Social Science

“Look! There in the playground -- with the stroller and diaper bag! It's Superdad! Yes, it's Superdad—the most involved fathers in American history. And with this careful, compassionate and also critical group portrait, Gayle Kaufman has finally told their story. If you think men aren't changing—or if you think they somehow get neutered if they are changing—you need to read this book.”—Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland


In an age when fathers are spending more time with their children than at any other point in the past, men are also facing unprecedented levels of work-family conflict. How do fathers balance their two most important roles—that of father and that of worker? In Superdads, Gayle Kaufman captures the real voices of fathers themselves as they talk about their struggles with balancing work and family life.

Through in-depth interviews with a diverse group of men, Kaufman introduces the concept of “superdads”, a group of fathers who stand out by making significant changes to their work lives in order to accommodate their families. They are nothing like their fathers, “old dads” who focus on their traditional role as breadwinner, or even some of their peers, so-called “new dads” who work around the increasing demands of their paternal roles without really bucking the system. In taking their family life in a completely new direction, these superdads challenge the way we think about long-held assumptions about men’s role in the family unit.

Thought-provoking and heartfelt, Superdads provides an overview of an emerging trend in fatherhood and the policy solutions that may help support its growth, pointing the way toward a future society with a more feasible approach to the work-family divide.

Every day for the next twenty years, more than 10,000 people in the United States will turn 65. With life expectancies increasing as well, many of these Americans will eventually require round-the-clock attention—and we have only begun to prepare for the challenge of caring for them. In Labors of Love, Jason Rodriquez examines the world of the fast-growing elder care industry, providing a nuanced and balanced portrait of the day-to-day lives of the people and organizations that devote their time to supporting America’s aging population.

Through extensive ethnographic research, interviews with staff and management, and analysis of internal documents, Rodriquez explores the inner workings of two different nursing homes—one for-profit and one non-profit—to understand the connections among the administrative regulations, the professional requirements, and the type of care provided in both types of facilities. He reveals a variety of challenges that nursing home care workers face day to day: battles over the budget; the administrative hurdles of Medicaid and Medicare; the employees’ struggle to balance financial stability and compassionate care for residents. Yet, Rodriquez argues, nursing home workers give meaning and dignity to their work by building emotional attachments to residents and their care. An unprecedented study, Labors of Love brings new insight into the underlying structures of a crucial and expanding sector of the American health care system.

Talking at Trena's is an ethnography conducted in a bar in an African American, middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's southside. May's work focuses on how the mostly black, working- and middle-class patrons of Trena's talk about race, work, class, women, relationships, the media, and life in general. May recognizes tavern talk as a form of social play and symbolic performace within the tavern, as well as an indication of the social problems African Americans confront on a daily basis.
Following a long tradition of research on informal gathering places, May's work reveals, though close description and analysis of ethnographic data, how African Americans come to understand the racial dynamics of American society which impact their jobs, entertainment—particularly television programs—and their social interactions with peers, employers, and others. Talking at Trena's provides a window into the laughs, complaints, experiences, and strategies which Trena's regulars share for managing daily life outside the safety and comfort of the tavern.

From Rodney King and “driving while black” to claims of targeting of undocumented Latino immigrants, relationships surrounding race, ethnicity, and the police have faced great challenge. Race, Ethnicity, and Policing includes both classic pieces and original essays that provide the reader with a comprehensive, even-handed sense of the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and existing research necessary to understand the problems associated with racial and ethnic profiling and police bias. This path-breaking volume affords a holistic approach to the topic, guiding readers through the complexity of these issues, making clear the ecological and political contexts that surround them, and laying the groundwork for future discussions. The seminal and forward-thinking twenty-two essays clearly illustrate that equitable treatment of citizens across racial and ethnic groups by police is one of the most critical components of a successful democracy, and that it is only when agents of social control are viewed as efficient, effective, and legitimate that citizens will comply with the laws that govern their society. The book includes an introduction by Robin S. Engel and contributions from leading scholars including Jeffrey A. Fagan, James J. Fyfe, Bernard E. Harcourt, Delores Jones-Brown, Ramiro Martínez, Jr., Karen F. Parker, Alex R. Piquero, Tom R. Tyler, Jerome H. Skolnick, Ronald Weitzer, and many others.

In a world increasingly beset by ethnocultural conflicts, the pursuit of cultural rights has taken on new urgency. Claims for cultural justice affect economic distribution as much as they do address demands for recognition from marginalized groups. It is this vital connection between economic life and cultural expression that Andrew Ross, one of our preeminent social critics, explores in Real Love. From the consequences of cyberspace for work and play to the uses and abuses of genetics in the O.J. trial, from world scarcity to world music, Ross interrogates the cultural forms through which economic forces take their daily toll upon our labor, communities, and environment.
In its relentless pursuit of cultural justice - an ideal comprised, in part, of doing justice to culture, pursuing justice through cultural means, and seeking justice for cultural claims - Real Love continues and expands the main concern of Ross's thought, namely the demonstration that, through rigorous research, the cultural critic can elucidate the complexity of everyday life. But even more than in his earlier work, Ross here examines the effects of debates about race, technology, ecology, and the arts on social and legal change. In particular, he focuses on how demands for certain forms of cultural justice often go hand in hand with injustices of other sorts and at other levels of social existence.
Through close attention to the concrete details of daily life, strong argumentation, and a marvelous sense of the anecdotal, Ross shows why cultural politics are a real and inescapable part of any advocacy for social change.

Car bombing, suicide bombing, abduction, smuggling, homicide, and hijacking are all profoundly criminal acts. In Terrorism as Crime Mark S. Hamm presents an understanding of terrorism from a criminological point of view, arguing that the most successful way to understand, detect, prosecute and deter these acts is to use conventional criminal investigation methods. Whether in Oklahoma City or London, Terrorism as Crime demonstrates that criminal activity is the lifeblood of terrorist groups and that there are simple common denominators at work that can remove the mystery surrounding many of these terrorist groups. Once understood the vulnerabilities of these organizations can be exposed.
This important volume focuses in on six case studies of crimes committed by jihad and domestic right wing groups, including biographies of more than two dozen terrorists along with descriptions of their organizations, strategies, and terrorist plots. Terrorism as Crime offers an original and significant framework for explaining international and domestic terrorism, as well as how future acts might be detected or exposed.

A lyrical and meticulously researched mapping of the ways in which diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and geography

From the ancient poet Sappho to tombois in contemporary Indonesia, women throughout history and around the globe have desired, loved, and had sex with other women. In beautiful prose, Sapphistries tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place.

Leila J. Rupp reveals how, from the time of the very earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been known, even when it is feared, ignored, or denied. We hear women in the sex-segregated spaces of convents and harems whispering words of love. We see women beginning to find each other on the streets of London and Amsterdam, in the aristocratic circles of Paris, in the factories of Shanghai. We find women’s desire and love for women meeting the light of day as Japanese schoolgirls fall in love, and lesbian bars and clubs spread from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Buffalo. And we encounter a world of difference in the twenty-first century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.

Giving voice to words from the mouths and pens of women, and from men’s prohibitions, reports, literature, art, imaginings, pornography, and court cases, Rupp also creatively employs fiction to imagine possibilities when there is no historical evidence. Sapphistries combines lyrical narrative with meticulous historical research, providing an eminently readable and uniquely sweeping story of desire, love, and sex between women around the globe from the beginning of time to the present.

Music has always been central to the cultures that young people create, follow, and embrace. In the 1960s, young hippie kids sang along about peace with the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and tried to change the world. In the 1970s, many young people ended up coming home in body bags from Vietnam, and the music scene changed, embracing punk and bands like The Sex Pistols. In Sells Like Teen Spirit, Ryan Moore tells the story of how music and youth culture have changed along with the economic, political, and cultural transformations of American society in the last four decades. By attending concerts, hanging out in dance clubs and after-hour bars, and examining the do-it-yourself music scene, Moore gives a riveting, first-hand account of the sights, sounds, and smells of “teen spirit.”
Moore traces the histories of punk, hardcore, heavy metal, glam, thrash, alternative rock, grunge, and riot grrrl music, and relates them to wider social changes that have taken place. Alongside the thirty images of concert photos, zines, flyers, and album covers in the book, Moore offers original interpretations of the music of a wide range of bands including Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Metallica, Nirvana, and Sleater-Kinney. Written in a lively, engaging, and witty style, Sells Like Teen Spirit suggests a more hopeful attitude about the ways that music can be used as a counter to an overly commercialized culture, showcasing recent musical innovations by youth that emphasize democratic participation and creative self-expression—even at the cost of potential copyright infringement.

An examination of women's self-defense culture and its relationship to feminism.
I was once a frightened feminist. So begins Martha McCaughey's odyssey into the dynamic world of women's self- defense, a culture which transforms women involved with it and which has equally profound implications for feminist theory and activism.
Unprecedented numbers of American women are learning how to knock out, maim, even kill men who assault them. Sales of mace and pepper spray have skyrocketed. Some 14 million women own handguns. From behind the scenes at gun ranges, martial arts dojos, fitness centers offering Cardio Combat, and in padded attacker courses like Model Mugging, Real Knockouts demonstrates how self-defense trains women out of the femininity that makes them easy targets for men's abuse.
And yet much feminist thought, like the broader American culture, seems deeply ambivalent about women's embrace of violence, even in self-defense. Investigating the connection between feminist theory and women physically fighting back, McCaughey found self-defense culture to embody, literally, a new brand of feminism.

From youth culture to adolescent sexuality to the consumer purchasing power of children en masse, studies are flourishing. Yet doing research on this unquestionably more vulnerable—whether five or fifteen—population also poses a unique set of challenges and dilemmas for researchers. How should a six-year-old be approached for an interview? What questions and topics are appropriate for twelve year olds? Do parents need to give their approval for all studies?
In Representing Youth, Amy L. Best has assembled an important group of essays from some of today’s top scholars on the subject of youth that address these concerns head on, providing scholars with thoughtful and often practical answers to their many methodological concerns. These original essays range from how to conduct research on youth in ways that can be empowering for them, to issues of writing and representation, to respecting boundaries and to dealing with issues of risk and responsibility to those interviewed. For anyone doing research or working with children and young adults, Representing Youth offers an indispensable guide to many of the unique dilemmas that research with kids entails.
Contributors include: Amy L. Best, Sari Knopp Biklen, Elizabeth Chin, Susan Driver, Marc Flacks, Kathryn Gold Hadley, Madeline Leonard, C.J. Pascoe, Rebecca Raby, Alyssa Richman, Jessica Taft, Michael Ungar, Yvonne Vissing, and Stephani Etheridge Woodson.

