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The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect.

Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria

The Gloria Wekker Reader compiles articles, essays, interviews, poems, and letters by the Afro-Surinamese Dutch theorist and activist, Gloria Wekker. Wekker is a preeminent scholar in feminist Black diaspora studies, especially known for her developments in epistemology and methodology, conceptualizations of sexuality, and mapping of the connections between race, gender, and empire. These writings demonstrate Wekker’s theoretical and political prowess, illuminating how her scholarship was foundational in shifting the fields of anthropology, feminist and queer studies, and Black diasporic studies. Featuring a foreword by Angela Y. Davis, engaging with The Gloria Wekker Reader is an invitation for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue to inspire political action.

Examining Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century, Thomas Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. The Heartland of U.S. Empire offers a cogent analysis of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and its infamous Philippine Exhibit alongside minor museum displays and archives of Midwesterners in the Philippines. Sarmiento also considers the “exile literature” of Filipino/American writer Bienvenido Santos as well as the TV shows Glee and Superstore, which provide mainstream visibility of the queer Filipinx Midwest.

He employs a queer, decolonial Filipinx methodology that traces how narratives of America’s heartland position Filipinxs in the region as nonnormative due to their racial, gender, sexual, and national statuses. The Heartland of U.S. Empire locates queer Filipinxs in the geographic center of the nation and at the center of cultural narratives, thereby mapping alternative images of diasporic Filipinx identity and experience alongside U.S. regional and national identities, histories, and realities.

In the series Asian American History and Culture

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children’s art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood’s cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia, and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood can hurt children. Dyer’s analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children’s drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood.
 

In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.

Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States.

From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.

Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves—they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.
 

 

Realizing Diversity and Inclusion in Archives and the Archival Profession The impulse to create archives is rooted in the very human need to leave one’s mark on the world. Whether through letters, diaries, reports, photographs, films, or a teenager’s simple need to scrawl “I was here” on a subway wall, there’s a deep desire in individuals to tell their stories, to be seen literally and figuratively in archives. With this desire also comes the need to ensure that archives are as diverse as the world we live in and to preserve the individuals and cultures that have been consciously or unconsciously underserved in the archives. Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion, edited by Mary A. Caldera and Kathryn M. Neal, features ten essays that explore prominent themes related to diversity, including: • Creating a diverse record • Recruiting diversity to the profession and retaining a diverse workforce • Questioning the archive itself, on representation, authority, neutrality, objectivity, and power Through the Archival Looking Glass illustrates a multitude of perspectives and issues so that fresh voices can emerge alongside more familiar ones, and new concepts can be examined with new treatments of established ideas. Diversity is an ever-evolving concept; the term itself is increasingly rephrased as inclusion. By stimulating further ideas and conversation, we can come closer to a common understanding of what diversity and inclusion are or can be and, perhaps most importantly, how they may be realized in archives and the archival profession.