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For over twenty-five years, Charles C. Ragin has developed Qualitative Comparative Analysis and related set-analytic techniques as a means of bridging qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Now, with Peer C. Fiss, Ragin uses these impressive new tools to unravel the varied conditions affecting life chances.

Ragin and Fiss begin by taking up the controversy regarding the relative importance of test scores versus socioeconomic background on life chances, a debate that has raged since the 1994 publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s TheBell Curve. In contrast to prior work, Ragin and Fiss bring an intersectional approach to the evidence, analyzing the different ways that advantages and disadvantages combine in their impact on life chances. Moving beyond controversy and fixed policy positions, the authors propose sophisticated new methods of analysis to underscore the importance of attending to configurations of race, gender, family background, educational achievement, and related conditions when addressing social inequality in America today.

Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? Intersectionality and Higher Education examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences. Contributors look at both the individual and institutional perspectives on issues like campus climate, race, class, and gender disparities, LGBTQ student experiences, undergraduate versus graduate students, faculty and staff from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and the intersections of two or more of these topics. Taken together, this volume presents an evidence-backed vision of how the twenty-first century higher education landscape should evolve in order to meaningfully support all participants, reduce marginalization, and reach for equity and equality.

The rich but often neglected field of Turkish and Ottoman literature has long suffered from the fact that a number of traditional research boundaries have separated the studies of folk and elite literature, of Ottoman and modern literature, of the village and the city, the religious and the secular.
Intersections in Turkish Literature is a collection of essays on Turkish literature by former students of James Stewart-Robinson. The topics and methods cover a broad range--from a careful thematic analysis of a traditional Turkish folktale, which reveals its resemblance to well-known Western tales; to an analysis of the "saint tales" recounted by present-day Albanian Bektasi adepts; to a study of narrative rhythm in Nazim Hikhmet's rendition of an account of a fifteenth-century popular uprising.
Walter G. Andrews has assembled the writings of a number of scholars who bridge traditional chasms, inviting us to rethink our approaches to the study of Turkish and Ottoman literature. This collection forms a nucleus that clearly demonstrates the great potential now existing for study in this area, the essays displaying a variety of unusual approaches that bring together seemingly disparate materials: the Turkish story "The Pomegranate Seed" and Disney's "Snow White"; a fifteenth-century chronicle and the poetry of a modern socialist poet; Albanian dervishes in Detroit; a modern Turkish novel; Virginia Woolf; a Yale critic; traditional Japanese poetry; and Ottoman lyrics.
Intersections in Turkish Literature will provide an important stimulus to work that reaches beyond the limits of area studies, intersecting with the interests of scholars and students of literary theory, folklore studies, anthropology, French, Japanese, and Persian.
Walter G. Andrews is Affiliate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington.

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities. 

 

Intersections of Harm is more than just a nuanced examination of the intersections among race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It also explores the intersections of deviance and defiance, individual and collective, and mind, body, and place. Halperin proposes that, ironically, the harmful ascriptions of Latina deviance are tied to the hopeful expressions of Latina defiance. While the Latina protagonists’ defiance feeds into the labels of deviance imposed on them, it also fuels the protagonists’ ability to resist such harmful treatment.  In this analysis, Halperin broadens the parameters of literary studies of female madness, as she compels us to shift our understanding of where madness lies. She insists that the madness readily attributed to individual Latinas is entwined with the madness of institutional structures of oppression, and she maintains that psychological harm is bound together with physical and geopolitical harm.

 

In her pan-Latina study, Halperin shows how each writer’s work emerges from a unique set of locales and histories, but she also traces a network of connections among them. Bringing together concepts from feminism, postcolonialism, illness studies, and ecocriticism, Intersections of Harm opens up exciting new avenues for Latina/o studies. 

 

 

 

In this special issue of GLQ, experts from a variety of disciplines discuss the future of treatment for people with intersex conditions—those born with ambiguous genitalia—and consider what intersexuality means for theories of gender. By examining the ethics of medical treatment and the repercussions of intersex surgery, “Intersex and After” demonstrates how biology, activism, law, morality, and ethics have a shared interest in the relationship between intersexuality and the meaning of sex, gender, and sexuality.

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

Approximately one in every two thousand infants born in America each year is sexually ambiguous in such a way that doctors cannot immediately determine the child’s sex. Some children’s chromosomal sexuality contradicts their sexual characteristics. Others have the physical traits of both sexes, or of neither. Is surgical intervention or sex assignment of intersexed children necessary for their physical and psychological health, as the medical and mental health communities largely assume? Should parents raise sexually ambiguous children as one gender or another and keep them ignorant of their medical history?

