A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Results by Title
38 books about Reproduction
38 books about Reproduction
The Amboseli Elephants
A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal
Edited by Cynthia J. Moss, Harvey Croze, and Phyllis C. Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Aristotle wrote of them with awe; Hannibal used them in warfare; and John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s greatest masterpiece. . . . The only harmless great thing.” Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.
The Amboseli Elephants is the long-awaited summation of what’s been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP)—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. Cynthia J. Moss and Harvey Croze, the founders of the AERP, and Phyllis C. Lee, who has been closely involved with the project since 1982, compile more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as exciting new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making important arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.
The most comprehensive account of elephants in their natural environment to date, The Amboseli Elephants will be an invaluable resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone interested in the lives and loves of these extraordinary creatures.
[more]
The Ancient Art of Emulation
Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity
Elaine K. Gazda, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This volume of essays examines the question of copying and other forms of artistic imitation and emulation in relation to Greek and Roman art, focusing particularly on sculpture and painting in the Roman period. It goes beyond recent studies of the subject in bringing to bear the views of early modern, modern, and contemporary artists on matters of copying and imitation as well as an exceptionally wide array of traditional and current critical perspectives--historiographic, literary, technical, stylistic, iconographic, and museological, among others.
Long regarded as copies of lost Greek masterpieces, a great many Roman works are now seen as neoclassical images worthy of analysis within their own Roman contexts. This book identifies and takes account of Roman criteria in rethinking the function and aesthetic appeal of these works in the eyes of their Roman owners and audiences. Collectively, the essays argue that many traditional assumptions about the status of works of classical art as originals or copies, and much of the evidence that has been used to sustain these assumptions, must be thoroughly rethought.
Among the authors are classical archaeologists, art historians (whose areas of expertise range from antiquity to the nineteenth century), and a contemporary artist and critic.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan.
Long regarded as copies of lost Greek masterpieces, a great many Roman works are now seen as neoclassical images worthy of analysis within their own Roman contexts. This book identifies and takes account of Roman criteria in rethinking the function and aesthetic appeal of these works in the eyes of their Roman owners and audiences. Collectively, the essays argue that many traditional assumptions about the status of works of classical art as originals or copies, and much of the evidence that has been used to sustain these assumptions, must be thoroughly rethought.
Among the authors are classical archaeologists, art historians (whose areas of expertise range from antiquity to the nineteenth century), and a contemporary artist and critic.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan.
[more]
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction
Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital
Tamara Trodd
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction presents a striking new approach to how traditional art mediums—painting, sculpture, and drawing—changed in the twentieth century in response to photography, film, and other technologies. Countering the modernist view that the medium provides advanced art with “resistance” against technological pressures, Tamara Trodd argues that we should view art and its practices as imaginatively responding to the potential that artists glimpsed in mechanical reproduction, putting art into dialogue with the commercial cultures of its time.
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades—and allows us to think about these artists anew.
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades—and allows us to think about these artists anew.
[more]
Between Art and Artifact
Archaeological Replicas and Cultural Production in Oaxaca, Mexico
By Ronda L. Brulotte
University of Texas Press, 2012
Oaxaca is internationally renowned for its marketplaces and archaeological sites where tourists can buy inexpensive folk art, including replicas of archaeological treasures. Archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals sometimes discredit this trade in “fakes” that occasionally make their way to the auction block as antiquities. Others argue that these souvenirs represent a long cultural tradition of woodcarving or clay sculpting and are “genuine” artifacts of artisanal practices that have been passed from generation to generation, allowing community members to preserve their cultural practices and make a living. Exploring the intriguing question of authenticity and its relationship to cultural forms in Oaxaca and throughout southern Mexico, Between Art and Artifact confronts an important issue that has implications well beyond the commercial realm.
Demonstrating that identity politics lies at the heart of the controversy, Ronda Brulotte provides a nuanced inquiry into what it means to present “authentic” cultural production in a state where indigenous ethnicity is part of an awkward social and racial classification system. Emphasizing the world-famous woodcarvers of Arrazola and the replica purveyors who come from the same community, Brulotte presents the ironies of an ideology that extols regional identity but shuns its artifacts as “forgeries.” Her work makes us question the authority of archaeological discourse in the face of local communities who may often see things differently. A departure from the dialogue that seeks to prove or disprove “authenticity,” Between Art and Artifact reveals itself as a commentary on the arguments themselves, and what the controversy can teach us about our shifting definitions of authority and authorship.
[more]
The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog
Social Life of a Burrowing Mammal
John L. Hoogland
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog, John L. Hoogland draws on sixteen years of research at Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota, in the United States to provide this account of prairie dog social behavior. Through comparisons with more than 300 other animal species, he offers new insights into basic theory in behavioral ecology and sociobiology.
Hoogland documents interactions within and among families of prairie dogs to examine the advantages and disadvantages of coloniality. By addressing such topics as male and female reproductive success, inbreeding, kin recognition, and infanticide, Hoogland offers a broad view of conflict and cooperation. Among his surprising findings is that prairie dog females sometimes suckle, and at other times kill, the offspring of close kin.
Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, this book illuminates the social organization of a burrowing mammal and raises fundamental questions about current theory. As the most detailed long-term study of any social rodent, The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog will interest not only mammalogists and other vertebrate biologists, but also students of behavioral and evolutionary ecology.
Hoogland documents interactions within and among families of prairie dogs to examine the advantages and disadvantages of coloniality. By addressing such topics as male and female reproductive success, inbreeding, kin recognition, and infanticide, Hoogland offers a broad view of conflict and cooperation. Among his surprising findings is that prairie dog females sometimes suckle, and at other times kill, the offspring of close kin.
Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, this book illuminates the social organization of a burrowing mammal and raises fundamental questions about current theory. As the most detailed long-term study of any social rodent, The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog will interest not only mammalogists and other vertebrate biologists, but also students of behavioral and evolutionary ecology.
[more]
Bodies of Knowledge
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave
Wendy Kline
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women’s liberation.
As Kline shows, the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the women’s movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women’s health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women’s pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists, Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodies—that marked the lives—of feminism’s second wave.
[more]
The Cancer Within
Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania
Cristina A. Pop
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
[more]
Conceiving Cuba
Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era
Andaya, Elise
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 First Michelle Rosaldo Prize for a First Book in Feminist Anthropology from the Association for Feminist Anthropology
Winner of the Adele E. Clarke Book Award from ReproNetwork
After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families.
Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state.
Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.
Winner of the Adele E. Clarke Book Award from ReproNetwork
After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families.
Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state.
Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.
[more]
Engraving the Savage
The New World and Techniques of Civilization
Michael Gaudio
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers.
In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other.” Going beyond the notion of the “savage” as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savage demonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own “civil” image-making practices and the “savage” practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian.
The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry’s engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in between civil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making.
Michael Gaudio is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.
[more]
Generation and Degeneration
Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe
Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.
The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.
This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies.
The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.
This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies.
Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub
[more]
Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction
The Global Burden of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, HIV, Maternal Conditions, Perinatal Disorders, and Congenital Anomalies
Christopher J. L. Murray
Harvard University Press, 1998
From the health risks of sexual activity to those of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth, reproduction constitutes enormous risks to a woman’s health. Ill-health conditions related to sex and reproduction account for 25 percent of the global disease burden in adult women. In sub-Saharan Africa, they account for over 40 percent. The catastrophic effects of reproductive ill-health, however, are not limited to women; for infants and adult men, they inflict 25 percent and 1 percent respectively of the global burden.
This volume offers comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the epidemiologies of three sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and five specific maternal conditions, as well as those of congenital anomalies and perinatal conditions. Projections of the HIV epidemic are provided: by 2020 HIV is projected to double to 2.5 percent of the global disease burden.
Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction will serve as a comprehensive reference for epidemiologists, public health specialists, practitioners and advocates of STD and HIV prevention, and reproductive and neonatal health.
[more]
The I in Team
Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity
Erin C. Tarver
University of Chicago Press, 2017
There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are.
Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.
Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.
[more]
Intimate States
Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History
Edited by Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history.
The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present.
The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.
The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present.
The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.
[more]
Major Evolutionary Transitions in Flowering Plant Reproduction
Edited Spencer C. H. Barrett
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The first volume to address the study of evolutionary transitions in plants, Major Evolutionary Transitions in Flowering Plant Reproduction brings together compelling work from the three areas of significant innovation in plant biology: evolution and adaptation in flowers and pollination, mating patterns and gender strategies, and asexual reproduction and polyploidy. Spencer C. H. Barrett assembles here a distinguished group of authors who address evolutionary transitions using comparative and phylogenetic approaches, the tools of genomics, population genetics, and theoretical modeling, and through studies in development and field experiments in ecology. With special focus on evolutionary transitions and shifts in reproductive characters—key elements of biological diversification and research in evolutionary biology—Major Evolutionary Transitions in Flowering Plant Reproduction is the most up-to-date treatment of a fast-moving area of evolutionary biology and ecology.
[more]
Mammalian Reproductive Biology
F. H. Bronson
University of Chicago Press, 1990
A unique interdisciplinary overview of the way mammals reproduce, this volume synthesizes research done by laboratory physiologists, behaviorists, population ecologists, and animal breeders. F. H. Bronson has drawn together the disparate literature in these areas to provide students and researchers with a comprehensive and biologically integrated approach to the study of mammalian reproduction.
Each chapter presents a wealth of issues and questions, summarizing the current consensus on interpretations as well as viable alternatives under debate. The book is principally concerned with how environmental factors regulate reproduction. Bronson proposes that a mammal's reproductive performance routinely reflects simultaneous regulation by several environmental factors that interact in fascinatingly complex ways. Environment is defined broadly, and the chapters give equal weight to ecological and physiological factors when considering how variables such as food availability, ambient temperature, photoperiod, and social cues interact to regulate a mammal's reproduction. Particular attention is given to seasonal breeding, and a taxonomically arranged chapter underscores the importance of comparative and evolutionary biology to an understanding of mammalian reproduction.
Mammalian Reproductive Biology is a powerful argument for the value and importance of interdisciplinary approaches to research. Its almost 1,500 references constitute the most comprehensive bibliography to date on this topic. Bronson also gives detailed consideration to promising areas for future research. Well organized, carefully planned, and clearly written, this book will become standard reading for scientists concerned with any aspect of mammalian biology.
Each chapter presents a wealth of issues and questions, summarizing the current consensus on interpretations as well as viable alternatives under debate. The book is principally concerned with how environmental factors regulate reproduction. Bronson proposes that a mammal's reproductive performance routinely reflects simultaneous regulation by several environmental factors that interact in fascinatingly complex ways. Environment is defined broadly, and the chapters give equal weight to ecological and physiological factors when considering how variables such as food availability, ambient temperature, photoperiod, and social cues interact to regulate a mammal's reproduction. Particular attention is given to seasonal breeding, and a taxonomically arranged chapter underscores the importance of comparative and evolutionary biology to an understanding of mammalian reproduction.