"Written with warmth, humor, and extraordinary insight, Teach Me! is a book that will change the way teachers think."
--Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Ordinary Time and Wait Till Next Year
"Murray Levin starts with a brilliant idea-to probe the political and social thought of African-American and Latino teenagers who are not supposed to have such thoughts-and fulfills it. The result is totally compelling, an education for the reader. Teach Me! is an original."
--Howard Zinn, Author of A People's History of the United States
Teach Me! is an account of a seasoned educator's experience in an urban high school. A book that confronts "social decay, . . . the malignancy of our time," Teach Me! also describes a remarkable collaboration between a teacher and his students, who came to recognize together that the world needs to change.

From Benjamin
Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman’s
attempt to levitate the Pentagon, pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused
confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling
the most notorious mischief makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters
explores how “pranks” are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power
and social critique.

Invoking such historical and contemporary figures as P.T. Barnum,
Jonathan Swift, WITCH, The Yes Men, and Stephen Colbert, Kembrew McLeod shows
how staged spectacles that balance the serious and humorous can spark important
public conversations. In some instances, tricksters have incited social change
(and unfortunate prank blowback) by manipulating various forms of media, from
newspapers to YouTube. For example, in the 1960s, self-proclaimed “professional
hoaxer” Alan Abel lampooned America’s hypocritical sexual mores by using
conservative rhetoric to fool the news media into covering a satirical organization
that advocated clothing naked animals. In the 1990s, Sub Pop Records
then-receptionist Megan Jasper satirized the commodification of alternative
music culture by pranking the New York
Times into reporting on her fake lexicon of “grunge speak.” Throughout this
book, McLeod shows how pranks interrupt the daily flow of approved information
and news, using humor to underscore larger, pointed truths.

Written in an accessible, story-driven style, Pranksters
reveals how mischief makers have left their shocking, entertaining, and
educational mark on modern political and social life.

2012 Honorable Mention Award, Sociology of Religion Section, presented by the American Sociological Association


2011 Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association International Migration Section's Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book



Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America explores the factors that may lead to greater success in ethnic preservation. Pyong Gap Min compares Indian Americans and Korean Americans, two of the most significant ethnic groups in New York, and examines the different ways in which they preserve their ethnicity through their faith. Does someone feel more “Indian” because they practice Hinduism? Does membership in a Korean Protestant church aid in maintaining ties to Korean culture?

Pushing beyond sociological research on religion and ethnicity which has tended to focus on whites or on a single immigrant group or on a single generation, Min also takes actual religious practice and theology seriously, rather than gauging religiosity based primarily on belonging to a congregation. Fascinating and provocative voices of informants from two generations combine with telephone survey data to help readers understand overall patterns of religious practices for each group under consideration. Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America is remarkable in its scope, its theoretical significance, and its methodological sophistication.

After decades of feminism and deconstruction, romance remains firmly in place as a central preoccupation in the lives of most women. Divorce rates skyrocket, the traditional family is challenged from all sides, and yet romance seems indestructible. In terms of its cultural representation, the popularity of romance also appears unchallenged. Popular fiction, Hollywood cinema, television soap-operas, and the media in general all display a seemingly bottomless appetite for romantic subjects. The trappings of classic romance—white weddings, love songs, Valentine's Day--are as commercially viable as ever.
In this anthology of original essays, romance is revisited from a wide spectrum of perspectives, not just in fiction and film but in a whole range of cultural phenomena. Essays range over such issues as Valentine's Day, interracial relationships, medieval erotic visions and modern romance fiction, the relationship between the lesbian poet H.D. and Bryher, the pervasive whiteness of romantic desire, lesbian erotica in the age of AIDS, and the public romance of Charles and Diana.

Sexual beliefs, behaviors and identities are interwoven throughout our lives, from childhood to old age. An edited collection of original empirical contributions united through its use of a distinctive, cutting-edge theoretical framework, Sex for Life critically examines sexuality across the entire lifespan. Rooted in diverse disciplines and employing a wide range of research methods, the chapters explore the sexual and social transitions that typically map to broad life stages, as well as key age-graded physiological transitions, such as puberty and menopause, while drawing on the latest developments in gender, sexuality, and life course studies.

Sex for Life explores a wide variety of topics, including puberty, sexual initiation, coming out, sexual assault, marriage/life partnering, disability onset, immigration, divorce, menopause, and widowhood, always attending to the social locations – including gender, race, ethnicity, and social class – that shape, and are shaped by, sexuality. The empirical work collected in Sex for Life ultimately speaks to important public policy issues, such as sex education, aging societies, and the increasing politicization of scientific research. Accessibly written, the contributions capture the interplay between individual lives and the ever-changing social-historical context, facilitating new insight not only into people’s sexual lives, but also into ways of studying them, ultimately providing a fresh, new perspective on sexuality.

Representations of the city have typically focused on urban dichotomies such as renewal or decline, poverty or prosperity, and politics or culture. These simplistic portrayals leave many fundamental questions unanswered. What constitutes a city? What images and discourses are used to construct it? What makes city dwellers succeed or fail?
Discussing recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major world cities in relation to the themes of ethnicity, capital, and culture, Re- Presenting the City moves between interpretative representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of representation itself. Contributors from an wide range of backgrounds--urban planning, philosophy, sociology, folklore studies, cultural studies and architecture--reflect on the construction of both the real and the unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.

Bringing together an impressive range of new scholarship deeply informed both by the legacies of the past and current intellectual trends, Race Consciousness is a veritable Who's Who of the next generation of scholars of African-American studies. This collection of original essays, representing the latest work in African-American studies, covers such trenchant topics as the culture of America as a culture of race, the politics of gender and sexuality, legacies of slavery and colonialism, crime and welfare politics, and African-American cultural studies. In his entertaining Foreword to the volume, Robin D. G. Kelley presents a startling vision of the state of African-American Studies--and the world in general--in the year 2095. Arnold Rampersad and Nell Irvin Painter, chart the different disciplinary and theoretical paths African-American Studies has taken since the 19th century in their Preface to the volume.

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice,’ Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Question’ in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Too often, in the debate over reproductive rights and technologies, we lose sight of the fundamental emotional and psychological issues that define the experience of pregnancy. Robin Gregg here draws on the words and stories of over thirty women to provide a first- hand perspective on pregnancy in the modern age.
In an age where a new advance in reproductive technology occurs seemingly every month, pregnancy has come to be defined by such medical procedures as prenatal screening, amniocentesis, fetal monitoring, induced labor, and cesarean sections. Public policymakers, ethicists, religious figures, and the medical establishment control the debate, drowning out the voices of women who grapple in the most immediate sense with the issues. Even feminist theorists often overlook the nuances and paradoxes of the reproductive revolution as experienced by individual, particular women.
The reader follows these thirty women as they speak about whether to become pregnant, and by what means; how to choose a health provider; what meaning they attribute to their pregnancies; and how they navigate their way through the contradictory pressures they face during pregnancy. The intimate nature of Gregg's research, consisting as it does largely of women's pregnancy narratives, lends her book a vibrancy often lacking in academic writing about reproduction.

Prison, Inc. provides a first-hand account of life behind bars in a controversial new type of prison facility: the private prison. These for-profit prisons are becoming increasingly popular as state budgets get tighter. Yet as privatization is seen as a necessary and cost-saving measure, not much is known about how these facilities are run and whether or not they can effectively watch over this difficult and dangerous population. For the first time, Prison, Inc. provides a look inside one of these private prisons as told through the eyes of an actual inmate, K.C. Carceral who has been in the prison system for over twenty years.

Is bisexuality coming out in America? Bisexual characters are surfacing on popular television shows and in film. Newsweek proclaims that a new sexual identity is emerging. But amidst this burgeoning acknowledgment of bisexuality, is there an understanding of what it means to be bisexual in a monosexual culture?
RePresenting Bisexualities seeks to answer these questions, integrating a recognition of bisexual desire with new theories of gender and sexuality. Despite the breakthroughs in gender studies and queer studies of recent years, bisexuality has remained largely unexamined. Problematic sexual images are usually attributed either to homosexual or heterosexual desire while bisexual readings remain unexplored. The essays found in RePresenting Bisexualities discuss fluid sexualities through a variety of readings from the fence, covering texts from Emily Dickinson to Nine Inch Nails. Each author contributes to the collection a unique view of sexual fluidity and transgressive desire. Taken together, these essays provide the most comprehensive bisexual theory reader to date.

Exploring young Latina youth's sexual agency, education, and expression

While Latina girls have high teen birth rates and are at increasing risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections, their sexual lives are much more complex than the negative stereotypes of them as “helpless” or “risky” (or worse) suggest. In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls’ experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group.

Bringing together an impressive range of new scholarship deeply informed both by the legacies of the past and current intellectual trends, Race Consciousness is a veritable Who's Who of the next generation of scholars of African-American studies. This collection of original essays, representing the latest work in African-American studies, covers such trenchant topics as the culture of America as a culture of race, the politics of gender and sexuality, legacies of slavery and colonialism, crime and welfare politics, and African-American cultural studies. In his entertaining Foreword to the volume, Robin D. G. Kelley presents a startling vision of the state of African-American Studies--and the world in general--in the year 2095. Arnold Rampersad and Nell Irvin Painter, chart the different disciplinary and theoretical paths African-American Studies has taken since the 19th century in their Preface to the volume.

What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic?
Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories.
Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.

In many arenas the debate is raging over the nature of sexual orientation. Queer Words, Queer Images addresses this debate, but with a difference, arguing that homosexuality has become an issue precisely because of the way in which we discuss, debate, and communicate about the concept and experience of homosexuality. The debate over homosexuality is fundamentally an issue of communication—as we can see by the recent controversy over gays in the military. This controversy, termed by one gay man as the annoying habit of heterosexual men to overestimate their own attractiveness, has been debated in communication-sensitive terms, such as morale and discipline.
The twenty chapters address such subjects as gay political language, homosexuality and AIDS on prime-time television, the politics of male homosexuality in young adult fiction, the identification of female athleticism with lesbianism, the politics of identity in the works of Edmund White, and coming out strategies. This is must reading for students of communication practices and theory, and for everyone interested in human sexuality.
Contributing to the book are: James Chesebro (Indiana State), James Darsey (Ohio State), Joseph A. Devito (Hunter College, CUNY), Timothy Edgar (Purdue), Mary Anne Fitzpatrick (Wisconsin, Madison), Karen A. Foss (Humboldt State), Kirk Fuoss (St. Lawrence), Larry Gross (Pennsylvania), Darlene Hantzis (Indiana State), Fred E. Jandt (California State, San Bernardino), Mercilee Jenkins (San Francisco State), Valerie Lehr (St. Lawrence), Lynn C. Miller (Texas, Austin), Marguerite Moritz (Colorado, Boulder), Fred L. Myrick (Spring Hill), Emile Netzhammer (Buffalo State), Elenie Opffer, Dorothy S. Painter (Ohio State), Karen Peper (Michigan), Nicholas F. Radel (Furman), R. Jeffrey Ringer (St. Cloud State), Scott Shamp (Georgia), Paul Siegel (Gallaudet), Jacqueline Taylor (Depaul), Julia T. Wood (North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

Shame, a powerful emotion, leads individuals to feel vulnerable, victimized, rejected. In Shameless, noted scholar and writer Arlene Stein explores American culture's attitudes toward shame and sexuality.
Some say that we live in a world without shame. But American culture is a curious mix of the shameless and the shamers, a seemingly endless parade of Pamela Andersons and Jerry Falwells strutting their stuff and wagging their fingers. With thoughtful analysis and wit, Shameless analyzes these clashing visions of sexual morality.
While conservatives have brought back sexual shame—by pushing for abstinence-only sex education, limitations on abortion, and prohibitions of gay/lesbian civil rights—progressives hold out for sexual liberalization and a society beyond “the closet.” As these two Americas compete with one another, the future of family life, the right to privacy, and the very meaning of morality hang in the balance.

