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Arousing Sense spotlights the senses and embodied knowledge for exploring the realm of creativity, experimentation, and knowledge making. The book is a collection of practiced-based explorations to arouse the senses, to “make sense” of how sensory experiences help to orient the body and self with others. No specialization needed! The purpose of the exercises is to stimulate creative activity by engaging with the senses, heighten sensory awareness, and deepen one’s understanding of what it is to be human. The exercises support workshop leaders and solo practitioners with straightforward instructions in cookbook recipe format, sometimes served with playfulness, performative drama, seriousness, or mystery to engage deeper, potentially sensitive issues. Heightening sensory awareness supports empathy and encourages compassion. Shifting one’s sensory point of view, communicating clearly, embracing open-mindedness, shedding assumptions, and inviting empathy and vulnerability into the explorations can enable revelations that what one experiences personally may not be the same as what others experience. The senses, as vehicles of transmission, serve as a means for understanding who we are in an embodied and situated sensibility. The recipes that can be delivered easily online are noted with an asterisk in the table of contents “Menu.”

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have created a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This interdisciplinary volume explores the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by four groups of African Americans: artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and diasporic perspectives, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

In 1933, Eugénie Brazier earned three Michelin stars for both of her restaurants—she was the first person to claim these high accolades and the only woman to ever do so. Brazier’s rise to fame helped establish Lyon’s place as the gastronomic capital of France, but it did not ensure that women would continue to lead the way in professional kitchens. Women are celebrated home cooks and guardians of French cuisine, but they have largely failed to achieve the same recognition for their craft in the professional kitchen. The small number of women who have succeeded in the culinary arts are celebrated as exceptions. This book looks at the historical and contemporary reasons for the underrepresentation of women in culinary professions in France, a country where cuisine is considered an important cultural form. It considers the strategies that women use to enter and move ahead in what is often a hostile work environment where gender inequality persists. The author explores the realities of women who cook professionally through their own culinary education and apprenticeship as well as extensive interviews with female and male cooks, chefs, and journalists. Lyon serves as a rich field site for discovering women’s resilience, skill and challenges as they seek to make their mark in the culinary arts.

A considerable amount of attention and money has been spent on programs aimed to improve the technical skills of girls of color. The impact of such efforts is not clearly understood. This book illustrates how one of the first technology programs for girls of color, COMPUGIRLS, shaped and is shaped by its adolescent participants. As a series of narratives exemplifying how intersectionality is more than a theory of multiple identities and resilience, the African American, Latina, and Native American stars of this book challenge many of the taken-for-granted ideas of girlhoods in this digital age. Navigating a program that emphasizes both technical and “power skills,” the stories reveal how culturally responsive computing practices succeed and, in some instances, fail to prepare the next generation to become the techno-social agents our society requires. To this end, the book challenges broad audiences to recognize and embrace the uniqueness of girlhoods of color theoretically and programmatically.

This book chronicles the history of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics against the backdrop of the Cold War. Accepted into the Olympic program in 1952 because it was considered uniquely appropriate for women, the sport has always been defined by the performance of femininity. Eastern bloc governments harnessed the nonthreatening nature of gymnasts to advance their political ambitions through citizen diplomacy. Yet at the same time, they were accused of flouting the amateur rule. But this was not the only rule being broken. Some also cheated by score fixing and later, age falsification. The sport became notorious for its young athletes. Their youth contributed to a power imbalance with their coaches, creating the conditions for abuse. Gymnastics was once at the forefront of women’s sport. But can a sport facing these issues, designed to promote a narrow view of gender, really be feminist? In exploring these topics, this book shows how gymnastics became a part of the cultural battlefield for Cold War supremacy. But gymnastics was not only a space for challenge. It also provided moments of international collaboration: between the international gymnastics federation and the International Olympic Committee, between gymnasts, coaches, officials, fans, and even politicians. This book argues that these global interactions charged the transformation of the sport throughout the twentieth century. It offers new insights into how sport transmits and perpetuates social ideals and the role sports, and their governing bodies, play in international relations. And with this knowledge, it suggests how women’s gymnastics might once again become the empowering, feminist experience it once was.

