University Of Minnesota Press

Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

mandy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

In Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim approaches the Cold War not as a period in United States history, but as an epistemology, a continued production of knowledge. How does the Cold War generate specific forms of knowledge about the world that reproduce the binary categories of nations as “good” and “evil”? The Cold War is now what Kim characterizes as a “protracted afterlife,” as its gendered and racialized logics and rhetorics are once again deployed in the War on Terror.

Ends of Empire is, therefore, a timely intervention. Kim traces how the rivalry between the US and the USSR was triangulated throughout Asia, and how this triangulation has been sustained through complex cultural formations that naturalize the values of imperialism.

Kim’s project draws heavily from Cultural Studies, as she looks into cultural production as sites of resistance. Since dominant historical accounts obscure the gendered and racialized logics of the Cold War as an epistemology, Kim turns instead towards Asian American cultural products. She skillfully turns her analytic eye on how such literary and cinematic texts make visible the mandated “forgettings,” and violent displacements that Cold War logic continues to unleash in Asia.

In Chapter Three, for example, Kim examines Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats. Jane, one of the novel’s main characters, is the adult daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father who served as an Army botanist during World War II. In her capacity as producer for a television show, Jane promotes the cooking and consumption of US meat to Japanese housewives. Jane is thus part of an enterprise to recruit Japanese housewives as enthusiastic consumers of US products, a contemporary form of imperialist gendered racial rehabilitation for a nation that was once seen as an enemy.

Jane’s observations about the lingering cancers and contaminations in Japan and in American towns that produced plutonium for the bombs, as well as her meditations on her father’s death from cancer, highlight the transnational links between Japanese and US victims of the war, who are all but ignored in dominant historical accounts. In Chapter Five, Kim’s reading of the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang shows how the continued inequalities in political and racial economies made it impossible for a US transracial adoptee to know the lives of her Vietnamese mother and family.

Kim provides a good example of how cultural critique could be employed to make visible various narratives that are suppressed in dominant accounts of history. Many of the narratives of loss, violence, and haunting that she teases out would be impossible to articulate outside literary or cinematic forms. Ends of Empire thus serves to illustrate how cultural production not only serves to give voice to suppressed histories. By refusing to conform to the logics of the Cold War, these works also serve important sites of resistance.

Kim ends her book with the hope that her efforts to trace links between former and current manifestations of US empire would contribute to “a broader interrogation of the intersecting genealogies that have produced our contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization, imperial mandate, and enduring gendered racial regimes of domination.” It is a welcome invitation, as social critique is particularly relevant when it is oriented towards imagining ways of life and organizing that are not built around the need to reproduce empire.

Written by: Tanglad, September 14th 2010

Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina

mandy — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Regina A. Root

University Of Minnesota Press

While I was intrigued by Regina Root’s assertion that fashion played a large role in the development of national identity in postcolonial Argentina, I was more than intimidated to jump into a book with such an impressive thesis without much background knowledge of Argentinean history. Thankfully, Root packs an incredible amount of information into a slim volume.

In Couture and Consensus Root cleverly divides her work into five distinct chapters, the first of which addresses the tension that existed in Argentina following the revolution in 1810. She deftly explains the divide between the Federalists (those who pledged loyalty to Juan Manuel de Rosas, the tyrannical leader from 1829-1852) and the Unitarians (the rebels) in two ways: through a straightforward explanation of the politics of each side, and by using the lens of material history. Here is where Root’s thesis begins to take hold. By discussing the critical role that color played in this political binary—Federalists wore red and Unitarians favored green—she illuminates the power that dress held in that society to both conform and subvert a political agenda.

