Essays by feminist film, media, and literature scholars based in the United States and United Kingdom provide an array of perspectives on the social and political implications of postfeminism. Examining magazines, mainstream and independent cinema, popular music, and broadcast genres from primetime drama to reality television, contributors consider how postfeminism informs self-fashioning through makeovers and cosmetic surgery, the “metrosexual” male, the “black chick flick,” and more. Interrogating Postfeminism demonstrates not only the viability of, but also the necessity for, a powerful feminist critique of contemporary popular culture.

Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Steven Cohan, Lisa Coulthard, Anna Feigenbaum, Suzanne Leonard, Angela McRobbie, Diane Negra, Sarah Projansky, Martin Roberts, Hannah E. Sanders, Kimberly Springer, Yvonne Tasker, Sadie Wearing

In one essay, two prominent intersex activists reflect on their often controversial work on behalf of the Intersex Society of North America to achieve change in medical policy over the last ten years. Other essays explore the impact of the categorization of intersexuality as a “disorder of sex development” and of the treatment guidelines published in 2006 by the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development. An essay by the issue’s guest editor takes a comprehensive look at the relationship between intersexuality and the study of gender and sexuality. The issue also includes a portfolio of photographs as well as a roundtable discussion that brings together intersex experts from medicine, law, psychology, and the humanities.

Contributors. Sarah M. Creighton, Alice D. Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Julie A. Greenberg, April Herndon, Iain Morland, Katrina Roen, Vernon A. Rosario, Nikki Sullivan, Del LaGrace Volcano

Examining how encounters produced by migration lead to intimacies-ranging from sexual, spiritual, and neighborly to hateful and violent, Jane Juffer considers the significant changes that have occurred in small towns following an influx of Latinos to the Midwest.

Intimacy across Borders situates the story of the Dutch Reformed Church in Iowa and South Africa within a larger analysis of race, religion, and globalization. Drawing on personal narrative, ethnography, and sociopolitical critique, Juffer shows how migration to rural areas can disrupt even the most thoroughly entrenched religious beliefs and transform the schools, churches, and businesses that form the heart of small-town America. Conversely, such face-to-face encounters can also generate hatred, as illustrated in the increasing number of hate crimes against Latinos and the passage of numerous anti-immigrant ordinances. 

Juffer demonstrates how Latino migration to new areas of the U.S. threatens certain groups because it creates the potential for new kinds of families—mixed race, mixed legal status, and transnational—that challenge the conservative definition of community based on the racially homogeneous, coupled, citizen family. 

The rise in divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood, and same-sex partnerships, along with an increase in surrogacy, adoption, and assisted reproductive technologies, has led to many diverse configurations of families, or intimate associations. J. Herbie DiFonzo and Ruth C. Stern chart these trends over the past several decades and investigate their social, legal, and economic implications.

Drawing upon a wealth of social science data, they show that, by a number of measures, children of married parents fare better than children in a household formed by cohabiting adults. This is not to condemn nontraditional families, but to point out that society and the law do not yet adequately provide for their needs. The authors applaud the ways in which courts and legislatures are beginning to replace rigid concepts of marriage and parenthood with the more flexible concept of “functional” family roles. In the conclusion, they call for a legal system that can adapt to the continually changing reality of family life.

Bolivians and Japanese involved in these musical practices often express narratives of intimacy and racial belonging that reference shared but unspecified indigenous ancestors. Along with revealing the story of Bolivian music's route to Japan and interpreting the transnational staging of indigenous worlds, Bigenho examines these stories of closeness, thereby unsettling the East-West binary that often structures many discussions of cultural difference and exotic fantasy.

This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries—those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals—are shaping Asia’s growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers’ relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below.

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with Korean American students at the University of Illinois and closely following multiple generations of a single extended Korean American family in the Chicago metropolitan area, Abelmann investigates the complexity of racial politics at the American university today. Racially hyper-visible and invisible, Korean American students face particular challenges as they try to realize their college dreams against the subtle, day-to-day workings of race. They frequently encounter the accusation of racial self-segregation—a charge accentuated by the fact that many attend the same Evangelical Protestant church—even as they express the desire to distinguish themselves from their families and other Korean Americans. Abelmann concludes by examining the current state of the university, reflecting on how better to achieve the university’s liberal ideals despite its paradoxical celebration of diversity and relative silence on race.

Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners

Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet. 

These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish.

Presenting the account of France’s most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.

Contributors. Frank Lentricchia, Anthony Decurtis, Daniel Aaron, Hal Crowther, John A. McClure, Eugene Goodheart, Charles Molesworth, Dennis A. Foster, and John Frow

An Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology exposes students to the cultural detail and personal experiences that lie in the anthropological record and extends their anthropological understanding to contemporary issues.

The book is divided into three parts that focus on the main themes of the discipline: ecological adaptations, structural arrangements, and interpretive meanings. Each chapter provides an overview of a particular topic and then presents two case examples that illuminate the range of variation in traditional and contemporary societies. New case examples include herders’ climate change adaptations in the Arctic, matrilineal Muslims in Indonesia, Google’s AI winning the Asian game Go, mass migration in China, cross-cultural differences in the use of social media, and the North American response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Instructors will also have digital access to all the book’s illustrations for class review.

