Elevate Difference

Reviews of Indiana University Press

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire explores the intersections of queer studies and environmental studies and aims to trouble dominant discourses of nature and sexuality. The authors in this collection argue that we should adopt a queer ecological perspective, a “transgressive and historically relevant critique of dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.” Drawing on science studies, environmental history, queer geography, ecocriticism, critical race theory, cultural studies, landscape ecology, and LGBTQ theory, this interdisciplinary anthology presents the various possibilities for “queering ecology and greening queer politics.”

The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures

This is a book for the post post-modernist thinker. Written by professor of political science, Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures seeks to alleviate the theorist's conundrum with the material consequences in the events of natural disaster and destruction. Many theorists today are curiously silent on tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and earthquakes and Hekman sees this as a problem of post-modern thinking.

Women in Power in Post-Communist Parliaments

Reading the title of this book, Women in Power in Post-Communist Parliaments, one pictures Chancellor Angela Merckel standing alongside Presidents Obama and Medvedev. Then, East German women swimmers, intimidating and Frankenstein-esque, and hearty Russian farmers, resilient with scythes in hand march across the landscape of one's mind, all of them serious and dour in shades of grey and brown.

Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction

There is no use in burying the head of an ostrich in censorship and imagining the enemy knows nothing of what we are doing. — S.C. Lind Censorship in South Asia dissects the history and socio-political dynamics of censorship in India, which have been transcribed into the public culture of the South Asian society over the years.

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire and Contemporary African-American Culture

Stefanie Dunning takes the scalpel of reason to the twin sores of misogyny and homophobia that sometimes stain traditional notions of a black nationalist consciousness.

Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe: Gender, Microbusiness, and Globalization

In the early 1990s, Mary Osirim took a team of interviewers to several urban areas in Zimbabwe to learn about the lives and financial status of women working in the “microenterprise sector.” She found that while women were largely excluded from education and much of the Zimbabwean economy, some had found a niche as crocheters, seamstresses, hairdressers, and “market traders” in fruits and vegetables and other goods. There is plenty of sociological theory—the author is, after all, an eminent sociologist—much of it concerning the damage wrought by globalization generally and more specifically

Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention

In periods of rapid social change, the poets of one ideological system or another rush to find the cogent metaphor or, more recently, the winning soundbite, that will interpret the change to suit their own ends, to control meaning. To find and sell the right descriptive phrase is to raise the flag of possession over a historical event. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—or, even more stridently, the U.S.

Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations Of Aje In Africana Literature

Teresa N. Washington, an associate professor of Africana Literature at Kent State University, has attempted a vindication of Africana writers who have tried to explicate the importance of aje in women of African heritage. The Yoruba word aje denotes the potency of personal spiritual power derived from Creation that can be possessed by both women and men. The controllers of that power, however, are revered women – matriarchs of society and the cosmos, who are given the respectful title of Mothers.
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