Root swiftly moves through her historical discussion and begins to set her sights on discussing the role that women played during this tumultuous time. She oscillates between highlighting the few, largely undocumented women who dressed as men to fight during the British invasions and women who commanded a space of their own by wearing outlandish garb such as massive skirts and intimidating hairpieces. The peineton was a hair comb that Root states was “one yard in height and width” during its most popular time. As a result of its grandeur, Root explains that woman gained more physical presence than ever and also more ridicule for being frivolous (as the combs were quite expensive). The amount of detail that Root uses in her discussion of the peineton is remarkable—she has truly searched out every archive in an attempt to form a material history of Argentina.

Her final chapter is perhaps her most interesting, because she speaks to the new found voices that women gained in the political sphere through engaging in fashionable discourse. While revolutionary men gained political footing under the guise of writing articles about fashion, it was the women who felt empowered by their ability to finally speak their minds. Root calls on everything from storylines of novels to the history of the magazines to prove this point, and the reader is almost exhausted at the conclusion of this book as a result of the incredible amount of information they’ve received. While this is an academic text, the amount of interdisciplinary thought that Root embodies is laudable—this isn’t just a book about fashion, politics, or feminism. Couture and Consensus is a book that manages to weave all of those distinct philosophies into one cohesive narrative about a beautiful country that is still forming its national identity to this day.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, September 5th 2010

Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Eleanor Ty

University Of Minnesota Press

In a similar vein as Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination and Rocío Davis' Begin Here, the monograph Unfastened has been a treat to read for the simple fact that author Eleanor Ty forefronts a wide range of readings that demonstrate the continued evidence of the heterogeneity that embodies the field of Asian North American literature. Ty’s book is called unfastened, precisely because it is a descriptive that designates the continuing complexity that has been emerging with the textual terrains around concepts of mobility, displacement, and diaspora that make fastening Asian North American literature to any one place practically impossible.

In the primary texts that Ty so elegantly analyzes, multiple nations, multiple local spaces, and multiple subjectivities are always imagined, such that her readings flow contextually, specific to particular aesthetic forms and contexts, but always linked by the notion of “globality.” Ty is careful about her terminology. She purposefully does not use the term Asian American precisely because she carves out a specific place for Asian Canadian cultural production in her work, which has had a long history of being too reductively classified within Asian American more broadly.

She also distinguishes globality from the globalization, rendering globality the more salient feature of her critical reading practice precisely because it is more connected to issues of economic differentials and power inequities that arise as bodies, cultures, ideas, technologies, etc. migrate to new locations and establish new spatial configurations. As Ty clarifies, “Issues of globality include concern for earth and our environment, health and the spread of disease across national borders, the globalization of markets, and the production of goods.”

The wide range of primary text readings are truly astonishing and we see what a fan of Asian North American narrative Ty is as she meticulously crafts her analyses to continually point to the ways that Asian North American writers are thinking about globality and routing that issue directly within their textual terrains. Taken together, Ty concentrates on Brian Roley’s American Son, Han Ong’s Fixer Chao, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy, and Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, among others. Many of these authors are ones that have received very little critical attention, even though their works present such rich terrains upon which to consider the complexities of globalization.

While all the chapters provide sprightly interpretative readings in which texts cannot be fastened within one context or sociocultural moment, some standouts include chapter two’s “Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building” and chapter five’s “Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.” Given the astonishing range of writings being produced, Ty’s conclusion offers a corrective to the concept of Asian American literature, offering that the rubric of “global novelist and global writing are more accurate for terms and for works,” especially with respect to the increasingly non-domestic contexts of many narratives.

Ty leaves us then with the concept of the “Asian global,” conceptualized in part because such narratives “arise out of and are contingent upon globalization—the movement of people, capital, and production across the north and south—and because they are no longer located just in North America or Britain.” In ending this brief review, it would seem the possibility that Ty is pushing for a potentially new field rubric in which Asian global texts written in English appear front and center. In this way, the move to diasporic and transnational critiques which typically and traditionally have not shifted beyond a two-country paradigm can be supplanted with this Asian global literary studies model that pushes scholars to contextualize texts from multi-focal spatial axes.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, May 17th 2010

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:14:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

It’s easy to disregard sex workers, to relegate them to the margins of society and pretend that they don’t exist in the perfect little world that is uncomfortable with the idea that there are members of our population who have sex for money. Often considered an untouchable part of society (no matter what culture we’re talking about), sex workers are often overlooked in anthropological or sociological studies with many researchers content to look at the more accepted members of society rather than delve into the seedy underbelly of urban life. Luckily, the sex workers of Dalian, a bustling metropolis in Northern China, had their voices heard by Tiantian Zheng who writes a beautiful study of the realities facing these women.

