In Archive of Tongues Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.

Women’s political representation is often expected to be better on “the left.” However, the reality is more complicated. Using Germany’s multi-party system as its central case study, Beyond Left, Right, and Center challenges this conventional wisdom on political ideology.

Christina Xydias shows that some right-leaning parties advocate for women’s rights and interests, while left- and right-leaning parties can be equally indifferent to lack of representation for women from marginalized groups. These findings follow from analyses of election results, transcripts from debates and speeches, and personal interviews, as well as from a close reading of intertwined military and citizenship policies that illustrate how women’s and ethnic minority groups’ rights are constructed.

Beyond Left, Right, and Center concludes with an analysis of women’s representation across OECD countries, showing that right-leaning parties are more likely to support women’s rights and interests in societies that are more egalitarian.

The first of its kind, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep challenges the popular notion that eating problems occur only among white, well-to-do, heterosexual women. Based on in-depth life history interviews with African-American, Latina, and lesbian women, Becky Thompson's book chronicles the effects of racism, poverty, sexism, acculturation, and sexual abuse on women's bodies and eating patterns. By demonstrating how these girls and women use eating to "make a way outa no way," A Hunger So Wide and So Deep dispels popular stereotypes of anorexia and bulimia as symptoms of vanity and stresses the risks of mislabeling what is often a way of coping with society's own disorders. With its multicultural focus, this book not only brings women of color and lesbians into our picture of eating problems, but also clears up many demeaning and sexist ideas about these problems among white women. By featuring the creative ways in which women have changed their unwanted eating patterns and regained trust in their bodies and appetites, the author offers a message of hope and empowerment that applies across race, class, and sexual preference. "Becky W. Thompson has provided a rigorous and impassioned study of eating problems, casting a special light on the experiences of women of color. Linking unhealthy eating patterns to the oppression women suffer in a society both sexist and racist, Thompson breaks new ground and offers hope for the multitudes of women who have swallowed their pain." Evelyn C. White, editor, The Black Women's Health Book "Thompson is making an important contribution to the field of eating disorders. The diversity of these women's experiences makes it particularly crucial that we hear their perspectives. Thompson's work should help us to reevaluate our assumptions about race, ethnicity, sexism, and violence in the etiology and maintenance of eating problems." Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention "Compelling stories appear in her book." San Jose Mercury News "Eating disorders have been a disastrous and dangerous problem for women for decades. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep sheds light on the seldom-noted fact that eating disorders do not discriminate. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep should be read by all women with eating disorders, parents who want to raise healthy children, and friends, lovers, spouses, and siblings of the women who struggle with eating disorders." Hispania News "In a Hunger So Wide and So Deep, psychologist Becky Thompson refutes this media image of the victims of eating disorders and builds a foundation for an entirely different perception of what causes these diseases. Her results are both surprising and alarming. Thompson argues-quite convincingly-that eating disorders happen most frequently in women of color, lesbians, and women under severe economic distress. Hunger is stuffed full of footnotes and references to statistics, studies, psychological profiles and other data to bolster her well-reasoned argument that eating disorders are most often caused by a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) response to racism, sexism, homophobia and other abuses suffered by women. Thompson's theories are complicated but never murky and are presented in a clearly delineated manner that never deteriorates into academese. Hunger refutes an enormous number of popularly held theories about eating disorders. Thompson's research belies the notion that it is teens and college students who are most at risk for these diseases; according to Thompson's studies, women in their 30s are the most frequent victims of eating disorders. And her most potent find, that non-white, non-heterosexual women are also frequent victims means a total redefinition of what these illnesses are about. Thompson urges a second look at our national obsession with weight and proffers theories and practices that could save the lives of women of all colors and sexual orientations." Lambda Book Report "A Hunger So Wide and So Deep is a wonderful book: gripping, creative and profoundly humane. In lucid prose Becky Thompson offers an original explanation for women's eating problems. She argues that many women turn to food-bingeing, dieting, purging, or starving- as a sensible means of coping with physical and psychic 'atrocities' deriving from 'racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.' Thompson breaks new ground by examining the experiences of lesbians, women of color and working-class women. Her inclusive approach produces a serious challenge to the stereotype that eating problems stem primarily from a concern with thinness." Women's Review of Books "In addition to an excellent analysis of the issues, we get a real sense of each of the women she interviewed. Although well documented and an asset to other researchers, the book is also accessibly written and an important read for anyone who wants to understand more about eating problems and women's bodies." Body Image Task Force Newsletter "Becky Thompson criticizes current feminist theory on women and eating disorders for utilizing gender almost exclusively as the category of analysis, ignoring race, class, and sexuality. She demonstrates that women of color and women of many classes and sexual orientations can be included in feminist analyses in a more meaningful way than simply saying 'these groups are affected, too'." Feminist Collections "Thompson's A Hunger So Wide and So Deep provides a bridge between the micro- and macroanalyses of eating disorders. Thompson's is the only study to my knowledge that deals systematically with race and sexualities, and it is this diversity of interviewees as well as Thompson's careful listening that shapes her analysis. More than even the feminist therapists, Thompson allows her interviewees to tell their stories. Most significant, Thompson derives her theory of disturbed eating from the stories the women told, while not reducing the behavior to personal problems." NWSA Journal "This book offers a message of hope and empowerment across race, class and sexual orientation. This book represents the postmodern challenge to us all: to question the dominant stories and pay attention to each individual's knowledge about her own life. It has been refreshing to read this book and, using these descriptions with others I see, to bring help and vision from one woman to another." Journal of Feminist Family Therapy Becky W. Thompson is an assistant professor of sociology at the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and coeditor (with Sangeeta Tyagi) of Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence. She is the author of A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism and Mothering without a Compass: White Mother's Love, Black Son's Courage.

Gloria Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2009

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women—from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization—into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

Linked to the Caribbean and southern Europe as well as to the Confederacy, the Cigar City of Tampa, Florida, never fit comfortably into the biracial mold of the New South. Nancy A. Hewitt explores the interactions among distinct groups of women--native-born white, African American, Cuban and Italian immigrant women--that shaped women's activism in the vibrant, multiethnic city.

Hewitt emphasizes the process by which women forged and reformulated their activist identities from Reconstruction through the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898, the industrywide cigar strike of 1901, and the emergence of progressive reform and labor militancy. She also recasts our understanding of southern history by demonstrating how Tampa's triracial networks alternately challenged and re-inscribed the South's biracial social and political order.

Interest in the mother-daughter relationship has never been greater, yet there are few books specifically devoted to the relationships between daughters and mothers of color. To fill that gap, this collection of original essays explores the mother-daughter relationship as it appears in the works of African, African American, Asian American, Mexican American, Native American, Indian, and Australian Aboriginal women writers.

Prominent among the writers considered here are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory and the other essayists examine the myths and reality surrounding the mother-daughter relationship in these writers' works. They show how women writers of color often portray the mother-daughter dyad as a love/hate relationship, in which the mother painstakingly tries to convey knowledge of how to survive in a racist, sexist, and classist world while the daughter rejects her mother's experiences as invalid in changing social times.

This book represents a further opening of the literary canon to twentieth-century women of color. Like the writings it surveys, it celebrates the joys of breaking silence and moving toward reconciliation and growth.