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1104 books match the query 'Gender Studies' and 189 start with t

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TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault

Edited by Judith Rudakoff

Intellect Books, 2012

Transgendered playwright, performer, columnist, and sex worker Nina Arsenault has undergone more than sixty plastic surgeries in pursuit of a feminine beauty ideal. In TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, Judith Rudakoff brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, scholars, and Arsenault herself to offer an exploration of beauty, image, and the notion of queerness through the lens of Arsenault’s highly personal brand of performance art.

Illustrated throughout with photographs of the artist’s transformation over the years and demonstrating her diversity of personae, this volume contributes to a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful. Also included in this volume is the full script of Arsenault’s critically acclaimed stage play, The Silicone Diaries.

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TV Family Values

Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms

Alice Leppert

Rutgers University Press, 2019

During the 1980s, U.S. television experienced a reinvigoration of the family sitcom genre. In TV Family Values, Alice Leppert focuses on the impact the decade's television shows had on middle class family structure. These sitcoms sought to appeal to upwardly mobile “career women” and were often structured around non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework. Drawing on Foucauldian and feminist theories, Leppert examines the nature of sitcoms such as Full House, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, and Who's the Boss? against the backdrop of a time period generally remembered as socially conservative and obsessed with traditional family values.

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Taking Liberties

Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989

Halina Filipowicz

Ohio University Press, 2014

As narrow, nationalist views of patriotic allegiance have become widespread and are routinely invoked to justify everything from flag-waving triumphalism to xenophobic bigotry, the concept of a nonnationalist patriotism has vanished from public conversation. Taking Liberties is a study of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights, respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity, and, overall, open-minded and inclusive.

Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Halina Filipowicz turns to the plays themselves and to archival materials, ranging from parliamentary speeches to polemical pamphlets and verse broadsides, to explore the cultural phenomenon of transgressive patriotism and its implications for society in the twenty-first century.

In addition to recovering lost or forgotten materials, the author builds an innovative conceptual and methodological framework to make sense of those materials. The result is not only a significant contribution to the debate over the meaning and practice of patriotism, but a masterful intellectual history.

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Taking The Field

Women, Men, and Sports

Michael A. Messner

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls’ and women’s dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations.

To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men’s violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men’s investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport.

Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions-interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport.

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Tales Out of School

Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film

Jo Keroes

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Jo Keroes's scope is wide: she examines the teacher as represented in fiction and film in works ranging from the twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise to contemporary films such as Dangerous Minds and Educating Rita. And from the twelfth through the twentieth century, Keroes shows, the teaching encounter is essentially erotic.

Tracing the roots of eros from cultural as well as psychological perspectives, Keroes defines erotic in terms broader than the merely sexual. She analyzes ways in which teachers serve as convenient figures on whom to map conflicts about gender, power, and desire. To show how portrayals of men and women differ, she examines pairs of texts, using a film or a novel with a woman protagonist (Up the Down Staircase, for example) as counterpoint to one featuring a male teacher (Blackboard Jungle) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie balanced against Dead Poets Society.

The portrayals of teachers, like all images a culture presents of itself, reveal much about our private and social selves. Keroes points out authentic accounts of authoritative women teachers who are admired and respected by colleagues and students alike. Real teachers differ from the stereotypes we see in fiction and film, however. Male teachers are often portrayed as heroes in film and fallibly human in fiction, whereas women in either genre are likely to be monstrous or muddled and are virtually never women of color. Among other things, Keroes demonstrates, the tension between reality and representation reveals society's ambivalence about power in the hands of women.

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Talking Leadership

Conversations with Powerful Women

Hartman, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Talking Leadership presents a though-provoking look at differences and commonalities in the lives and leadership approaches of some of today's outstanding women in areas ranging from philanthropy to politics, and from business to academia. Regardless of their backgrounds and areas of expertise, these women are committed to social change--change that includes improving women's lives and options.

Well beyond personal details and entertaining anecdotes, these conversations capture a variety of fascinating experiences and insights reflecting what it is like to be a woman and a major leader in America at the close of the twentieth century. Many of these women hold positions in which womanhood sets them apart--not infrequently in uncomfortable ways. Talking Leadership gives testimony not only to how far women have come, but also how far they still have to go to claim their places as leaders.

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Talking Leadership

Conversations with Powerful Women

Hartman, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Whether we love it, hate it, or use it just to pass the time, most adults in the United States are watching more television than ever, up to four hours a day by some estimates. Our devotion to commercial television gives it unprecedented power in our lives.

Advertisers and television executives want us to spend as much time as we can in front of our sets, for it is access to our brains that they buy and sell. Yet the most important effect of television may be one that no one intends-accelerated destruction of the natural environment.