Red Lights shows that not only are these women a vital part of society, their work is inextricably entwined with China’s rapidly changing economy. The hostesses that Zheng follows are not the stereotypical submissive Asian sex goddesses that are so often a fixture of the porn industry. Nor are they unwilling sexual slaves, sold into a world they don’t understand. Many of the women enter the trade willingly, seeing hostessing as the only way to make enough money to support their families back in the rural villages that they call home. But, this is not a female empowerment story either.

Zheng does an excellent job of showing the reader all sides of the story. The struggle to stay safe in an incredibly unsafe profession. The violence and fear that are often a daily part of life for the hostesses. The conflict between their new lives in the city and their rural pasts and the difficulty of “going home again” when the city has hardened the hostesses view of life and the way the world works. The thrill of making their money versus the shame of a profession that isn’t looked kindly upon by family—even though for some of these families, it’s often the only source of income.

Like so many decisions in life, the decision of these women to become hostesses and to willingly serve men isn’t an easy one and it isn’t easily understood. This book adequately portrays these women as real people. We learn how they feel about their jobs, how they relate to their families and how they survive in the dangerous world of sex work. Unsurprisingly, the real world is quite a bit more complex than the stereotypes let on.

Given the serious nature of the subject, one would expect Red Lights to be a tough read. However, Zheng handles her subjects with a delicate touch, showing readers the hostesses’ pain, as well as their happiness. While the lengthy breakdowns of the Chinese economy and the effect of decades of socialist beliefs on the Chinese citizen may be a little too long and too in-depth for a casual reader, overall I found the book engrossing. The hostesses’ stories scattered throughout added a human element to what could have easily been an overly academic tome. Those interested in the social ramifications of sex work or the effect the post-Socialist economy has on Chinese women should pick up this book.

Written by: Jennifer Lee Johnson, August 31st 2009

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:56:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body. However, by living and working closely with hostesses in the bar, I gained their recognition and friendship.

Ethnographers always get their man (or woman... or both) even if they have to use their bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis. Ethnographers usually become participant-observers during fieldwork to facilitate rapport and to capture what people actually do as opposed merely to what they say they do, but as these snippets suggest, such can lead to squeamish feelings and harrowing experiences. Zheng participated in activities that male ethnographers could only have observed. Her analysis of sexual networking is consequently first-rate because she moves easily and persuasively from person to state, capital to labor, ideology to practice.

Red Lights is a beautifully written account of the emergence of new femininities and masculinities in post-socialist People’s Republic of China. Zheng analyzes the growth, structure, registration and functions of the karaoke bars now dotting the landscape and in which are played out the social and economic contradictions of class, heterosexuality, ethnicity and gender. In often grim detail, she shows how Communist Party bureaucrats, gangsters, and small business owners (literally) patronize young, unmarried females. In so doing, the former make money, express obeisance to their own social superiors, and get back at Mao Zedong for allegedly having sapped their masculinity during the Cultural Revolution. Women escape poverty (sort of), find boyfriends (ditto), manipulate men as best they can, and experience female solidarity. Her male informants freely express their disturbing misogyny while also confessing their sexual anxieties and class resentment. Confucianism, capitalism and communism each but differently punish women for alleged sexual promiscuity while rewarding men for theirs.