Mammalian Reproductive Biology is a powerful argument for the value and importance of interdisciplinary approaches to research. Its almost 1,500 references constitute the most comprehensive bibliography to date on this topic. Bronson also gives detailed consideration to promising areas for future research. Well organized, carefully planned, and clearly written, this book will become standard reading for scientists concerned with any aspect of mammalian biology.
[more]
The Most Secret Quintessence of Life
Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850-1950
Chandak Sengoopta
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Less than a century ago, physicians, scientists, and cultural commentators became fascinated by the endocrine glands and the effects of their secretions on our bodies and minds. Of all the characteristics supposed to be governed by them, the attributes of sex evoked the wildest interest. The gonads, it was revealed, secreted chemicals that not only influenced the biological expressions of sex, but seemed to generate the vitality and energy that made life worth living.
Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties.
Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties.
[more]
Multiples in Pre-Modern Art
Edited by Walter Cupperi
Diaphanes, 2014
In the art world, replicas are typically thought to be of low value. However skillfully created, they remain in the eyes of many mere copies, pointing toward an original of greater significance. In recent years, however, replicas and multiples have come to occupy a more central position in discussions about ancient, medieval, and early modern art.
Multiples in Pre-Modern Art looks at the production and reception of replicas and multiples before the nineteenth century. A wide variety of media are considered, including metal, marble, terra cotta, textiles, plaster, porcelain, canvas, wood, and wax. Through a series of questions—What happens if a copy purposely points not to an original but to another copy? What does it matter that some serially made multiples are not identical?—many of the works are reappraised as significant art forms in their own right.
Multiples in Pre-Modern Art looks at the production and reception of replicas and multiples before the nineteenth century. A wide variety of media are considered, including metal, marble, terra cotta, textiles, plaster, porcelain, canvas, wood, and wax. Through a series of questions—What happens if a copy purposely points not to an original but to another copy? What does it matter that some serially made multiples are not identical?—many of the works are reappraised as significant art forms in their own right.
[more]
Off the Walls
Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks
Sarah Waldorf
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020
When life (in a global pandemic) imitates art . . .
Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.
[more]
The Ovary of Eve
Egg and Sperm and Preformation
Clara Pinto-Correia
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The Ovary of Eve is a rich and often hilarious account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century efforts to understand conception. In these early years of the Scientific Revolution, the most intelligent men and women of the day struggled to come to terms with the origins of new life, and one theory—preformation—sparked an intensely heated debate that continued for over a hundred years. Clara Pinto-Correia traces the history of this much maligned theory through the cultural capitals of Europe.
"The most wonderfully eye-opening, or imagination-opening book, as amusing as it is instructive."—Mary Warnock, London Observer
"[A] fascinating and often humorous study of a reproductive theory that flourished from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century."—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education
"More than just a good story, The Ovary of Eve is an object lesson about the history of science: Don't trust it. . . . Pinto-Correia says she wants to tell the story of history's losers. In doing so, she makes defeat sound more appealing than victory."—Emily Eakin, Nation.
"A sparkling history of preformation as it once affected every facet of European culture."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
"The most wonderfully eye-opening, or imagination-opening book, as amusing as it is instructive."—Mary Warnock, London Observer
"[A] fascinating and often humorous study of a reproductive theory that flourished from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century."—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education
"More than just a good story, The Ovary of Eve is an object lesson about the history of science: Don't trust it. . . . Pinto-Correia says she wants to tell the story of history's losers. In doing so, she makes defeat sound more appealing than victory."—Emily Eakin, Nation.
"A sparkling history of preformation as it once affected every facet of European culture."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
[more]
Perfect Copies
Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic
Shiamin Kwa
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.
[more]
Planning Families in Nepal
Global and Local Projects of Reproduction
Brunson, Jan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning.
Promoting a two-child norm, global family planning programs have disseminated the slogan, “A small family is a happy family,” throughout the global South. Jan Brunson examines how two generations of Hindu Nepali women negotiate this global message of a two-child family and a more local need to produce a son. Brunson explains that while women did not prefer sons to daughters, they recognized that in the dominant patrilocal family system, their daughters would eventually marry and be lost to other households. As a result, despite recent increases in educational and career opportunities for daughters, mothers still hoped for a son who would bring a daughter-in-law into the family and care for his aging parents. Mothers worried about whether their modern, rebellious sons would fulfill their filial duties, but ultimately those sons demonstrated an enduring commitment to living with their aging parents. In the context of rapid social change related to national politics as well as globalization—a constant influx of new music, clothes, gadgets, and even governments—the sons viewed the multigenerational family as a refuge.
Throughout Planning Families in Nepal, Brunson raises important questions about the notion of “planning” when applied to family formation, arguing that reproduction is better understood as a set of local and global ideals that involve actors with desires and actions with constraints, wrought with delays, stalling, and improvisation.
[more]
Poison in the Ivy
Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses
Byrd, W. Carson
Rutgers University Press, 2017
The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort.
Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.
Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.
[more]
The Politics of Reproduction
Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism
Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives—are attentive to neoliberalism’s reshaping of economies and intimacies to better understand the politics of reproduction. By looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina Mississippi, among other sites), The Politics of Reproduction focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction? Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic motivations behind the “choice” to surrender a baby for adoption or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive politics, The Politics of Reproduction makes a distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities, politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.
