Results by title

Interrogates the forces that determine who truly “belongs” in an inclusive society, and who remains on its margins.

How can a society call itself inclusive while systematically excluding those who do not fit the norm? Intersectional Challenges to Cohesion? critically examines how people are marked as “not belonging” based on multiple, intersecting dimensions of identity: race, gender, disability, migration status, and more.

By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, this volume brings to light the lived realities of marginalized individuals at personal and social levels, depicting how systemic exclusion persists despite democratic ideals. Through interdisciplinary research and case studies, the contributors analyze the structures that enforce non-normativity and limit participation and ultimately question the very fabric of social cohesion. Through mapping these intersectional challenges, this book provides crucial insights for scholars and policymakers striving for genuine inclusion.
 

How televisual queer identities entered and transformed the mainstream.

Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal, this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production, contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges preexisting notions that such “mainstreamification” necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. This project argues the opposite, showing that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and that new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
 

People of Mexican descent and Anglo Americans have lived together in the U.S. Southwest for over a hundred years, yet relations between them remain strained, as shown by recent controversies over social services for undocumented aliens in California. In this study, covering the Spanish colonial period to the present day, Martha Menchaca delves deeply into interethnic relations in Santa Paula, California, to document how the residential, social, and school segregation of Mexican-origin people became institutionalized in a representative California town.

Menchaca lived in Santa Paula during the 1980s, and interviews with residents add a vivid human dimension to her book. She argues that social segregation in Santa Paula has evolved into a system of social apartness—that is, a cultural system controlled by Anglo Americans that designates the proper times and places where Mexican-origin people can socially interact with Anglos.

This first historical ethnographic case study of a Mexican-origin community will be important reading across a spectrum of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity, Latino studies, and American culture.