Is bisexuality coming out in America? Bisexual characters are surfacing on popular television shows and in film. Newsweek proclaims that a new sexual identity is emerging. But amidst this burgeoning acknowledgment of bisexuality, is there an understanding of what it means to be bisexual in a monosexual culture?
RePresenting Bisexualities seeks to answer these questions, integrating a recognition of bisexual desire with new theories of gender and sexuality. Despite the breakthroughs in gender studies and queer studies of recent years, bisexuality has remained largely unexamined. Problematic sexual images are usually attributed either to homosexual or heterosexual desire while bisexual readings remain unexplored. The essays found in RePresenting Bisexualities discuss fluid sexualities through a variety of readings from the fence, covering texts from Emily Dickinson to Nine Inch Nails. Each author contributes to the collection a unique view of sexual fluidity and transgressive desire. Taken together, these essays provide the most comprehensive bisexual theory reader to date.

Offers a portrait of the overlapping construction of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities in America

Since pre-colonial days, America has been both torn apart and united by love, sex, and marriage across racial boundaries. Whether motivated by violent conquest, economics, lust, or love, such unions have disturbed some of America's most sacred beliefs and prejudices.

Sex, Love, Race provides a historical foundation for contemporary discussions of sex across racial lines, which, despite the numbers of interracial marriages and multiracial children, remains a controversial issue today. The first historical anthology to focus solely and widely on the subject, Sex, Love, Race gathers new essays by both younger and well-known scholars which probe why and how the specter of sex across racial boundaries has so threatened Americans of all colors and classes.

Traversing the whole of American history, from liaisons among Indians, Europeans, and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists' fascination with sex between "Orientals" and whites, the essays cover a range of regions, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. In so doing, Sex, Love, Race sketches a larger portrait of the overlapping construction of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities in America.

As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Dominguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question.






Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Morales Dominguez surveys the major advancements in race relations that occurred as a result of the revolution, but does not ignore continuing signs of inequality and discrimination. Instead, he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.

A selection of essential writings to understand the radical feminism movement of the 1960s and 1970s

The second wave of feminism was one of the most significant political and cultural developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the role radical feminism played within the women's movement remains hotly contested. For some, radical feminism has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of male privilege, and the ways the power imbalance between men and women affects the everyday fabric of women's lives. For others, radical feminism represents a reflexive hostility toward men, sex, and heterosexuality, and thus is best ignored or forgotten.

Rather than have the movement be interpreted by others, Radical Feminism permits the original work of radical feminists to speak for itself. Comprised of pivotal documents written by U.S. radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Radical Feminism combines both unpublished and previously published manifestos, position papers, minutes of meetings, and newsletters essential to an understanding of radical feminism. Consisting of documents unavailable to the general public, and others in danger of being lost altogether, this panoramic collection is organized around the key issues of sex and sexuality, race, children, lesbianism, separatism, and class. Barbara A. Crow rescues the groundbreaking original work of such groups as The Furies, Redstockings, Cell 16, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Contributors include Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Rosalyn Baxandall, Toni Morrison, Ellen Willis, Anne Koett, and Vivan Gornick.

Gathered for the first time in one volume, these primary sources of radical feminism fill a major gap in the literature on feminism and feminist thought. Radical Feminism is an indispensable resource for future generations of feminists, scholars, and activists.

Uncovers the history of hair removal practices and sheds light on the prolific culture of beauty

From the clamshell razors and homemade lye depilatories used in colonial America to the diode lasers and prescription pharmaceuticals available today, Americans have used a staggering array of tools to remove hair deemed unsightly, unnatural, or excessive. This is true especially for women and girls; conservative estimates indicate that 99% of American women have tried hair removal, and at least 85% regularly remove hair from their faces, armpits, legs, and bikini lines. How and when does hair become a problem—what makes some growth “excessive”? Who or what separates the necessary from the superfluous?

In Plucked, historian Rebecca Herzig addresses these questions about hair removal. She shows how, over time, dominant American beliefs about visible hair changed: where once elective hair removal was considered a “mutilation” practiced primarily by “savage” men, by the turn of the twentieth century, hair-free faces and limbs were expected for women. Visible hair growth—particularly on young, white women—came to be perceived as a sign of political extremism, sexual deviance, or mental illness. By the turn of the twenty-first century, more and more Americans were waxing, threading, shaving, or lasering themselves smooth. Herzig’s extraordinary account also reveals some of the collateral damages of the intensifying pursuit of hair-free skin. Moving beyond the experiences of particular patients or clients, Herzig describes the surprising histories of race, science, industry, and medicine behind today's hair-removing tools. Plucked is an unsettling, gripping, and original tale of the lengths to which Americans will go to remove hair.

Traces the origins of modern propaganda and its influence in modern history

This volume traces the origins, ethos, and workings of modern propaganda, which now permeates all institutions in our society. Scholars such as C. Wright Mills, Walter Lippmann, and Hans Speier here explore the social and institutional groundwork of modern propaganda. The book then examines the axial age of propaganda, from the Great War through the Cold War, focusing on key propaganda organizations, such as the Committee on Public Information, the Nazi propaganda machine, and the group of Hollywood directors that produced propaganda films for the armed services during the Second World War. This section also details the wizardry of the master Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Finally, the volume examines the ubiquity of propaganda in contemporary society, focusing on bureaucratic propaganda, advertising, public relations, and politics and language.

A unique introduction to sexual and gender identity and queer studies

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are becoming more and more visible in all aspects of American culture, from party politics to MTV videos.

Despite the recent queer publishing explosion, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are high-level theory books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. There has been to date no general, accessible, and inclusive work suitable for use as an introduction to Queer Studies.

In this collection, contributors assess the conflict between postmodernism and identity, the concept which typically serves as a linchpin for social and political organizing. Others address queer theory, looking specifically at how we define it, how it informs political activism, and how we can theorize such aspects of sexual performance/behaviors as s/m or butch-femme relationships.

The volume contains contributions from both established and newly emerging Queer Studies scholars, including Amber Ault, M. V. Lee Badgett, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Gregory Conerly, Patricia L. Duncan, Ruth Goldman, Lynda Goldstein, Sherrie A. Inness, Christopher James, Amanda Udis-Kessler, JeeYeun Lee, Michele E. Lloyd, Tracy D. Morgan, Ki Namaste, Vernon Rosario II, Paula Rust, and Siobhan Somerville.

In Russia, a group of leading Russian intellectuals and social scientists join with top researchers from around the world to examine the social, political, and economic transformation in Russia. This timely and important book of orginal essays makes clear that neither politics nor economics alone holds the key to Russia's future, presenting critical perspectives on challenges facing Russia, both in its domestic policies and in its international relations. It also explores how global order—or disorder—may develop over the coming decades.
Contributors include: Oleg Atkov, Timothy J. Colton, Georgi Derluguian, Mikhail K. Gorshkov, Leonid Grigoriev, Nur Kirabaev, Andrew C. Kuchins, Bobo Lo, Roderic Lyne, Vladimir Popov, Alexander Rahr, Richard Sakwa, Guzel Ulumbekova, Vladimir I. Yakunin, Rustem Zhangozha.

In Private Affairs, Phillip Brian Harper explores the social and cultural significance of the private, proposing that, far from a universal right, privacy is limited by one's racial-and sexual-minority status. Ranging across cinema, literature, sculpture, and lived encounters-from Rodin's The Kiss to Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning-Private Affairs demonstrates how the very concept of privacy creates personal and sociopolitical hierarchies in contemporary America.

People at Work is noted sociologist Marjorie L. DeVault’s groundbreaking collection of original essays on the complexities of the modern-day workplace. By focusing on the lived experiences of the worker, not as an automaton on an assembly line, but as an embodied human of flesh and bone, these essays offer important insight on the realities of the workplace, and their effects on life at home and in communities. With contributions from some of today’s top scholars, each essay is a detailed case study of a different aspect of the working world.
Compelling, lively, and sometimes chilling, the contributors address issues from disability rights to immigrant labor, welfare reforms to budget cuts, competition to personal motivations. Each one valuable on its own, the essays in People at Work combine to illuminate the hurdles that workers of all backgrounds struggle with and, more broadly, the impact of change on workers’ lives in the new, increasingly global, economy.

Fighting for marriage and family rights; protection from discrimination in employment, education, and housing; criminal law reform; economic justice; and health care reform: the LGBT movement is engaged in some of the most important cultural and political battles of our times. Seeking to reshape many of our basic social institutions, the LBGT movement’s legal, political, and cultural campaigns reflect the complex visions, strategies, and rhetoric of the individuals and groups knocking at the law’s door.
The original essays in this volume bring social movement scholarship and legal analysis together, enriching our understanding of social movements, LGBT politics and organizing, legal studies, and public policy. Moreover, they highlight the struggle to make the law relevant and responsive to the LGBT community. Ultimately, Queer Mobilizations examines how the LGBT movement’s engagement with the law shapes the very meanings of sexuality, sex, gender, privacy, discrimination, and family in law and society.
Contributors: Ellen Ann Andersen, Steven A. Boutcher, Bayliss Camp, Casey Charles, Ashley Currier, Courtenay W. Daum, Shauna Fisher, David John Frank, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Charles W. Gossett, Marybeth Herald, Nicholas Pedriana, Darren Rosenblum, Susan M. Sterett, and Amy L. Stone.