[more]
Power and Decision
The Social Control of Reproduction
Gita Sen
Harvard University Press, 1994
This volume brings together feminist social and biomedical scholars from the Southern and Northern hemispheres to examine the aggregate forces that affect reproductive choice. Drawing on numerous case studies, this book examines the range of social, economic, and scientific policies which collectively impact on reproductive well being. Power and Decision offers an analysis of how disparate policies, seemingly unrelated to reproduction, are implicitly “pro-natalist” or “anti-natalist.” Moreover, these policies are imbued with gender, race, and class biases. The authors examine the reproductive impact of welfare and parental leave legislation, health services, adoption policies, biomedical research, the global transfer and regulation of reproductive technologies, and international family planning programs.
Offering a rare global feminist critique of social policy, this volume makes explicit the direction of current legislative, economic, and scientific trends, providing a basis for discussion, debate, and possible redress.
[more]
Promiscuity
An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition
Tim Birkhead
Harvard University Press, 2000
Males are promiscuous and ferociously competitive.Females--both human and of other species--are naturally monogamous. That at least is what the study of sexual behavior after Darwin assumed, perhaps because it was written by men. Only in recent years has this version of events been challenged. Females, it has become clear, are remarkably promiscuous and have evolved an astonishing array of strategies, employed both before and after copulation, to determine exactly who will father their offspring.
Reviews of this book:
Birkhead...has written an engrossing, accessible explanation of sperm competition and related elements of animal biology. Birkhead succeeds on two levels at once. He sets out evolutionists' arguments about sperm competition and sexual selection, and shows how their hypotheses have been tested. He also offers a fantastic array of biological believe-it-or-nots. [His] work is solid and intriguing, a clear picture of many out-there phenomena; no one who cares for biology should miss it.
--Publishers Weekly
Reviews of this book:
[Darwin] didn't expand on...promiscuity in females...but Tim Birkhead more than makes up for Darwin's omission. Promiscuity is a fascinating, wide-ranging, erudite, readable journey through some of the weirder stretches of biology.
--A. H. Harcourt, Nature
Reviews of this book:
[A] fascinating story of a revolution in evolutionary biology. Until recently, biologists and cigar-toting males who haunt singles bars would have agreed that the reproductive act is what it's about. That may still be the case for singles-bar louts, but biologists now know the Darwinian struggle to reproduce does not end with copulation. "Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous," Birkhead writes, but recently they've found that in many species of insects, birds and reptiles, females are highly promiscuous...These new findings demolish the idea that reproduction is a warm, romantic collaboration. "This is real sexual conflict: the battle of the sexes," Birkhead says,; males and females are out to get "the best, selfish genetic deal they can get." The battle of the sexes is an old story, but the idea that it continues after copulation, in the microscopic arena of sperm and eggs, is distinctly new...As the battle of the sexes continues, Birkhead's provocative book is a reminder of how little we know.
--Paul Raeburn, New York Times Book Review
Reviews of this book:
Darwin's evolutionary theory, as originally presented, taught the importance of, and the powerful results of, the processes of sexual selection. However, according to...Birkhead, Darwin's attention stopped short at mate selection. This current work takes the study of sexual selection to yet another level...[Promiscuity is] quite readable and engaging...Birkhead is an excellent, clear writer and this approach allows even non-biologists to learn much about his subject. Certainly, the book will stimulate the reader to consider the meaning of male-female relationships in a new light.
--Keith S. Harris, Metapsychology
A century after Darwin originated the concept of sexual selection, an explosion of research began on the topic. Tim Birkhead has documented a fascinating part of this explosion; a part that Darwin did not discuss--namely adaptations taking effect after mating: sperm competition and sperm selection, and the associated battles of the sexes. Birkhead's account is riveting--it will captivate everyone, not only for its scintillating and easy presentation of the biology, but for its portrayal of some of the dramas, personalities, and social pressures that shaped the directions of the research.
--Professor G. A. Parker, Population & Evolutionary Biology Research Group, Nicholson Building, The University of Liverpool
Darwin explained why males evolve weapons to conquer rivals and ornaments to charm mates. But this is only half the story. Tim Birkhead shows how conflicts continue after copulation inside the female reproductive tract, which provides an extraordinary obstacle course where sperm from different males often battle for paternity. This is a marvellous and lucid survey, from bed-bugs to humans. If you want to know why sex is so complicated, read this book and give your brain a treat.
--Nick Davies, Professor of Behavioural Ecology, University of Cambridge
Tim Birkhead has written an engaging, popular account of the ultimate battle between the sexes, the contest to see whose sperm wins the race to fertilise the egg. This warfare shapes the reproductive lives of the lowly dungfly, the spawning salmon, the mating frog, the flirtatious zebra finch, the sneaky rutting stag and the cuckolding courtesan. But the female exploits the male to her own advantage in the end. This excellent book will leave you in no doubt that Kipling was right when he declared that the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
--Professor Roger Short, Royal Women's Hospital, Australia
At last: a book that lives up to its title! Real biology, not pseudo-science; clear, convincing and a welcome absence of speculation.
--Steve Jones, author of Almost Like a Whale, The Language of Genes and In the Blood
This is a well-written, entertaining, and quite interesting book. It's the best introduction I know of to an important and controversial topic in evolutionary biology.
--Lee Dugatkin, author of Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees
The recent appreciation of the fact that females in many species mate hundreds of times, often with various males, is a problem for traditional views of animal sexuality. Tim Birkhead's tour of the new data is studded with bizarre adaptations and quirky behaviors, but its strength lies in his elegant account of the science and its puzzles-- some solved, others still mysterious. Promiscuity is a wonderfully fresh account--equally invaluable for students of evolutionary biology and ribald after-dinner speakers.
