Goldenberg - 2013
    The collection provides new perspectives on central works of Holocaust scholarship and representation, from the books of Hannah Arendt and Ruth Kl�ger to films such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Interviews with survivors and their descendants draw new attention to the significance of women's roles and family structures during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and interviews and archival research reveal the undercurrents of sexual violence within the Final Solution. As Doris Bergen shows in the book's first chapter, the focus on women's and gender issues in this collection "complicates familiar and outworn categories, and humanizes the past in powerful ways."

Gender and Sexuality For Beginners


Jaimee Garbacik - 2013
    But we do.What does sexual orientation mean if the very categories of gender are in question? How do we measure equality when our society's definitions of "male" and "female" leave out much of the population? There is no consensus on what a "real" man or woman is, where one's sex begins and ends, or what purpose the categories of masculine and feminine traits serve. While significant strides have been made in recent years on behalf of women's, gay and lesbian rights, there is still a large division between the law and day-to-day reality for LGBTQIA and female-identified individuals in American society. The practices, media outlets and institutions that privilege heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as "natural" need a closer examination.Gender and Sexuality For Beginners considers the uses and limitations of biology in defining gender. Questioning gender and sex as both categories and forms of compulsory identification, it critically examines the issues in the historical and contemporary construction, meaning and perpetuation of gender roles. Gender and Sexuality For Beginners interweaves neurobiology, psychology, feminist, queer and trans theory, as well as historical gay and lesbian activism to offer new perspectives on gender inequality, ultimately pointing to the clear inadequacy of gender categories and the ways in which the sex-gender system oppresses us all. Gender and Sexuality For Beginners examines the evolution of gender roles and definitions of sexual orientation in American society, illuminating how neither is as objective or "natural" as we are often led to believe.

Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader


Joy James - 2013
    Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.Ebook also available.

Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes


Endnotes Collective - 2013
    The newest installment in this UK journal features articles on: Arab Spring; indignados; Occupy; England riots; austerity and anti-austerity; the logic of gender; class identity; Jasper Bernes on logistics, counterlogistics and the communist prospect; Chris Chen on race, and redefining central concepts of revolutionary theory—spontaneity, mediation, rupture.

The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California


Wendy Cheng - 2013
    suburbs are typically imagined to be predominantly white communities, but this is increasingly untrue in many parts of the country. Examining a multiracial suburb that is decidedly nonwhite, Wendy Cheng unpacks questions of how identity—especially racial identity—is shaped by place. She offers an in-depth portrait, enriched by nearly seventy interviews, of the San Gabriel Valley, not far from downtown Los Angeles, where approximately 60 percent of residents are Asian American and more than 30 percent are Latino. At first glance, the cities of the San Gabriel Valley look like stereotypical suburbs, but almost no one who lives there is white.The Changs Next Door to the Díazes reveals how a distinct culture is being fashioned in, and simultaneously reshaping, an environment of strip malls, multifamily housing, and faux Mediterranean tract homes. Informed by her interviews as well as extensive analysis of three episodic case studies, Cheng argues that people’s daily experiences—in neighborhoods, schools, civic organizations, and public space—deeply influence their racial consciousness. In the San Gabriel Valley, racial ideologies are being reformulated by these encounters. Cheng views everyday landscapes as crucial terrains through which racial hierarchies are learned, instantiated, and transformed. She terms the process “regional racial formation,” through which locally accepted racial orders and hierarchies complicate and often challenge prevailing notions of race.There is a place-specific state of mind here, Cheng finds. Understanding the processes of racial formation in the San Gabriel Valley in the contemporary moment is important in itself but also has larger value as a model for considering the spatial dimensions of racial formation and the significant demographic shifts taking place across the national landscape.

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.

