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Numerous activists and scholars have appealed for rights, inclusion, and justice in the name of “citizenship.” This book shows that there is nothing redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of “community” practice, or belonging. According to the book, citizenship is a violent dehumanizing mechanism that makes the comparative devaluing of human lives seem commonsensical, logical, and even necessary. The book argues that whenever we work on behalf of citizenship, whenever we work toward including more types of peoples under its reign, we inevitably reify the violence of citizenship against non-normative others. The book's focus on three legal case studies—same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In this way, the book argues that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality, that is, strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation—and how, oftentimes, progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.

This first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, the book shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. The book also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole.

The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as well as within the medical, scholarly, and autistic communities. This book suggests the proliferating number of discussions point to autism as a rhetorical phenomenon that engenders attempts to persuade through arguments, appeals to emotions, and representational strategies. The book focuses on the ways gender influences popular discussion and understanding of autism's causes and effects. It identifies gendered theories like the “refrigerator mother” theory, for example, which blames emotionally distant mothers for autism, and the “extreme male brain” theory, which links autism to the modes of systematic thinking found in male computer geeks. The book's analysis reveals how people employ such highly gendered theories to craft rhetorical narratives around stock characters—fix-it dads, heroic mother warriors rescuing children from autism—that advocate for ends beyond the story itself while also allowing the storyteller to gain authority, understand the disorder, and take part in debates. The book reveals the ways we build narratives around controversial topics while offering new insights into the ways rhetorical inquiry can and does contribute to conversations about gender and disability.

This book shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of “India” held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political–military Indian state on the other. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against men and women, the book establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what “India” means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, the book offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and India.

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.

Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Drawing on heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls, this book explores the phenomenon of black girlhood. It shows that the figure of the black girl in African American literature provided a powerful avenue for exploring issues like domesticity, femininity, and proper conduct. The characters' actions, however fictional, became a rubric for African American citizenship and racial progress. At the same time, their seeming dependence and insignificance allegorized the unjust treatment of African Americans. The book reveals fascinating black girls who, possessed of a premature knowing and wisdom beyond their years, projected a courage and resiliency that made them exemplary representations of the project of racial advance and citizenship. The book asks why black writers of the period conveyed racial inequality, poverty, and discrimination through the lens of black girlhood; why black writers and activists emphasized certain types of girls; what tropes can be identified in the early literature of black girlhood; and where these girlhood tropes originated. It examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press and it examines the first writings of black women about girlhood during the antebellum era. In doing this and more, the book documents a literary genealogy of the cultural attitudes toward black girls in the United States.

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.

Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. This book brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these chapters show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. The book sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.

Often perceived as unbridgeable, the boundaries that divide humanity from itself—whether national, gender, racial, political, or imperial—are rearticulated through friendship. This book expresses the different ways that women forge hospitality in deference to or defiance of the structures meant to keep them apart. Emerging out of postcolonial theory, the book discusses instances when the authors have negotiated friendship's complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain. It offers fresh perspectives on feminists' invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation, and reflects on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity. The book unpacks the details of transnational dissident friendships. The book emphasizes the importance of friendship in solidarity efforts between women of different cultural, national, or religious backgrounds or who share those backgrounds yet inhabit/make different sartorial/political communities/choices. It considers the significance of friendship in enacting feminist ethnography as well as the often hidden role friendship plays in academic rituals. And it proposes an approach called “transcultural feminist solidarity” in order to address the issue of women's solidarity in the context of cultural differences and globalization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, this book focuses on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Each chapter in this book uses Garner's example—the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved and the opera Margaret Garner—as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance. Drawing on history, anthropology, and artistic imagination, the chapters examine the psychological consequences of trauma and sexual violence in a number of geographic locations, including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States.

A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. The book reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, the book uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary voices, this book examines the concept of masculinity from the perspectives of cultures around the world. The chapters deconstruct the history and politics of masculinities within the contexts of the cultures from which they have been developed, examining what makes a man who he is within his own culture. Highlighting manifestations of masculinity in countries including Jamaica, Turkey, Peru, Kenya, Australia, and China, the chapters grapple with topics including how masculinity is affected by war and conflict, defined in relation to race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and expressed in cultural activities such as sports or the cinema. The book follows three major themes: defining masculinity in the global sphere; mediated representations of masculinity; and the cultural practice of masculinity as both a local and global phenomenon. It looks at Jamaican masculinity; queer masculinities; the intersections of gender, ethnicity, nationalism, sexuality, and class interactions among Kurdish minorities; the representation of masculinity in Peru; the symbols of masculinity and political power within Kenyan society; the “warrior” in Native American communities; Aboriginal and Asian masculinities; and the inequalities of racial masculinities in sport.

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.

This book creates a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the chapters offer varied perspectives on the ways that women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The chapters address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations.

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.

This book uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform the discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation, and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple—and often difficult—borders. The book links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that bring these into intimate dialogue. It reveals a politically engaged researcher and writer working to become “radically vulnerable,” and the ways in which such radical vulnerability can allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens up new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.