Covering the full range of sociocultural anthropology in a compact approach, this revised and updated edition of Cultural Anthropology: Adaptations, Structures, Meanings is a holistic, accessible, and socially relevant guide to the discipline for students at all levels.

This book is a no-apologies introduction to Detective Fiction. It's written in an aggressive, modern English well-suited to a genre which has traditionally broken ground in terms of aggressive writing, contemporary scenarios, and tough dialogue.

The Invasion, a novel originally published in 1932, marked the debut of historical novelist Janet Lewis, who went on to write numerous poems and short stories as well as the novels The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist. Lewis grew up in the Lake country of the Old Northwest and The Invasion is based on family stories she heard as a child.The Invasion displays well-researched historical accuracy, an innate understanding of and feeling for Native American culture enhanced by the author's fluency in the Ojibway language, and an economy of style that is remarkable for a first novel. 
     In 1790, John Johnston, a cultivated young Irishman, came to the far corner of the Northwest Territory to make his fortune intending to spend only a year. Instead he married Ozhah-guscoday- wayquay (The Woman of the Glade), daughter of the Ojibway chief Waub- ojeeg, and settled on the St. Mary's River. Together they founded a family that was loved, respected, and famous throughout the region for honesty, fairness, and hospitality. Their home was the center of culture for the area and for every visiting traveler, Native American or white. The Invasion chronicles a time when one culture violently supplanted another even as it depicts a family that blends two cultures together. 
     Henry Rowe Schoolcraft considered the Johnston family his most valued connection to the Native American population. He eventually married Jane Johnston, daughter of John and The Woman of the Glade, and remain close to her entire family. In his diary, Schoolcraft wrote of the Johnstons, "I have in fact stumbled, as it were, on the only family in Northwest America who could in Indian lore have acted as my guide, philosopher, and friend."

In The Invasion of Indian Country in the 20th Century, Donald Fixico details the course of this struggle, providing a wealth of information on the resources possessed by individual tribes and the way in which they were systematically defrauded and stripped of these resources. Fixico contends that federal policies originally devised to protect Indian interests ironically worked against the Indian nations as the tribes employed new tactics with the Council of Energy Resources Tribes, using the law in courts and applying aggressive business leadership to combat the capitalist invasion by mainstream America.

Fixico's analysis of this war being waged throughout the century and today serves as an indispensable reference tool for anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands.

Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies.

Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Betz, Zoë Druick, Lee Grieveson, Stephen Groening, Haden Guest, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Laura Mulvey, Dana Polan,
D. N. Rodowick, Philip Rosen, Alison Trope, Haidee Wasson, Patricia White, Sharon Willis,
Peter Wollen, Michael Zryd

On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, sixteen boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. The boys were largely the sons of upper-class Boston Brahmins, and they lived through the transformative periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Later as they grew old, in the 1920s, a handful of them orchestrated a series of commemorative events about their boyhood game. Benefitting from elite networks developed through the city’s social and educational institutions, including Harvard University, they donated artifacts (such as an oddly shaped, battered black ball) to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected bronze and stone memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football (and later, by extension, soccer). But was this origin story of what, by then, had become one of America’s favorite games as straightforward as they made it seem or a myth-making hoax?

In Inventing the Boston Game, Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club and reveal what really happened. In a compelling, well told narrative that is informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, they posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. This exploration of the Club’s history provides fascinating insight into how and why origin stories are created in the first place. 

Luana Ross writes, "Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned."

In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women's own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences within the criminal justice system.

Dolores del Río first came to Hollywood from Mexico in 1925 and within a year had become an international star for her role in Raoul Walsh's 1926 film What Price Glory. She would go on to work with Hollywood’s top directors, including John Ford and King Vidor, and star opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles (with whom she had a scandalous affair), and Elvis Presley. Voted by Photoplay magazine in 1933 as having "the most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood," del Río was billed as one of cinema’s most "exotic" and "aristocratic" beauties. This image-carefully crafted by her producers, her studio publicists, and by del Río herself-reveals many fascinating insights into Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward race and femininity.

In The Invention of Dolores del Río, Joanne Hershfield explores the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and stardom in American popular culture through the lens of del Río’s successful and unusually lengthy career, which lasted until the 1960s. Hershfield offers close readings of del Río’s films—discussing in detail the roles she played, her costumes and makeup, the music and mise-en-scène, advertising, publicity, and reviews—that provide a nuanced understanding of how Hollywood constructed del Río as an exotic commodity and blunted the inherent challenge her sexual and ethnic image posed to both prevailing standards of white femininity and widespread injunctions against miscegenation. Throughout this astute and imaginative case study, Hershfield looks at del Río’s Hollywood films in relation to shifting ideologies about nationality, gender, and race between the 1920s and 1960s, offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding Hollywood’s ability to both reflect the nation’s racial and sexual obsessions and influence its perceptions about ethnic and gender identity.

Considers the meaning of gender in an African context.

The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures.