"Christianity or cuisine, cinema or sex manuals, Eros or Thanatos, Artaud or Marilyn Monroe? Marry or suture or eat all of them and you are close to Ravenous. A brutal tour de force."–Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Half of the World in Light"Durbin's debut volume sizzles…Throughout this deeply feminist, groundbreaking collection, she employs both the elemental forces of her intellect and a vigorous intensity of startling imagery to implode or explode conventional notions of sexuality and womanhood."–Maurya Simon, author of Cartographies"Durbin writes first-rate traditional lyric poems, while at other times she writes poems that push the limits of the avant-garde and, most amazingly, at other times, she makes a loving marriage of the two! This is an exceptional debut by a young poet burning with talent."–Thomas Lux, author of God ParticlesBlack Goat is an independent poetry imprint of Akashic Books created and curated by award-winning Nigerian author Chris Abani (author of Becoming Abigail and Song for Night). Black Goat is committed to publishing well-crafted poetry with a focus on experimental or thematically challenging work. The series aims to create a proportional representation of female poets and non-American poets, particularly poets from Africa.Little Red Riding Hood, Jezebel, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Christ–these are only a few of the archetypal and pop cultural characters that populate Kate Durbin's strange and mesmerizing coming-of-age poetry collection, The Ravenous Audience.
Set amidst the outsider worlds of present-day downtown New York, 1990s Los Angeles, and 1940s Mexico City, Like Son is the not-so-simple story of a love-blindness shared between a father and a son. Born a bouncing baby girl named Francisca Cruz, Frank Cruz is now a post-punk thirty-year-old who has inherited his dead father’s wanderlust, unrequited love, and hyperbolic tendencies. Felicia Luna Lemus is the author of the novel Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and her writing has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic Books). She currently teaches writing at The New School and lives in the East Village of Manhattan.
Cindy Crabb provides a DIY tour of the promise and perils of sexual relationships in Learning Good Consent. Building ethical relationships is one of the most important things we can do, but sex, consent, abuse, and support can get complicated. This collection is an indispensable guide to both preventing sexual violence and helping its survivors to heal. Includes a foreword by Kiyomi Fujikawa and Jenna Peters-Golden.“Whether or not you think you need it, whether or not you’re a survivor, or dating a survivor, or even having sex, you would probably benefit from reading this book. And the people you choose to be intimate with will probably thank you for making their safety a priority.” —Nomy Lamm, Feminist Review “Learning Good Consent … offers powerful, complicated information (instead of shallow questions and uncomplicated answers). This book speaks to those who are unlearning silence as a safety/communication strategy.” —Jen Cross, make/shift“Essential reading.” —Colin Atrophy Hagendorf, author of Slice Harvester “What this book does is to stress consent: not ‘no means no,’ or even ‘yes means yes,’ but ‘Do you want me to stay here with you?’ ‘Are you here?’ ‘I thought I wanted this, but I’m not sure now.’ ‘Do you think we should take this farther?’ I’m moved that this book is here. It matters.” —Alison Piepmeier, author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism Cindy Crabb is an author of the influential, feminist, autobiographical ‘zine Doris, which has been anthologized into two books: The Encyclopedia of Doris: Stories, Essays and Interviews and Doris: An Anthology 1991–2001. Her essays and analyses of the impact of her writing have appeared in numerous books and magazines, including: The Riot Grrrl Collection; Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth; Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism; and We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists.
“A much-needed collection that thinks through power, desire, and human liberation. These pieces are sure to raise the level of debate about sexuality, gender, and the ways that they tie in with struggles against our ruling institutions.”?Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman “Against the austerity of straight politics, Queering Anarchism sketches the connections between gender mutiny, queer sexualities, and anti-authoritarian desires. Through embodied histories and incendiary critique, the contributors gathered here show how we must not stop at smashing the state; rather normativity itself is the enemy of all radical possibility.”—Eric A. Stanley, co-editor of Captive Genders What does it mean to «queer» the world around us? How does the radical refusal of the mainstream codification of GLBT identity as a new gender norm come into focus in the context of anarchist theory and practice? How do our notions of orientation inform our politics?and vice versa? Queering Anarchism brings together a diverse set of writings ranging from the deeply theoretical to the playfully personal that explore the possibilities of the concept of «queering,» turning the dominant, and largely heteronormative, structures of belief and identity entirely inside out. Ranging in topic from the economy to disability, politics, social structures, sexual practice, interpersonal relationships, and beyond, the authors here suggest that queering might be more than a set of personal preferences?pointing toward the possibility of an entirely new way of viewing the world. Contributors include Jamie Heckert, Sandra Jeppesen, Ben Shepard, Ryan Conrad, Jerimarie Liesegang, Jason Lydon, Susan Song, Stephanie Grohmann, Liat Ben-Moshe, Anthony J. Nocella, A.J. Withers, and more. Deric Shannon, C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, and Abbey Volcano are anarchists and activists who work in a wide variety of radical, feminist, and queer communities across the United States.