Consuming Environments explores how, with its portrayal of a world of simulated abundance, television has nurtured a culture of consumerism and overconsumption. The average person in the US consumers more than twice the grain and ten times the oil of a citizen of Brazil or Indonesia. And people in less industrialized countries suffer while their resources while their resources are commandeered to support comfortable lifestyles in richer nations.

Using detailed examples illustrated with images from actual commercials, news broadcasts, and television shows, and authors demonstrate how ads and programs are put together in complex way s to manipulate viewers, and they offer specific ways to counteract the effects of TV and overconsumption's assault on the environment.

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Tan Men/Pale Women

Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach

Mary Ann Eaverly

University of Michigan Press, 2013

One of the most obvious stylistic features of Athenian black-figure vase painting is the use of color to differentiate women from men. By comparing ancient art in Egypt and Greece, Tan Men/Pale Women uncovers the complex history behind the use of color to distinguish between genders, without focusing on race. Author Mary Ann Eaverly considers the significance of this overlooked aspect of ancient art as an indicator of underlying societal ideals about the role and status of women. Such a commonplace method of gender differentiation proved to be a complex and multivalent method for expressing ideas about the relationship between men and women, a method flexible enough to encompass differing worldviews of Pharaonic Egypt and Archaic Greece. Does the standard indoor/outdoor explanation—women are light because they stay indoors—hold true everywhere, or even, in fact, in Greece? How “natural” is color-based gender differentiation, and, more critically, what relationship does color-based gender differentiation have to views about women and the construction of gender identity in the ancient societies that use it?

The depiction of dark men and light women can, as in Egypt, symbolize reconcilable opposites and, as in Greece, seemingly irreconcilable opposites where women are regarded as a distinct species from men. Eaverly challenges traditional ideas about color and gender in ancient Greek painting, reveals an important strategy used by Egyptian artists to support pharaonic ideology and the role of women as complementary opposites to men, and demonstrates that rather than representing an actual difference, skin color marks a society’s ideological view of the varied roles of male and female.

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Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge

Brigitte Hipfl

Central European University Press, 2012

How to deal with gender, women, gender roles, feminism and gender equality in teaching practices? Following in the footsteps of the ATHENA thematic network, ATGENDER brings together specialists in women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality and diversity. In the book series ‘Teaching with Gender’ the partners in this network have collected articles on a wide range of teaching practices in the field of gender. The books in this series address challenges and possibilities of teaching about women and gender in a wide range of educational contexts. The authors discuss pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching about women and gender. The books contain teaching material, reflections on feminist pedagogies, and practical discussions about the development of gender-sensitive curricula in specific fields. All books address the crucial aspects of education in Europe today: increasing international mobility, the growing importance of interdisciplinarity, and the many practices of life-long learning and training that take place outside the traditional programmes of higher education. These books will be indispensable tools for educators who take seriously the challenge of teaching with gender. Teaching “Race” with a Gendered Edge responds to the need to approach the idea of race from a feminist perspective. This collection of essays aims to broaden our understanding of both race and gender by highlighting the intersections and intertwinedness of race, gender, and other axes of inequality. The book also points to the importance of taking colonial legacies into account when it comes to the understanding of contemporary forms of racisms. In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world this perspective is essential for understanding the dynamics of identity politics but also for pointing towards possible ways of intervention and change.The essays in the book discuss historically contextualised examples of the intersections of race and gender from different localities in Europe and beyond and provide readers with a rich body of resources and teaching material.

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Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives

Sara De Jong

Central European University Press, 2014

This volume invites teachers and students in gender and women’s studies to engage with the library not as an instrument for knowledge, but as a subject and object of knowledge in its own right. The authors and editors had three specific aims. Firstly, to highlight how Gender Studies and the institutions and practices that preserve and disseminate feminist knowledge are historically and systematically intertwined. Secondly, the necessity to reflect on the symbolic meaning and practical institutionalization of libraries and archives as they are undergoing profound transformations under the influence of new (technological) developments; finally, to engage with the question of how these transformations give way to new ways of producing, preserving and disseminating feminist knowledge through practices situated between the force fields of cultural and academic institutions, material and virtual culture, and the collective imaginary.This book is a part of the series Teaching with Gender, European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms, jointly published with ATGENDER, The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation.

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Teaching against Violence

The Reassessing Toolbox

Inez Testoni

Central European University Press, 2014

Teaching Against Violence deals with gender based violence, paying particular attention to domestic violence, as in this field feminism has tenaciously sought to change the condition of women and, as a result, many international policies have promoted a significant social transformation. The chapters present active techniques that were adopted during the interventions to promote women's empowerment. The contributions face these issues from various perspectives, present the state of the art research in multiple fields of study and suggest educational best practices that can be used where this problem is particularly severe.

