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Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans.

Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.

Hannah Arendt is one of the most famous political theorists of the twentieth century, yet in the social sciences her work has rarely been given the attention it deserves. This careful and comprehensive study introduces Arendt to a wider audience.

Finn Bowring shows how Arendt's writings have engaged with and influenced prominent figures in the sociological canon, and how her ideas may shed light on some of the most pressing social and political problems of today. He explores her critique of Marx, her relationship to Weber, the influence of her work on Habermas and the parallels and discrepancies between her and Foucault. This is a clearly written and scholarly text which surveys the leading debates over Arendt’s work, including discussions of totalitarianism, the public sphere and the nature of political responsibility.
This book will bring new perspectives to students and lecturers in sociology and politics.

Journeying through the emotional migrations of women living in the in-between

In Hilal Isler’s gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler’s characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events.

The women in Har Mar don’t always make sound decisions, and they’re not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.
 

How contemporary poetry illuminates the workings—and struggles—of commitment in feminism.

In this lucid and vigorous defense of poetics for feminism, Anna Moser situates the practice of contemporary poetry in an exploratory dialogue with the work of philosophical, critical, and historical thinkers—placing Denise Riley in conversation with Judith Butler, Lyn Hejinian with Hannah Arendt, m. nourbeSe philip with Saidiya Hartman, and Susan Howe with Emily Dickinson. 

Moser’s central theme is these poets’ questioning, agonistic commitment to feminism. What, the book asks, does it mean to be committed? How does such a commitment materialize? What are its consequences? What does it mean not to take for granted an affiliation like “feminist” (or even “woman”), but rather to involve one’s art in probing its historical formations, present conditions, and future trajectories? Moser explores both the risks and possibilities of making art in this equivocal condition. She reveals that the poetry of certain contemporary writers not only unfolds within this space of agonistic commitment, but that, in doing so, it offers an important contribution to feminist thinking. Moser’s book also shows that while form is a constraint that limits these poets’ freedom, it also holds them in a more sustaining sense, allowing something belatedly and imperfectly to be said. 

In dialogue with feminist political theory, philosophy, historiography, and aesthetics, Held by Form reveals poetics as a unique mode of critical practice: one that models relations of care and collectivity, refigures inherited forms in ways that contest their hierarchies of value, and responds with generosity and openness to the complexities of living in gender.

Henpecked: Winston Churchill and Women’s Suffrage explores the recurrent interactions between Winston Churchill and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. Churchill purposely concealed, under a discursive veil, his complex and shifting perceptions of women’s competency to use the franchise. In balancing a public stance that vaguely favored the “principle” of women’s suffrage with his, often private, opposition to the movement’s legislative efforts, he employed every available rhetorical tool. This book presents a new understanding of his early Parliamentary career, his ability to manipulate public and private discourse, and his complicated stance on women’s right to vote. This rhetorical history challenges the view that Winston Churchill was only dissuaded in his support of women’s suffrage by the militancy of suffrage activists.

Her Oxford looks at the people and the political and social forces that produced this dramatic transformation. Drawing on a vast array of biographies, histories, obituaries, and archives, Batson traces not only the institutional struggles over privileges and disciplinary rules for women, but also the rich texture of everyday life-women's amateur theatricals, debating societies, sports, and college escapades (Dorothy Sayers is the subject of quite a few). She tells the stories of women's active roles in two war efforts and in the suffrage movement.

An unusual feature of the book is the set of 120 biographical profiles of women who attended Oxford between 1879 and 1960. They constitute a Who's Who of women scientists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, educators, novelists, and social reformers in the English-speaking world.

In this vital and groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan introduces readers to a range of fascinating, women-led societies. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s matrilineal community in South India, Mohan explores communities around the globe—from controversial feminist online troll networks in South Korea to older women co-housing in Paris and North London to the Rain Queens of South Africa. The result is a vivid, global portrait of women’s communities.

Through extensive research and exclusive first-hand reporting, Mohan goes in search of the roots of women-led societies, revealing a vibrant global history brought together for the first time. She also takes us into modern spaces where women live on their own terms, showing us how we can rethink society for new ways of living, working, and collaborating.

