front cover of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Ella Shohat
Duke University Press, 2006
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time a selection of trailblazing essays by Ella Shohat, an internationally renowned theorist of postcolonial and cultural studies of Iraqi-Jewish background. Written over the past two decades, these twelve essays—some classic, some less known, some new—trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the consequences of a deep critique of Eurocentric epistemology, whether to rethink feminism through race, nationalism through ethnicity, or colonialism through sexuality.

Shohat’s critical method boldly transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries. She explores such issues as the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, the paradoxical repercussions for audio-visual media of the “graven images” taboo, the allegorization of race through the refiguring of Cleopatra, the allure of imperial popular culture, and the gender politics of medical technologies. She also examines the resistant poetics of exile and displacement; the staging of historical memory through the commemorations of the two 1492s, the anomalies of the “national” in Zionist discourse, the implications of the hyphen in the concept “Arab-Jew,” and the translation of the debates on orientalism and postcolonialism across geographies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the concerns that have animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades; it also points toward new scholarly possibilities.

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Technologies of the Gendered Body
Reading Cyborg Women
Anne Balsamo
Duke University Press, 1996
This book takes the process of "reading the body" into the fields at the forefront of culture—the vast spaces mapped by science and technology—to show that the body in high-tech is as gendered as ever. From female body building to virtual reality, from cosmetic surgery to cyberpunk, from reproductive medicine to public health policies to TV science programs, Anne Balsamo articulates the key issues concerning the status of the body for feminist cultural studies in a postmodern world.
Technologies of the Gendered Body combines close readings of popular texts—such as Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the movie Pumping Iron II: The Women, cyberpunk magazines, and mass media—with analyses of medical literature, public policy documents, and specific technological practices. Balsamo describes the ways in which certain biotechnologies are ideologically shaped by gender considerations and other beliefs about race, physical abilities, and economic and legal status. She presents a view of the conceptual system that structures individuals’ access to and participation in these technologies, as well as an overview of individuals’ rights and responsibilities in this sometimes baffling area. Examining the ways in which the body is gendered in its interactions with new technologies of corporeality, Technologies of the Gendered Body counters the claim that in our scientific culture the material body has become obsolete. With ample evidence that the techno-body is always gendered and marked by race, this book sets the stage for a renewed feminist engagement with contemporary technological narratives.
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Tendings
Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man
Nathan Snaza
Duke University Press, 2024
In Tendings, Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture’s resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought. Analyzing writing and performances by Maryse Condé, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Starhawk, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others, Snaza introduces his theory of tending as a concept that links ontology, attunement, care, and anticipatory action to explore how worlds persist through everyday acts of participation. In contrast to the universalizing presuppositions of the enlightenment, Snaza shows how certain feminist occult and esoteric practices constitute what he calls an endarkenment that embraces decolonial spiritual knowledge. Highlighting how endarkenment practices challenge universal presumptions and reject the racializing and colonialist mission of enlightenment modernity, Snaza demonstrates the ways esoterism affirms a pluriversal worldview that reimagines what it means to live in a more-than-human world.
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The Terrible We
Thinking with Trans Maladjustment
Cameron Awkward-Rich
Duke University Press, 2022
In The Terrible We Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationships among trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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Third Wave Agenda
Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
Leslie Heywood
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Discusses the challenges and pleasures of creating a new feminism.

Young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images-in the distance from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, a chasm has been traversed and an entire history made. In Third Wave Agenda, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter now, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past and in planning for the challenges of the future.