Red Dirt Women: At Home on the Oklahoma Plains


Susan Kates - 2013
    When women are pictured at all, they seem frozen in time: as the bonneted pioneer woman stoically enduring hardship or the bedraggled, gaunt-faced mother familiar from Dust Bowl photographs. In Red Dirt Women, Susan Kates challenges these one-dimensional characterizations by exploring—and celebrating—the lives of contemporary Oklahoma women whose experiences are anything but predictable. In essays both intensely personal and universal, Red Dirt Women reveals the author’s own heartaches and joys in becoming a parent through adoption, her love of regional treasures found in “junk” stores, and her deep appreciation of Miss Dorrie, her son’s unconventional preschool teacher. Through lively profiles, interviews, and sketches, we come to know pioneer queens from the Panhandle, rodeo riders, casino gamblers, roller-derby skaters, and the “Lady of Jade”—a former “boat person” from Vietnam who now owns a successful business in Oklahoma City. As she illuminates the lives of these memorable Oklahoma women, Kates traces her own journey to Oklahoma with clarity and insight. Born and raised in Ohio, she confesses an initial apprehension about her adopted home, admitting that she felt “vulnerable on the open lands.” Yet her original unease develops into a deep affection for the landscape, history, culture, and people of Oklahoma. The women we meet in Red Dirt Women are not politicians, governors’ wives, or celebrities—they are women of all ages and backgrounds who surround us every day and who are as diverse as Oklahoma itself.

People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier


Ruha Benjamin - 2013
    Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don't—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society.People's Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California's 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Under the shadow of the free market and in a nation still at odds with universal healthcare, the socially marginalized are often eagerly embraced as test-subjects, yet often are unable to afford new medicines and treatment regimes as patients.Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research— from African Americans' struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if "the people" ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.

Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon


Eboni Marshall Turman - 2013
    How is it, then, that black women's oppression persists in black churches that espouse theological and ethical commitments to justice? The book engages the Chalcedonian Definition as the starting point for exploring the body as a moral dilemma. It reveals how the body of Christ has historically posed a problem for the church, and has produced a Christian trajectory of violence that has resulted in the breaking of the body of Christ. A survey of the black body as an American problem provides the lens for understanding how the theological problem of body has functioned as a social dilemma for black people. An exploration of the black Social Gospel as the primary theological trajectory that has approached the problem of embodied difference reveals how body injustice, namely sexism, functions behind the veil of race in black churches.

Stripping Down to the Bones


Merry Clark - 2013
    How does this pretty, educated, organically grown girl become an outcast in her own country? Set against the backdrops of the competitive University of Michigan, the vast Front Range of Colorado, the concrete jungle of Los Angeles, and a small backwoods home town in Michigan, this story winds its way through untrammeled wilderness as the search for belonging unfolds. Who does she think she is? How does she go about answering this question? Is she only who others think she is? The narrative is often reflective, questioning the very nature of real life experiences and expanding on the greater issues that lie just under the surface. The narrative is honest and does not sidestep the inconvenient or the uncomfortable, but rather sheds light on the "convenient untruths" that many use as crutches to get through life. There are no neatly tied up endings and no answers given here. The goal is to challenge conventional thinking, cross out easy answers, and draw the reader into the mind and heart of this examined life. Even with the reflective pauses in the narrative, the pacing flows smoothly as each short chapter merges into the next as water falls over rocks.

Fortunes of Feminism. From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis


Nancy Fraser - 2013
    But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.

Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars


Kristin Lieb - 2013
    Stars -- and the industry power brokers who make their fortunes -- have learned to prioritize sexual attractiveness over talent as they fight a crowded field for movie deals, magazine covers, and fashion lines, let alone record deals. This focus on the female pop star s body as her core asset has resigned many women to being "short term brands," positioned to earn as much money as possible before burning out or aging ungracefully. This book, which includes interview data from music industry insiders, explores the sociological forces that drive women into these tired representations, and the ramifications on the greater social world.This book is for Sociology of Media and Sociology of Popular Culture courses.

Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Pro-Feminist Men's Movement


Rob A. Okun - 2013
    Through thematically arranged essays by leading experts, Voice Male illustrates how a growing movement of men is redefining masculinity. In this collection, Rob Okun directs a chorus of pro-feminist voices, introducing readers to men examining contemporary manhood from a variety of perspectives: from overcoming violence, fatherhood, and navigating life as a man of color, a gay man, or a boy on the journey to manhood. It also provides a critical forum for both male survivors and GBTQ men to speak out. This inspired book is evidence of a new direction for men, brightly illuminating what’s around the bend on the path to gender justice.

A Girl Like Any Other


Sophie Labelle - 2013
    A Girl Like Any Other is a great way to introduce the subject of gender-variance to children aged 6-12. Using a light and humourous tone along with dynamic and colourful illustrations, the author succeeds in portraying a story that will leave no one indifferent.

Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices


Fiona Joy Green - 2013
    Mothers may struggle with shifts in their own subjectivity and the peculiar conjoinment of parenthood. As women experience the unique powerlessness of motherhood, they also hold the uncomfortable power of acting as advocates for and as agents of socialization and social control over their children. Fathers may feel the desire for feminist parenting whilst experiencing a backlash and a lack of support, while some parents may attempt to resist the binaries of mothering and fathering in their feminist parenting journey. Feminist parents may attempt to resist gender binaries; they may submit to them while attempting to foster critical dialogue; they may struggle with the display of their own femininity and masculinity or, for some, its perceived lack. For some parents a dialogue about gender normativity may be inspired by gender-diverse behavior on the part of their own children, while others may parent children who happily submit to the mainstream and query the need for gender questioning."Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices" attempts to cast a lens on the messy and convoluted ways that feminist parents approach parenting their children in gender aware and gender fluid ways. The collection draws together scholars, activists and community members to open a conversation about the challenges of exploring and maintaining an awareness of gender while parenting in a highly gender normative world.Chapter One: Dancing in the Eye of the Storm: The Gift of Gender Diversity to Our Family–Kathy WitterickChapter Two: Get your Gender Binary Off My Childhood! Towards a Movement for Children’s Self-Determination–Jane WardChapter Three: The Boy in the Red Dress–Susan GoldbergChapter Four: Trapped in the Wrong Body and Life Uncharted: Anticipation and Identity within Narratives of Parenting Transgender/Gender Non-conforming Children–Jessica Ann VoorisChapter Five: Transgender Men’s Self-Representations of Bearing Children Post-Transition–Damien RiggsChapter Six: We’re Having a Stanley–j WallaceChapter Seven: Between the Village and The Village People: Negotiating Community, Ethnicity and Safety in Gender Fluid Parenting–May FriedmanChapter Eight: Feminist Parents’ Strategic use of Liminoid Experiences to Produce Sites of Empowerment for Young, Gender-Diverse Children–Sandra SchneiderChapter Nine: Complicating the Truth of Gender: Gender Literacy and the Possible Worlds of Trans Parenting–Jake PyneChapter Ten: Pink Butterflies and Blue Caterpillars–Arwen BrennemanChapter Eleven: I Wish I Knew How to Make Cabbage Rolls: An explanation of Why the Future of Ethnicity Relies Upon Gender Fluidity–Sarah SahagianChapter Twelve: The Parental Transition: A Study of Parents of Gender Variant Children–Elizabeth RahillyChapter Thirteen: Our Fluid Family: Engagement, Feminism and Expression–Fiona Joy Green, Barry Edginton and Liam Edginton-Green

Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America


Christa Craven - 2013
    Together, we suggest avenues for incorporating methodological innovations, collaborative analysis, and collective activism in our scholarly projects. What are the possibilities (and challenges) that exist for feminist ethnography 25 years after initial debates emerged in this field about reflexivity, objectivity, reductive individualism, and the social relevance of activist scholarship? How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? This collection continues a crucial dialog about feminist activist ethnography in the 21st century--at the intersection of engaged feminist research and activism in the service of the organizations, people, communities, and feminist issues we study.

Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood


Shelley M. Park - 2013
    Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one—and only one—“real” mother, many contemporary family constellations do not fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference.Shelley M. Park is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Central Florida.

A Force Such as the World Has Never Known: Women Creating Change


Sharon G. Mijares - 2013
    These are stories of compassion and bravery, empowered by the vision of a better world for all life. It emphasizes the need to empower the feminine and assure gender balance and human rights for all. This accumulation of women's stories reveals the role of women in creating needed changes in areas of health and nutrition, supporting efforts toward sustainable environments, promoting political and social rights, protecting women from the travesties of war and rape and promoting religious diversity and better conditions for all beings.

Short Story Masterpieces by American Women Writers


Clarence C. Strowbridge - 2013
    Dating from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, these narratives range in mood from "Heat," Joyce Carol Oates's chilling tale of murder, to "Why I Live at the P.O.," Eudora Welty's comic monologue in the Southern Gothic tradition. Other contributors include Flannery O'Connor, Kate Chopin, and Edna Ferber as well as lesser-known, newly rediscovered writers. Edith Wharton examines the issue of divorce and remarriage in "The Other Two," and Willa Cather explores life among Greenwich Village artists at the turn of the twentieth century in "Coming, Aphrodite!" Stories with modern settings include Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," an insightful look at the role of heritage in African-American culture, and Louise Erdrich's "The Shawl," a meditation on memory and the transformation of old stories into new ones. Together, the tales offer a revealing panorama of perspectives on women's ongoing struggles for dignity and self-sufficiency.

Breastfeeding Solutions: Quick Tips for the Most Common Nursing Challenges


Nancy Mohrbacher - 2013
    In situations like these, is weaning the best answer? Or are there simple ways to overcome challenges and meet their breastfeeding goals? Breastfeeding Solutions is the perfect book for any new mother who wants quick, practical solutions to common breastfeeding problems. The book includes illustrations, tables and charts, and other visual aids to make it easy to quickly find the answers without wading through hundreds of pages of text. Breastfeeding is one of the best things a mother can do. This book will help mothers overcome the hurdles so they can start cherishing this special time with their child.

The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium


Eleanor Heartney - 2013
    In After the Revolution, the authors concluded that The battles may not all have been won...but barricades are gradually coming down, and work proceeds on all fronts in glorious profusion. Now, with The Reckoning, authors Heartney, Posner, Princenthal, and Scott bring into focus the accomplishments of 24 acclaimed international women artists born since 1960 who have benefited from the groundbreaking efforts of their predecessors. The book is organized in four thematic sections: Bad Girls profiles artists whose work represents an assault on conventional notions of gender and racial difference. History Lessons offers reflections on the self in the context of history and globalization. Spellbound focuses on women's embrace of the irrational, subjective, and surreal, while Domestic Disturbances takes on women's conflicted relationship to home, family, and security. Written in lively prose and fully illustrated throughout, this book gives an informed account of the wonderful diversity of recent contemporary art by women.

Coconut Milk


Dan Taulapapa McMullin - 2013
    The first collection by Samoan writer and painter Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the poems evoke both intimate conversations and provocative monologues that allow him to explore the complexities of being a queer Samoan in the United States.  McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki kitsch–inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illustrates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples.McMullin’s Fa’a Fafine identity—the ability to walk between and embody both the masculine and feminine—creates a grounded and dynamic voice throughout the collection. It also fosters a creative dialogue between Fa’a Fafine people and trans-Indigenous movements. Through a uniquely Samoan practice of storytelling, McMullin contributes to the growing and vibrant body of queer Indigenous literature.

Las Hociconas: Three Locas with Big Mouths and Even Bigger Brains


Adelina Anthony - 2013
    In these intensely bold, highly theatrical, and hilarious Spanglish shows, our performer intertwines Xicanismo, the queer, the feminist and everything else that matters for those of us working toward progressive politics and practices. Each solo script is a full-length comedy that stands on its own. Conceived to be in conversation with each other, all three comedies are presented together in this book; delivering non-stop critical comedia.