Many tens of thousands of Chinese women have migrated from economically and socially stagnating rural areas to the strip clubs and karaoke bars, back rooms, and guest houses of urban centers such as Dalian, where they “choose” forms of employment that entail grotesque subservience, daily humiliation, squalid working conditions, and social leprosy. Dalian was long ago hailed as an oasis of economic development during the period of Occupation by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Its morally unsavory status today as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah—but whose economic function is central to post-socialist China—reveals the social and economic contradictions of Confucianism, patriarchy, communism, Western media forms and capitalism. “In Dalian,” Zheng writes, “taxes paid by the entertainment industry are the largest source of local revenue.”

Red Lights opens with Zheng’s painful personal stories of growing up a filial daughter in a sex-negative and patriarchal Chinese household. It continues with her painful humiliation in a U.S. college classroom regarding her views of gender relations. It proceeds to detail the humiliation of Chinese women. Her extremely sorrowful Afterword, entitled “From Entertainer to Prostitute,” shows the inexorable logic of patriarchy and capitalism and gives the lie to pro-sex work activist positions that can neglect or ignore specifically gendered humiliation in sex work. Her Acknowledgments section deeply moved me in recounting the joys and pains of scholarly work. It exemplifies the beauty and honor of academic collaborations that break through barriers of geography, language, culture, theory and gender but that are nevertheless mindful of them.

Red Lights would make a fine addition to graduate-level courses in social theory and fieldwork, but could be used in upper-division courses in gender studies and ethnography, too. It is a major contribution to ethnographic explorations of gender, sexuality, and prostitution, and to Asian Studies, too, which has enabled too few participant observation-style studies of sexual networking.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., August 7th 2009

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0000

By Julie Abraham

University Of Minnesota Press

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history. Following a concise preface synthesizing the extraordinarily broad and encompassing history of the relation shared by homosexual communities and cities, she fittingly opens with a chapter tracing the lesbian body throughout urban and literary history, exploring Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal and Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The author acknowledges her challenge to recent assumptions regarding “the union of homosexuals and cities, namely, that the homosexuality of the city is always male,” and emphasizes an often overlooked facet of urban studies. Her treatment of the legibility of the lesbian and her privileging of this body is an important and refreshing contribution to LGBTQ studies.

Abraham is a Professor of literature and of LGBT Studies and Metropolitan Lovers evidences a marked emphasis on the relevance of literary perspectives to sociological interpretations of the city. She notes that it is in fact literature that has taught us how to “read” urban homosexuality and alludes to literary/philosophical figures such as Susan Sontag to enhance her portrayal of the theatricality of urban social life. A generous number of photographs and illustrations offer a satisfying visual element that becomes crucial to understanding the complexities of gaze and spectacle in the formulation of the modern city. Events such as Stonewall are not left unexamined in Abraham’s study as she attempts to portray as comprehensive history of the Western urban landscape through the lens of LGBTQ theory.

The tone of Metropolitan Lovers is a bit less erudite than it would appear to be based on Abraham’s scholarly career and university publisher. Her writing is lucid, accessible, perhaps more to the casual reader interested in a general introduction to an LGBTQ study of Western cities than for an academic researcher. This is not to say, however, that Abraham does not offer an insightful survey highlighting the relevance of homosexuality to the construction of the modern city. The work also provides an implicit introduction to the exercise of “queering” texts previously understood in heterocentric terms and will most certainly contribute to and stimulate future scholarship and interrogations of what it means to be urban and queer.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, June 30th 2009

Feminist Art and the Maternal

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:36:00 +0000

By Andrea Liss

University Of Minnesota Press

As a teen, I imagined I would someday grow up to be an artist. As an eager feminist and first year university student, I took an art history course taught by an incredibly self-important professor. In all of his slide shows, I only remember two images being attributed to women artists. This experience did not encourage me to embark upon an artistic career.

In a world where feminism is often assumed to be irrelevant and the Guerilla Girls have purportedly bequeathed their archives to the Getty Research Institute, a book which showcases any form of feminist work is a welcome standout. Andrea Liss’s Feminist Art and the Maternal places feminist artwork front and center using the creations of contemporary visual and performance artists. In doing so she displays the many ways in which women artists have challenged individual and institutional attempts to define the scope of femininity and families, as well as the limits of women’s gendered work and status in society.

