Race & Gender Studies

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classroom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Mary Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism"--everyday occurrences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative.

Williams gets to the roots of racism not by finger-pointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law's shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong--we all know that. What we don't know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. This Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfulness. The result, as the title suggests, is magic.

A "dissident of the gender-sex binary system" reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the "third sex" and the rights of those who "love differently." Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. "My trans condition is a new form of uranism," he writes. "I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism."

This book recounts Preciado's transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come. An Apartment on Uranus is a bold, transgressive, and necessary book.

From the author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the New York Times Bestseller, Best Book of the Year at NPR, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and many more, and instant classic

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.

"Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink--all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue."

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.

Portraits and texts recover lost queer history: the lives of people who didn't conform to gender norms, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

"A serious--and seriously successful--queer history recovery project."
--Publishers Weekly

Katherina Hetzeldorfer, tried "for a crime that didn't have a name" (same sex sexual relations) and sentenced to death by drowning in 1477; Charles aka Mary Hamilton, publicly whipped for impersonating a man in eighteenth-century England; Clara, aka "Big Ben," over whom two jealous women fought in 1926 New York: these are just three of the lives that the artist Ria Brodell has reclaimed for queer history in Butch Heroes. Brodell offers a series of twenty-eight portraits of forgotten but heroic figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical note. They are individuals who were assigned female at birth but whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine, who did not want to enter into heterosexual marriage, and who often faced dire punishment for being themselves.

Brodell's detailed and witty paintings are modeled on Catholic holy cards, slyly subverting a religious template. The portraits and the texts offer intriguing hints of lost lives: cats lounge in the background of domestic settings; one of the figures is said to have been employed variously as "a prophet, a soldier, or a textile worker"; another casually holds a lit cigarette. Brodell did extensive research for each portrait, piecing together a life from historical accounts, maps, journals, paintings, drawings, and photographs, finding the heroic in the forgotten.

Centers of the Self offers us a chronologically arranged collection of riveting short fiction from the best of America's black women writers. Each of these fine works reveals an important aspect of the core experience of self-discovery in African American life. We take pride in a major collection that illuminates a long tradition as well as the recent renaissance of black and women writers.

Both a rediscovery and a celebration, this anthology gathers the beat period writings of 26 women. The work aims to provide a celebration of the female independence of mind and spirit.

Landmark, groundbreaking, classic these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of the problem that has no name: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins."

Beneath the nonstop cacophony of voices across social media, online forums, and news outlets lie the stubborn facts at the heart of the everyday struggles of women today: more than a third of single moms live in poverty; the United States sees more maternal deaths than anywhere else in the developed world; one in five women will be raped in her lifetime; and women still make eighty cents for every dollar earned by a man. Between these brutal statistics and the ill-informed, often contentious public debate stand millions of women who feel alienated, disaffected, or just plain worn out.

In the era of #MeToo, Trump, and online harassment, innovative progressive feminist voices are more essential than ever. With her latest book, Deborah Cameron considers feminism from all sides--as an idea, as a theoretical approach, and as a political movement. Written in the succinct, sharp style that has made Cameron's feminist linguistics blog so popular, this short book lays out past and present debates on seven key topics: domination, rights, work, femininity, sex, culture, and the future. Feminism emphasizes the diversity of feminist thought, including queer, women-of-color, and trans perspectives. Cameron's clear and incisive account untangles the often confusing strands of one of history's most important intellectual and political movements.

Broad in scope but refreshingly concise, this book is perfect for anyone who needs a straightforward primer on the complex history of feminism, a nuanced explanation of key issues and debates, or strategic thinking about the questions facing activists today.

Unapologetic, troublemaking, agitating, revolutionary, and hot-headed: radical feminism bravely transformed the history of politics, love, sexuality, and science. In Firebrand Feminism, Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore. Taking aim at the selfishness of the right and the incremental politics of the liberal left, they defiantly and fiercely created a new kind of feminism in the late 1960s.

Firebrand Feminism provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work. This unique and provocative book unites second- and third-wave feminism and creates a much-needed intergenerational dialogue about the utility of feminist rage, the importance of refusal, the changing politics of sex and love, trans rights, and tactics to start (and continue) a revolution.

"Smart, delightful . . . a splendidly entertaining education in ethics, activism, and science." --The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

An impassioned defense of intellectual freedom and a clarion call to intellectual responsibility, Galileo's Middle Finger is one American's eye-opening story of life in the trenches of scientific controversy. For two decades, historian Alice Dreger has led a life of extraordinary engagement, combining activist service to victims of unethical medical research with defense of scientists whose work has outraged identity politics activists. With spirit and wit, Dreger offers in Galileo's Middle Finger an unforgettable vision of the importance of rigorous truth seeking in today's America, where both the free press and free scholarly inquiry struggle under dire economic and political threats.

