Results by title

Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape

 

Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.

 

In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.

 

Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place—with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.

Winner of the Ralph Bunche Award, American Political Science Association

No socialist organization has ever had a more profound effect on black life than the Communist Party did in Harlem during the Depression. Mark Naison describes how the party won the early endorsement of such people as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and how its support of racial equality and integration impressed black intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.

This meticulously researched work, largely based on primary materials and interviews with leading black Communists from the 1930s, is the first to fully explore this provocative encounter between whites and blacks. It provides a detailed look at an exciting period of reform, as well as an intimate portrait of Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, at the high point of its influence and pride.

The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public.

Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement.

The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.
 

New Yorkers generate millions of tons of trash annually, which, through the magic of infrastructure and one of the largest waste management systems in the world, disappears from city sidewalks each night. Under pressure from environmentalists, activists, policymakers, and industry, the New York City Department of Sanitation started exploring ways to divert organic material from the waste stream, and in 2013, launched its composting pilot program.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with community composters and microhaulers in New York City, alongside the rollout of the city’s curbside organics collection system, Composting Utopia describes how local, grassroots organizations intervened in the city’s waste system, enacting change and presenting an alternative vision of the composting city. As Guy Shaffer argues, movement-driven infrastructure projects develop new tools for organizing the world, give communities agency over urban design, and promote just sustainability.

Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir belongs to the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau: the "confession" of a life that is a quest for truth. It is in large part the story of two major episodes from Abigail Rosenthal's early adulthood, bought putting personal identity dramatically at risk. As a young Fulbright scholar in Paris, Rosenthal met and entered reluctantly into a love affair with a young Greek communist philosopher who believed (along with many Parisian intellectuals of that era) that force and deception were justified by a utopian vision of world history. In the inevitable collision of values--between Jew and Greek, liberal and revolutionary, theist and atheist, woman and man in unequal truggle--they separated. Suffering in the aftermath, she at last turned for help to a young African American woman graduate student whom she met in London. This woman's Gnostic Christian rejection of personal and cultural history eventually left Rosenthal without defense against her new mentor's remarkable use of charisma, ridicule, and moralistic reproach to usurp the author's life story. These stratagems of mind control reached a climactic phase in Portugal, where the two went--Rosenthal to paint the other woman to write--in what would turn out to be the terrifying reverse of a summer idyll. With the U.S. State Department, the Portuguese Policía Internacional devised an extraordinary rescue. This arresting narrative, which deals with relations between blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, and men and women, delivers its own philosophic theory of the individual in history. "Rosenthal's work belongs to the classical tradition of the life that is a quest for truth. Pertinent to the genre is its relation to the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She is also anti-Augustinian in that her depiction of history is oriented by the standpoint of Judaism rather than Christianity and is bound up with a quest for the historical realization of justice. "The first of the two episodes she recounts is a love affair (entered into reluctantly) with a young Greek communist philosopher whom she met in Paris while a Fulbright student in the late 1950s. The second, darker, episode is a later Pygmalion-like involvement with an African American woman graduate student whom Rosenthal first encountered in London, where she worked on a Hegel dissertation, and with whom she entered into a life-threatening reverse, as it were, idyll in a small Portuguese village. The saga is replete with details that could have been dreamt up by Le Carre: Salazar's Portugal, its intelligence arm, the U.S. State Department. Her depiction of these complex relations raises in unsettling ways the question of what counts as freedom, as racism, as terror. "Her in-passing observations about analytic philosophy, existentialism, and postmodernism (and I am far from being in her camp on many issues) are worth the price of the book. Hers is an original philosophic mind." --Edith Wyschogrod, 1993 President of the American Academy of Religion and Jay Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University

Confidence man and canny operative, charlatan and manipulator--William A. A. Carsey emerged from the shadow of Tammany Hall to build a career undermining working-class political organizations on behalf of the Democratic Party. Mark A. Lause’s biography of Carsey takes readers inside the bare-knuckle era of Gilded Age politics. An astroturfing trailblazer and master of dirty tricks, Carsey fit perfectly into a Democratic Party that based much of its post-Civil War revival on shattering third parties and gathering up the pieces. Lause provides an in-depth look at Carsey’s tactics and successes against the backdrop of enormous changes in political life. As Carsey used a carefully crafted public persona to burrow into unsuspecting organizations, the forces he represented worked to create a political system that turned voters into disengaged civic consumers and cemented America’s ever-fractious two-party system.

The 4-mile-long, 550-acre Hudson River Park is nearing completion and is the largest park built in Manhattan since Central Park opened more than 150 years ago. It has transformed a derelict waterfront, protected the Hudson River estuary, preserved commercial maritime activities, created new recreational opportunities for millions of New Yorkers, enhanced tourism, stimulated redevelopment in adjacent neighborhoods, and set a precedent for waterfront redevelopment. The Park attracts seventeen million visitors annually. Creating the Hudson River Park is a first-person story of how this park came to be. Working together over three decades, community groups, civic and environmental organizations, labor, the real estate and business community, government agencies, and elected officials won a historic victory for environmental preservation, the use and enjoyment of the Hudson River, and urban redevelopment. However, the park is also the embodiment of a troubling trend toward the commercialization of America’s public parks.

After the defeat of the $2.4 billion Westway plan to fill 234 acres of the Hudson in 1985, the stage was set for the revitalization of Manhattan’s West Side waterfront. Between 1986 and 1998 the process focused on the basics like designing an appropriate roadway, removing noncompliant municipal and commercial activities from the waterfront, implementing temporary improvements, developing the Park’s first revenue-producing commercial area at Chelsea Piers, completing the public planning and environmental review processes, and negotiating the 1998 Hudson River Park Act that officially created the Park. From 1999 to 2009 planning and construction were funded with public money and focused on creating active and passive recreation opportunities on the Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen waterfronts.

However, initial recommendations to secure long term financial support for the Park from the increase in adjacent real estate values that resulted from the Park’s creation were ignored. City and state politicians had other priorities and public funding for the Park dwindled. The recent phase of the project, from 2010 to 2021, focused on “development” both in and adjacent to the Park. Changes in leadership, and new challenges provide an opportunity to return to a transparent public planning process and complete the redevelopment of the waterfront for the remainder of the 21st-century. Fox’s first-person perspective helps to document the history of the Hudson River Park, recognizes those who made it happen and those who made it difficult, and provides lessons that may help private citizens and public servants expand and protect the public parks and natural systems that are so critical to urban well-being. 

 

A reframing of the history of 1960s New York avant-garde art centered on the queer, genre-bending criticism of Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston.
 
In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. First working independently of one another, then later in dialogue, Swenson and Johnston demanded criticism become life-sustaining, subverting protocols and distorting its form beyond recognition. They utilized criticism as a means of navigating queer existence and reclaimed terms like lesbian, homosexual, mad, and psychotic as their own.
 
Jennifer Sichel follows the intertwined paths of Swenson and Johnston, providing a history of queer practices that were central to the development of avant-garde art but have been largely overlooked. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art. As Sichel shows, Swenson's and Johnston’s practices, bucking categories and disciplinary formations, resist historical streamlining and stand as a key for unlocking the queerness of postwar art history.