Drawing upon life history interviews with adults who were treated for intersexuality as children, Sharon E. Preves explores how such individuals experience and cope with being labeled sexual deviants in a society that demands sexual conformity.  Preves frames their stories within a sociological discussion of gender, the history of intersex medicalization, the recent political mobilization of intersexed adults, and the implications of their activism on identity negotiation, medical practice, and cultural norms. By demonstrating how intersexed people manage and create their own identities, often in conflict with their medical diagnosis, Preves argues that medical intervention into intersexuality often creates, rather than mitigates, the stigma these people suffer.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author’s text recognizes, references, alludes to, imitates, parodies, or otherwise elicits an audience member’s familiarity with other texts. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West use the fiction of Horatio Alger, Jr., as an intertext in their novels, The Great Gatsby and A Cool Million. Callie Khouri and Ridley Scott use the buddy-road-picture genre as an intertext for their Thelma and Louise. In all these cases, intertextual encounters take place between artists, between texts, between texts and audiences, between artists and audiences. Michael Dunne investigates works from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfeld.

Interventions into Modernist Cultures is a comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in the United States and Taiwan. Amie Elizabeth Parry argues that the two sites of modernism are linked by their representation or suppression of histories of US imperialist expansion, Cold War neocolonial military presence, and economic influence in Asia. Focusing on poetry, a genre often overlooked in postcolonial theory, she contends that the radically fragmented form of modernist poetic texts is particularly well suited to representing U.S. imperialism and neocolonial modernities.

Reading various works by US expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.

In the 1600s, Marcos Cunamasi, an indigenous man in Pelileo, Ecuador, hid his child to protect him from officials who would put the boy to work in the textile mill. Cunamasi was forced to turn him over. Because his young son couldn’t keep up with spinning his quota of wool per day, Cunamasi helped so the child wouldn’t be whipped. After working a year, Cunamasi was paid a shirt and a hat.

Interwoven is the untold story of indigenous people’s historical experience in colonial Ecuador’s textile economy. It focuses on the lives of Native Andean families in Pelileo, a town dominated by one of Quito’s largest and longest-lasting textile mills. Quito’s textile industry developed as a secondary market to supply cloth to mining centers in the Andes; thus, the experience of indigenous people in Pelileo is linked to the history of mining in Bolivia and Peru.

Although much has been written about colonial Quito’s textile economy, Rachel Corr provides a unique perspective by putting indigenous voices at the center of that history. Telling the stories of Andean families of Pelileo, she traces their varied responses to historical pressures over three hundred years; the responses range from everyday acts to the historical transformation of culture through ethnogenesis. These stories of ordinary Andean men and women provide insight into the lived experience of the people who formed the backbone of Quito’s textile industry.
 

Last year's impeachment of President Bill Clinton demonstrated the paradox, but did not begin to explain it.

How is it that "private matters" are analyzed endlessly in public forums on a daily basis? Why is it assumed that "getting a life" means having a private relationship? Intended to unravel some of the tangled relations that fall under the broad category of "intimacy," this provocative collection of sixteen essays articulates the ways in which intimate lives are connected with the institutions, ideologies, and desires that organize people's worlds.

Locating its domain in the familiar spaces of friendship, love, sex, family, and feeling "at home," Intimacy also examines the estrangement, betrayal, loneliness, and even violence that may accompany the demise of relationships, both personal and political. These include intimacies among strangers, such as happens in times of national scandal or habits of everyday life. The contributors to this volume traverse many disciplines and cultures, tracking the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the dominant rhetoric, law, ethics, and ideologies of public spheres. Drawing on examples from contemporary culture, history, art, literature, and music, this book illuminates the ways in which intimacy has become linked with stories of citizenship, capitalism, aesthetic forms, and the writing of history. As it challenges conventional notions of private life, Intimacy is sure to spark controversy about its institutions as well.

Some of these essays in this book were previously published in an award-winning issue of the journal "Critical Inquiry."

Contributors include Lauren Berlant, Svetlana Boym, Steven Feld, Deborah R. Grayson, Michael Hanchard, Dagmar Herzog, Annamarie Jagose, Laura Kipnis, Laura Letinsky, Biddy Martin, Maureen McLane, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Joel Snyder, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, and others.

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. 