This book examines how fashion became an important vehicle for expressing modern gender identities and promoting feminist ideas during the long twentieth century. Arguing against narratives that view fashion only as an oppressive force, it demonstrates how different groups of women used clothes in empowering ways that allowed them to experience and express new freedoms. Especially for those who were barred from positions of power due to their class or race, the rise of mass media and culture turned fashion into an accessible route to advance claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles. Drawing on a variety of written, visual, and material sources, it shows how instead of being a hindrance to women’s political engagement, fashion enabled the mainstreaming and popularization of feminism in public discourse. In foregrounding fashion as an everyday feminist practice, the book revises our understanding of feminism, shifting the attention to its cultural manifestations. By examining the fashionable politics of the Rainy Day Club of the 1890s, early twentieth-century suffragists, the modernist avant-garde, flappers, mid-twentieth-century fashion designers, and women’s liberationists, the book highlights the continuities in women’s sartorial practices to express ideas of freedom, independence, and equality. As these women employed mainstream fashion styles, they expanded the spaces of feminist activism beyond formal organizations and movements, reclaiming fashion as a realm of pleasure, power, and feminist consciousness.

Building upon historic transnational connections between the cosmopolitan port of Tampico, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the Mexican north, and ports of entry across the Atlantic, a network of labor activists including women such as Caritina Piña emerged in the early twentieth century to address labor inequities. This book retraces the emergence of this network circulating on the eve of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The early revolutionary period ushered in a wave of anarcho-syndicalist groups privileging organizing via labor unions and other collectives. Organizations such as the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) were among the most progressive of collectives that incorporated women’s issues in their agenda. Its members encouraged women’s participation as compañeras, key to creating a real revolution. Yet, despite such progressive stance, gendered ideas about femininity and masculinity shaped members’ perspectives just as much as they shaped mainstream media outlets casting radical female activists as “women of ill-repute.” Their own understanding of gender and ideas about motherhood shaped women activists too. While anarcho-syndicalism declined as the revolutionary state grew stronger in its co-opting of organized labor, the legacy of women’s activism remained a distinctive feature of the greater Mexican borderlands. Women left an indelible mark on the Tamaulipas-Texas borderlands’ labor history. Such historic and gendered border solidarities, while imperfect, helped to build a foundation for postrevolutionary labor alliances.

Across North America, Native Americans and colonists played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. The book explores the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. The various games called football encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service and gave women an outlet as athletes. Football followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, the arrival of immigrants from Great Britain, and the backing of industrial firms helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States. By the early twentieth century, soccer communities had become established in many cities around the country. These communities served as a foundation for the growth that occurred following the end of World War I.

This book reassess how tennis evolved from a cloistered amateur game to a more inclusive and thoroughly professionalized global sport. Tennis began in Britain in 1873. The game grew quickly along the east coast of the United States before moving west, where it found a home in California. For most of its history, tennis remained a sport that separated amateur and professional players. In the minds of the private clubs and associations that organized the game for the first half century of its existence, control rather than commercialization was paramount. The Great Depression and World War II significantly undermined the authority of those associations by introducing a new generation of less affluent and working-class players with social backgrounds different than those of the men who ran the amateur associations. The best of those athletes challenged the amateur associations about the role of money in their sport. From 1945 to 1968, they professionalized tennis with annual barnstorming tours throughout the world. The visibility, viability, and popularity of those tours finally coaxed the reluctant leaders of amateur associations to allow the opening of their major tournament venues to professional players in 1968. Almost simultaneously, sports marketers, professional promoters, and sports publishers popularized and further globalized so-called Open Tennis into much the same form it retains today.