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This perceptive, lively study explores U.S. women's sport through historical "points of change": particular products or trends that dramatically influenced both women's participation in sport and cultural responses to women athletes.
 
Beginning with the seemingly innocent ponytail, the subject of the Introduction, scholar Jaime Schultz challenges the reader to look at the historical and sociological significance of now-common items such as sports bras and tampons and ideas such as sex testing and competitive cheerleading. Tennis wear, tampons, and sports bras all facilitated women’s participation in physical culture, while physical educators, the aesthetic fitness movement, and Title IX encouraged women to challenge (or confront) policy, financial, and cultural obstacles.
 
While some of these points of change increased women's physical freedom and sporting participation, they also posed challenges. Tampons encouraged menstrual shame, sex testing (a tool never used with male athletes) perpetuated narrowly-defined cultural norms of femininity, and the late-twentieth-century aesthetic fitness movement fed into an unrealistic beauty ideal.
 
Ultimately, Schultz finds that U.S. women's sport has progressed significantly but ambivalently. Although participation in sports is no longer uncommon for girls and women, Schultz argues that these "points of change" have contributed to a complex matrix of gender differentiation that marks the female athletic body as different than--as less than--the male body, despite the advantages it may confer.

Winner of the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph

Interweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike.
 
Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.

Feminist mentorship remains in short supply within communication studies and feminist and gender studies. A diverse group of contributors from the undergraduate level to senior scholars use Black feminist, Chicana feminist, and queer lenses to explore feminist mentorship examples in both pedagogical and relationship-building contexts.

The first section draws upon the contributors’ unique and situated experiences of mentorship in academia. Essays explore their past and current experiences with feminist mentorship in relationships that take many forms: faculty members with fellow faculty members; faculty members with undergraduate and graduate students; and faculty members who feel as if they have become family with their mentors and mentees. In the second section, the contributors deeply interrogate the practices of feminist mentoring by problematizing practices and offering new ways, places, and formats that make space and consider new possibilities. A conclusion reflects on the future of feminist mentorship amidst contemporary debates and concerns in higher education.

Enriching and hopeful, Queer, Women of Color, and Critical Approaches to Feminist Mentorship and Pedagogy is a much-needed challenge to traditional forms of mentorship.

In Queer/Early/Modern, Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term “queer,” in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography” that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labé, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin’s take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and France’s domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Turning to French cleric Jean de Léry’s account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

Querying Consent examines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, the contributors to Querying Consent address the most uncomfortable questions about consent today. Grounded in theoretical explorations of the entanglement of consent and subjectivity across a range of textual, visual, multi- and digital media, Querying Consent considers the relationships between consent and agency before moving on to trace the concept’s outcomes through a range of investigations of the mutual implication of personhood and self-ownership.

"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years  ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable." —Alice Walker

"A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity."—Women's Studies International Forum

Rutgers' all-time bestselling book, Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Passing is now a major motion picture written, produced, and directed by Rebecca Hall. It premiered at Sundance in 2021 and is available on Netflix.