Every user knows the importance of the “@” symbol in internet communication. Though the symbol barely existed in Latin America before the emergence of email, Spanish-speaking feminist activists immediately claimed it to replace the awkward “o/a” used to indicate both genders in written text, discovering embedded in the internet an answer to the challenge of symbolic inclusion. In repurposing the symbol, th ...
Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early People’s Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Wang Zheng extends ...
Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so, based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popular books touting girls’ academic success. Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But in spite of the messages of post-feminism and neoliberal individualism that tell ...
In the late 1970s, the adult film industry began the transition from celluloid to home video. <I>Smutty Little Movies</I> traces this change and examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, <I>Smutty Little Movies</I> de-centers the film text in favor of industry histories and contexts. In so doing, the book argues that the ...
LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. <I>Lavender and Red </I>recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. This politics was born in the late 1960s but survived well past Stonewall, propelling a gay and lesbian left t ...
AIDS has been a devastating plague in much of sub-Saharan Africa, yet the long-term implications for gender and sexuality are just emerging. <I>AIDS and Masculinity in the African City</I> tackles this issue head on and examines how AIDS has altered the ways masculinity is lived in Uganda—a country known as Africa’s great AIDS success story. Based on a decade of ethnographic research in an urban ...
The inequalities that structure relationships in Delhi’s urban slums have left the health of women living there chronically vulnerable. Yet for women living in slums, there is no other option than to depend on someone. Based on fourteen months of intensive fieldwork with ten families in a Delhi slum, <I>No One Will Let Her Live</I> argues that women rely on moral strategies to confront the poverty and unstable relationships that thre ...
Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. <I>A Taste of Power</I> examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right ...
At the turn of the past century, the main function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which readers could make sense of modern life and imagine how to order their daily lives. Among those menus in the mid-1910s were several that mediated the interests of movie manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors, and the rapidly expanding audience of fans. This writing about the movies arguably played a crucial role in the emergence o ...
