Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies: GWSS Faculty Books

A Thousand Miles of Dreams recounts the evocative and intimate biography of two intensely rivalrous Chinese sisters, a writer and a doctor, whose eventful lives took very different paths in their quest to be independent women. They were Chinese modern girls who sought to forge their own way during a period of social revolution that unsettled relations between men and women, even among nations. Daughters of an imperial scholar-official and a concubine, the two sisters followed professional trajectories unimaginable to their parents' generation.

Transforming Scholarship is a user-friendly work of practical guidance and inspiration for supporting a student's interest in a Women's Studies degree. Berger and Radeloff use empirical evidence to help students with the major barriers they face when exploring Women's Studies: the negative response a student often faces when announcing to the world that he or she is interested in Women's Studies; and the perceived lack of employment and career options that supposedly comes with graduating with a Women's Studies degree. This book will support students to think critically about what they know, how to demonstrate what they know, and how to prepare for life both personally and professionally after the degree.

During the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the censorious attitude that characterized China's post-1989 official response to contemporary art gave way to a new market-driven, culture industry valuation of art. In Experimental Beijing Sasha Su-Ling Welland examines the interlocking power dynamics in this transformational moment and rapid rise of Chinese contemporary art into a global phenomenon. Focusing on the contradictions and exclusions that emerged, Welland traces the complex gender politics involved and shows that feminist forms of art practice hold the potential to reshape consciousness, produce a nonnormative history of Chinese contemporary art, and imagine other, more just worlds.

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism.

Sex in Transition explores the lives of those who undermine the man/woman binary, exposing the gendered contradictions of apartheid and the transition to democracy in South Africa. In this context, gender liminality--a way to describe spaces between common conceptions of "man" and "woman"--is expressed by South Africans who identify as transgender, transsexual, transvestite, intersex, lesbian, gay, and/or eschew these categories altogether. This book is the first academic exploration of challenges to the man/woman binary on the African continent and brings together gender, queer, and postcolonial studies to question the stability of sex.

Chocolate has long been a favorite indulgence. But behind every chocolate bar we unwrap, there is a world of power struggles and political maneuvering over its most important ingredient: cocoa. In this incisive book, Kristy Leissle reveals how cocoa, which brings pleasure and wealth to relatively few, depends upon an extensive global trade system that exploits the labor of five million growers, as well as countless other workers and vulnerable groups. As calls for justice in the industry have grown louder, Leissle reveals the possibilities for and constraints upon realizing a truly sustainable and fulfilling livelihood for cocoa growers, and for keeping the world full of chocolate.

This volume of essays continues the establishment of Lois McMaster Bujold as an important author of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It argues persuasively that Bujold's corpus spans the distance between two full arcs of US feminism, and has anticipated or responded to several of its current concerns in ways that invite or even require theoretical exploration.

This (Boi)yant Body is an ode to my Black boihood, my inner child, and the water that has returned us to ourselves countless times. This work, born in the spirit of needing an out from the depths of learned self-hatred, is a detailed account of my transition from being raised and displaced in the suburbs of San Ramon, CA., to the utter tiredness over living out the patterns of addiction that lead me into drug and alcohol recovery. It is only a surface scratch, and I am grateful for the opportunity to give you all insight on my internal process through sharing work that stems from 2013 onward.

In the summer of 1995, El Vez, the "Mexican Elvis,"along with his backup singers and band, The Lovely Elvettes and the Memphis Mariachis, served as master of ceremony for a ground-breaking show, "Diva L.A.: A Salute to L.A.'s Latinas in the Tanda Style." In Loca Motion, Michelle Habell-Pallan argues that performances like Diva L.A. play a vital role in shaping and understanding contemporary transnational social dynamics. Chicano/a and Latino/a popular culture, including spoken word, performance art, comedy, theater, and punk music aesthetics, is central to developing cultural forms and identities that reach across and beyond the Americas, from Mexico City to Vancouver to Berlin.