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Teaching with Tenderness

Toward an Embodied Practice

Becky Thompson

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Imagine a classroom that explores the twinned ideas of embodied teaching and a pedagogy of tenderness. Becky Thompson envisions such a curriculum--and a way of being--that promises to bring about a sea change in education.

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries; and praises self and community care.

Tenderness examines contemporary challenges to teaching about race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, religion, and other hierarchies. It examines the ethical, emotional, political, and spiritual challenges of teaching power-laden, charged issues and the consequences of shifting power relations in the classroom and in the community. Attention to current contributions in the areas of contemplative practices, trauma theory, multiracial feminist pedagogy, and activism enable us to envision steps toward a pedagogy of liberation. The book encourages active engagement and makes room for self-reflective learning, teaching, and scholarship.

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Teamsters Metropolis

Ryan Patrick Murphy

University of Michigan Press, 2025

In the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs.

Teamsters Metropolis argues that the union achieved unprecedented organizing success in the immediate postwar period precisely because its members defied bourgeois cultural standards. They wore overly flamboyant clothes, instigated jarringly violent confrontations, used aliases, extorted money, flouted the law, and often blended friendship, sex, and love in a way that challenged the boundaries of heteronormativity. Perhaps no one exemplified this freedom more than Jimmy Hoffa, who delivered better pay and worker conditions to marginal workers while also using coercive tactics, embezzling money, and colluding with the Mafia. Rather than impeding the union’s growth, unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

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Techniques of Pleasure

BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality

Margot Weiss

Duke University Press, 2012

Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM (SM) community. Margot Weiss conducted ethnographic research at dungeon play parties and at workshops on bondage, role play, and flogging, and she interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners. She describes a scene devoted to a form of erotic play organized around technique, rules and regulations, consumerism, and self-mastery. Challenging the notion that SM is inherently transgressive, Weiss links the development of commodity-oriented sexual communities and the expanding market for sex toys to the eroticization of gendered, racialized, and national inequalities. She analyzes the politics of BDSM’s spectacular performances, including those that dramatize heterosexual male dominance, slave auctions, and US imperialism, and contends that the SM scene is not a “safe space” separate from real-world inequality. It depends, like all sexual desire, on social hierarchies. Based on this analysis, Weiss theorizes late-capitalist sexuality as a circuit—one connecting the promise of new emancipatory pleasures to the reproduction of raced and gendered social norms.

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Templates for Authorship

American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Windy Counsell Petrie

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

As autobiographies by famous women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart became bestsellers in the 1930s, American publishers sought out literary autobiographies from female novelists, poets, salon hosts, and editors. Templates for Authorship analyzes the market and cultural forces that created an unprecedented boom in American women's literary autobiography.

Windy Counsell Petrie considers twelve autobiographies from a diverse group of writers, ranging from highbrow modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Monroe to popular fiction writers like Edith Wharton and Edna Ferber, and lesser known figures such as Grace King and Carolyn Wells. Since there were few existing examples of women's literary autobiography, these writers found themselves marketed and interpreted within four cultural templates: the artist, the activist, the professional, and the celebrity. As they wrote their life stories, the women adapted these templates to counter unwanted interpretations and resist the sentimental feminine traditions of previous generations with innovative strategies of deferral, elision, comedy, and collaboration. This accessible study contends that writing autobiography offered each of these writers an opportunity to define and defend her own literary legacy.

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Temporarily Yours

Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex

Elizabeth Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Generations of social thinkers have assumed that access to legitimate paid employment and a decline in the ‘double standard’ would eliminate the reasons behind women’s participation in prostitution. Yet in both the developing world and in postindustrial cities of the West, sexual commerce has continued to flourish, diversifying along technological, spatial, and social lines. In this deeply engaging and theoretically provocative study, Elizabeth Bernstein examines the social features that undergird the expansion and diversification of commercialized sex, demonstrating the ways that postindustrial economic and cultural formations have spawned rapid and unforeseen changes in the forms, meanings, and spatial organization of sexual labor.

Drawing upon dynamic and innovative research with sex workers, their clients, and state actors, Bernstein argues that in cities such as San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amstersdam, the nature of what is purchased in commercial sexual encounters is also new. Rather than the expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations, what sex workers are increasingly paid to offer their clients is an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. As such, contemporary sex markets are emblematic of a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce—and between public life and private—have been radically redrawn. Not simply a compelling exploration of the changing landscape of sex-work, Temporarily Yours ultimately lays bare the intimate intersections of political economy, desire, and culture.