The women and men writing here are activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists, and journalists. They distinguish themselves from a group of young, conservative feminists, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who criticize second wave feminists and are regularly called on to speak for the “next generation” of feminism. In contrast, Third Wave Agenda seeks to complicate our understanding of feminism by not only embracing the second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures, but also emphasizing ways that desires and pleasures such as beauty and power can be used to enliven activist work, even while recognizing the importance of maintaining a critique of them.Combining research, theory, and social practice with an autobiographical style, these writers are hard at work creating a new feminism that draws on the submerged histories of other feminisms-black feminism, “womanism,” and working-class feminism, among others. Some topics explored in Third Wave Agenda include feminism in popular music, interracial coalitions, and tensions between individual ambitions and collective action. Contributors: Barry Baldridge, Ana Marie Cox, Ophira Edut, Tali Edut, Carol Guess, Freya Johnson, Melissa Klein, Dyann Logwood, Annalee Newitz, Jeff Niesel, Jennifer Reed, Jillian Sandel, Leigh Shoemaker, Michelle Sidler, Deborah L. Siegel, Jen Smith, Carolyn Sorisio, and Lidia Yukman.
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A Time of One's Own
Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art
Catherine Grant
Duke University Press, 2022
In A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.
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Transformation Now!
Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change
AnaLouise Keating
University of Illinois Press, 2013
In this lively, thought-provoking study, AnaLouise Keating writes in the traditions of radical U.S. women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women of color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and her own personal and pedagogical experiences, Keating develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, Transformation Now! calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.
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front cover of Transforming Knowledge 2Nd Edition
Transforming Knowledge 2Nd Edition
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
Temple University Press, 2004
This is a book about how we define knowledge and how we think about moral and political questions. It argues that the prevailing systems of knowledge, morality, and politics are rooted in views that are exclusionary and therefore legitimate injustice, patriarchy, and violence. That is, these views divide humans into different kinds along a hierarchy whose elite still defines the systems that shape our lives and misshape our thinking. Like the first edition of Transforming Knowledge, this substantially revised edition calls upon us to continue to liberate our minds and the systems we live within from concepts that rationalize inequality. It engages with the past fifteen years of feminist scholarship and developments in its allied fields (such as Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies) to critique the deepest and most vicious of old prejudices. This new edition extends Minnich's arguments and connects them with the contemporary academy as well as recent instances of domination, genocide, and sexualized violence.
* Updated to consider recent scholarship in Gender, Multicultural, Postcolonial, Disability, Native American, and Queer Studies, among other fields of study
 * Revised to include an extended analysis of the conceptual errors that legitimate domination, including the construction of kinds ("genders") of human beings
* Revised to include new materials from a variety of cultures and times, and engages with today's contemporary debates about affirmative action, postmodernism, and religion
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front cover of Transnational Feminist Itineraries
Transnational Feminist Itineraries
Situating Theory and Activist Practice
Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Transnational Feminist Itineraries brings together scholars and activists from multiple continents to demonstrate the ongoing importance of transnational feminist theory in challenging neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms around the world. The contributors illuminate transnational feminism's unique constellation of elements: its specific mode of thinking across scales, its historical understanding of identity categories, and its expansive imagining of solidarity based on difference rather than similarity. Contesting the idea that transnational feminism works in opposition to other approaches—especially intersectional and decolonial feminisms—this volume instead argues for their complementarity. Throughout, the contributors call for reaching across social, ideological, and geographical boundaries to better confront the growing reach of nationalism, authoritarianism, and religious and economic fundamentalism.

Contributors. Mary Bernstein, Isabel Maria Cortesão Casimiro, Rafael de la Dehesa, Carmen L. Diaz Alba, Inderpal Grewal, Cricket Keating, Amy Lind, Laura L. Lovett, Kathryn Moeller, Nancy A. Naples, Jennifer C. Nash, Amrita Pande, Srila Roy, Cara K. Snyder, Ashwini Tambe, Millie Thayer, Catarina Casimiro Trindade
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front cover of Troubled Bodies
Troubled Bodies
Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical Ethics, and the Body
Paul A. Komesaroff
Duke University Press, 1995
Setting out the implications of the postmodern condition for medical ethics, Troubled Bodies challenges the contemporary paradigms of medical ethics and reconceptualizes the nature of the field. Drawing on recent developments in philosophy, philosophy of science, and feminist theory, this volume seeks to expand familiar ethical reflections on medicine to incorporate new ways of thinking about the body and the dilemmas raised by recent developments in medical techniques.
These essays examine the ways in which the consideration of ethical questions is shaped by the structures of knowledge and communication at work in clinical practice, by current assumptions regarding the concept of the body, and by the social and political implications of both. Representing various perspectives including medicine, nursing, philosophy, and sociology, these essays look anew at issues of abortion, reproductive technologies, the doctor-patient relationship, the social construction of illness, the cultural assumptions and consequences of medicine, and the theoretical presuppositions underlying modern psychiatry. Diverging from the tenets of mainstream bioethics, Troubled Bodies suggests that, rather than searching for the correct "coherent perspective" from which to draw ethical principles, we must apprehend the complexity and diversity of the discursive systems within which we dwell.
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