Feminist Art and the Maternal is a fairly accessible text, even for the non-artist or art history student like me. Using the work of women artists spanning the last thirty years, Liss systematically demonstrates how these women have used their experiences of maternal parenting and motherhood as the subject of their work to created pieces that challenge past and current definitions of appropriate gender roles. This happens in many ways, such as breaking down assumptions about family structures or conflating accepted stereotypical images of racialized women with visual statements on sexual orientation, nurturing, and motherhood.

Sentimental ideas of motherhood are challenged by explorations of the maternal focusing on sensuality or experiences of trauma and loss. Key methods of articulating these concepts and experiences are laid out by the author in each chapter and accompanied by the work of one artist or groups of artists which exemplify each particular method. Highly conceptual artwork—still images, performance pieces, film—and theoretical terminology are explained in great detail, making the social and historical context in which the work was created clear for the reader.

Like the artists whose work is contained in the book, Liss attempts to make a connection between the personal and political by incorporating her own experiences of motherhood into the book. These sections of writing are less successful in that they do not blend seamlessly with the remainder of the detailed text, but stand out in competition to the parallel experiences articulated by the artists in their work, and interrupt the overall flow of the book. While the many black and white images help to illustrate the work of the artists, a larger format complete with color images would have more effectively conveyed details of some of the pieces included in the body of the work.

Regardless, I wish that Feminist Art and the Maternal had been available at the beginning of my short-lived venture into the world of art to give me a broader perspective on art, women, women artists, and motherhood. This book and its subject matter broadens the scope of contemporary art through giving voice to both neglected subject matter in art and its creators.

Written by: Ruth Cameron, June 6th 2009

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Michael Snediker

University Of Minnesota Press

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction.

This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in. They have suffered self-doubt, identity crisis, and depression the moment their secrets have been revealed.

Snediker’s scholarly work Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions aims to counterpoint the negativity that revolves around queer theory, which is often melancholy, self-shattering, shame and death driven, with the help of poetic lyrics coming from Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop. The author’s queer optimism “doesn’t aspire toward optimism,” rather “to find happiness interesting.”

He chose the aforementioned poets as there is more to their work than their melancholic poetics; that deep inside there hides a smile that has a long-lasting effect on anyone who might want to read beyond their quatrains. It seems to be an ambitious task. By using different theories (from Michel Foucault’s to Judith Butler’s) and other bodies of work from literary critics, Snediker successfully managed to give his readers fresh views on the poets’ selected literary works to search for the ultimate quest for enjoyment and personhood.

For example, when most of the literary critics were convinced that Crane’s last work, "The Broken Tower," suggested his impending death, which they all agreed showed “deeper insight and wisdom” than his earlier poems, Snediker refuted that there was another oeuvre that could be written at the same time of his intended last poem, "The Circumstance," that salvaged the “broken stones” that “were dismantled” in "The Broken Tower." Meaning, behind the sadness of Crane’s there lingered his own optimism. Perhaps. Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico from the steamship SS Orizaba, regarded himself as a failure, partly literary and partly due to his homosexuality. His critics saw his works as difficult to understand. Yet, in the 1930s America, Crane was one of its victims: misunderstood and gay.

Snediker, an assistant professor of English at Queens’ University in Ontario, Canada, didn’t arrange his chapters chronologically, instead thematically, with each chapter relating to each other. Hence Dickinson went after Crane’s.

As a childhood favorite, I was aware of Dickinson’s masochistic tendencies. Her dedication to producing poems engorged with pain, dying and death always made me smile. This drove Snediker to probe through her works.