Examining race and ethnic relations through an intersectional lens, Shirley Yee's An Immigrant Neighborhood investigates the ways that race, class, and gender together shaped concepts of integration and assimilation as well as whiteness and citizenship in lower Manhattan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. In contrast to accounts of insulated neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves, Yee unearths the story of working class urban dwellers of various ethnic groups Chinese, Jews, Italians, and Irish routinely interacting in social and economic settings.

Provocative, timely, and global, this volume offers a critical and grounded engagement with transnational feminism through the lens of praxis—the juncture of theory and practice. In so doing, it grapples with questions of power and representation while remaining deeply committed to radical critiques and agendas of transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Long-time activists and well-known scholars speak to a wide range of issues and practices, including women’s studies curricula; NGOs; transnational and LGBTQ studies; feminist methodologies; and film. These essays similarly conceptualize ways to more effectively theorize feminist collaborative practices while subverting such rigid, established dichotomies as theory/practice, academic/activist, individual/collaborative, and the global North/South.

Poetry collection.

The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for "stranger intimacies," and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on "everynight life" through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists.

This new edition of Karen Blair's popular anthology originally published in 1989 includes thirteen essays, eight of which are new. Together they suggest the wide spectrum of women's experiences that make up a vital part of Northwest history.

During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Dressed in provocative attire and in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. The contributors to this collection track the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period. Scholars of history, women's studies, literature, and cultural studies follow the Modern Girl around the world; in so doing, they highlight the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas.

In Power Interrupted, Sylvanna M. Falcón redirects the conversation about UN-based feminist activism toward UN forums on racism. Her analysis of UN antiracism spaces, in particular the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, considers how a race and gender intersectionality approach broadened opportunities for feminist organizing at the global level. Using a combination of interviews, participant observation, and extensive archival data, Sylvanna M. Falcón situates contemporary antiracist feminist organizing from the Americas' specifically the activism of feminists of color from the United States and Canada, and feminists from Mexico and Peru, alongside a critical historical reading of the UN and its agenda against racism.

Creating Across Cultures is a collection of stories about visionary Asian women who have journeyed outside of their comfort zones to expand their artistic horizons. It celebrates the achievements of sixteen women in the arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan--a region of diverse cultures, languages and histories. Creating in a range of literary, visual and performing arts, these women must often defy cultural and social expectations in order to heed their artistic drive. In bringing these women's stories together in one book, editor Michelle Vosper illuminates the value of the exchange of arts and ideas across borders and cultures, while offering inspiring role models for women aspiring to careers in the arts.

Luana Ross writes, "Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned."In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates.

This prodigious volume represents a landmark assemblage of the significant work of the legendary anthropologist and Native American intellectual Beatrice Medicine. Included in this retrospective collection are Medicine's clear-eyed views of assimilation, bilingual education, and the adaptive strategies by which Native Americans have conserved and preserved their ancestral languages. The volume also includes Medicine's thoughtful assessments of sex roles in contemporary Native American societies, kinship and family structures, alcoholism and sobriety, the activism implicit in the religious ritual of the Lakota Sioux Sun Dance, and the ceremonial uses of Lakota star quilts.

In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women--students, faculty, administrators, members of the community--persisted in collaborating on women's studies programs. In all of these programs, these "founding mothers" grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.

By virtue of being both black and female in antebellum America, black women abolitionists confronted a particular set of tensions. Drawing on a wide array of previously untapped primary sources, Shirley Yee examines the activism of black women in the Northeast, the Midwest, and to some extent, California and Canada. The activists' experiences render heartbreakingly clear the pervasiveness of middle-class white values in antebellum America and the contradictions and ironies inherent in prevailing conceptions of "freedom."

This volume, the second in the series, explores music's impact on identity politics within the Americas and beyond, its interconnectedness to the emergence of fluid new ethnicities in urban contexts, and its historical links to processes of intercultural exchange. One major focus is on the ethnic impact of US American popular music with a specific emphasis on Latino/a influences both on music within the United States and on the migration of sounds and music genres across national boundaries. This collection of essays aims at differentiating and rewriting existing histories of the emergence of US American popular music, which focus primarily on intercultural exchange between European and African as well as African American forms, by exploring the yet unrecognized Latino/a influences.