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Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants

Race, Gender, and Immigration Policy Post-9/11

Anna Sampaio

Temple University Press, 2015

Immigration politics has been significantly altered by the advent of America’s war on terror and the proliferation of security measures. In her cogent study, Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants, Anna Sampaio examines how these processes are racialized and gendered and how they impose inequitable burdens on Latina/o immigrants. She interrogates the rise of securitization, restrictive legislation, and the return of large-scale immigration raids and describes how these re-articulate and re-inscribe forms of racial and gender hierarchy.

Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants demonstrates how the ascendance of America as a security state serves as a template to scrutinize, harass, and encumber immigrants while also reconfiguring citizenship. Sampaio uses intersectional analysis coupled with theoretical and empirical approaches to develop a critical framework for analyzing current immigration politics.

Sampaio provides a sustained and systematic examination of policy and enforcement shifts impacting Latinas/os. Her book concludes with an examination of immigration reform under the Obama administration, contrasting the promise of hope and change with the reality of increased detentions, deportations, and continued marginalization.

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Testimonios of Care

Feminist Latina/x and Chicana/x Perspectives on Caregiving Praxis

Edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa, Yvette G. Flores, Angie Chabram

University of Arizona Press, 2024

The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community.

The book opens with an introductory chapter by the three co-editors, and then is divided into three sections exploring the caregiver voice, community caregiving, and reflections that outline a Caregiver Bill of Rights and present a call to action. Throughout, contributors discuss kinship care, including formal and informal adoptions, community care, caregiving in professional health contexts, and the implicit caregiving inherent in teaching BIPOC students, which largely falls upon faculty of color.

Testimonios of Care gives voice to those who often are voiceless in histories of caregiving and is guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, which include solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community.

Contributors
yvonne hurtado allen
Angie Chabram
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Inés Hernández-Ávila
ire’ne lara silva
Josie Méndez-Negrete
Maria R. Palacios
Hector Rivera-Lopez
Maria Angelina Soldatenko
Anita Tijerina Revilla
Mónica Torreiro-Casal
Enriqueta Valdez-Curiel

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Testing for Athlete Citizenship

Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport

Henne, Kathryn E

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Incidents of doping in sports are common in news headlines, despite regulatory efforts. How did doping become a crisis? What does a doping violation actually entail? Who gets punished for breaking the rules of fair play? In Testing for Athlete Citizenship, Kathryn E. Henne, a former competitive athlete and an expert in the law and science of anti-doping regulations, examines the development of rules aimed at controlling performance enhancement in international sports.

As international and celebrated figures, athletes are powerful symbols, yet few spectators realize that a global regulatory network is in place in an attempt to ensure ideals of fair play. The athletes caught and punished for doping are not always the ones using performance-enhancing drugs to cheat. In the case of female athletes, violations of fair play can stem from their inherent biological traits. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, Testing for Athlete Citizenship offers a compelling account of the origins and expansion of anti-doping regulation and gender-verification rules.

Drawing on research conducted in Australasia, Europe, and North America, Henne provides a detailed account of how race, gender, class, and postcolonial formations of power shape these ideas and regulatory practices. Testing for Athlete Citizenship makes a convincing case to rethink the power of regulation in sports and how it separates athletes as a distinct class of citizens subject to a unique set of rules because of their physical attributes and abilities.

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Texas Through Women's Eyes

The Twentieth-Century Experience

By Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith

University of Texas Press, 2010

Winner, Liz Carpenter Award For Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association, 2010

Texas women broke barriers throughout the twentieth century, winning the right to vote, expanding their access to higher education, entering new professions, participating fully in civic and political life, and planning their families. Yet these major achievements have hardly been recognized in histories of twentieth-century Texas. By contrast, Texas Through Women's Eyes offers a fascinating overview of women's experiences and achievements in the twentieth century, with an inclusive focus on rural women, working-class women, and women of color.

McArthur and Smith trace the history of Texas women through four eras. They discuss how women entered the public sphere to work for social reforms and the right to vote during the Progressive era (1900–1920); how they continued working for reform and social justice and for greater opportunities in education and the workforce during the Great Depression and World War II (1920–1945); how African American and Mexican American women fought for labor and civil rights while Anglo women laid the foundation for two-party politics during the postwar years (1945–1965); and how second-wave feminists (1965–2000) promoted diverse and sometimes competing goals, including passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive freedom, gender equity in sports, and the rise of the New Right and the Republican party.

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Thai Women in the Global Labor Force

Consuming Desires, Contested Selves

Mills, Mary Beth

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Most research on female labor migration in Thailand focuses on that country's infamous sex industry. Mary Beth Mills offers the first extended ethnographic analysis of rural women's movement into less visible occupations, paying particular attention to the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis. Mills follows the women as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae to Bangkok, where they encounter new forms of consumption, new "modern" lifestyles, and a new sense of identity. She finds this rural-urban migration is more than a simple economic activity, but rather an elaborate process of cultural change.