Misogyny Re-Loaded


Abigail Bray - 2013
    By exposing everything from the casual acceptance of snuff pornography in "gore" culture to the framing of rape as a punch line, Abigail Bray links the celebration of sexual sadism to the rise of an authoritarian culture of militarized violence.Arguing that a meaningful collective resistance has been undermined by the mass destruction of genuine social and economic security for ordinary women, "Misogyny Re-loaded" presents a scathing critique of a politically convenient, billionaire-friendly, mainstream brand of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of resources from popular culture, literature, economics, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and environmental science, this book offers a warning about the growing social and environmental threat of an out-of-control military industrial complex.

Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning: A Strategic Participatory Systems-Based Handbook on Human Security


Lisa Schirch - 2013
    The "Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook" aims to improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding by better linking practical conflict assessment exercises to self-assessment, theories of change, designing and planning, and monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding efforts. Recognizing that many groups skimp on assessment fearing an analysis paralysis, or design programs based on untested assumptions, this approach provides basic as well as advanced tools to improve peacebuilding practice. This concise and lucid handbook tackles the problem of too much data by suggesting ways to sort, categorize and prioritize data to make it useful. Through its synthesis of a wide range of conceptual frameworks into a convenient and logical framework useful for practitioners such as NGOs developing projects, journalists wanting to write conflict-sensitive stories, or government/military agencies designing large scale efforts, the "Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook" is an essential scholarly and practical tool for the study and implementation of peacebuilding efforts.

Gender and the Law


Joanne Conaghan - 2013
    It presents a clear, concise introduction to thinking about gender issues for lawyers and law students.

Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West


Monica Rico - 2013
    

The Curious Kinky Person's Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy


Peter Tupper - 2013
    Knowing that this book would be many people’s introduction to the world of consensual sadomasochism, or BDSM, Peter Tupper, a journalist and historian who has been studying the history of BDSM since 2005, began a series of blog postings, critiquing the book’s depiction of bondage and discipline chapter by chapter. Instead of the romantic-comedy-with-bondage-and-spanking he expected, the author found a twisted psychodrama of lust, greed and fear, written by someone who has only the faintest idea of how consensual BDSM should work. Instead of a critique, it became a diagnosis of how a deeply abusive relationship between a childish, terrified woman and a mentally unstable billionaire with his private security guards could be read as a love story. Solving that riddle involves a journey through 18th century romances, the link between vampires and capitalism, The Godfather II, and the tangled boundaries between romance and abuse. This ebook contains revised and expanded material previously published on historyofbdsm.com.

Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices


Pat Armstrong - 2013
    

Antigone, Interrupted


Bonnie Honig - 2013
    Studying the play in its fifth-century and modern contexts, Bonnie Honig argues for an Antigone committed not just to dissidence but to a positive politics of counter-sovereignty and solidarity.

The Penetrated Male


Jonathan Kemp - 2013
    Deconstructing the penetrated male body and the genderisation of its representation, The Penetrated Male offers new understandings of passivity, suggesting that the modern masculine subject is predicated on a penetrability it must always disavow. Arguing that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought, it is an important contribution to queer theory and our understandings of gendered bodies.

Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror


Bonnie Mann - 2013
    national imaginary. How is it that gender, which we commonly take to be a structure at the heart of individual identity, is also at stake in the life of the nation? What do we learn about gender when wepay attention to how it moves and circulates between the lived experience of the subject and the aspirations of the nation in war? What is the relation between national sovereignty and sovereign masculinity?Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender. It is neither a natural essence nor merely a social construct. Gender is first and foremost an operation of justification whichbinds the lived existence of the individual subject to the aspirations of the regime.Inspired by a reexamination of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, the author exposes how sovereign masculinity hinges on the nation's ability to tap into and mobilize the structure of self-justification at the heart of masculine identity.At the national level, shame is repeatedly converted to power in the War on Terror through hyperbolic displays of agency including massive aerial bombardment and practices of torture. This is why, as Mann demonstrates, the phenomenon of gender itself demands a four-dimensional analysis that movesfrom the phenomenological level of lived experience, through the collective life of a people expressed in the social imaginary and the operations of language, to the material relations that prevail in our times.

