Feminist critics place a premium on the "real" stories told by the victimized and the oppressed. Haunting Violations offers a corrective to such uncritical acceptance of the "real" in confessional, testimonial, and ethnographic narratives. Through close readings of a wide variety of texts, contributors argue that depictions of the "real" are inherently performative, crafted within the limits and in the interests of specific personal, political, or social projects.
Haunting Violations explores the inseparability of discourse and politics in quasi-autobiographical works such as I, Rigoberta Menchú and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Contributors consider how the Sri Lankan Mother's Front movement exploits the sanctity of the maternal and how multiple political purposes on both sides bleed through government "documentary" photographs of Japanese-American concentration camp internees. This volume also investigates how South Asian feminists use the authority of their personal experience to critique the film Mississippi Masala and how realist narratives, such as Janet Campbell Hale's autobiographical Bloodlines, Margie Strosser's documentary film Rape Stories, and Shekur Kapur's film Bandit Queen, reexamine how assumptions about power and trauma are embedded in the promise of the real.
 

Reaching into our own time, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man confronts the disintegration of traditional sources of meaning and the correlative attempt to generate new sources of order from within the self. Voegelin allows us to contemplate the crisis in its starkest terms as the apocalypse of man that now seeks to replace the apocalypse of God. The totalitarian upheaval that convulsed Voegelin's world, and whose aftermath still defines ours, is only the external manifestation of an inner spiritual turmoil. Its roots have been probed throughout the eight volumes of History of Political Ideas, but its emergence is marked by the age of Enlightenment.

In our postmodern era, discussions of the collapse of the "enlightenment project" have become commonplace. Voegelin compels us to follow the great-souled individuals who sought to go from disintegration of the present toward evocations of order for the future. Such thinkers as Comte, Bakunin, and Marx suffered through the crisis and fully understood the need for a new outpouring of the spirit. They resolved to supply the deficiency themselves. As a consequence they launched us irrevocably on the path of the apocalypse of man.

One of the great merits of Voegelin's analysis is his exposition of the pervasive character of this crisis. It is not confined to the megalomaniacal dreamers of a revolutionary apocalypse; rather, echoes of it are found in the more moderate Enlightenment preoccupation with progress to be attained through application of the scientific method. Faith in the capacity of instrumental reason to answer the ultimate questions of human existence defined men such as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Condorcet. It remains the authoritative faith of our world today, Voegelin argues, demonstrated by our continuing inability to step outside the parameters of the Enlightenment. Are we condemned, then, to oscillate between the rational incoherence of a science that never delivers on its promises and a now discredited revolutionary idealism that wreaks havoc in practice? This is the question toward which Voegelin's final volume points. While not direct, his response is evident everywhere. Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man could have been written only by a man who had reached his own resolution of the crisis.

Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, Homosexuality in Cold War America examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the national security state, the growth of the suburbs, and postwar consumer culture, Corber examines how gay men resisted the "organization man" model of masculinity that rose to dominance in the wake of World War II.
By exploring the representation of gay men in film noir, Corber suggests that even as this Hollywood genre reinforced homophobic stereotypes, it legitimized the gay male "gaze." He emphasizes how film noir’s introduction of homosexual characters countered the national "project" to render gay men invisible, and marked a deep subversion of the Cold War mentality. Corber then considers the work of gay male writers Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, demonstrating how these authors declined to represent homosexuality as a discrete subculture and instead promoted a model of political solidarity rooted in the shared experience of oppression. Homosexuality in Cold War America reveals that the ideological critique of the dominant culture made by gay male authors of the 1950s laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement of the following decade.