Mills describes the environments from which these women left, as well as the urban landscape they now call home. Hence, she examines key aspects of rural Thai community life, such as local consumption practices, gender roles, and the familial tensions that are often the catalyst to labor migration. Then she focuses on the city and the underlying tensions of urban employment as migrants pursue newly imagined identities as modern women, while still upholding economic and moral responsibilities to rural kin.

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The Age of Sex

Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa

Corrie Decker

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

As in much of the world, societies in precolonial East Africa—what is now Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—used rites of passage to chart an individual’s social and developmental progress toward adulthood. Under European colonialism, from the 1890s to the 1960s, colonial judicial systems and the emerging genre of ethnography converged to subject African people to standardized definitions of childhood and adulthood. The coexistence of rites of passage and chronological age regulations generated confusion well into the postcolonial era, and the question of when childhood ends sparked extensive debates about gender, race, and development. Corrie Decker argues that ultimately these debates came down to “the age of sex.”

In The Age of Sex, Decker demonstrates how maturation became defined as the hypothetical moment when a girl becomes a woman capable of engaging in heterosexual activity and a boy becomes a man imbued with the right and responsibility to have heterosexual intercourse. Colonial ethnographic studies reduced complex precolonial rites of passage to “puberty rites” fixated on these sexual transformations. The resulting stereotypes influenced, in turn, how colonial and postcolonial court officials decided age-of-consent and other sex crime cases. Court rituals thus legally transformed girls into women by ruling on their sexual maturity and boys into men by sentencing them to corporal punishment, marking their acceptance of heterosexual responsibilities.

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The American Woman's Home

Beecher, Catharine E

Rutgers University Press, 2002

The American Womans Home, originally published in 1869, was one of the late nineteenth centurys most important handbooks of domestic advice. The result of a collaboration by two of the eras most important writers, this book represents their attempt to direct womens acquisition and use of a dizzying variety of new household consumer goods available in the postCivil War economic boom. It updates Catharine Beechers influential Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and incorporates domestic writings by Harriet Beecher Stowe first published in The Atlantic in the 1860s.

Today, the book can be likened to an anthology of household hints, with articles on cooking, decorating, housekeeping, child-rearing, hygiene, gardening, etiquette, and home amusements. The American Womans Home, almost a bible on domestic topics for Victorian women, illuminates womens roles a century and a half ago and can be used for comparison with modern theories on the role of women in the home and in society. Illustrated with the original engravings, this completely new edition offers a lively introduction by Nicole Tonkovich and notes linking the text to important historical, social, and cultural events of the late nineteenth century

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The Archival Turn in Feminism

Outrage in Order

Kate Eichhorn

Temple University Press, 2014

In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism.

The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections.

Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations.

A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

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The Banality of Good

The UN's Global Fight against Human Trafficking

Lieba Faier

Duke University Press, 2024

In The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human trafficking. Detailing the protocols that have been put in place and evaluating their enactment, Faier reveals how the continued failure of humanitarian institutions to address structural inequities and colonial history ultimately reinforces the violent status quo they claim to be working to change.

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The Battle over Marriage

Gay Rights Activism through the Media

Leigh Moscowitz

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Over the past decade, the controversial issue of gay marriage has emerged as a primary battle in the culture wars and a definitive social issue of our time. The subject moved to the forefront of mainstream public debate in 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began authorizing same-sex marriage licenses, and it has remained in the forefront through three presidential campaigns and numerous state ballot initiatives. In this thorough analysis, Leigh Moscowitz examines how prominent news outlets presented this issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life.

During this time, LGBT rights leaders sought to harness the power of media to advocate for marriage equality and to reform their community's public image. Building on in-depth interviews with activists and a comprehensive, longitudinal study of news stories, Moscowitz investigates these leaders' aims and how their frames, tactics, and messages evolved over time. In the end, media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause. Media exposure gave activists a platform to discuss gay and lesbian families. But it also triggered an upsurge in opposing responses and pressured activists to depict gay life in a way calculated to appeal to heterosexual audiences. Ultimately, The Battle over Marriage reveals both the promises and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.

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The Bear and His Sons

Masculinity in Spanish and Mexican Folktales

By James M. Taggart

University of Texas Press, 1997

All the world over, people tell stories to express their deepest feelings about such things as what makes a "real" man or woman; what true love, courage, or any other virtue is; what the proper relationships are between people. Often groups of people widely separated by space or time will tell the same basic story, but with differences in the details that reveal much about a particular group's worldview.