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence. As Coviello shows, race - and especially whiteness - functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness created an imaginary fraternity that symbolized citizenship, the ownership of property, and an affinity between strangers, which became entangled in the nation's evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and "white studies" into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the national meanings of race and sex in American literature, as well as on the still-current dream of American-ness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

Intimate Activism tells the story of Nicaraguan sexual-rights activists who helped to overturn the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. The law was passed shortly after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990 and, to the surprise of many, was repealed in 2007. In this vivid ethnography, Cymene Howe analyzes how local activists balanced global discourses regarding human rights and identity politics with the contingencies of daily life in Nicaragua. Though they were initially spurred by the antisodomy measure, activists sought to change not only the law but also culture. Howe emphasizes the different levels of intervention where activism occurs, from mass-media outlets and public protests to meetings of clandestine consciousness-raising groups. She follows the travails of queer characters in a hugely successful telenovela, traces the ideological tensions within the struggle for sexual rights, and conveys the voices of those engaged in "becoming" lesbianas and homosexuales in contemporary Nicaragua.

The many popular representations of student life at women’s colleges produced in the United States during the Progressive Era are examined. The college woman was described and defined in a period when women’s higher education was still socially suspect.
    While other scholars have argued that the Progressive Era was the “golden age” for women’s single-sex education, pointing to the many positive depictions of the women’s college student, Inness suggests that these representations actually helped to perpetuate the status quo and did little to advance women’s social rights.

What does it mean to play "someone else’s music"? Intimate Distance delves into this question through a focus on Bolivian musicians who tour Japan playing Andean music and Japanese audiences, who often go beyond fandom to take up these musical forms as hobbyists and even as professional musicians. Michelle Bigenho conducted part of her ethnographic research while performing with Bolivian musicians as they toured Japan. Drawing on interviews with Bolivian musicians as well as Japanese fans and performers of these traditions, Bigenho explores how transcultural intimacy is produced at the site of Andean music and its performances.

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.

Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.

Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris.

In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

On April 24, 2013, Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, possibly the first Native American community to create such a post. The establishment of this position testifies to the importance of Navajo poets and poetry to the Navajo Nation. It also indicates the Navajo equivalence to the poetic traditions connected with the U.S. poet laureate and the poet laureate of the United Kingdom, author Anthony K. Webster asserts, as well as its separateness from those traditions.

Intimate Grammars takes an ethnographic and ethnopoetic approach to language and culture in contemporary time, in which poetry and poets are increasingly important and visible in the Navajo Nation. Webster uses interviews and linguistic analysis to understand the kinds of social work that Navajo poets engage in through their poetry.

Based on more than a decade of ethnographic and linguistic research, Webster’s book explores a variety of topics: the emotional value assigned to various languages spoken on the Navajo Nation through poetry (Navajo English, Navlish, Navajo, and English), why Navajo poets write about the “ugliness” of the Navajo Nation, and the way contemporary Navajo poetry connects young Navajos to the Navajo language. Webster also discusses how contemporary Navajo poetry challenges the creeping standardization of written Navajo and how boarding school experiences influence how Navajo poets write poetry and how Navajo readers appreciate contemporary Navajo poetry.

Through the work of poets such as Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Rex Lee Jim, Gloria Emerson, Blackhorse Mitchell, Esther Belin, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others, Webster provides new ways of thinking about contemporary Navajo poets and poetry. Intimate Grammars offers an exciting new ethnography of speaking, ethnopoetics, and discourse-centered examinations of language and culture.

Drawing on extended ethnographic research conducted over the course of more than two decades, Andrew Canessa explores the multiple identities of a community of people in the Bolivian highlands through their own lived experiences and voices. He examines how gender, race, and ethnic identities manifest themselves in everyday interactions in the Aymara village. Canessa shows that indigeneity is highly contingent; thoroughly imbricated with gendered, racial, and linguistic identities; and informed by a historical consciousness. Addressing how whiteness and indianness are reproduced as hegemonic structures in the village, how masculinities develop as men go to the mines and army, and how memories of a violent past are used to construct a present sense of community, Canessa raises important questions about indigenous politics and the very nature of indigenous identity.

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.

Contributors: Danièle Bélanger, Hae Yeon Choo, Nicole Constable, Daisy Deomampo, Akhil Gupta, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, Purnima Mankekar, Eileen Otis, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel Parreñas, Sharmila Rudrappa, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Rachel Silvey, Hung Cam Thai, Leslie Wang

Mobilizing performance to amplify migrant domestic workers’ creative expertise
 
Intimate inequalities exist where the embodied and the everyday rub up against transnational structures of power. Ella Parry-Davies conducted collaborative research with migrant domestic workers from the Philippines living in the UK and Lebanon, where migration is regulated by employer sponsorship systems, to explore how they negotiate the intimacy of the family home and the attendant inequalities of laboring within it. Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work brings these conditions into focus while articulating a methodological inquiry into the dynamics of collaborative performance research. Parry-Davies examines site-specific soundwalks, recorded and coedited with domestic workers, which steer the book between church choirs in Beirut and activist gatherings in London, and from urban performances in Lebanon’s 2019 revolution to mutual aid organizing amid COVID-19 in the UK. Breaking with prevalent depictions of migrant domestic workers as voiceless and victimized, Intimate Inequalities mobilizes performance as both an analytic lens and a practical methodology, amplifying its subjects’ expertise while reckoning with the intimate yet unequal dynamics of research itself.

