No Bond but the Law
- 291 pages
- 11 hours of reading
The author analyzes punishment as a way to explore the dynamic of state formation in a colonial society making the transition from slavery to freedom.
Next Wave: New Directions in Women's StudiesSeries
This series provides a forum for feminist scholarship, engaging with transformations in intellectual scope, theory, and method that have redefined women's studies for the new century. The books within this collection firmly reassess feminist interdisciplinarity and emphasize the transnational study of women. They reformulate historical and genealogical gender studies in relation to race, class, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Furthermore, they destabilize the division between humanistic and scientific knowledge in the study of women, gender, and sexuality.
Recommended Reading Order
Partners in Conflict
- 366 pages
- 13 hours of reading
Analyses differences between men's and women's participation in Chile's Agrarian Reform movement, examining how conflicts over gender shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics.
Orgasmology
- 251 pages
- 9 hours of reading
In this long-awaited work, the queer theorist Annamarie Jagose demonstrates that attention to orgasm as an object of queer and feminist thought reveals much about gender, agency, history, and modernity.
Time Travels
- 257 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Essays on the relationship between temporatlity and feminism that focus on the political and philosophical ramifications of being future oriented.
Street Corner Secrets
- 280 pages
- 10 hours of reading
Street Corner Secrets challenges widespread notions of sex work in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city of Mumbai that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame—brothels, streets, and public day-wage labor markets (nakas), where sexual commerce may be solicited discretely alongside other income-generating activities. Focusing on women who migrated to Mumbai from rural, economically underdeveloped areas within India, Svati P. Shah argues that selling sexual services is one of a number of ways women working as laborers may earn a living, demonstrating that sex work, like day labor, is a part of India's vast informal economy. Here, various means of earning—legitimized or stigmatized, legal or illegal—overlap or exist in close proximity to one another, shaping a narrow field of livelihood options that women navigate daily. In the course of this rich ethnography, Shah discusses policing practices, migrants' access to housing and water, the idea of public space, critiques of states and citizenship, and the discursive location of violence within debates on sexual commerce. Throughout, the book analyzes the epistemology of prostitution, and the silences and secrets that constitute the discourse of sexual commerce on Mumbai's streets.
A comparative feminist work that starts with a substantial historical account of the different ways that freedom, race and gender were intertwined in Jamaica and Haiti after the end of slavery. It examines the contemporary gendered spaces of citizenship, travel, and popular culture across the Caribbean.
The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders
- 296 pages
- 11 hours of reading
The book explores how "Our Bodies, Ourselves" revolutionized feminist thought by empowering women with knowledge about their bodies and health. It highlights the text's role in challenging societal norms and promoting self-advocacy among women. The impact of this groundbreaking work extends beyond personal health, influencing broader discussions on gender equality, reproductive rights, and the intersection of feminism with various social issues. Through its inclusive approach, the book underscores the importance of women's voices and experiences in shaping feminist discourse.
Gut Feminism
- 240 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Elizabeth A. Wilson shakes feminist theory from its resistance to biological and pharmaceutical data and urges that now is the time for feminism to critically engage with biology. Doing so will reanimate feminist theory, strengthening its ability to address depression, affect, gender, and feminist politics.
Black Feminism Reimagined
- 184 pages
- 7 hours of reading
Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, contending that black feminists should let go of their possession and policing of the concept in order to better unleash black feminist theory's visionary and world-making possibilities.
A preeminent science studies scholar shows how feminist and postcolonial science studies challenge the problematic modernity versus tradition binary.
Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms
- 296 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Exploring the identities of South Asian Americans, this study examines how their sense of self is shaped by the transnational connections between the U.S. and India. It delves into the complexities of cultural identity, highlighting the interplay between personal and national narratives. Through this lens, the book provides insights into the broader implications of immigration and globalization on the understanding of American identity.
Everyday Conversions
- 288 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Attiya Ahmad examines the practice of conversion to Islam by South Asian migrant domestic workers in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region and how these women's conversions stem from an ongoing process rooted in their everyday experiences as migrant workers rather than a clean break from their preexisting lives.
Examining debates in interdisciplinary identity studies, this title studies debates in Women's Studies, American Studies, Queer Theory and Whiteness studies, especially at points when the key terms changed, as happened when Women's Studies was superseded by Gender Studies.
During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her flashy, fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. This work tracks the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon during the 1920s and 1930s.
Saving the Security State
- 336 pages
- 12 hours of reading
Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism, under which everyday life is militarized, humanitarianism serves imperial aims, and white Christian men become exceptional citizens tasked with protecting the nation from racialized others.
Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war, in which new forms of wounding necessitate the continual development of treatment and prosthetic technologies while the military justifies violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge.
No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870
- 300 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Aerial Aftermaths
- 312 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Caren Kaplan traces the cultural history of aerial imagery-from the first vistas provided by balloons in the eighteenth century to the sensing operations of military drones-to show how aerial imagery is key to modern visual culture and can both enforce military power and foster positive political connections.
Why Stories Matter
- 272 pages
- 10 hours of reading
A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory.
Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico is an empirically rich history of women’s political organizing during a critical stage of regime consolidation. Rebutting the image of Mexican women as conservative and antirevolutionary, Jocelyn Olcott shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship. Piecing together material from national and regional archives, popular journalism, and oral histories, Olcott examines how women inhabited the conventionally manly role of citizen by weaving together its quotidian and formal traditions, drawing strategies from local political struggles and competing gender ideologies. Olcott demonstrates an extraordinary grasp of the complexity of postrevolutionary Mexican politics, exploring the goals and outcomes of women’s organizing in Mexico City and the port city of Acapulco as well as in three rural the southeastern state of Yucatán, the central state of Michoacán, and the northern region of the Comarca Lagunera. Combining the strengths of national and regional approaches, this comparative perspective sets in relief the specificities of citizenship as a lived experience.
