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“Where are you from?” For Catherine Jagoe, a set of complicated assumptions often lies behind this seemingly banal question. While partly an immigrant narrative, Jagoe’s memoir in essays is not so much—or not only—about moving to the US and putting down roots but rather more about feeling perpetually in-between and never quite “home.” Throughout, Jagoe wrestles with what identity and fidelity mean for a woman with three nationalities, a job as a translator who frequently lives in a fourth country, a history of depression, and chronically divided allegiances. Together, these essays paint a deeply personal yet incredibly relatable portrait of what it means to be an American—and an immigrant—in the twenty-first century. 

“Where are you from?” For Catherine Jagoe, a set of complicated assumptions often lies behind this seemingly banal question. While partly an immigrant narrative, Jagoe’s memoir in essays is not so much—or not only—about moving to the US and putting down roots but rather more about feeling perpetually in-between and never quite “home.” Throughout, Jagoe wrestles with what identity and fidelity mean for a woman with three nationalities, a job as a translator who frequently lives in a fourth country, a history of depression, and chronically divided allegiances. Together, these essays paint a deeply personal yet incredibly relatable portrait of what it means to be an American—and an immigrant—in the twenty-first century. 

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

This book contains plays by Genny Lim (Paper Angels), Wakako Yamauchi (The MusicLessons), Momoko Iko (Gold Watch),Velina Hasu Houston (Tea), Jeannie Barroga (Walls), and Elizabeth Wong (Letters to a Student Revolutionary). The volume includes an extended introduction, a profile of each playwright, and an appendix. The six plays of this anthology represent some of the best dramatic literature written by Asian American women since the 1970s. Each is a groundbreaking work and addresses in its own way the experiences of Asians in America. All six playwrights are American-born daughters of Asian immigrants, and their voices span the genres of naturalism, impressionism, ritual drama, postmodern collage, and media-influenced episodic drama.

In 1998, when Mona Al-Habanin was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she stood before a council of al-Naqab Bedouin shaykhs and faced the most difficult decision of her life: give up her children or be responsible for more killings in her tribe.

This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert. Through Mona's life, it illuminates Indigenous Bedouin women's traumas and resilience while documenting a genealogy of contemporary Palestinian Bedouin feminism. It traces her journey from desert tent dwelling through forced dislocation, her community's struggles with violence against women, and her battle for her children—against state-sanctioned tribal justice rooted in British colonial paradigms and Zionist settler-native relations—and to her turn to fierce and irreverent activism, taboo-breaking, and political trailblazing. This book tells the story of an unrecognized community under siege and of a new form of Indigenous feminism that bravely defies the violence of silencing. 

A vivid account of the powerful ideas and remarkable lives of eleven women philosophers across two centuries.

When you think of modern philosophers, who comes to mind? Likely, they are popular figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. But what if the history of philosophy we know is missing some of its most vital voices?

As Kristin Gjesdal shows us in Unruly Women, there is an abundance of important thinkers who were famous in their time, helped shape philosophy as we know it, and yet have been pushed into oblivion. She introduces eleven iconic women philosophers, from Germaine de Staël in Paris during the French Revolution to Angela Davis during the Black freedom movement in the US, whose ideas challenged and revolutionized the intellectual orthodoxies of their time. Moving across centuries, traditions, and political contexts, Unruly Women illustrates how the work of these philosophers engaged with questions that remain urgent now: What does freedom imply? How are power and inequality produced and sustained? What roles do gender, race, and class play in shaping our lives? And who gets to define what counts as knowledge, reason, and philosophy?

More than just an act of historical recovery, this book places these forgotten thinkers in conversation with one another, revealing a new history of philosophy—one shaped not only by abstract systems and canonical texts, but also by struggles over justice, emancipation, and political change. The result is a vibrant and accessible account of philosophy as something lived, contested, and deeply connected to the world around us—with unruly ideas that still matter today.

Fame-shaming suggests that those who identify as women and openly pursue public recognition transgress the bounds of propriety and good taste. In Unseemly, Lorraine York analyzes fame-hunger accusations that have been directed at “fame whores” and “drama queens” from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, showing how these women have creatively handled such accusations. From Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Barbara Strozzi, Eliza Haywood, and Sarah Bernhardt to Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Kim Kardashian, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, York shows how fame-shaming has been informed by expectations of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

The unease that gives rise to public shaming of women who desire fame, says York, is a reaction to their skillful use of emergent media, whether print, film, secular song, science fiction, reality television, political speech, or social media. Fame hunger is not, as some assume, the last refuge of the untalented. To the contrary, women who have been accused of an unseemly thirst for celebrity turn out to be especially adept at emergent and boundary-breaking forms of cultural expression.