--Richard Wrangham, Peabody Museum, Harvard University
A delightfully written and fascinating tour of the mysterious world of sperm competition and sexual conflict. Birkhead has done a masterful job at engaging the reader with background stories of the key players as the scientific dramas from Darwin on have unfolded, while maintaining the highest standards of scientific balance and accuracy. The book is informative, disturbing, and never boring. After reading this book, you will never think about human mating in quite the same way.
--David M. Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex
By viewing males and females as each having their own agenda, the choices underlying reproduction become far more complex than previously thought. Tim Birkhead offers a highly readable account of the decisions involved, and the many adaptations found in nature. He also presents a sober-minded evaluation of sperm competition, which is a relief after the hype and exaggeration by others.
--Frans de Waal, author of Good Natured and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
Tim Birkhead's excellent book tells us almost everything we always wanted to know about the evolution of sex. It also gives us a fascinating account of the sometimes tortuous paths that have led to scientific discoveries of sexual strategies.
--Bert Hölldobler, University of Würzburg, Germany
Birds do it, bees do it, and they mostly do it more than once. Female promiscuity and male sperm competition are rife in the animal kingdom. Tim Birkhead guides us through the unseen side of the battle of the sexes. He has complete authority within the literature produced by earnest research, and an easy style that conveys his own fascination with what really determines whose genes make it into the next generation. Whether you read this book as a work of science or as a late night excursion into the wild world of a fruit fly with sperm 38 times the length of its body and scientists wading knee-deep in mating garter snakes, it is likely to give you a whole new view of the facts of life.
--Alison Jolly, author of Lucy's Legacy
Tim Birkhead reveals a wonderful world in which males and females vie with each other as they strive to maximize their reproductive success. Both sexes have evolved staggeringly sophisticated ways to get what they want--often at the expense of the other. He introduces us to fish whose first encounter locks them together for life in a perpetual sexual embrace; hermaphrodites who "joust" with their reproductive organs, each trying to inseminate the other without being inseminated; and tiny flies whose seminal fluid is so toxic that it not only destroys the sperm of rival males but eventually kills the female. He explores the long and tortuous road leading to our current state of knowledge, from Aristotle's observations on chickens, to the first successful artificial insemination in the seventeenth century, to today's ingenious molecular markers for assigning paternity. And he shows how much human behavior--from the wife-sharing habits of Inuit hunters to Charlie Chaplin's paternity case--is influenced by sperm competition.
Lucidly written and lavishly illustrated, with a wealth of fascinating detail and vivid examples, Promiscuity is the ultimate guide to the battle of the sexes.
Table of Contents:
List of Plates
Preface
1. Competition, Choice and Sexual Conflict
2. Paternity and Protection
3. Genitalia
4. Sperm, Ejaculates and Ova
5. Copulation, Insemination and Fertilization
6. Mechanisms of Sperm Competition and Sperm Choice
7. The Benefits of Polyandry
References
Bibliography
Appendix: Species mentioned in the text
Index
Reviews of this book:
Birkhead...has written an engrossing, accessible explanation of sperm competition and related elements of animal biology. Birkhead succeeds on two levels at once. He sets out evolutionists' arguments about sperm competition and sexual selection, and shows how their hypotheses have been tested. He also offers a fantastic array of biological believe-it-or-nots. [His] work is solid and intriguing, a clear picture of many out-there phenomena; no one who cares for biology should miss it.
--Publishers Weekly
Reviews of this book:
[Darwin] didn't expand on...promiscuity in females...but Tim Birkhead more than makes up for Darwin's omission. Promiscuity is a fascinating, wide-ranging, erudite, readable journey through some of the weirder stretches of biology.
--A. H. Harcourt, Nature
Reviews of this book:
[A] fascinating story of a revolution in evolutionary biology. Until recently, biologists and cigar-toting males who haunt singles bars would have agreed that the reproductive act is what it's about. That may still be the case for singles-bar louts, but biologists now know the Darwinian struggle to reproduce does not end with copulation. "Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous," Birkhead writes, but recently they've found that in many species of insects, birds and reptiles, females are highly promiscuous...These new findings demolish the idea that reproduction is a warm, romantic collaboration. "This is real sexual conflict: the battle of the sexes," Birkhead says,; males and females are out to get "the best, selfish genetic deal they can get." The battle of the sexes is an old story, but the idea that it continues after copulation, in the microscopic arena of sperm and eggs, is distinctly new...As the battle of the sexes continues, Birkhead's provocative book is a reminder of how little we know.
--Paul Raeburn, New York Times Book Review
Reviews of this book:
Darwin's evolutionary theory, as originally presented, taught the importance of, and the powerful results of, the processes of sexual selection. However, according to...Birkhead, Darwin's attention stopped short at mate selection. This current work takes the study of sexual selection to yet another level...[Promiscuity is] quite readable and engaging...Birkhead is an excellent, clear writer and this approach allows even non-biologists to learn much about his subject. Certainly, the book will stimulate the reader to consider the meaning of male-female relationships in a new light.
--Keith S. Harris, Metapsychology
A century after Darwin originated the concept of sexual selection, an explosion of research began on the topic. Tim Birkhead has documented a fascinating part of this explosion; a part that Darwin did not discuss--namely adaptations taking effect after mating: sperm competition and sperm selection, and the associated battles of the sexes. Birkhead's account is riveting--it will captivate everyone, not only for its scintillating and easy presentation of the biology, but for its portrayal of some of the dramas, personalities, and social pressures that shaped the directions of the research.