While other titles have explored gender in the context of the American prison population, Captive Genders is the first book to explicitly examine self-identified trans-folk and gender-queer individuals inside US prisons.Composed largely of first-hand accounts of the policing of trans and gender-queer folks, this book is suitable for readers in the GLBTQ community, as well as for readers who are looking for an introduction to the history of sexual-identity-based politics and discrimination.The collection is edited by two noted young GLBTQ activists.Since the abolition of the «Category B» classification in the late 1990s, it has been impossible to quantify the exact number of trans-folks currently incarcerated. However, a recent study suggests that widespread job-site discrimination has made it difficult for trans-identified individuals to gain legal employment, leading in turn to a wild upsurge in the trans population in America's prisons.
Will be of interest to GLBTQ activists and theorists, and anyone interested in gender politics.By the author of anthologies That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, which are staples on the shelves of anyone interested in queer theory.Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a well-respected and well-known queer cultural icon with a large and loyal following. 25 essays by recognized and exciting up-and-coming writers.
In Women of the Right , Kathleen M. Blee and Sandra McGee Deutsch bring together a groundbreaking collection of essays examining women in right-wing politics across the world, from the early twentieth-century white Afrikaner movement in South Africa to the supporters of Sarah Palin today. The volume introduces a truly global perspective on how women matter in the national and transnational links and exchanges of rightist politics. Suitable for classroom use, it sets a new agenda for scholarship on women on the right. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Nancy Aguirre, Karla J. Cunningham, Kirsten Delegard, Kathleen M. Fallon, Kate Hallgren, Randolph Hollingsworth, Jill Irvine, Vandana Joshi, Carol S. Lilly, Annette Linden, Julie Moreau, Margaret Power, Mariela Rubinzal, Daniella Sarnoff, Ronnee Schreiber, Meera Sehgal, Louise Vincent, and Veronica A. Wilson.
Most democratic theorists have taken Western political traditions as their primary point of reference, although the growing field of comparative political theory has shifted this focus. In Decolonizing Democracy , comparative theorist Christine Keating interprets the formation of Indian democracy as a progressive example of a “postcolonial social contract.” In doing so, she highlights the significance of reconfigurations of democracy in postcolonial polities like India and sheds new light on the social contract, a central concept within democratic theory from Locke to Rawls and beyond. Keating’s analysis builds on the literature developed by feminists like Carole Pateman and critical race theorists like Charles Mills that examines the social contract’s egalitarian potential. By analyzing the ways in which the framers of the Indian constitution sought to address injustices of gender, race, religion, and caste, as well as present-day struggles over women’s legal and political status, Keating demonstrates that democracy’s social contract continues to be challenged and reworked in innovative and potentially more just ways.
Prejudice is often not a conscious attitude: because of ingrained habits in relating to the world, one may act in prejudiced ways toward others without explicitly understanding the meaning of one’s actions. Similarly, one may know how to do certain things, like ride a bicycle, without being able to articulate in words what that knowledge is. These are examples of what Alexis Shotwell discusses in Knowing Otherwise as phenomena of “implicit understanding.” Presenting a systematic analysis of this concept, she highlights how this kind of understanding may be used to ground positive political and social change, such as combating racism in its less overt and more deep-rooted forms.
Shotwell begins by distinguishing four basic types of implicit understanding: nonpropositional, skill-based, or practical knowledge; embodied knowledge; potentially propositional knowledge; and affective knowledge. She then develops the notion of a racialized and gendered “common sense,” drawing on Gramsci and critical race theorists, and clarifies the idea of embodied knowledge by showing how it operates in the realm of aesthetics. She also examines the role that both negative affects, like shame, and positive affects, like sympathy, can play in moving us away from racism and toward political solidarity and social justice. Finally, Shotwell looks at the politicized experience of one’s body in feminist and transgender theories of liberation in order to elucidate the role of situated sensuous knowledge in bringing about social change and political transformation.
“Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show is one of the more moving and imagina­tive works I have ever seen on the American stage…what makes it so transcendent is its delicious ability to alternate the pain of being different with a sense of humor about lives not lived among the status quo.” —Hilton Als, New Yorker “The twisty, turbulent, argumentative work of Young Jean Lee…will make you flinch, but it’s hard to look away…Lee has always been interested in exposing how we perform our identities. But in Straight White Men , she drills into something more core. Shuck off, subvert, cleave to your gender or race all you like, but a universal horror of weakness remains—a collective orientation toward status, power, control.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Who said the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak? Both are pretty damn fierce in director Young Jean Lee’s all-nude dance suite cheekily (but purposefully) called Untitled Feminist Show . In a scant (and scantily clad) hour, Lee and her gutsy danc­ers try on a dizzying variety of modes and masks to shake up gender norms.” —David Cote, Time Out New York “ Straight White Men might be the most subversive thing that Young Jean Lee, one of American theater’s most keenly seditious practitioners, has ever done.” —Alexis Soloski, Guardian “Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times Young Jean Lee , with Straight White Men , became the first Asian-American woman to have her play produced on Broadway. She has directed her work in more than thirty cities around the world, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a PEN Literary Award.