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A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.

In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society’s norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms. 

The roots—and reach—of “Great Replacement” theory in France and beyond​
 

The Eurabia Myth delves into the origins and evolution of far-right anxieties about the future of a Europe that welcomes postcolonial migration, racial and ethnic diversity, and tolerance of Islam. Nationalists deploy the specter of “Eurabia”—an Arabized and Islamized Europe—as a doomsday scenario of demographic replacement that only they can avert. Mehammed Amadeus Mack traces this dark vision to a sociopolitical conspiracy theory that began in France, spread throughout Europe, and has become especially virulent in the United States: Great Replacement Theory.

Examining how the Eurabia narrative gained traction, Mack analyzes dystopian fiction that envisions how this Replacement will take place, the contemporary politicization of medieval history, and ecofascist rhetoric depicting immigrants as an “invasive” species. He also interviews prominent French activists of color about how they subvert being portrayed as Replacers and destroyers of European civilization, and he explores the American echoes of the Great Replacement Theory.

Innovatively deploying gender and sexuality theory to the concept of Eurabia, Mack demonstrates that the demographic and racial anxieties underlying Great Replacement Theory are intertwined with a more fundamental crisis of masculinity, evident in the far right’s accusations that feminists and the LGBT community are responsible for the decline in white birth rates. As it uncovers the deeper roots of this pervasive theory, The Eurabia Myth shows its insidious relevance to a rising tide of nativist fear, hatred, and violence.

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An in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama—from the state’s creation through the end of the Civil War

The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama examines the evolving position of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of the most pivotal epochs in the state’s history. Drawing on a wide range of personal and public documents reflecting the state’s varied regions and economies, Victoria E. Ott uses gender and family as a lens to examine the yeomanry and poor whites, a constituency that she collectively defines as “common whites,” who identified with the Confederate cause.

Ott provides a nuanced examination of how these Alabamians fit within the antebellum era’s paternalistic social order, eventually identifying with and supporting the Confederate mission to leave the Union and create an independent, slaveholding state. But as the reality of the war slowly set in and the Confederacy began to fray, the increasing dangers families faced led Alabama’s common white men and women to find new avenues to power as a distinct socioeconomic class.

Ott argues that family provided the conceptual framework necessary to understand why common whites supported a war to protect slavery despite having little or no investment in the institution. Going to war meant protecting their families from outsiders who threatened to turn their worlds upside down. Despite class differences, common whites envisioned the Confederacy as a larger family and the state as paternal figures who promised to protect its loyal dependents throughout the conflict. Yet, as the war ravaged many Alabama communities, devotion to the Confederacy seemed less a priority as families faced continued separations, threats of death, and the potential for starvation. The construct of a familial structure that once created a sense of loyalty to the Confederacy now gave them cause to question its leadership. Ott shows how these domestic values rooted in highly gendered concepts ultimately redefined Alabama’s social structure and increased class distinctions after the war.
 

    Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history.
    The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men’s particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials.

This is volume one of two projected volumes.

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

The Home in Hollywood Melodrama considers the home’s narrative, thematic, and visual construction within domestic melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, exploring the assumptions of gender, class, and race through which the home is visualized on screen. Informed by approaches from genre studies, architectural and urban studies, feminist film theory, critical race theory, and phenomenology, amongst others, the book traces how routine domestic activities and unremarkable stylistic gestures become charged with meaning via melodrama’s emphasis on recurrence and return and its moral elevation of victimhood. Drawing on original archival research and detailed textual analysis, The Home in Hollywood Melodrama offers a series of detailed case studies that explore the onscreen home as a product of both Hollywood production norms and wider cultural conceptions of belonging. Addressing questions of female movement and labor, property relations and class, race, and national identity, the book argues that the generic structures of domestic melodrama are fundamental to understanding how the home within these films takes shape onscreen.

Now in paperback!

This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in On Gendering Texts, studies how, by what means, and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even "sexuality"; are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. The investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation, and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics."

Features:

• Paperback format of an essential Brill monograph
• A classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data
• Discussion of wider sociological and theological implications

Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards

On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In pursuit, the FBI launched a massive dragnet. Five lesbian women and one gay man ended up in jail for refusing to cooperate with federal officials, whom they saw as invading their lives and community. Dubbed the Lexington Six, the group's resistance attracted national attention, inspiring a nationwide movement in other minority communities. Like the iconic Stonewall demonstrations, this gripping story of spirited defiance has special resonance in today's America. 

Drawing on transcripts of the judicial hearings, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, hundreds of pages of FBI files released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with many of the participants, Josephine Donovan reconstructs this fascinating, untold story. The Lexington Six is a vital addition to LGBTQ, feminist, and radical American history.

Aleksandr Aleksandrov was an author and soldier in service of the Russian tsar, active in the Prussian theater of the War of the Fourth Coalition (1806–7) and in the Napoleonic Wars. In scholarship, he is better known by his birth name, Nadezhda Andreevna Durova, and often referred to with the female pronouns bestowed upon him at birth. In this first book-length study of Aleksandrov, Ruth Averbach argues that we should understand this celebrated figure of Imperial Russia, whose sex was legally changed by Tsar Aleksandr I, simply as a man, one whose masculinity was intimately connected to the imperialist cause and Russian nationalism.

For the majority of his life, Aleksandrov lived, wrote, and fought as a man and was recognized as such by most of his contemporaries. This contradicts the dominant position in especially Western feminist scholarship, which understands “Durova” either as a woman so patriotic that she dressed as a man to fight Russia’s wars or as a woman so frustrated by gender restrictions that she dramatically sought to cast them aside. Averbach instead asserts that we should take Aleksandrov at his word and accept his transition as genuine. Doing so allows for fresh interpretations of both his autobiographical writings and his works of fiction, interpretations that Averbach deftly shows have salience not just for a single man’s life but also for how we understand masculinity, imperialism, and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russia more broadly.

Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers become the primary breadwinner has increased by almost 50 percent and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners—the bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to less job security and wage stagnation for all workers.  

The increase of mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children has increased—more time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including healthcare and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are vulnerable to dependency on their mothers’ earnings and intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women and federal paid family and medical leave and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.