--Professor G. A. Parker, Population & Evolutionary Biology Research Group, Nicholson Building, The University of Liverpool
Darwin explained why males evolve weapons to conquer rivals and ornaments to charm mates. But this is only half the story. Tim Birkhead shows how conflicts continue after copulation inside the female reproductive tract, which provides an extraordinary obstacle course where sperm from different males often battle for paternity. This is a marvellous and lucid survey, from bed-bugs to humans. If you want to know why sex is so complicated, read this book and give your brain a treat.
--Nick Davies, Professor of Behavioural Ecology, University of Cambridge
Tim Birkhead has written an engaging, popular account of the ultimate battle between the sexes, the contest to see whose sperm wins the race to fertilise the egg. This warfare shapes the reproductive lives of the lowly dungfly, the spawning salmon, the mating frog, the flirtatious zebra finch, the sneaky rutting stag and the cuckolding courtesan. But the female exploits the male to her own advantage in the end. This excellent book will leave you in no doubt that Kipling was right when he declared that the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
--Professor Roger Short, Royal Women's Hospital, Australia
At last: a book that lives up to its title! Real biology, not pseudo-science; clear, convincing and a welcome absence of speculation.
--Steve Jones, author of Almost Like a Whale, The Language of Genes and In the Blood
This is a well-written, entertaining, and quite interesting book. It's the best introduction I know of to an important and controversial topic in evolutionary biology.
--Lee Dugatkin, author of Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees
The recent appreciation of the fact that females in many species mate hundreds of times, often with various males, is a problem for traditional views of animal sexuality. Tim Birkhead's tour of the new data is studded with bizarre adaptations and quirky behaviors, but its strength lies in his elegant account of the science and its puzzles-- some solved, others still mysterious. Promiscuity is a wonderfully fresh account--equally invaluable for students of evolutionary biology and ribald after-dinner speakers.
--Richard Wrangham, Peabody Museum, Harvard University
A delightfully written and fascinating tour of the mysterious world of sperm competition and sexual conflict. Birkhead has done a masterful job at engaging the reader with background stories of the key players as the scientific dramas from Darwin on have unfolded, while maintaining the highest standards of scientific balance and accuracy. The book is informative, disturbing, and never boring. After reading this book, you will never think about human mating in quite the same way.
--David M. Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex
By viewing males and females as each having their own agenda, the choices underlying reproduction become far more complex than previously thought. Tim Birkhead offers a highly readable account of the decisions involved, and the many adaptations found in nature. He also presents a sober-minded evaluation of sperm competition, which is a relief after the hype and exaggeration by others.
--Frans de Waal, author of Good Natured and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
Tim Birkhead's excellent book tells us almost everything we always wanted to know about the evolution of sex. It also gives us a fascinating account of the sometimes tortuous paths that have led to scientific discoveries of sexual strategies.
--Bert Hölldobler, University of Würzburg, Germany
Birds do it, bees do it, and they mostly do it more than once. Female promiscuity and male sperm competition are rife in the animal kingdom. Tim Birkhead guides us through the unseen side of the battle of the sexes. He has complete authority within the literature produced by earnest research, and an easy style that conveys his own fascination with what really determines whose genes make it into the next generation. Whether you read this book as a work of science or as a late night excursion into the wild world of a fruit fly with sperm 38 times the length of its body and scientists wading knee-deep in mating garter snakes, it is likely to give you a whole new view of the facts of life.
--Alison Jolly, author of Lucy's Legacy
[more]
Red-winged Blackbirds
Decision-making and Reproductive Success
Les D. Beletsky and Gordon H. Orians
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Drawing on detailed data from their sixteen-year study of red-winged blackbirds in the marshes of Washington's Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, Beletsky and Orians analyze the information redwings use to make breeding-season decisions and the consequences these decisions have for lifetime reproductive success. Because male and female redwings make different, and often independent, decisions—males focus on territory acquisition and maintenance, while females must choose when and where to nest and how much energy to invest in reproduction—the authors have taken the novel approach of studying the sexes separately.
Using analyses of observational data combined with field experiments and game-theoretical models, the authors provide new insights into the complex patterns of reproductive decision-making and breeding behavior in redwings. This book will be of interest to all who study social animals, including behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and ornithologists.
Using analyses of observational data combined with field experiments and game-theoretical models, the authors provide new insights into the complex patterns of reproductive decision-making and breeding behavior in redwings. This book will be of interest to all who study social animals, including behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and ornithologists.
[more]
Reproduction by Design
Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain
Angus McLaren
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world.
That debate continues today, and to understand the history of our anxieties about modernity, we can have no better guide than Angus McLaren. In Reproduction by Design, McLaren draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and '30s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex change operations, and in vitro fertilization.
Here, McLaren brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a cogent discussion of science’s place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.
[more]
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State
New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives
Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds.
Duke University Press, 2011
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control, HIV/AIDS, assisted reproductive technologies, paternity tests, sex work, and humanitarian assistance. The contributors address the methodological challenges of research on globalization, including ways of combining fine-grained ethnography with analyses of large-scale political, economic, and ideological forces. Their essays reveal complex interactions among global and state population policies and politics; public health, human rights, and feminist movements; diverse medical systems; various religious practices, doctrines, and institutions; and intimate relationships and individual aspirations.