This illuminating chronicle begins with Dreger's own research into the treatment of people born intersex (once called hermaphrodites). Realization of the shocking surgical and ethical abuses conducted in the name of "normalizing" intersex children's gender identities moved Dreger to become an internationally recognized patient rights activist. But even as the intersex rights movement succeeded, Dreger began to realize how some fellow progressive activists were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed uncomfortable truths about humans. In researching one such case, Dreger suddenly became the target of just these kinds of attacks.

Troubled, she decided to try to understand more--to travel the country to ferret out the truth behind various controversies, to obtain a global view of the nature and costs of these battles. Galileo's Middle Finger describes Dreger's long and harrowing journeys between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice activists determined to win and researchers determined to put hard truths before comfort. Ultimately what emerges is a lesson about the intertwining of justice and of truth--and a lesson of the importance of responsible scholars and journalists to our fragile democracy.

Praise for Galileo's Middle Finger
"An engrossing volume that is sure to undo any lingering notions that academic debate is the province of empiricists who pledge allegiance to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth . . . Dreger's clear and well-paced prose makes for compelling . . . reading." --The Chicago Tribune

Gender in Modernism, conceived as a sequel to the now-classic volume The Gender of Modernism, selects the best from the fifteen years of feminist literary and modernist scholarship that has appeared since the original's publication. Its fresh and diverse texts examine new themes and reflect today's broader, more-inclusive understanding of modernism. The collection's modernist works have been grouped into twenty-one thematic sections, with theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in new directions. The selections enhance our understanding of the complex intersections of gender with a large array of social identifications, including global location, ideas of race, passing, the queering of sexualities, medicine, and experiences of trauma and war. Gender in Modernism sees continental modernism in a different light, and moves on to colonial and postcolonial sites. It also considers editors, journalists and the creators of less-studied genres of modernism, including writers on the left, suffragists, authors of manifestos, mediums, authors dismissed as sentimental, artists, dancers, dramatists, and filmmakers. Gender in Modernism will quickly move from resource to springboard, furthering modernist study well into the twenty-first century.

This is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than 700,000 copies sold around the world, In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience."

The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.

Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women's lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.

Ebrey questions whether women's situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.

This book is about body outlaws, operating in the interzone between the cold seduction of the hysterical male and the beginning of that new horizon called "the last sex."

By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time.

Thirty years ago, in a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute, Tillie Olsen first addressed the problem of silences in literature - paving the way for future explorations of the subject, including her landmark work, Silences. The subject of silences and silencing - as fact, as trope, as lens through which to understand literary history - has been central to feminist criticism ever since. In Listening to Silences, a group of distinguished feminist literary critics reevaluates Olsen's heritage to reassert, extend, redefine, and question her insights, and to probe the dynamics of silence and silencing as they operate today in literature, criticism, and the academy. The book traces for the first time the genealogy of an important American critical tradition, one that still influences contemporary debates about feminism, multiculturalism, and the literary canon. Forming a highly diverse group, the contributors to Listening to Silences include Kate Adams, Norma Alarcon, Joanne Braxton, King-Kok Cheung, Constance Coiner, Robin Dizard, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Diana Hume George, Elaine Hedges, Carla Kaplan, Patricia Laurence, Rebecca Mark, Diane Middlebrook, Carla L. Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, Judith L. Sensibar, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, and Sharon Zuber.

"A powerful -- and personal -- account of the movement and its players."--The Washington Post

"This perceptive resource on radical black liberation movements in the 21st century can inform anyone wanting to better understand . . . how to make social change."--Publishers Weekly

The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change.

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.

Turning on its head that familiar woman question, this innovative work poses masculinity as a problem that requires explanation. Ferguson rebukes the sense of coherence contained in patriarchal theory in the name of a voice that both calls upon and challenges the category woman. Stepping back from the opposition of male and female, she artfully loosens the hold of gender on life and meaning, creating and at the same time deconstructing a women's point of view. Posing the man question provides a way not only to view male power and female subordination but also to valorize and problematize women's experiences, thus destabilizing conventional notions of man and woman.

Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from--or antidote to--ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are.

Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era.

This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.

Fiction. NAKED LADIES, the second novel by Alma Luz Villanueva, revolves around the lives of four remarkable and intriguing women. In this work, Villanueva explores interracial and interethnic relationships between Chicanas, Anglos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans at the deepest cultural and sexual levels. Villanueva considers racial prejudices and how they play out in male-female relationships, the physical abuse of women and the retribution that women exact from men, AIDS, and aspects of both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. The title of the novel, taken from wild flowers called "naked ladies," evokes the life and death battles of these women: they are vulnerable to the worst elements of this world, yet, as part of the natural cycle, they remain resilient.