This book looks at differences in the telling of several common Hispanic folktales. James Taggart contrasts how two men—a Spaniard and an Aztec-speaking Mexican—tell such tales as "The Bear's Son." He explores how their stories present different ways of being a man in their respective cultures.

Taggart's analysis contributes to a revision of Freud's theory of gender, which was heavily grounded in biological determinism. Taggart focuses instead on how fathers reproduce different forms of masculinity in their sons. In particular, he shows how fathers who care for their infant sons teach them a relational masculinity based on a connected view of human relationships. Thus, The Bear and His Sons will be important reading not only in anthropology and folklore, but also in the growing field of men's studies.

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The Black Body in Ecstasy

Reading Race, Reading Pornography

Jennifer C. Nash

Duke University Press, 2014

In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

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The Black Shoals

Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

Tiffany Lethabo King

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.

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The Bodies of Others

Drag Dances and Their Afterlives

Selby Wynn Schwartz

University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.

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The Bohemian Body

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture

Alfred Thomas

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and social groups—Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights.
By re-examining the work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural, and intellectual lines and within the works of such individual writers as Karel Hynek Mácha, Bozena Nemcová, and Rainer Maria Rilke, resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera, and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.

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The Book of Minor Perverts

Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

Benjamin Kahan

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize

Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.

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The British Blues Network

Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity

Andrew Kellett

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Beginning in the late 1950s, an influential cadre of young, white, mostly middle-class British men were consuming and appropriating African-American blues music, using blues tropes in their own music and creating a network of admirers and emulators that spanned the Atlantic. This cross-fertilization helped create a commercially successful rock idiom that gave rise to some of the most famous British groups of the era, including The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin. What empowered these white, middle-class British men to identify with and claim aspects of the musical idiom of African-American blues musicians? The British Blues Network examines the role of British narratives of masculinity and power in the postwar era of decolonization and national decline that contributed to the creation of this network, and how its members used the tropes, vocabulary, and mythology of African-American blues traditions to forge their own musical identities.

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The Bullet Meant for Me

By Jan Reid

University of Texas Press, 2005

Jan Reid's powerful, moving account of what being shot during a robbery in Mexico City and the painful road to recovery taught him about manhood, friendship, and marriage.

On April 20, 1998, Jan Reid was shot during a robbery in Mexico City, where he had gone to watch his friend, the boxer Jesus Chavez, fight. In The Bullet Meant for Me, Reid powerfully recounts his ordeal, the long chain of life events that brought him to that fateful attack, and his struggle to regain the ability to walk and to be a full partner in a deeply satisfying marriage. Re-examining the whole trajectory of his life, Reid questions how much the Texan ideal of manhood shaped his identity, including his love for boxing and participation in the sport. He meditates on male friendship as he tells the story of his close relationship with Chavez, whose career and personal travails Reid details with empathy and insight. And he describes his long months in physical therapy, during which he drew on the unwavering love of his wife and daughter, as well as the courage and strength he had learned from boxing, to heal his body and spirit. A moving, intimate portrait of a man, a friendship, and a marriage, The Bullet Meant for Me is Jan Reid's most personal book.

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The Cassowary's Revenge

The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society

Donald Tuzin

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Donald Tuzin first studied the New Guinea village of Ilahita in 1972. When he returned many years later, he arrived in the aftermath of a startling event: the village’s men voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. The cult’s collapse indicated nothing less than the death of masculinity, and Tuzin examines the labyrinth of motives behind this improbable, self-devastating act. The villagers' mythic tradition provided a basis for this revenge of Woman upon the dominion of Man, and, remarkably, Tuzin himself became a principal figure in its narratives. The return of the magic-bearing "youngest brother" from America had been prophesied, and the villagers believed that Tuzin’s return "from the dead" signified a further need to destroy masculine traditions.

The Cassowary's Revenge is an intimate account of how Ilahita’s men and women think, emote, dream, and explain themselves. Tuzin also explores how the death of masculinity in a remote society raises disturbing implications for gender relations in our own society. In this light Tuzin's book is about men and women in search of how to value one another, and in today's world there is no theme more universal or timely.

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The Changing Face of Representation

The Gender of U.S. Senators and Constituent Communications

Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney

University of Michigan Press, 2015

As the number of women in the U.S. Senate grows, so does the number of citizens represented by women senators. At the same time, gender remains a key factor in senators’ communications to constituents as well as in news media portrayals of senators. Focusing on 32 male and female senators during the 2006 congressional election year, Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney examine in detail senators’ official websites, several thousand press releases and local news stories, and surveys of 18,000 citizens to discern constituents’ attitudes about their senators.