An emotionally evocative, richly textured history based on autobiographical accounts of those who lived and shaped the struggle. The importance of many of Rogers' subjects and the uniqueness of New Orleans make this must reading for anyone interested in the history of the movement. But those interested in oral history and African-American autobiography will find riches aplenty as well. A welcome addition to a number of literatures
--Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer
Righteous Lives skillfully blends oral history with a perceptive analysis of three generations of civil rights leadership in New Orleans. Rogers has revealed not only what people did, but what they remember, and how their assessments of their activism have changed over time.
--Donald A. Ritchie, U.S. Senate Historical Office
"Rogers paints a slightly less rosy picture, one in which the Louisiana un-American Activities Committee staged a raid on the offices of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and the City Council passed laws prohibiting the right to peaceful assembly, paving the way to jailing protesters."
—Gambit Weekly
This important study provides fresh insights into the lives of both black and white civil rights leaders, documents the diversity of individuals and motivations, and traces movement history in a major southern city. Well written and well researched, this book is highly recommended for readers at all levels.
--Choice
Charts the distinctly different experiences and memories of 25 black and white civil rights activists of three 'generations' in New Orleans, opening with a deft sketch of the city's unusual racial background with its black Creole caste.
--Publishers Weekly
An important study, full of valuable information, profoundly moving testimony, and provocative insights.
--The Journal of Southern History
A major contribution to our understanding of the civil rights movement. RIGHTEOUS LIVES illustrates the complexity of movements for social change, the long history of seemingly spontaneous conflicts, and the personal consequences of political activism. Rogers reveals how issues of caste and class, of gender and generation divided the black community in New Orleans, while her in-depth interviews and observations bring to the surface previously unexamined contradictions within the white southern experience as well. RIGHTEOUS LIVES also offers perceptive and thought-provoking insights into broader issues of collective and individual memory, life history, and autobiography. It evokes the struggle for African-American self-determination in the Crescent City with clarity and conviction, and it stands as a fitting testimonial to the courageous men and women whose voices provide so much of the book's fascinating narratives and textures.
-- George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego
When former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke campaigned for governor in late 1991, race relations in Louisiana were thrust dramatically into the national spotlight. New Orleans, the political and economic hub of the state, is in many ways representative of Louisiana's unique racial mix, a fusion of African-American, Caribbean, European, and white Southern cultures. An old, colorful port famous for its French and Spanish heritage, distinctive architecture, and jazz, New Orleans was a peculiarly segregated city in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, despite its complicated racial and ethnic identity and heated desegregation battles, New Orleans, unlike other Southern cities such as Birmingham, did not explode.
In this moving work, Kim Rogers tells the stories, in their own words, of the New Orleans' civil rights workers who fought to deter the racial terrorism that scarred much of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Spanning three generations of activists, RIGHTEOUS LIVES traces the risks, triumphs, and disappointments that characterized the lives of New Orleans activists. Chronicling watershed moments in the movement, Rogers' compelling narrative illustrates how blacks and whites worked together to decompress the tensions that accompanied desegregation in the ethnic mosaic of New Orleans.

Scholars of postcolonial and LGBT studies examine the validity of the globalization of queer cultures

Globalization has a taste for queer cultures. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the internet, or in the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, queerness sells and the transnational circulation of peoples, identities and social movements that we call "globalization" can be liberating to the extent that it incorporates queer lives and cultures. From this perspective, globalization is seen as allowing the emergence of queer identities and cultures on a global scale.

The essays in Queer Globalizations bring together scholars of postcolonial and lesbian and gay studies in order to examine from multiple perspectives the narratives that have sought to define globalization. In examining the tales that have been spun about globalization, these scholars have tried not only to assess the validity of the claims made for globalization, they have also attempted to identify the tactics and rhetorical strategies through which these claims and through which global circulation are constructed and operate.

Contributors include Joseba Gabilondo, Gayatri Gopinath, Janet Ann Jakobsen, Miranda Joseph, Katie King, William Leap, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Bill Maurer, Cindy Patton, Chela Sandoval, Ann Pellegrini, Silviano Santiago, and Roberto Strongman.

Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York’s economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families. Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker.
Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited—and this is the case for many—Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don’t believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.

In what ways do men think about and express themselves as procreative beings? Under what circumstances do they develop paternal identities? What is their involvement with partners during the pregnancy and delivery process, and how do they feel about it?
In Procreative Man, William Marsiglio addresses these and other timely questions with an eye toward the past, present, and future. Drawing upon writings ranging from sociology to biomedicine, Marsiglio develops a novel framework for exploring men's multifaceted and gendered experiences as procreative beings. Addressing such issues as how men feel about their limited role in the abortion decision and process, how important genetic ties are for men who want to be fathers, and men's reactions to infertility, Marsiglio shows how men's roles in creating and fathering human life is embedded within a rapidly changing cultural and sociopolitical environment.
The most comprehensive analysis of men and procreation, this theoretically informed work challenges us to expand our vision of fatherhood.

Not Working chronicles the devastating effects of the 1996 welfare reform legislation that ended welfare as we know it. For those who now receive public assistance, “work” means pleading with supervisors for full-time hours, juggling ever-changing work schedules, and shuffling between dead-end jobs that leave one physically and psychically exhausted.
Through vivid story-telling and pointed analysis, Not Working profiles the day-to-day struggles of Mexican immigrant women in the Los Angeles area, showing the increased vulnerability they face in the welfare office and labor market. The new “work first” policies now enacted impose time limits and mandate work requirements for those receiving public assistance, yet fail to offer real job training or needed childcare options, ultimately causing many families to fall deeper below the poverty line.
Not Working shows that the new “welfare-to-work” regime has produced tremendous instability and insecurity for these women and their children. Moreover, the authors argue that the new politics of welfare enable greater infringements of rights and liberty for many of America's most vulnerable and constitute a crucial component of the broader assault on American citizenship. In short, the new welfare is not working.

While widely acknowledged as the world's oldest profession, and often glamorized or demonized in the media, prostitution is a critical part of American culture and its economy, as well as a social problem in need of an updated public policy.
In Prostitution Policy, Lenore Kuo combines feminist social research and legal studies to tackle issues raised by heterosexual prostitution in the U.S. Through the lens of feminist theory, Kuo examines the milieu of prostitutes and the role of prostitution in contemporary society, and how the interplay of those two works itself out in practice.
Moving beyond theoretical analysis of prostitution, Prostitution Policy turns to the complicated problem of formulating a reasonable legal policy that minimizes harm. Kuo discusss criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization as possible approaches, ultimately arguing for a unique form of decriminalization including detailed legal oversight and mandatory social services.

Explores how teenage girls across the world—Mexico City, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, San Francisco—reject the patriarchy and redefine their girlhood to claim their political authority and become activists

From anti-war walkouts to anarchist youth newspapers, rallies against educational privatization, and workshops on fair trade, teenage girls are active participants and leaders in a variety of social movements. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas illuminates the experiences and perspectives of these uniquely positioned agents of social change. Jessica K. Taft introduces readers to a diverse and vibrant transnational community of teenage girl activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Vancouver. Expansive in scope and full of rich details, Taft brings to life the voices of these inspiring activists who are engaged in innovative and effective organizing for global and local social justice, highlighting their important contributions to contemporary social movements and social theory.

Rebel Girls explores how teenage girls construct activist identities, rejecting and redefining girlhood and claiming political authority for youth in the process. Taft examines the girl activists’ social movement strategies and collective political practices, detailing their shared commitments to process-based political education, participatory democracy, and hopeful enthusiasm. Ultimately, Rebel Girls has substantial implications for social movements and youth organizations, arguing that adult social movements could learn a great deal from girl activists and making clear the importance of increased collaboration between young people and adults.

A selection of essential writings to understand the radical feminism movement of the 1960s and 1970s

The second wave of feminism was one of the most significant political and cultural developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the role radical feminism played within the women's movement remains hotly contested. For some, radical feminism has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of male privilege, and the ways the power imbalance between men and women affects the everyday fabric of women's lives. For others, radical feminism represents a reflexive hostility toward men, sex, and heterosexuality, and thus is best ignored or forgotten.

Rather than have the movement be interpreted by others, Radical Feminism permits the original work of radical feminists to speak for itself. Comprised of pivotal documents written by U.S. radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Radical Feminism combines both unpublished and previously published manifestos, position papers, minutes of meetings, and newsletters essential to an understanding of radical feminism. Consisting of documents unavailable to the general public, and others in danger of being lost altogether, this panoramic collection is organized around the key issues of sex and sexuality, race, children, lesbianism, separatism, and class. Barbara A. Crow rescues the groundbreaking original work of such groups as The Furies, Redstockings, Cell 16, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Contributors include Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Rosalyn Baxandall, Toni Morrison, Ellen Willis, Anne Koett, and Vivan Gornick.

Gathered for the first time in one volume, these primary sources of radical feminism fill a major gap in the literature on feminism and feminist thought. Radical Feminism is an indispensable resource for future generations of feminists, scholars, and activists.

After decades of feminism and deconstruction, romance remains firmly in place as a central preoccupation in the lives of most women. Divorce rates skyrocket, the traditional family is challenged from all sides, and yet romance seems indestructible. In terms of its cultural representation, the popularity of romance also appears unchallenged. Popular fiction, Hollywood cinema, television soap-operas, and the media in general all display a seemingly bottomless appetite for romantic subjects. The trappings of classic romance—white weddings, love songs, Valentine's Day--are as commercially viable as ever.
In this anthology of original essays, romance is revisited from a wide spectrum of perspectives, not just in fiction and film but in a whole range of cultural phenomena. Essays range over such issues as Valentine's Day, interracial relationships, medieval erotic visions and modern romance fiction, the relationship between the lesbian poet H.D. and Bryher, the pervasive whiteness of romantic desire, lesbian erotica in the age of AIDS, and the public romance of Charles and Diana.

Drug testing has become the norm in many workplaces. In order to get a job, potential employees are required to provide their urine for testing. Pissing on Demand examines this phenomenon along with the resulting rise of the anti-drug testing movement, or the "detox industry," that works to beat these tests. Strategies include over-the-counter products like "body flushers" that sound innocent but are really designed to mask the presence of illegal drugs to kits advertised in pro-drug publications like High Times that make no bones about their real purpose. The first exposé of the detox industry in all its manifestations, this book is required reading for anyone concerned with social control, privacy, and workers' rights.

Working-class Appalachian women on the picket line, fighting for better working conditions. White women organizing against the racial integration of schools. Native American women struggling for Indian treaty rights. African American women in the Black Panther Party. What prompts these women to adopt political stances outside mainstream politics? How are these women changed by personal experiences of militancy and activism?
Until recently, radical and militant activists have been viewed largely as male, while women have been assumed to be apolitical, more interested in domestic concerns and personal relationships than in public issues and political controversies. Despite evidence that women have been involved in a wide range of political activities, from revolutionary parties to racial hate groups, little attention has been paid to women's radical action.
No Middle Ground brings together a wide variety of contributors to uncover women's roles in radical and militant movements. Examining women's radicalism in the United States from the 1950s through the 1990s, the volume details women's activism in both right-wing and left-wing movements, in feminist as well as anti-feminist groups, and in both movements supporting racial equality and those favoring race supremacism. The essays shed light on the conditions which encourage women's militancy, the issues around which women mobilize, how they organize, and what divides them in organizations.
The essays and personal narratives in No Middle Ground advance our understanding of the gendered underpinnings of activism that occurs outside the "middle ground" of conventional electoral and pressure group politics. They suggest the significance of identity, consciousness, personal biography, and external context for understanding women's involvement with radical protest movements.
No Middle Ground brings new insight into women's oppositional politics, as well as into our understandings of radical action.

