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In the highland region of Sullk'ata, located in the rural Bolivian Andes, habitual activities such as sharing food, work, and stories create a sense of relatedness among people. Through these day-to-day interactions—as well as more unusual events—individuals negotiate the affective bonds and hierarchies of their relationships. In Performing Kinship, Krista E. Van Vleet reveals the ways in which relatedness is evoked, performed, and recast among the women of Sullk'ata.

Portraying relationships of camaraderie and conflict, Van Vleet argues that narrative illuminates power relationships, which structure differences among women as well as between women and men. She also contends that in the Andes gender cannot be understood without attention to kinship.

Stories such as that of the young woman who migrates to the city to do domestic work and later returns to the highlands voicing a deep ambivalence about the traditional authority of her in-laws provide enlightening examples of the ways in which storytelling enables residents of Sullk'ata to make sense of events and link themselves to one another in a variety of relationships. A vibrant ethnography, Performing Kinship offers a rare glimpse into an compelling world.

The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the next two decades responded to the massacre and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity.

This book critically bridges feminist theory and theatrical practice. Dolan examines how performance can subvert normative constructs of gender and sexuality. The collection evaluates mainstream theater, academic stages, subcultural venues, and performance in daily life. It centers sexuality as a primary analytical framework to explore queer visibility and cultural representation. It bridges contemporary feminist theory, poststructuralism, and theatrical practice and places sexuality at the center of its analytical framework to explore how theatrical representation can subvert normative constructs of gender and desire. Dolan evaluates a vast spectrum of performance spaces—ranging from mainstream professional and academic stages to subcultural venues, pornography, and everyday social interactions—to champion queer visibility and claim recognition for women's bodies. Ultimately, the volume functions as a foundational text in performance studies and LGBTQ+ cultural criticism, demonstrating how deliberate theatrical strategies can provoke American culture to actively dismantle and reimagine its traditional social relations

Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces.

Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women's voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?

Multifaceted insights into female life in prophetic contexts

Both prophets and prophetesses shared God’s divine will with the people of Israel, yet the voices of these women were often forgotten due to later prohibitions against women teaching in public. This latest volume of the Bible and Women series focuses on the intersection of gender and prophecy in the Former Prophets (Joshua to 2 Kings) as well as in the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Essays examine how women appear in the iconography of the ancient world, the historical background of the phenomenon of prophecy, political and religious resistance by women in the biblical text, and gender symbolism and constructions in prophetic material as well as the metaphorical discourse of God. Contributors Michaela Bauks, Athalya Brenner-Idan, Ora Brison, L. Juliana Claassens, Marta García Fernández, Irmtraud Fischer, Maria Häusl, Rainer Kessler, Nancy C. Lee, Hanne Løland Levinson, Christl M. Maier, Ilse Müllner, Martti Nissinen, Ombretta Pettigiani, Ruth Poser, Benedetta Rossi, Silvia Schroer, and Omer Sergi draw insight into the texts from a range of innovative gender-oriented approaches.

Protected Children, Regulated Mothers examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.