For anyone interested in our collective histories, cultures, economics, and governance, Herlands shows the power and possibility of new ways of living—and leading—for us all. It’s an important landmark exploration for our times that not only explores fascinating ways of living but also addresses broader questions about new ways to think and govern and why it matters.

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. 
 
Hero Me Not offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. 
 
With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you. 

Powerful and moving, Heroes of Their Own Lives offers an honest understanding of a persistent problem and a realistic view of the difficulties in stopping it.

WINNER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACK WOMEN HISTORIANS 2020 LETITIA WOODS-BROWN AWARD FOR THE BEST BOOK IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY 

WINNER OF THE WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN HISTORIAN'S BARBARA “PENNY” KANNER AWARD

2021 FINALIST FOR THE HARRIET TUBMAN BOOK PRIZE

2020 FINALIST BERSHIRE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN HISTORIANS BOOK PRIZE

Uncovering the Afro-Argentine women behind the myth of a white nation.

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and that of their children.

Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.

This volume makes use of a wealth of sources to relate these women’s choices. The sources consulted include city censuses and notarial and probate records that deal with free and enslaved African descendants; criminal, ecclesiastical, and civil court cases; marriages and baptisms records and newsletters. These varied sources provide information about the day-to-day activities of cordobés society and how women of African descent lived, formed relationships, thrived, and partook in the transformation of racial identities in Argentina.
 

History films were a highly popular genre in the 1990s, as Hollywood looked back at significant and troubling episodes from World War II, the Cold War era, and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. As filmmakers attempted to confront and manage intractable elements of the American past, such as the trauma of war and the legacy of racism, Susan Linville argues that a surprising casualty occurred—the erasure of relevant facets of contemporary women's history.

In this book, Linville offers a sustained critique of the history film and its reduction of women to figures of ambivalence or absence. Historicizing and adapting Freud's concept of the uncanny and its relationship to the maternal body as the first home, she offers theoretically sophisticated readings of the films Midnight Clear, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Nixon, Courage Under Fire, Lone Star, and Limbo. She also demonstrates that the uncanny is not only a source of anxiety but also potentially a progressive force for eroding nostalgic ideals of nation and gender. Linville concludes with a close reading of a recent 9/11 documentary, showing how the patterns and motifs of 1990s history films informed it and what that means for our future.

In 1982, 20,000 Chinese-American garment workers—most of them women—went on strike in New York City. Every Chinese garment industry employer in the city soon signed a union contract. The successful action reflected the ways women's changing positions within their families and within the workplace galvanized them to stand up for themselves. 

Xiaolan Bao's now-classic study penetrates to the heart of Chinese American society to explain how this militancy and organized protest, seemingly so at odds with traditional Chinese female behavior, came about. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Bao blends the poignant personal stories of Chinese immigrant workers with the interwoven history of the garment industry and the city's Chinese community. Bao shows how the high rate of married women employed outside the home profoundly transformed family culture and with it the image and empowerment of Chinese American women. At the same time, she offers a complex and subtle discussion of the interplay of ethnic and class factors within New York's garment industry. 

Passionately told and prodigiously documented, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky examines the journey of a community's women through an era of change in the home, on the shop floor, and walking the picket line.

Lillian Lorca de Tagle is living proof of women's progress in the twentieth century. Born into a privileged, yet circumscribed world in 1914 as the daughter of a wealthy Chilean diplomat, she became a translator and journalist at a time when few women of her class held jobs. Ordered into exile in the United States by her disapproving mother, she became a successful reporter, translator, and editor, while raising two daughters as a single working mother.

In this beautifully written memoir, de Tagle looks back over a fascinating, cosmopolitan life. She describes how her upbringing in various European capitals prepared her for a life of continual change. She remembers the restrictions that upper class Chilean society placed on women and how these ultimately propelled her to a career in the United States that included an editorship at Américas magazine and work for the State Department, as well as a series of posts with the USIA/Voice of America.

Woven throughout her memoir are vivid glimpses of family, friends, husbands, and lovers, including the artist Roberto Matta. This spicy blend of personalities, work, and culture tells a quintessential coming-of-age story of a thoroughly modern woman.