During the heyday of the U.S. and international labor movements in the 1930s and 1940s, Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born co-founder and second-in-command of the National Maritime Union (NMU), stands out as one of the most—if not the most—powerful black labor leaders in the United States. Smith’s active membership in the Communist Party, however, coupled with his bold labor radicalism and shaky immigration status, brought him under continual surveillance by U.S. authorities, especially during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Smith was eventually deported to his homeland of Jamaica, where he continued his radical labor and political organizing until his death in 1961.
Gerald Horne draws on Smith’s life to make insightful connections between labor radicalism and the Civil Rights Movement—demonstrating that the gains of the latter were propelled by the former and undermined by anticommunism. Moreover, Red Seas uncovers the little-known experiences of black sailors and their contribution to the struggle for labor and civil rights, the history of the Communist Party and its black members, and the significant dimensions of Jamaican labor and political radicalism.

In what ways do men think about and express themselves as procreative beings? Under what circumstances do they develop paternal identities? What is their involvement with partners during the pregnancy and delivery process, and how do they feel about it?
In Procreative Man, William Marsiglio addresses these and other timely questions with an eye toward the past, present, and future. Drawing upon writings ranging from sociology to biomedicine, Marsiglio develops a novel framework for exploring men's multifaceted and gendered experiences as procreative beings. Addressing such issues as how men feel about their limited role in the abortion decision and process, how important genetic ties are for men who want to be fathers, and men's reactions to infertility, Marsiglio shows how men's roles in creating and fathering human life is embedded within a rapidly changing cultural and sociopolitical environment.
The most comprehensive analysis of men and procreation, this theoretically informed work challenges us to expand our vision of fatherhood.

While widely acknowledged as the world's oldest profession, and often glamorized or demonized in the media, prostitution is a critical part of American culture and its economy, as well as a social problem in need of an updated public policy.
In Prostitution Policy, Lenore Kuo combines feminist social research and legal studies to tackle issues raised by heterosexual prostitution in the U.S. Through the lens of feminist theory, Kuo examines the milieu of prostitutes and the role of prostitution in contemporary society, and how the interplay of those two works itself out in practice.
Moving beyond theoretical analysis of prostitution, Prostitution Policy turns to the complicated problem of formulating a reasonable legal policy that minimizes harm. Kuo discusss criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization as possible approaches, ultimately arguing for a unique form of decriminalization including detailed legal oversight and mandatory social services.

For most of the twentieth century, social thinkers devoted their attention mainly to the issues of economic class. They generally dismissed the more primordial bonds of racial, ethnic, and national identities as irrational anachronisms that either communism or the liberal frameworks of democracy would dissolve.
Today, communism is nearly dead and liberalism is on the wane. At the same time, older ethno-racial tribalisms, along with some newly invented ones, have shattered our illusions of a rationally manageable world. They find expression in chauvinistic nationalisms, multiculturalist ideologies, vicious civil wars, "ethnic cleansing" of whole regions, intensified racial and ethnic strife, a resurgence of prejudice, scapegoating, hate groups, and nativism, as well as new group-based challenges to the individualistic focus of Western liberalism.
Bringing together prominent historians, sociologists, and political scientists, New Tribalisms examines early conceptions of racial and ethnic pluralism in the United States. The volume also confronts some of the causes, implications, and possible outcomes of resurgent tribalisms in the country and around the world.

Finalist for 2010 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Awards
Unwed teen mothers, abortion, masturbation, pornography, gay marriage, sex trafficking, homosexuality, and HIV are just a few in a long line of issues that have erupted into panics. These sexual panics spark moral crusades and campaigns, defining and shaping how we think about sexual and reproductive rights. The essays in Moral Panics, Sex Panics focus on case studies ranging from sex education to AIDS to race and the "down low," to illustrate how sexuality is at the heart of many political controversies. The contributors also reveal how moral and sexual panics have become a mainstay of certain kinds of conservative efforts to win elections and gain power in moral, social, and political arenas. Moral Panics, Sex Panics provides new and important insights into the role that key moral panics have played in social processes, arguing forcefully against the political abuse of sex panics and for the need to defend full sexual and reproductive rights.
Contributors: Cathy J. Cohen, Diane DiMauro, Gary W. Dowsett, Janice M. Irvine, Carole Joffe, and Saskia Eleonora Wieringa.

Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires.
In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information.
Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies.
Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013

A bold approach to re-envisioning the future of academic publishing

Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them.

Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy’s future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changes—especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimedia—necessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin.

Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick’s own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain relevant in the digital future.

Related Articles:
"Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities"—Chronicle of Higher Education
"Academic Publishing and Zombies"—Inside Higher Ed

As the Victorian era drew to a close, American culture experienced a vast transformation. In many ways, the culture changed even more rapidly and profoundly for women. The "new woman," the "new freedom," and the "sexual revolution" all referred to women moving out of the Victorian home and into the public realm that men had long claimed as their own.
Modern middle-class women made a distinction between emotional styles that they considered Victorian and those they considered modern. They expected fulfillment in marriage, companionship, and career, and actively sought up-to-date versions of love and happiness, relieved that they lived in an age free from taboo and prudery.
Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of women from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic regions, this volume offers insights into middle-class women's experiences of American culture in this age of transition. It documents the ways in which that culture--including new technologies, advertising, and movies--shaped women's emotional lives and how these women appropriated the new messages and ideals. In addition, the authors describe the difficulties that women encountered when emotional experiences failed to match cultural expectations.

Most Americans think of Betsy Ross as she was depicted in Charles Weisberger's popular painting The Birth of Our Nation's Flag--a motherly figure, sewing at the hearth. In fact, as Jo Ann Menezes's analysis in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism points out, Ross was a widowed businesswoman who ran an upholstery shop out of her house. In Weisberger's painting, all signs of economic industry are erased and Ross's house is transformed into a home rather that the site of cottage industry. Ross is constructed as the perfect heroic mother, worthy of sacred creation; thus, our flag was born.
Ross's transformation into an icon neatly illustrates the conjunction of soaring nationalism and the establishment of woman as a fixed domestic presence and serves as an excellent example of the master narratives revealed in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism. The essays in this provocative anthology explore the connections between nation and gender and the ways in which nostalgia functions to bind these two presumably unrelated constructions together. Collectively they suggest that women pay a special fee on behalf of the nation, even though it is traditionally represented as an honorarium given to them and that, in fact, the nation-state takes as a foundational principle the subordination of women.

Throughout the twentieth century, beauty shops have been places where women could enjoy the company of other women, exchange information, and share secrets. The female equivalent of barbershops, they have been institutions vital to community formation and social change.
But while the beauty shop created community, it also reflected the racial segregation that has so profoundly shaped American society. Links between style, race, and identity were so intertwined that for much of the beauty shop's history, black and white hairdressing industries were largely separate entities with separate concerns. While African American hair-care workers embraced the chance to be independent from white control, negotiated the meanings of hair straightening, and joined in larger political struggles that challenged Jim Crow, white female hairdressers were embroiled in struggles over self-definition and opposition to their industry's emphasis on male achievement. Yet despite their differences, black and white hairdressers shared common stakes as battles were waged over issues of work, skill, and professionalism unique to women's service work.
Permanent Waves traces the development of the American beauty shop, from its largely separate racial origins, through white recognition of the "ethnic market," to the present day.

2013 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, LGBT Studies category

Barton argues that conventional Southern manners and religious institutions provide a foundation for homophobia in the Bible Belt

In the Bible Belt, it’s common to see bumper stickers that claim One Man + One Woman = Marriage, church billboards that command one to “Get right with Jesus,” letters to the editor comparing gay marriage to marrying one’s dog, and nightly news about homophobic attacks from the Family Foundation. While some areas of the Unites States have made tremendous progress in securing rights for gay people, Bible Belt states lag behind. Not only do most Bible Belt gays lack domestic partner benefits, lesbians and gay men can still be fired from some places of employment in many regions of the Bible Belt for being a homosexual.

In Pray the Gay Away, Bernadette Barton argues that conventions of small town life, rules which govern Southern manners, and the power wielded by Christian institutions serve as a foundation for both passive and active homophobia in the Bible Belt. She explores how conservative Christian ideology reproduces homophobic attitudes and shares how Bible Belt gays negotiate these attitudes in their daily lives. Drawing on the remarkable stories of Bible Belt gays, Barton brings to the fore their thoughts, experiences and hard-won insights to explore the front lines of our national culture war over marriage, family, hate crimes, and equal rights. Pray the Gay Away illuminates their lives as both foot soldiers and casualties in the battle for gay rights.

Those seeking social change confront the centrality of power on a daily basis. What precisely is power and how does it manifest itself? And how are radical and progressive strategies shaped by the ways in which we conceptualize it?
Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and Marxist theory, Davina Cooper develops an innovative framework for understanding power relations in forms as diverse as reproductive technology, queer activism, municipal politics, and the regulation of lesbian reproduction. Power in Struggle explores the relationship between power, sexuality, and the state and ultimately provides a radical re-thinking of these concepts and their interactions. Sexual politics, Cooper posits, must recognize the sexualization of everyday life and should not be exclusively the concern of a young, educated elite, nor should sex be shuttered as a private affair.
Concluding with an important and original discussion of how an ethics of empowerment can inform political strategy, Power in Struggle is a must-read for activists, scholars, and lawyers interested in understanding the role of power in the state.

Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy tells the story of how first-generation Americans coupled their legacy of liberty with a penal philosophy that promoted patriarchy, especially for marginal Americans.
American patriots fought a revolution in the name of liberty. Their victory celebrations barely ended before leaders expressed fears that immigrants, African Americans, women, and the lower classes were prone to vice, disorder, and crime. This spurred a generation of penal reformers to promote successfully the most systematic institution ever devised for stripping people of liberty: the penitentiary.
Today, Americans laud liberty but few citizens contest the legitimacy of federal, state, and local government authority to incarcerate 2 million people and subject another 4.7 million probationers and parolees to scrutiny, surveillance, and supervision. How did classical liberalism aid in the development of such expansive penal practices in the wake of the War of Independence?

