front cover of Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis
Who We Become after Facial Paralysis
Faye Linda Wachs
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Losing her smile to synkinesis after unresolved Bell’s palsy changed how Faye Linda Wachs was seen by others and her internal experience of self. In Metamorphosis, interviewing over one hundred people with acquired facial difference challenged her presumptions about identity, disability, and lived experience. Participants described microaggressions, internalizations, and minimalizations and their impact on identity. Heartbreakingly, synkinesis disrupts the ability to have shared moments.  When one experiences spontaneous emotion, wrong nerves trigger misfeel and misperception by others. One is misread by others and receives confusing internal information. Communication of and to the self is irrevocably damaged. Wachs describes the experience as a social disability. People found a host of creative ways to reinvigorate their sense of self and self-expression. Like so many she interviewed, Wachs experiences a process of change and growth as she is challenged to think more deeply about ableism, identity, and who she wants to be.
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front cover of No Slam Dunk
No Slam Dunk
Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change
Cooky, Cheryl
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see gender equality in sports.  

The chapters in No Slam Dunk show that is this not simply a story of an “unfinished revolution.” Rather, they contend, it is simplistic optimism to assume that we are currently nearing the conclusion of a story of linear progress that ends with a certain future of equality and justice.  This book provides important theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary world of sports to help explain the unevenness of social change and how, despite significant progress, gender equality in sports has been “No Slam Dunk.”  
 
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