Browse

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.

South Africa’s democratization has been celebrated internationally for the remarkable advances of women in political office. Despite these visible steps forward, South Africa continues to face exceedingly high levels of sexual assault, rape, and intimate-partner violence. This book is about this juxtaposition between women’s national political power and these egregious violations of human rights. The South African women’s movement initially pursued state feminism, specifically using insider strategies to construct institutions and enact policies for women’s advancement. Yet the most poignant measure of the shortcomings of state feminism is the persistence of gender-based violence. The recent turn toward carceral feminism, with its focus on arrests and prosecutions, also fails to address the complexity of interpersonal violence. Through fieldwork in nine local communities, this book contains the voices of service providers, religious leaders, traditional leaders, police officers, and medical professionals who address gender-based violence at the community level. Specifically, this book examines how community networks are created on a landscape that is still marked by apartheid legacies of racism, inequality, and violence. It is also a story about understanding how place and space affect policy implementation. Rather than becoming immobilized by this complexity, policy makers could support street-level workers who are at the cutting edge of the struggle to end gender-based violence.

Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.

The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are deemed available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that hungry people actively create politics and knowledge by living dynamic visions of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Hungry Translations approaches this socio-political and epistemic injustice by embodying a radically vulnerable collective praxis of unlearning and relearning that interweaves critical epistemology with critical pedagogy as an ongoing movement of relationships, visions, and modes of being. It argues for an ever-evolving quest that refuses imposed frameworks and that seeks to open up spaces for embracing the serendipitous and the untranslatable in the relation between self and other. Through storytelling, poems, diaries, songs, and play, Nagar theorizes lessons from journeys undertaken with thousands of co-travellers in three interrelated realms of embodied learning: the first comprises Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, a movement of 8000 small farmers and mazdoors working in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh. The second sphere involves a partnership with Parakh Theatre to collectively interrogate Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy, casteism, hunger, and death with 20 amateur and professional actors in Mumbai. Third, these interlayered journeys birth "Stories, Bodies, Movements: A Syllabus in Fifteen Acts," a course that grapples with continuous relearning of our worlds by reimagining the classroom through theatre.

Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.

This book examines how women’s public demonstrations claim and transform public space. Focusing on seven examples--Take Back the Night Marches, Dyke Marches, SlutWalks, Women in Black Vigils, CODEPINK direct actions, the March for Women’s Lives, and the Million Mom March--the book explores the ways that women use gender to physically and affective transform public space, through a process of “holding space” for each other. Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers is organized into three sections addressing key foci of feminist public demonstration: sexuality, war and militarism, and citizenship norms and practices. Each section includes multiple, related chapters along with an introduction providing a brief overview of the issue and contextual links between the chapters. Throughout, the analyses emphasize the utopic impulse of public demonstration.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class. Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. examines the expressive culture of African American women in Washington, D.C. during the early twentieth century. Honing in on the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women communities in New Negro era Washington, I unveil a city in which African American women sought to configure themselves as authorial subjects. Between 1860 and 1930, the population of black women in Washington increased from 8.402 to 69,843. Over the course of seventy years of African American women’s migration to the nation’s capital, numerous institutions, organizations, and political, social, and cultural arenas emerged in Washington that catered to the specific needs, desires, and interests of a rapidly growing population of black women. African American women established spaces for contesting political, social and cultural currents and conventions that limited black women’s participation in the public sphere. Many of these women defiantly entered into public cultures such as higher education, literary activism, and local and interstate commerce. New Negro women challenged racial, gender, and sexual ideologies and norms that often relegated African American women to subordinate political, social, and cultural statuses. Colored No More reveals the significance of Washington, D.C. as a New Negro city. The African American women who inhabited the nation’s capital were integral to African American freedom and equality struggles of the early twentieth century.

This book traces a quiet transformation in public life, in which a populist sense of white male aggrievement, and an admiration for deal-making sensibilities and an interest in remaking the self have combined to form a potent political formation. To understand it, the book identifies a central cultural site where aspects of this formation has been developed, refined, and occasionally contested: media texts about the National Football League (NFL). Deploying the tools of feminist media analysis, it seeks answers to a number of questions: How have the corporate-produced meanings of the league shifted to make football meaningful and compelling to its millions of fans in a purportedly “post-feminist” and “post-racial” era? What kinds of gender and racialized subjects do these texts imagine? What ethics do they express? These questions are addressed in chapters that focus on a theme and a particular media form: Dramas for cinema and television about the dynamics of pro football teams; sports journalism about the NFL draft, in which new talent is assessed; popular books by football coaches that offer guides to managing organizations and the self; and promotions for fantasy football that present budget-minded strategies as entertainment. The concluding chapter argues that journalism and other depictions of football that challenge the logics of hegemonic racialized masculinity offer possibilities for resistance and transformation.

Environmental practices among Mexican American women have spurred a reconsideration of ecofeminism among Chicana feminists. This book examines ecological themes across the arts, Chicana activism, and direct action groups to reveal how Chicanas can craft alternative models for ecofeminist processes. The book revisits key debates to analyze issues surrounding embodiment, women's connections to nature, and spirituality's role in ecofeminist philosophy and practice. By doing so, it challenges Chicanas to escape the narrow frameworks of the past in favor of an inclusive model of environmental feminism that alleviates Western biases. The book uses readings of theory, elaborations of ecological narratives in Chicana cultural productions, histories of human and environmental rights struggles in the Southwest, and a description of an activist exemplar to underscore the importance of living with decolonializing feminist commitment in body, nature, and spirit. The book attempts to revitalize ecofeminist theory by investigating its intersections with other theoretical traditions, including Chicana and new materialist feminisms.