The past decade has seen an extraordinary outpouring of research, writing, and talk about lesbian and gay sexuality, triggered in part by the confluence of the AIDS epidemic, the feminist sex wars, and the development of queer studies. Yet many lesbian and gay writers and readers have been frustrated by recurring gaps and absences in the queer studies approach to sexuality, as well as by the limitations of explicit queer community discourse around sex.
Opposite Sex brings the sex back into queer studies, making real bodies, acts, and desires central to analysis of the complex relationships between male and female homosexualities, and their impact on lesbian and gay culture. The contributors to this volume--scholars, artists, activists, and journalists--redress the remarkable dearth of thoughtful discourse about the many ways in which lesbian and gay men are implicated--and viewed within--in each other's sexual realities.
Opposite Sex includes writing by lesbians and gay men about each other's bodies, interpretations of different male and female homosexual sex cultures, and reflections on the history, sociology, and politics of changing discourses around queer sexuality. Passionate and challenging, this anthology shows the rich and complex forms through which individuals and communities make meaning from their quotidian sexual impulses, their utopian sexual mores, and their idiosyncratic sexual acts.
The contributors include Roberto Bedoya, Kaucylia Brooke, Lawrence Chua, Linnea Due, Sandra Lee Golvin, Jewelle Gomez, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Della Grace, Amber Hollibaugh, Robert Jensen, Kate Kane, Elizabeth A. Kelly, Monica Majoli, Mimi McGurl, Robert Reid-Pharr, Gayle Rubin, Lawrence Schimel, Richard Schimpf, and Susan Stryker.

Phantom limb pain is one of the most intractable and merciless pains ever known—a pain that haunts appendages that do not physically exist, often persisting with uncanny realness long after fleshy limbs have been traumatically, surgically, or congenitally lost. The very existence and “naturalness” of this pain has been instrumental in modern science’s ability to create prosthetic technologies that many feel have transformative, self-actualizing, and even transcendent power. In Phantom Limb, Cassandra S. Crawford critically examines phantom limb pain and its relationship to prosthetic innovation, tracing the major shifts in knowledge of the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon.

Crawford exposes how the meanings of phantom limb pain have been influenced by developments in prosthetic science and ideas about the extraordinary power of these technologies to liberate and fundamentally alter the human body, mind, and spirit. Through intensive observation at a prosthetic clinic, interviews with key researchers and clinicians, and an analysis of historical and contemporary psychological and medical literature, she examines the modernization of amputation and exposes how medical understanding about phantom limbs has changed from the late-19th to the early-21st century. Crawford interrogates the impact of advances in technology, medicine, psychology and neuroscience, as well as changes in the meaning of limb loss, popular representations of amputees, and corporeal ideology. Phantom Limb questions our most deeply held ideas of what is normal, natural, and even moral about the physical human body.

Too often, in the debate over reproductive rights and technologies, we lose sight of the fundamental emotional and psychological issues that define the experience of pregnancy. Robin Gregg here draws on the words and stories of over thirty women to provide a first- hand perspective on pregnancy in the modern age.
In an age where a new advance in reproductive technology occurs seemingly every month, pregnancy has come to be defined by such medical procedures as prenatal screening, amniocentesis, fetal monitoring, induced labor, and cesarean sections. Public policymakers, ethicists, religious figures, and the medical establishment control the debate, drowning out the voices of women who grapple in the most immediate sense with the issues. Even feminist theorists often overlook the nuances and paradoxes of the reproductive revolution as experienced by individual, particular women.
The reader follows these thirty women as they speak about whether to become pregnant, and by what means; how to choose a health provider; what meaning they attribute to their pregnancies; and how they navigate their way through the contradictory pressures they face during pregnancy. The intimate nature of Gregg's research, consisting as it does largely of women's pregnancy narratives, lends her book a vibrancy often lacking in academic writing about reproduction.

A unique introduction to sexual and gender identity and queer studies

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are becoming more and more visible in all aspects of American culture, from party politics to MTV videos.

Despite the recent queer publishing explosion, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are high-level theory books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. There has been to date no general, accessible, and inclusive work suitable for use as an introduction to Queer Studies.

In this collection, contributors assess the conflict between postmodernism and identity, the concept which typically serves as a linchpin for social and political organizing. Others address queer theory, looking specifically at how we define it, how it informs political activism, and how we can theorize such aspects of sexual performance/behaviors as s/m or butch-femme relationships.

The volume contains contributions from both established and newly emerging Queer Studies scholars, including Amber Ault, M. V. Lee Badgett, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Gregory Conerly, Patricia L. Duncan, Ruth Goldman, Lynda Goldstein, Sherrie A. Inness, Christopher James, Amanda Udis-Kessler, JeeYeun Lee, Michele E. Lloyd, Tracy D. Morgan, Ki Namaste, Vernon Rosario II, Paula Rust, and Siobhan Somerville.

Perry argues that racism in America has moved into a new phase--post-intentional

For a nation that often optimistically claims to be post-racial, we are still mired in the practices of racial inequality that plays out in law, policy, and in our local communities. One of two explanations is often given for this persistent phenomenon: On the one hand, we might be hypocritical—saying one thing, and doing or believing another; on the other, it might have little to do with us individually but rather be inherent to the structure of American society.

More Beautiful and More Terrible compels us to think beyond this insufficient dichotomy in order to see how racial inequality is perpetuated. Imani Perry asserts that the U.S. is in a new and distinct phase of racism that is “post-intentional”: neither based on the intentional discrimination of the past, nor drawing upon biological concepts of race. Drawing upon the insights and tools of critical race theory, social policy, law, sociology and cultural studies, she demonstrates how post-intentional racism works and maintains that it cannot be addressed solely through the kinds of structural solutions of the Left or the values arguments of the Right. Rather, the author identifies a place in the middle—a space of “righteous hope”—and articulates a notion of ethics and human agency that will allow us to expand and amplify that hope.

To paraphrase James Baldwin, when talking about race, it is both more terrible than most think, but also more beautiful than most can imagine, with limitless and open-ended possibility. Perry leads readers down the path of imagining the possible and points to the way forward.

Drug testing has become the norm in many workplaces. In order to get a job, potential employees are required to provide their urine for testing. Pissing on Demand examines this phenomenon along with the resulting rise of the anti-drug testing movement, or the "detox industry," that works to beat these tests. Strategies include over-the-counter products like "body flushers" that sound innocent but are really designed to mask the presence of illegal drugs to kits advertised in pro-drug publications like High Times that make no bones about their real purpose. The first exposé of the detox industry in all its manifestations, this book is required reading for anyone concerned with social control, privacy, and workers' rights.

The first three volumes of the series, available for purchase as a set now!
The Possible Futures Series gathers together leading social
scientists to address the significance of the global economic crisis in a
series of short, accessible books. Each volume takes on the past,
present, and future of this crisis suggesting that it has an informative
history, that the consequences could be much more basic than the stock
market declines, and that only fundamental changes -- not fiscal
band-aids -- can head off future repetitions.

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia
Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers
Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Vadim Volkov, Giovanni Arrighi,
Beverly Silver, and Fernando Coronil.

Volume I, Business as Usual
The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, Business as Usual
shows how the current financial crisis was made possible by both
neoliberal financial reforms and a massive turning away from
manufacturing things of value to make profits from trading financial
assets. In original essays, the contributors establish how the Great
Recession is related to crises of the past, and yet why this meltdown
was different. The volume concludes by asking whether the crisis --
despite its severity -- contains seeds of a new global economy, what
role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to
global leadership.



Volume II, The Deepening Crisis
Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to
global governance. Environment, global security, ethnicity and
nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and
social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in
relationships between the world's richer and poorer countries, efforts
to strengthen global institutions, and dificulties facing states trying
to create stability for their citizens.





Volume III, Aftermath
A New Global Economic Order?
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream
economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world's
richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China,
India, Brazil, and other counties are growing faster than Europe or
America and have weathered the crisis better. Is their growth due to
following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership
and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of
which countries will grow in comind decades, as well as the likely
conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic
cooperation.

The concise introduction to the study of popular culture

From Madonna and drag queens to cyberpunk and webzines, popular culture constitutes a common and thereby critical part of our lives. Yet the study of popular culture has been condemned and praised, debated and ridiculed. In Popular Culture: An Introduction, Carla Freccero reveals why we study popular culture and how it is taught in the classroom.

Blending music, science fiction, and film, Freccero shows us that an informed awareness of politics, race, and sexuality is essential to any understanding of popular culture. Freccero places rap music, the Alien Trilogy and Sandra Cisneros in the context of postcolonialism, identity politics, and technoculture to show students how they can draw on their already existing literacies and on the cultures they know in order to think critically.Complete with a glossary of useful terms, a sample syllabus and extensive bibliography, this book is the concise introduction to the study of popular culture.

Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more so than in New York City and Amsterdam, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have populations that are more than a third foreign-born.

These cities have had to deal with the challenge of incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose cultures, languages, religions, and racial backgrounds differ dramatically from those of many long-established residents. New York and Amsterdam brings together a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of American and Dutch scholars to examine and compare the impact of immigration on two of the world’s largest urban centers.

The original essays in this volume discuss how immigration has affected social, political, and economic structures, cultural patterns, and intergroup relations in the two cities, investigating how the particular, and changing, urban contexts of New York City and Amsterdam have shaped immigrant and second generation experiences. Despite many parallels between New York and Amsterdam, the differences stand out, and juxtaposing essays on immigration in the two cities helps to illuminate the essential issues that today’s immigrants and their children confront. Organized around five main themes, this book offers an in-depth view of the impact of immigration as it affects particular places, with specific histories, institutions, and immigrant populations. New York and Amsterdam profoundly contributes to our broader understanding of the transformations wrought by immigration and the dynamics of urban change, providing new insights into how—and why— immigration’s effects differ on the two sides of the Atlantic.

The meaning and significance of the institution of marriage has engendered angry and boisterous battles across the United States. While the efforts of lesbians and gay men to make marriage accessible to same-sex couples have seen increasing success, these initiatives have sparked a backlash as campaigns are waged to “protect” heterosexual marriage in America. Less in the public eye is government legislation that embraces the idea of marriage promotion as a necessary societal good.





In this timely and extensive study of marriage politics, Melanie Heath uncovers broad cultural anxieties that fuel on-the-ground practices to reinforce a boundary of heterosexual marriage, questioning why marriage has become an issue of pervasive national preoccupation and anxiety, and explores the impact of policies that seek to reinstitutionalize heterosexual marriage in American society. From marriage workshops for the general public to relationship classes for welfare recipients to marriage education in high school classrooms, One Marriage Under God documents in meticulous detail the inner workings of ideologies of gender and heterosexuality in the practice of marriage promotion to fortify a concept of “one marriage,” an Anglo-American ideal of Christian, heterosexual monogamy.

The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male propertyholders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks.
In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's and his own- -to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.
Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era--when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black--and today's affirmative action policies--which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America's racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors.
Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.
Table of Contents
A Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
Preface: Telling Stories
Recasting Remedies as Diseases
Color-Blind Justice
The Design of This Book
Pt. 1. A Personal Narrative
Not White Enough
Dee
Black Columbus
Racial Poverty
Man-Child
Colored Matters
Coded Schools
Busing
Going Home
Equal Opportunity
The Character of Color
Diversity as One Factor
The Deception of Color Blindness
Pt. 2. White Privilege and Black Despair: The Origins of Racial Caste in America
The Declaration of Inferiority
Marginal Americans
Inventing American Slavery
The Road to Constitutional Caste
Losing Second-Class Citizenship
Reconstruction and Sacrifice
Separate and Unequal
The Color Line
Critiquing Color Blindness
Pt. 3. The Constitutionality of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Origins of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Court of Last Resort
The Invention of Reverse Discrimination
The Politics of Affirmative Action: Myth or Reality?
Racial Realism
Eliminating Caste
Afterword
Notes
Index

The first three volumes of the series, available for purchase as a set now!
The Possible Futures Series gathers together leading social
scientists to address the significance of the global economic crisis in a
series of short, accessible books. Each volume takes on the past,
present, and future of this crisis suggesting that it has an informative
history, that the consequences could be much more basic than the stock
market declines, and that only fundamental changes -- not fiscal
band-aids -- can head off future repetitions.

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia
Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers
Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Vadim Volkov, Giovanni Arrighi,
Beverly Silver, and Fernando Coronil.

Volume I, Business as Usual
The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, Business as Usual
shows how the current financial crisis was made possible by both
neoliberal financial reforms and a massive turning away from
manufacturing things of value to make profits from trading financial
assets. In original essays, the contributors establish how the Great
Recession is related to crises of the past, and yet why this meltdown
was different. The volume concludes by asking whether the crisis --
despite its severity -- contains seeds of a new global economy, what
role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to
global leadership.



Volume II, The Deepening Crisis
Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to
global governance. Environment, global security, ethnicity and
nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and
social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in
relationships between the world's richer and poorer countries, efforts
to strengthen global institutions, and dificulties facing states trying
to create stability for their citizens.





Volume III, Aftermath
A New Global Economic Order?
Edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian

The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream
economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world's
richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China,
India, Brazil, and other counties are growing faster than Europe or
America and have weathered the crisis better. Is their growth due to
following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership
and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of
which countries will grow in comind decades, as well as the likely
conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic
cooperation.

2012 Honorable Mention Award, Sociology of Religion Section, presented by the American Sociological Association


2011 Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association International Migration Section's Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book



Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America explores the factors that may lead to greater success in ethnic preservation. Pyong Gap Min compares Indian Americans and Korean Americans, two of the most significant ethnic groups in New York, and examines the different ways in which they preserve their ethnicity through their faith. Does someone feel more “Indian” because they practice Hinduism? Does membership in a Korean Protestant church aid in maintaining ties to Korean culture?

Pushing beyond sociological research on religion and ethnicity which has tended to focus on whites or on a single immigrant group or on a single generation, Min also takes actual religious practice and theology seriously, rather than gauging religiosity based primarily on belonging to a congregation. Fascinating and provocative voices of informants from two generations combine with telephone survey data to help readers understand overall patterns of religious practices for each group under consideration. Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America is remarkable in its scope, its theoretical significance, and its methodological sophistication.

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013

A bold approach to re-envisioning the future of academic publishing

Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them.

Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy’s future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changes—especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimedia—necessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin.

Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick’s own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain relevant in the digital future.

Related Articles:
"Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities"—Chronicle of Higher Education
"Academic Publishing and Zombies"—Inside Higher Ed

Alongside the O.J. Simpson trial, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90s. Alternatively transfixed and repelled by this sexual scandal, confusion still reigns over its meanings and implications. How are we to make sense of a tale that is often wild and bizarre, yet replete with serious political and cultural implications?
Our Monica, Ourselves provides a forum for thinking through the cultural, political, and public policy issues raised by the investigation, publicity, and Congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the affair. It pulls this spectacle out of the framework provided by the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what constitutes a newsworthy event. Drawing from a broad range of scholars, Our Monica, Ourselves considers Monica Lewinsky's Jewishness, Linda Tripp's face, the President's penis, the role of shame in public discourse, and what it's like to have sex as the president, as well as specific legal and historical issues at stake in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Thoughtful but accessible, immediate yet far reaching, Our Monica, Ourselves will change the way we think about the Clinton affair, while helping us reimagine culture and politics writ large.
Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Eric O. Clarke, Ann Cvetkovich, Simone Weil Davis, Lisa Duggan, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Janet R. Jakobsen, James R. Kincaid, Laura Kipnis, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Joe Lockard, Catharine Lumby, Toby Miller, Dana D. Nelson, Anna Marie Smith, Ellen Willis, and Eli Zaretsky.

Explores the often overlooked role of the NFL in the American civil rights movement

Watching a football game on a Sunday evening, most sports fans do not realize the profound impact the National Football League had on the civil rights movement. Similarly, in a sport where seven out of ten players are Black, few are fully aware of the history and contributions of their athletic forebears. Among the touchdowns and tackles lies a rich history of African American life and the struggle to achieve equal rights.

Outside the Lines traces how football laid a foundation for social change long before the judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating teams to include white and Black athletes alike fifty years before the reversal of Plessy v Ferguson, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows—the trials and triumphs—of racial integration. In this chronicle of the important stories of Black NFL athletes in the early twentieth century, Charles K. Ross has given us an important insight into the role of sports in the fight for racial justice.

Over the last decade the sociology of religion and religious studies have experienced a surge of ethnographic research. Scholars now use ethnography, as anthropologists have long done, as a valued source of knowledge from which they draw their pictures of the religious world.
Yet, many researchers of religion have yet to grapple with the issues that are changing anthropologists' use of the method. Personal Knowledge and Beyond seeks to foster a cross-disciplinary rethinking of ethnography's possibilities and limits for the study of religions. It provides an overview of recent debates while also pushing them in new directions. In addition, it offers critiques of some of anthropology's reigning conceptualizations.
The volume brings together many of the best-known ethnographic researchers of religion, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Lynn Davidman, Armin Geertz, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mary Jo Neitz, and Thomas Tweed. Together, they share substantively from their fieldwork and consider the consequences for the study of religion of rejecting old ethnographic myths, as well as the risks of replacing them with new ones. The volume will be of interest to students as well as to experienced scholars in the field.

"An eloquent work. Somer Brodribb not only gives us a feminist critique of postmodernism with its masculinist predeterminants in existentialism, its Freudian footholdings and its Sadean values, but in the very form and texture of the critique, she literally creates new discourse in feminist theory. Brodribb has transcended not only postmodernism but its requirement that we speak in its voice even when criticizing it. She creates a language that is at once poetic and powerfully analytical. Her insistent and compelling radical critique refuses essentialism—from both masculinist thinkers and their women followers. She demystifies postmodernism to reveal that it and its antecedents represent yet another mundane version of patriarchal politics. Ultimately Brodribb returns us to feminist theory with the message that we must refuse to be derivative and continue to originate theory and politics from the condition of women under male domination."
—Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery
An iconoclastic work brilliantly undertaken . . . Nothing Mat(T)ers magnificently shows that postmodernism is the cultural capital of late patriarchy. It is the art of self- display, the conceit of masculine self and the science of reproductive and genetic engineering in an ecstatic Nietzschean cycle of statis."
—Andre Michel
Nothing Mat(T)ers encapsulates in its title the valuelessness of the current academic fad of postmodernism. Somer Brodribb has written a brave and witty book demolishing the gods and goddesses of postmodernism by deconstructing their method and de-centering their subjects and, in the process, has deconstructed deconstructionism and decentered decentering! This is a long-awaited and much-needed book from a tough- minded, embodied, and unflinching scholar."
—Janice Raymond

Filled with Joyous self-affirmation, angry manifestos, and searching personal reflections, this classic work provides a close look at the individuals and ideologies of this important social movement. In the tradition of Sisterhood is Powerful, Out of the Closets presents , in their own words, the views, values attitudes, aspirations, and circumstances of the early generation of gay and lesbian liberationists. Highlighting both how much and how little has changed since Stonewall, this work is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of sexuality and the legal and social status of lesbians and gays in contemporary America.

"An eloquent work. Somer Brodribb not only gives us a feminist critique of postmodernism with its masculinist predeterminants in existentialism, its Freudian footholdings and its Sadean values, but in the very form and texture of the critique, she literally creates new discourse in feminist theory. Brodribb has transcended not only postmodernism but its requirement that we speak in its voice even when criticizing it. She creates a language that is at once poetic and powerfully analytical. Her insistent and compelling radical critique refuses essentialism—from both masculinist thinkers and their women followers. She demystifies postmodernism to reveal that it and its antecedents represent yet another mundane version of patriarchal politics. Ultimately Brodribb returns us to feminist theory with the message that we must refuse to be derivative and continue to originate theory and politics from the condition of women under male domination."
—Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery
An iconoclastic work brilliantly undertaken . . . Nothing Mat(T)ers magnificently shows that postmodernism is the cultural capital of late patriarchy. It is the art of self- display, the conceit of masculine self and the science of reproductive and genetic engineering in an ecstatic Nietzschean cycle of statis."
—Andre Michel
Nothing Mat(T)ers encapsulates in its title the valuelessness of the current academic fad of postmodernism. Somer Brodribb has written a brave and witty book demolishing the gods and goddesses of postmodernism by deconstructing their method and de-centering their subjects and, in the process, has deconstructed deconstructionism and decentered decentering! This is a long-awaited and much-needed book from a tough- minded, embodied, and unflinching scholar."
—Janice Raymond

More than fifty prominent thinkers on the development and lasting legacy of black nationalism in America

Since its dramatic growth under Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association during the 1920s, black nationalism has played a central role in American political and intellectual life. In Modern Black Nationalism, William L. Van Deburg has collected the most influential speeches, pamphlets, and articles that trace the development of black nationalism in the 20th century.

Beginning with Marcus Garvey, the acknowledged father of the 20th-century movement, William L. Van Deburg here provides a showcase of the work of more than fifty prominent thinkers including Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad, Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, Amiri Baraka and Molefi Asante. Rare pamphlets distributed by organizations such as the Black Panther Party, articles from underground magazines, and memos from governmental officials offer a fresh look at the roots and the manifestations of this movement.

It is increasingly difficult to use the word "victim" these days without facing either ridicule for "crying victim" or criticism for supposed harshness toward those traumatized. Some deny the possibility of "recovering" repressed memories of abuse, or consider date rape an invention of whining college students. At the opposite extreme, others contend that women who experience abuse are "survivors" likely destined to be psychically wounded for life.
While the debates rage between victims' rights advocates and "backlash" authors, the contributors to New Versions of Victims collectively argue that we must move beyond these polarizations to examine the "victim" as a socially constructed term and to explore, in nuanced terms, why we see victims the way we do.
Must one have been subject to extreme or prolonged suffering to merit designation as a victim? How are we to explain rape victims who seemingly "get over" their experience with no lingering emotional scars? Resisting the reductive oversimplifications of the polemicists, the contributors to New Versions of Victims critique exaggerated claims by victim advocates about the harm of victimization while simultaneously taking on the reactionary boilerplate of writers such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia and offering further strategies for countering the backlash.
Written in clear, accessible language, New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory.