The authors conclude that gender role expectations and stereotypes do indeed constrain representational and campaign messages and influence news coverage of both candidates and elected senators. Further, while citizens appear to be less influenced by entrenched stereotypes, they pay more attention to female senators’ messages and become more knowledgeable about them, in comparison to male senators.

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The Child Now

Julian Gill-Peterson, Rebekah Sheldon, and Kathryn Bond Stockton, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2016

A special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Futurity, innocence, and childish subversion—as concepts, as frameworks—have yet to catch up to where the child has moved in the present century. The contributors to this issue explore topics that are both vital and challenging for current queer studies, including paradoxical exportations of the U.S. "innocent" child abroad, the queer child under same-sex marriage law, child revolutionaries' actions in Egypt, and the colonial afterlife of the boarding school for indigenous children. Following the twists and turns of children now, contributors confront how race, gender, and sexuality are made to live and grow in children’s bodies.

Contributors
Paul Amar, Julian Gill-Peterson, Clifford J. Rosky, Rebekah Sheldon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Mary Zaborskis

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The Claremont Run

Subverting Gender in the X-Men

J. Andrew Deman; Foreword by Jay Edidin

University of Texas Press, 2023

Winner — 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards in Best Academic/Scholarly Work, announced at San Diego Comic-Con International (2024)

A data-driven deep dive into a legendary comics author’s subversion of gender norms within the bestselling comic of its time.

By the time Chris Claremont’s run as author of Uncanny X-Men ended in 1991, he had changed comic books forever. During his sixteen years writing the series, Claremont revitalized a franchise on the verge of collapse, shaping the X-Men who appear in today’s Hollywood blockbusters. But, more than that, he told a new kind of story, using his growing platform to articulate transgressive ideas about gender nonconformity, toxic masculinity, and female empowerment.

J. Andrew Deman’s investigation pairs close reading and quantitative analysis to examine gender representation, content, characters, and story structure. The Claremont Run compares several hundred issues of Uncanny X-Men with a thousand other Marvel comics to provide a comprehensive account of Claremont’s sophisticated and progressive gender politics. Claremont’s X-Men upended gender norms: where female characters historically served as mere eye candy, Claremont’s had leading roles and complex, evolving personalities. Perhaps more surprisingly, his male superheroes defied and complicated standards of masculinity. Groundbreaking in their time, Claremont’s comics challenged readers to see the real world differently and transformed pop culture in the process.

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The Clash of Moral Nations

Cultural Politics in Pilsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935

Eva Plach

Ohio University Press, 2006

The May 1926 coup d’état in Poland inaugurated what has become known as the period of sanacja or “cleansing.” The event has been explored in terms of the impact that it had on state structures and political styles. But for both supporters and opponents of the post-May regime, the sanacja was a catalyst for debate about Polish national identity, about citizenship and responsibility to the nation, and about postwar sexual morality and modern gender identities. The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the coup. Eva Plach shifts the focus from strictly political contexts and examines instead the sanacja’s open-ended and malleable language of purification, rebirth, and moral regeneration. In tracking the diverse appropriations and manipulations of the sanacja concept, Plach relies on a wide variety of texts, including the press of the period, the personal and professional papers of notable interwar women activists, and the official records of pro-sanacja organizations, such as the Women’s Union for Citizenship Work. The Clash of Moral Nations introduces an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.

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The Color Pynk

Black Femme Art for Survival

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2023 Honorable Mention, Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2024 MPCA/ACA Best Single Work by One or More Authors, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)

A celebration of the distinctive and politically defiant art of Black queer, cis-, and transfemmes, from the work of Janelle Monáe and Janet Mock to that of Indya Moore and Kelsey Lu.

The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.

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The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

Jean Carol Griffith

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Exploring how women writers used regional fiction to reimagine democracy, identity, and belonging in America.

American regionalism has become a contested subject in literary studies alongside the ubiquitous triad of race, class, and gender. The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing enters into the heart of an ongoing debate in the field about the significance of regional fiction at the end of the 19th century. Jean Griffith presents the innovative view that regional writing provided Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather with the means to explore social transformation in a form of fiction already closely associated with women readers and writers.

Griffith provides new readings of texts by these authors; she places them alongside the works of their contemporaries, including William Faulkner and Langston Hughes, to show regionalism's responses to the debate over who was capable of democratic participation and reading regionalism's changing mediations between natives and strangers as reflections of the changing face of democracy.

This insightful work enriches the current debate about whether regionalism critiques hierarchies or participates in nationalist and racist agendas and will be of great interest to those invested in regional writing or the works of these significant authors.

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The Color of Modernity

São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil

Barbara Weinstein

Duke University Press, 2015

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.” This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.

