Crip Authorship

Radical alternatives to consent and trauma

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

Examines how young Jewish Americans’ fundamentally Jewish values have led them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians

Unsettled digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement and challenge the staunch pro-Israel stance of mainstream Jewish American institutions. The book explores how these activists address Israeli government policies of occupation and apartheid, and seek to transform American Jewish institutional support for Israel.

Author Oren Kroll-Zeldin identifies three key social movement strategies employed by these activists: targeting mainstream Jewish American institutions, participating in co-resistance efforts in Palestine/Israel, and engaging in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. He argues that these young people perceive their commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid as a Jewish value, deeply rooted in the changing dynamics of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. By associating social justice activism with Jewish traditions and values, these activists establish a connection between their Jewishness and their pursuit of justice for Palestinians.

In a time of internal Jewish tensions and uncertainty about peace prospects between Palestine and Israel, the book provides hope that the efforts of these young Jews in the United States are pushing the political pendulum in a new direction, potentially leading to a more balanced and nuanced conversation.

How deviant materials figure resistance

Yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition.

Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories— gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication—to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art.

Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.

Winner of the 2023 Ángel David Nieves Book Award, given by the American Studies Association

The internet origins of the American transgender movement

The Two Revolutions explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.

Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.

Tort law regulates most human activities: from driving a car to using consumer products to providing or receiving medical care. Injuries caused by dog bites, slips and falls, fender benders, bridge collapses, adverse reactions to a medication, bar fights, oil spills, and more all implicate the law of torts. The rules and procedures by which tort cases are resolved engage deeply-held intuitions about justice, causation, intentionality, and the obligations that we owe to one another. Tort rules and procedures also generate significant controversy—most visibly in political debates over tort reform.

The Psychology of Tort Law explores tort law through the lens of psychological science. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research and their own experiences teaching and researching tort law, Jennifer K. Robbennolt and Valerie P. Hans examine the psychological assumptions that underlie doctrinal rules. They explore how tort law influences the behavior and decision-making of potential plaintiffs and defendants, examining how doctors and patients, drivers, manufacturers and purchasers of products, property owners, and others make decisions against the backdrop of tort law. They show how the judges and jurors who decide tort claims are influenced by psychological phenomena in deciding cases. And they reveal how plaintiffs, defendants, and their attorneys resolve tort disputes in the shadow of tort law.

Robbennolt and Hans here shed fascinating light on the tort system, and on the psychological dynamics which undergird its functioning.