Alerting readers to a body of recent work that has gone under-examined, Tania Modleski redraws in Old Wives' Tales the perimeter of popular culture. A critical analysis of films such as The Ballad of Little Jo, The Piano and Dogfight, Old Wives' Tales also takes up performance, autobiographical experience, and contemporary social issues to illustrate how women's genres mediate between us and reality. Modelski examines the changes occurring in traditional women's genres, such as romances and melodrama, and explores the phenomenon of female authors and performers who "cross-dress"--women, that is, who are moving into male genres and staking out territory declared off-limits by men and by many feminists.

Long associated with the pejorative clichés of the drug-trafficking trade and political violence, contemporary Colombia has been unfairly stigmatized. In this pioneering study of the Miami music industry and Miami’s growing Colombian community, María Elena Cepeda boldly asserts that popular music provides an alternative common space for imagining and enacting Colombian identity. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of popular media, music, and music video, Cepeda teases out issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and transnational identity in the Latino/a music industry and among its most renowned rock en español, pop, and vallenato stars.
Musical ImagiNation provides an overview of the ongoing Colombian political and economic crisis and the dynamics of Colombian immigration to metropolitan Miami. More notably, placed in this context, the book discusses the creative work and media personas of talented Colombian artists Shakira, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados, and Carlos Vives. In her examination of the transnational figures and music that illuminate the recent shifts in the meanings attached to Colombian identity both in the United States and Latin America, Cepeda argues that music is a powerful arbitrator of memory and transnational identity.

The concise introduction to the study of popular culture

From Madonna and drag queens to cyberpunk and webzines, popular culture constitutes a common and thereby critical part of our lives. Yet the study of popular culture has been condemned and praised, debated and ridiculed. In Popular Culture: An Introduction, Carla Freccero reveals why we study popular culture and how it is taught in the classroom.

Blending music, science fiction, and film, Freccero shows us that an informed awareness of politics, race, and sexuality is essential to any understanding of popular culture. Freccero places rap music, the Alien Trilogy and Sandra Cisneros in the context of postcolonialism, identity politics, and technoculture to show students how they can draw on their already existing literacies and on the cultures they know in order to think critically.Complete with a glossary of useful terms, a sample syllabus and extensive bibliography, this book is the concise introduction to the study of popular culture.

2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

Since the 1960s, a significant effort has been underway to program computers to “see” the human face—to develop automated systems for identifying faces and distinguishing them from one another—commonly known as Facial Recognition Technology. While computer scientists are developing FRT in order to design more intelligent and interactive machines, businesses and states agencies view the technology as uniquely suited for “smart” surveillance—systems that automate the labor of monitoring in order to increase their efficacy and spread their reach.
Tracking this technological pursuit, Our Biometric Future identifies FRT as a prime example of the failed technocratic approach to governance, where new technologies are pursued as shortsighted solutions to complex social problems. Culling news stories, press releases, policy statements, PR kits and other materials, Kelly Gates provides evidence that, instead of providing more security for more people, the pursuit of FRT is being driven by the priorities of corporations, law enforcement and state security agencies, all convinced of the technology’s necessity and unhindered by its complicated and potentially destructive social consequences. By focusing on the politics of developing and deploying these technologies, Our Biometric Future argues not for the inevitability of a particular technological future, but for its profound contingency and contestability.

"Sol Dollinger's remembrance of UAW's early days are juicy and provocative. His recall of those goofy internecine political battles within the union is tragic-comic. Yet they, united, even though hollering at each other, made GM, Ford, et al,recognize the union. The sequence involving Genora Johnson Dollinger, the heroine of the 1937 sit-down strike, is deeply moving and inspiring."
--Studs Terkel
"Should be read by every labor person who takes the principles of trade union history seriously. . . . Brings the history of the UAW up for a new survey of the events to include the men and women who would otherwise be unsung heroes or written out of history totally."
--David Yettaw President, UAW Buick Local 599, 1987-1996
This story of the birth and infancy of the United Auto Workers, told by two participants, shows how the gains workers made were not easy or inevitable-not automatic-but required strategic and tactical sophistication as well as concerted action.
Sol Dollinger recounts how workers, especially activists on the political left, created an auto union and struggled with one another over what shape the union should take. In an oral history conducted by Susan Rosenthal, Genora Johnson Dollinger tells the gripping tale of her role in various struggles, both political and personal.

Rural migration invovling land settlement is often a positive force in agricultural development. This book examines its impact in nine case-studies covering a wide time-span in Australia, England, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Latin America, Tanzania, United States and Zambia. MIgrants never operate in a vacuum and this study shows how they attempt to cope withg new restraints and opportunities. The enquiry has important implications for policy makers especially in dealing with refugees and land settlement. It underlines the important role of the agricultural entrepeneur in economic development and the wide range of national policies for the settlement of rural migrants.

A hopeful and inspiring treatise on the power of playing basketball

When high school basketball player LeBron James was selected as the top pick in the National Basketball Association draft of 2003, the hopes of a half-million high school basketball players soared. If LeBron could go straight from high school to the NBA, why couldn’t they? Such is the allure of basketball for so many young African American men. Unfortunately, the reality is that their chances of ever playing basketball at the professional, or even college, level are infinitesimal. In Living Through the Hoop, Reuben A. Buford May tells the absorbing story of the hopes and struggles of one high school basketball team.

With a clear passion for the game, May grabs readers with both hands and pulls them onto the hardwood, going under the hoop and inside the locker room. May spent seven seasons as an assistant coach of the Northeast High School Knights in Northeast, Georgia. We meet players like Larique and Pooty Cat, hard-working and energetic young men, willing to play and practice basketball seven days a week and banking on the unlimited promise of the game. And we meet Coach Benson, their unorthodox, out-spoken, and fierce leader, who regularly coached them to winning seasons, twice going to the state tournaments Elite Eight championships.

Beyond the wins and losses, May provides a portrait of the players’ hopes and aspirations, their home lives, and the difficulties they face in living in a poor and urban area—namely, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, violence in their communities, run-ins with the police, and unstable family lives. We learn what it means to become a man when you live in places that define manhood by how tough you can be, how many women you can have, and how much money you can hustle.

May shows the powerful role that the basketball team can play in keeping these kids straight, away from street-life, focused on completing high school, and possibly even attending college. Their stories, and the double-edged sword of hoop dreams, is at the heart of this compelling story about young African American men’s struggle to find their way in an often grim world.

Visit the author's YouTube channel!

The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male propertyholders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks.
In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's and his own- -to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.
Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era--when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black--and today's affirmative action policies--which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America's racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors.
Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.
Table of Contents
A Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
Preface: Telling Stories
Recasting Remedies as Diseases
Color-Blind Justice
The Design of This Book
Pt. 1. A Personal Narrative
Not White Enough
Dee
Black Columbus
Racial Poverty
Man-Child
Colored Matters
Coded Schools
Busing
Going Home
Equal Opportunity
The Character of Color
Diversity as One Factor
The Deception of Color Blindness
Pt. 2. White Privilege and Black Despair: The Origins of Racial Caste in America
The Declaration of Inferiority
Marginal Americans
Inventing American Slavery
The Road to Constitutional Caste
Losing Second-Class Citizenship
Reconstruction and Sacrifice
Separate and Unequal
The Color Line
Critiquing Color Blindness
Pt. 3. The Constitutionality of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Origins of Remedial Affirmative Action
The Court of Last Resort
The Invention of Reverse Discrimination
The Politics of Affirmative Action: Myth or Reality?
Racial Realism
Eliminating Caste
Afterword
Notes
Index

Over the last decade the sociology of religion and religious studies have experienced a surge of ethnographic research. Scholars now use ethnography, as anthropologists have long done, as a valued source of knowledge from which they draw their pictures of the religious world.
Yet, many researchers of religion have yet to grapple with the issues that are changing anthropologists' use of the method. Personal Knowledge and Beyond seeks to foster a cross-disciplinary rethinking of ethnography's possibilities and limits for the study of religions. It provides an overview of recent debates while also pushing them in new directions. In addition, it offers critiques of some of anthropology's reigning conceptualizations.
The volume brings together many of the best-known ethnographic researchers of religion, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Lynn Davidman, Armin Geertz, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mary Jo Neitz, and Thomas Tweed. Together, they share substantively from their fieldwork and consider the consequences for the study of religion of rejecting old ethnographic myths, as well as the risks of replacing them with new ones. The volume will be of interest to students as well as to experienced scholars in the field.

Teenagers have sex. While almost all parents understand that many teenagers are sexually active, there is a paradox in many parents’ thinking: they insist their own teen children are not sexual, but characterize their children’s peers as sexually-driven and hypersexual. Rather than accuse parents of being in denial, Sinikka Elliott teases out the complex dynamics behind this thinking, demonstrating that it is rooted in fears and anxieties about being a good parent, the risks of teen sexual activity, and teenagers’ future economic and social status. Parents—like most Americans—equate teen sexuality with heartache, disease, pregnancy, promiscuity, and deviance and want their teen children to be protected from these things.Going beyond the hype and controversy, Elliott examines how a diverse group of American parents of teenagers understand teen sexuality, showing that, in contrast to the idea that parents are polarized in their beliefs, parents are confused, anxious, and ambivalent about teen sexual activity and how best to guide their own children’s sexuality. Framed with an eye to the debates about teenage abstinence and sex education in school, Elliott also links parents’ understandings to the contradictory messages and broad moral panic around child and teen sexuality. Ultimately, Elliott considers the social and cultural conditions that might make it easier for parents to talk with their teens about sex, calling for new ways of thinking and talking about teen sexuality that promote social justice and empower parents to embrace their children as fully sexual subjects.

Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires.
In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information.
Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies.
Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.

From the early days of second-wave feminism, motherhood and the quest for women's liberation have been inextricably linked. And yet motherhood has at times been viewed, by anti-feminists and select feminists alike, as somehow at odds with feminism. In reality, feminists have long treated motherhood as an organizing metaphor for women's needs and advancement. The mother has been regarded with suspicion at times, deified at others, but never ignored.The first book devoted to this complex relationship, Motherhood Reconceived examines in depth how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought. Bringing to life the work of a variety of feminist writers and theorists, among them Jane Alpert, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, Umansky situates feminist discourses of motherhood within the social and political contexts of the 1960s. Charting an increasingly favorable view of motherhood among feminists from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Umansky reveals how African American feminists sought to redefine black nationalist discourses of motherhood, a reworking subsequently adopted by white radical and socialist feminists seeking to broaden the racial base of their movement.
Noting the cultural left's conflicted relationship to feminism, that is, the concurrent demand for individual sexual liberation and the desire for community, Umansky traces that legacy through various stages of feminist concern about motherhood: early critiques of the nuclear family, tempered by strong support for day care; an endorsement of natural childbirth by the women's health movement of the early 1970s; white feminists' attempt to forge a multiracial movement by declaring motherhood a universal bond; and the emergence of psychoanalytic feminism, ecofeminism, spiritual feminism, and the feminist anti- pornography movement.

2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.