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The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory

Kevin Blackburn

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

A balanced, sensitive study of the history of comfort women in Singapore during World War II.

“Comfort women” or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War, and has become the term generally used in English to discuss the subject. The role of comfort women in the Japanese empire during World War II remains an important and emotional topic around the world. Most scholarship concentrates on Korean comfort women, with less on their counterparts in Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even less on Southeast Asia. That gap persists despite widespread knowledge of the elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, that were organized by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why, the author asks, did no former comfort women from Singapore come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s?

To understand this silence, this book offers a detailed examination of the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls, and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Kevin Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore’s memory, including newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. Bringing great care, balance, and sensitivity to a difficult subject, Blackburn helps to fill an important gap in our understanding of this period.

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The Computer's Voice

From Star Trek to Siri

Liz W. Faber

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk

Although computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male. Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment.

Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself.

Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people.

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The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher

Voices from the Ottoman Harem

Translated and edited by Douglas Scott Brookes

University of Texas Press, 2008

In the Western imagination, the Middle Eastern harem was a place of sex, debauchery, slavery, miscegenation, power, riches, and sheer abandon. But for the women and children who actually inhabited this realm of the imperial palace, the reality was vastly different. In this collection of translated memoirs, three women who lived in the Ottoman imperial harem in Istanbul between 1876 and 1924 offer a fascinating glimpse "behind the veil" into the lives of Muslim palace women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The memoirists are Filizten, concubine to Sultan Murad V; Princess Ayse, daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II; and Safiye, a schoolteacher who instructed the grandchildren and harem ladies of Sultan Mehmed V. Their recollections of the Ottoman harem reveal the rigid protocol and hierarchy that governed the lives of the imperial family and concubines, as well as the hundreds of slave women and black eunuchs in service to them. The memoirists show that, far from being a place of debauchery, the harem was a family home in which polite and refined behavior prevailed. Douglas Brookes explains the social structure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman palace harem in his introduction.

These three memoirs, written across a half century and by women of differing social classes, offer a fuller and richer portrait of the Ottoman imperial harem than has ever before been available in English.

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The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus

Melanie Racette-Campbell

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

The political rupture caused by the ascension of Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome, which ended the centuries-old Republic, had drastic consequences for the performance and understanding of masculinity in a markedly androcentric society. Previously, masculinity was established and maintained through the frame of competition, in both public and private spheres—but the total accumulation of power by one man foreclosed most avenues of, and even appreciation for, competition. Melanie Racette-Campbell examines how Rome’s elite men navigated this liminal moment between Republic and Empire and shows that the process was neither linear nor uniform.

Careful reading of contemporary texts reveals a decades-long process as tumultuous and unsteady as the political events they echoed, one in which multiple and competing strategies for reconceiving the nature of masculinity were tested, employed, discarded, and adopted in a complex public-private discourse. The eventual reconstitution of a definition of Roman manhood was not easily agreed upon. Masculinity in both the Republic and the Empire are well-studied subjects, but by shining a light on the precise moment of transition Racette-Campbell unveils the complexity, contours, and nuances of the Augustan crisis of masculinity.

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The Critical Surf Studies Reader

Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

The evolution of surfing—from the first forms of wave-riding in Oceania, Africa, and the Americas to the inauguration of surfing as a competitive sport at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics—traverses the age of empire, the rise of globalization, and the onset of the digital age, taking on new meanings at each juncture. As corporations have sought to promote surfing as a lifestyle and leisure enterprise, the sport has also narrated its own epic myths that place North America at the center of surf culture and relegate Hawai‘i and other indigenous surfing cultures to the margins. The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing's history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and people of color have played in surfing.

Contributors. Douglas Booth, Peter Brosius, Robin Canniford, Krista Comer, Kevin Dawson, Clifton Evers, Chris Gibson, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, Scott Laderman, Kristin Lawler, lisahunter, Colleen McGloin, Patrick Moser, Tara Ruttenberg, Cori Schumacher, Alexander Sotelo Eastman, Glen Thompson, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Andrew Warren, Belinda Wheaton

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The Cultural Impact of RuPaul's Drag Race

Why Are We All Gagging?

Edited by Cameron Crookston

Intellect Books, 2022

This edited volume is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and commercial implications of the trailblazing reality television series RuPaul’s Drag Race. Going beyond mere analysis of the show itself, the contributors interrogate the ways RuPaul’s Drag Race has affected queer representation in media, examining its audience, economics, branding, queer politics, and every point in between.

Since its groundbreaking and subversive entry into the reality television complex in 2009, the show has had profound effects on drag and the cultures that surround it. Bringing together scholarship across disciplines—including cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology, marketing, and theater and performance studies—the collection offers rich academic analysis of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and its lasting influence on fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.

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