The first full length study of the history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters offers trenchant insights into the sexual behavior of Americans, from colonial times to today. D'Emilio and Freedman give us a deeper understanding of how sexuality has dramatically influenced politics and culture throughout our history.

"The book John D'Emilio co-wrote with Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters, was cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when, writing for a majority of court on July 26, he and his colleagues struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy. The decision was widely hailed as a victory for gay rights—and it derived in part, according to Kennedy's written comments, from the information he gleaned from D'Emilio's book, which traces the history of American perspectives on sexual relationships from the nation's founding through the present day. The justice mentioned Intimate Matters specifically in the court's decision."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

"Fascinating. . . . [D'Emilio and Freedman] marshall their material to chart a gradual but decisive shift in the way Americans have understood sex and its meaning in their lives." —Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review

"With comprehensiveness and care . . . D'Emilio and Freedman have surveyed the sexual patterns for an entire nation across four centuries." —Martin Bauml Duberman, Nation

"Intimate Matters is comprehensive, meticulous and intelligent." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"This book is remarkable. . . . [Intimate Matters] is bound to become the definitive survey of American sexual history for years to come." —Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

A groundbreaking history of American sexuality that Barbara Ehrenreich calls "fascinating"!

As the first full-length study of the history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters offered trenchant insights into the sexual behavior of Americans from colonial times to the present. In this fully up-to-date edition of the classic work, John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman give us an even deeper understanding of how sexuality has dramatically influenced politics and culture throughout our history and into the present.

 

Hailed by critics for its comprehensive approach and cited by the US Supreme Court in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas ruling, Intimate Matters is a landmark work, offering readers insight into changes in sexuality and the ongoing growth of individual freedoms in the United States through meticulous research and lucid prose.

Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo. As invited guests, these Europeans were “intimate outsiders” within the women’s quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time, elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers.

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.

 
      Winner of the 1995 University of Illinois Press-National Women's Studies
        Association manuscript prize
      Women's clubs at the turn of the century were numerous, dedicated to
        a number of issues, and crossed class, religious, and racial lines. Emphasizing
        the intimacy engendered by shared reading and writing in these groups,
        Anne Ruggles Gere contends that these literacy practices meant that club
        members took an active part in reinventing the nation during a period
        of major change. Gere uses archival material that documents club members'
        perspectives and activities around such issues as Americanization, womanhood,
        peace, consumerism, benevolence, taste, and literature--and offers a rare
        depth of insight into the interests and lives of American women from the
        fin de siècle through the beginning of the roaring twenties.
      Intimate Practices is unique in its exploration of a range of
        women's clubs--Mormon, Jewish, white middle-class, African American, and
        working class--and paints a vast and colorful multicultural, multifaceted
        canvas of these widely-divergent women's groups.
 

Plumbing the hearts of women and men in India and exploring the relations they engage in, Sudhir Kakar gives us the first full-length study of Indian sexuality. His groundbreaking work explores India's sexual fantasies and ideals, the "unlit stage of desire where so much of our inner theater takes place."

Kakar's sources are primarily textual, celebrating the primacy of the story in Indian life. He practices a cultural psychology that distills the psyches of individuals from the literary products and social institutions of Indian culture. These include examples of lurid contemporary Hindi novels; folktales; Sanskrit, Tamil, and Hindi proverbs; hits of the Indian cinema; Gandhi's autobiography; interviews with women from the slums of Delhi; and case studies from his own psychoanalytic practice. His attentive readings of these varied narratives from a vivid portrait of sexual fantasies and realities, reflecting the universality of sexuality as well as cultural nuances specific to India.

Moving from genre to genre, Kakar offers a brilliant reading of verses from the Laws of Manu, the original source of Hindu religious laws, to uncover their psychological foundations—male terror of the female sexual appetite that shields itself by idealizing women's maternal role. Kakar also examines the psychosexual history of Gandhi at length, though his near-lifelong celibacy makes him an atypical subject. Gandhi's story is universal, Kakar says, because "we all wage war on our wants."

In India's lore and tradition, complex symbols abound—snakes that take the shape of sensual women or handsome men, celibates sleep with naked women, gods rape their daughters, and a goddess fries a king in oil. With the analyst's "third ear," Kakar listens, decodes, and translates the psychological longings that find expression in Indian sexual relations.

Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

 Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category

The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
 
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth?

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.

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.

Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.