Contributors. Aditya Bharadwaj, Caroline H. Bledsoe, Carole H. Browner, Junjie Chen, Aimee R. Eden, Susan L. Erikson, Didier Fassin, Claudia Lee Williams Fonseca, Ellen Gruenbaum, Matthew Gutmann, Marcia C. Inhorn, Mark B. Padilla, Rayna Rapp, Lisa Ann Richey, Carolyn Sargent, Papa Sow, Cecilia Van Hollen, Linda Whiteford
[more]
Reproductive Success
Studies of Individual Variation in Contrasting Breeding Systems
Edited by T. H. Clutton-Brock
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"This book is well worth buying for its detailed summaries of the 25 studies, many of which are classic long-term projects, and for its insights into the factors determining reproductive success."—William J. Sutherland, TREE
"A must read for anyone interested in evolution, mating/social systems, and population ecology."—John L. Koprowski, IJournal of Insect Behavior
"A must read for anyone interested in evolution, mating/social systems, and population ecology."—John L. Koprowski, IJournal of Insect Behavior
[more]
Sculpture and its Reproductions
Edited by Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft
Reaktion Books, 1997
This collection of essays is the first of its kind to focus on issues concerning sculpture and reproduction, and to explore their theoretical and practical consequences. What does it mean for a sculpture to be reproduced? Does it diminish or add to the authenticity and authority of the original?
Ranging from the Ancient to the Modern world, and investigating the function of artistic reproduction in cultures as diverse as the Catholic Spain of the Golden Age and the avant-garde of early twentieth century Germany, these essays significantly add to our understanding of a number of major sculptors, including Michelangelo, Rodin and Brancusi.
With essays by Ed Allington, Malcolm Baker, Anthony Hughes, Neil McWilliam, Miranda Marvin, Alexandra Parigoris, Martin Postle, Erich Ranfft and Marjorie Trusted.
Ranging from the Ancient to the Modern world, and investigating the function of artistic reproduction in cultures as diverse as the Catholic Spain of the Golden Age and the avant-garde of early twentieth century Germany, these essays significantly add to our understanding of a number of major sculptors, including Michelangelo, Rodin and Brancusi.
With essays by Ed Allington, Malcolm Baker, Anthony Hughes, Neil McWilliam, Miranda Marvin, Alexandra Parigoris, Martin Postle, Erich Ranfft and Marjorie Trusted.
[more]
Seizing the Means of Reproduction
Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience
Michelle Murphy
Duke University Press, 2012
In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means—the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes—developed by feminist health activists. She argues that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics.
Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.
[more]
Sex on the Kitchen Table
The Romance of Plants and Your Food
Norman C. Ellstrand
University of Chicago Press, 2018
At the tips of our forks and on our dinner plates, a buffet of botanical dalliance awaits us. Sex and food are intimately intertwined, and this relationship is nowhere more evident than among the plants that sustain us. From lascivious legumes to horny hot peppers, most of humanity’s calories and other nutrition come from seeds and fruits—the products of sex—or from flowers, the organs that make plant sex possible. Sex has also played an arm’s-length role in delivering plant food to our stomachs, as human handmade evolution (plant breeding, or artificial selection) has turned wild species into domesticated staples.
In Sex on the Kitchen Table, Norman C. Ellstrand takes us on a vegetable-laced tour of this entire sexual adventure. Starting with the love apple (otherwise known as the tomato) as a platform for understanding the kaleidoscopic ways that plants can engage in sex, successive chapters explore the sex lives of a range of food crops, including bananas, avocados, and beets, finally ending with genetically engineered squash—a controversial, virus-resistant vegetable created by a process that involves the most ancient form of sex. Peppered throughout are original illustrations and delicious recipes, from sweet and savory tomato pudding to banana puffed pancakes, avocado toast (of course), and both transgenic and non-GMO tacos.
An eye-opening medley of serious science, culinary delights, and humor, Sex on the Kitchen Table offers new insight into fornicating flowers, salacious squash, and what we owe to them. So as we sit down to dine and ready for that first bite, let us say a special grace for our vegetal vittles: let’s thank sex for getting them to our kitchen table.
In Sex on the Kitchen Table, Norman C. Ellstrand takes us on a vegetable-laced tour of this entire sexual adventure. Starting with the love apple (otherwise known as the tomato) as a platform for understanding the kaleidoscopic ways that plants can engage in sex, successive chapters explore the sex lives of a range of food crops, including bananas, avocados, and beets, finally ending with genetically engineered squash—a controversial, virus-resistant vegetable created by a process that involves the most ancient form of sex. Peppered throughout are original illustrations and delicious recipes, from sweet and savory tomato pudding to banana puffed pancakes, avocado toast (of course), and both transgenic and non-GMO tacos.
An eye-opening medley of serious science, culinary delights, and humor, Sex on the Kitchen Table offers new insight into fornicating flowers, salacious squash, and what we owe to them. So as we sit down to dine and ready for that first bite, let us say a special grace for our vegetal vittles: let’s thank sex for getting them to our kitchen table.
[more]
Stacked Decks
Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality
Robin Bartram
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A startling look at the power and perspectives of city building inspectors as they navigate unequal housing landscapes.
Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact—housing inequality. In Stacked Decks, she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods. Stacked Decks illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.
Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact—housing inequality. In Stacked Decks, she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods. Stacked Decks illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.
[more]
Transgenerational Media Industries
Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture
Derek Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Within corporate media industries, adults produce children’s entertainment. Yet children, presumed to exist outside the professional adult world, make their own contributions to it—creating and posting unboxing videos, for example, that provide content for toy marketers. Many adults, meanwhile, avidly consume entertainment products nominally meant for children. Media industries reincorporate this market-disrupting participation into their strategies, even turning to adult consumers to pass fandom to the next generation.
Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of “kids’ media” to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals’ identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures.
This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.
Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of “kids’ media” to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals’ identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures.