Crowflight


Sunny Moraine - 2013
    Accused of losing the soul herself, Turn is exiled to the Shadowlands beyond the Crow’s city, lands occupied by the mysterious and secretive Raven tribe, weavers of dark magic and suspected by Turn as playing a role in her exile.But when Turn is saved from sickness and starvation by a Raven, everything she has always believed to be true is thrown into question. As she struggles to adapt to life among the people she once feared, terrible truths begin to emerge. There is a dark conspiracy behind her exile—a rising power that threatens to destroy everything that the Crows stand for, and even to upset the balance between life and death itself. And Turn may the only one who stands in its way . . .

The Womanist Musings Posts: Nascent Thoughts on Gender and Colonialism


b. binaohan - 2013
    the time period for the posts stretch almost a year (but there are only 36 posts because i missed quite a few weeks). one thing to mention, though, is that only 30 of the 36 posts were ever actually posted at Womanist Musings, the last six posts of this collection have never been posted or published anywhere else.

Women Serial Killers Through Time: 4 Books in 1


Sylvia Perrini - 2013
    IT INCLUDES: WSK OF THE 17th CENTURY WOMEN MURDERERS OF THE 18th CENTURY WSK OF THE 19th CENTURY WSK OF THE 20th CENTURY Our society can barely account for evil in males, let alone imagine it in females. The female nests, creates, and nurtures doesn't she or is it that we just want to believe in the intrinsic non-threatening nature of women? Yet, history is full of instrumentally violent women: women who have fought wars and battles throughout the world, with no less ferociousness than men, women such as Dynamis of Bosphorous, who starved her husband to death and took control of his kingdom, or Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus in the 5th century, who conducted a brilliant but brutal military campaign against the Greeks. Mary Tudor, Queen Mary 1 of England, in 1553 became known as "Bloody Mary," for her extreme cruelty and willingness to execute people. In modern times, women such as Madame Mao of China (1914-1991) the wife of Mao Tse-tung, who it is believed was the driving force behind the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of which she was the Deputy Director. During this 10-year period, intellectuals were imprisoned and many Eastern and Western sources have estimated the death toll from 1966-1969 alone to be around 500,000. Leaders such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and the United States Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are all equally as ruthless as their male counterparts. A grave misconception is that female serial killers are rare creatures, that they are not very common, a myth perpetuated by both the press and popular media. Women Serial Killers are not a phenomenon unique to the late twentieth century, nor are they exclusive to America. The case histories of the killers mentioned in these books clearly demonstrate that women serial killers have been active in many countries and for many centuries.

Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman


Matthew J. Perry - 2013
    The sexual identities of a female slave and a female citizen were fundamentally incompatible, as the former was principally defined by her sexual availability and the latter by her sexual integrity. Accordingly, those evaluating the manumission process needed to reconcile a woman's experiences as a slave with the expectations and moral rigor required of the female citizen. The figure of the freedwoman fictionalized and real provides an extraordinary lens into the matter of how Romans understood, debated, and experienced the sheer magnitude of the transition from slave to citizen, the various social factors that impinged upon this process, and the community stakes in the institution of manumission.

Global Beauty, Local Bodies


Afshan Jafar - 2013
    What do the words global, transnational, national, and local mean when talking about beauty, which is simultaneously abstract and ephemeral, embodied and concrete? How do ideas and images of beauty circulate in a globalizing world, and how do people's bodily practices respond to them? Rather than simply examining how beauty is thought about and aspired to in international settings, this collection of original scholarly work and first-person accounts takes globalization processes and the transnational links these processes create as the jumping-off point for an examination of what it means to be, have, or aspire to a beautiful body.