Black Gurl Reliable does the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge, indexing sociocultural tactics (schooling) that foreclose Black girl aliveness, while advancing embodiment as a key ingredient of Black mattering. Elevating Black Girlhood Studies as an ethos, narratives presented offer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and position Black girls and girlhood as more than lamentation and what happens to the body. Hill solicits the strength and utility of arts-based methods in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design for ephemerality and improvisation. Hill makes clear Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body.

As a means of mitigating the deleterious effects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.

In modern pediatric practice, gender matters. From the pink-and-blue striped receiving blankets used to swaddle newborns, to the development of sex-specific nutrition plans based on societal expectations of the stature of children, a gendered culture permeates pediatrics and children’s health throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book provides a look at how gender has served as one of the frameworks for pediatric care in the U.S. since the specialty’s inception. Pink and Blue deploys gender—often in concert with class and race—as the central critical lens for understanding the function of pediatrics as a cultural and social project in modern U.S. history.

Boy choirs are one of the oldest musical traditions in the Western world. While audiences admire boy singers for their distinctive treble notes, boys who sing in soprano voices have to contend with the notion that they’re doing something effeminate, even emasculating, because they sing in a vocal range typically reserved for women and girls. Known as the “unchanged trebles” within choirs, boys who sing in soprano voices defy prevailing norms of traditional masculinity. What do boy choirs represent in a culture that increasingly sees gender as an individual choice rather than a fixed, biological category? And is this tradition, which is rooted in exclusion of girls and women, one worth saving?

In Unchanged Trebles, Rebekah Peeples charts an unexpected, thought-provoking, and deeply personal journey into the peculiar world of contemporary boy choirs, where boys learn to do something together that they’re often embarrassed to do alone: sing in their soprano voices. Considering her experience as the unlikely mother of a boy soprano alongside dozens of interviews with current directors and former choristers, she argues that some of the tools for creating a more gender-inclusive future can be found in an ancient tradition that has long recognized gender fluidity within the pre-pubescent male body. With humor, insight, and the voice of a gifted storyteller, Unchanged Trebles explores a cultural tradition in which singing and expressing emotion are encouraged for boys, showing them a more expansive form of masculinity as they transition from boyhood to manhood.