This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.
[more]
The Tungara Frog
A Study in Sexual Selection and Communication
Michael J. Ryan
University of Chicago Press, 1985
In a Panamanian pond, male túngara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) gather in choruses, giving their "advertisement" call to the females that move among them. If a female chooses to make physical contact with a male, he will clasp her and eventually fertilize her eggs. But in vying for the females, the males whose calls are most attractive may also attract the interest of another creature: the fringe-lipped bat, a frog eater.
In the Túngara Frog, the most detailed and informative single study available of frogs and their reproductive behavior, Michael J. Ryan demonstrates the interplay of sexual and natural selection. Using techniques from ethology, behavioral ecology, sensory physiology, physiological ecology, and theoretical population genetics in his research, Ryan shows that large males with low-frequency calls mate most successfully. He examines in detail a number of explanations for the females' preferences, and he considers possible evolutionary forces leading to the males' success.
Though certain vocalizations allow males to obtain mates and thus should be favored by sexual selection, this study highlights two important costs of such sexual displays: the frogs expand considerable energy in their mating calls, and they advertise their whereabouts to predators. Ryan considers in detail how predators, especially the frige-lipped bat (Trachops cirrhosus), affect the evolution of the túngara frog's calls.
In the Túngara Frog, the most detailed and informative single study available of frogs and their reproductive behavior, Michael J. Ryan demonstrates the interplay of sexual and natural selection. Using techniques from ethology, behavioral ecology, sensory physiology, physiological ecology, and theoretical population genetics in his research, Ryan shows that large males with low-frequency calls mate most successfully. He examines in detail a number of explanations for the females' preferences, and he considers possible evolutionary forces leading to the males' success.
Though certain vocalizations allow males to obtain mates and thus should be favored by sexual selection, this study highlights two important costs of such sexual displays: the frogs expand considerable energy in their mating calls, and they advertise their whereabouts to predators. Ryan considers in detail how predators, especially the frige-lipped bat (Trachops cirrhosus), affect the evolution of the túngara frog's calls.
[more]
Unlearning Eugenics
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe
Dagmar Herzog
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Since the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich and the end of its horrific eugenics policies, battles over the politics of life, sex, and death have continued and evolved. Dagmar Herzog documents how reproductive rights and disability rights, both latecomers to the postwar human rights canon, came to be seen as competing—with unexpected consequences.
Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar—and now also postcommunist—Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also restores to the historical record a revelatory array of activists: from Catholic and Protestant theologians who defended abortion rights in the 1960s–70s to historians in the 1980s–90s who uncovered the long-suppressed connections between the mass murder of the disabled and the Holocaust of European Jewry; from feminists involved in the militant "cripple movement" of the 1980s to lawyers working for right-wing NGOs in the 2000s; and from a handful of pioneers in the 1940s–60s committed to living in intentional community with individuals with cognitive disability to present-day disability self-advocates.
Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar—and now also postcommunist—Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also restores to the historical record a revelatory array of activists: from Catholic and Protestant theologians who defended abortion rights in the 1960s–70s to historians in the 1980s–90s who uncovered the long-suppressed connections between the mass murder of the disabled and the Holocaust of European Jewry; from feminists involved in the militant "cripple movement" of the 1980s to lawyers working for right-wing NGOs in the 2000s; and from a handful of pioneers in the 1940s–60s committed to living in intentional community with individuals with cognitive disability to present-day disability self-advocates.
[more]
Van Gogh on Demand
China and the Readymade
Winnie Won Yin Wong
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In a manufacturing metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that famously houses thousands of workers who paint van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces for the world market, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about work and life in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, first investigating the work of conceptual artists who made projects there; then working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying wholesalers and retailers in Europe, East Asia and North America; establishing relationships with local leaders; and organizing a conceptual art exhibition for the Shanghai World Expo. The result is Van Gogh on Demand, a fascinating book about a little-known aspect of the global art world—one that sheds surprising light on the workings of art, artists, and individual genius.
Confronting big questions about the definition of art, the ownership of an image, and the meaning of originality and imitation, Wong describes an art world in which idealistic migrant workers, lofty propaganda makers, savvy dealers, and international artists make up a global supply chain of art and creativity. She examines how Berlin-based conceptual artist Christian Jankowski, who collaborated with Dafen’s painters to reimagine the Dafen Art Museum, unwittingly appropriated the work of a Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf. She recounts how Liu Ding, a Beijing-based conceptual artist, asked Dafen “assembly-line” painters to perform at the Guangzhou Triennial, neatly styling himself into a Dafen boss. Taking the Shenzhen-based photojournalist Yu Haibo’s award-winning photograph from the Amsterdam's World Press Photo organization, she finds and meets the Dafen painter pictured in it and traces his paintings back to an unlikely place in Amsterdam. Through such cases, Wong shows how Dafen’s painters force us to reexamine our preconceptions about creativity, and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art.
Providing a valuable account of art practices in an ascendant China, Van Gogh on Demand is a rich and detailed look at the implications of a world that can offer countless copies of everything that has ever been called “art.”
[more]
Way Down in the Hole
Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement
Angela J. Hattery
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.
Way Down the Hole Video 1 (https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0)
Way Down the Hole Video 2 (https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ)
Way Down the Hole Video 3 (https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs)
Way Down the Hole Video 4 (https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c)
Way Down the Hole Video 1 (https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0)
Way Down the Hole Video 2 (https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ)
Way Down the Hole Video 3 (https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs)
Way Down the Hole Video 4 (https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c)
[more]
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2023
The University of Chicago Press