He also posed some questions concerning Spicer’s serial poem Billy the Kid could be his own way of struggling with his own identity. Could it be the poet’s “aggression against himself?” or some “internalized homophobia?” Was the poem about the poet’s fascination with multiplicity, the character’s ability to elude death? The famed Billy the Kid who always comes back through the numerous films where he kills and dies again and kills and dies again greatly inspired Spicer. He, by the way, was a reader of Dickinson.

How about a connection, not a spiritual one but in terms of idealization, between Crane and Bishop? Was this a sort of queer love on the part of Bishop, who never mentioned her homosexuality throughout her works unlike her contemporaries’ confessional poetry? Did she think of Crane when she composed some of her works?

These are only tips of the iceberg, if you may call them. I have learned so many things after reading Snediker’s book; it is like a new world opening up with so many perspectives and possibilities. I remember a discussion with a friend years ago about poetry: the beauty of reading poems is that it is open for interpretation. Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion. There are no boundaries.

What’s also good about Snediker’s Queer Optimism is that it is not only the homosexual community that can profit from it, but all of us, who possess different colors and sexual orientations, because pain, love, and happiness are universal.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, May 10th 2009

Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:06:00 +0000

By Julie Abraham

University Of Minnesota Press

Are Girls Necessary? was an astoundingly great idea, exploring the lesbian in nineteenth and twentieth century lesbian-authored literature, even that which is not as explicit as the lesbian novels that make up the heart of the lesbian literary canon.

The subjects of Abraham’s examinations are a veritable pantheon of lesbian, bisexual and feminist literary icons: Willa Cather, Mary Renault, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas, et al. Granted certain literary and real-life freedoms due to their race and class, these women were able to forge the vocabulary and themes that would permeate lesbian and feminist literature well past their own lifetimes. Although the lesbian often had to be coded within heterosexual acceptability, it takes only a creative and open mind to find the subversive glimpses these authors coded into their work or left lying in the open for anyone who cared enough to look. An exploration of the means in which these women forged a path for themselves (and those who followed them) within the restraints of their time had great potential.

Unfortunately, the execution leaves much to be desired. Abraham’s prose is representative of all that is wrong with academic writing. Vague and obscurantist to the extreme, the text is heavy with the horrendous abuses of language that turn pleasant nouns into ugly verbs and replace simple, clear language with unnecessarily polysyllabic meanderings through overly complex grammar. What, must I ask, did the thesaurus ever do to her to be so mistreated and misused?

For the serious student of literary criticism willing to subject herself to linguistic torture, Are Girls Necessary? is well worth exploring. However, if you love language just a bit too much to see it battered around so callously, do not read this book.

Written by: Melinda Barton, March 11th 2009

How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism

admin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:17:00 +0000

By Tina Fetner

University Of Minnesota Press

While leftists and gay rights activists occasionally discuss the notion that left wing battles, and particularly GLBTQ struggles, are too influenced by the religious right, the complaint is always frustrated and dismissive, never a serious consideration. Tina Fetner approaches the notion differently, addressing how the influence of religious right was, in fact, invaluable in shaping, and in rendering more powerful, the lesbian and gay movement. (Both “religious right” and “lesbian and gay movement” are often used casually and defined vaguely, a notion that would normally bother me as a reader, but in the introduction Fetner skillfully clarifies the definitions she is using.)

How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism is an intriguing piece of research, full of facts to which I would otherwise have had no access. Though a self-proclaimed liberal, Fetner has done impressive work on all sides of the problem. She tracks the rise of the religious right even before it took on a formal anti-gay stance, discusses the state of the lesbian and gay movements before the identification of one clear antagonist, and takes us through Stonewall and the rise of Anita Bryant up to the contemporary gay marriage debates. Each chapter chronicles about a decade of the activist conflict, concluding with the notion that “[t]he religious right brought both new challenges and new opportunities to the lesbian and gay movement.”

Fascinating though the concept is, Fetner’s book—a clear doctoral dissertation—is bloodless, the prose dry and uncompelling, the powerful stories rendered inaccessible. The book demonstrates the need for good prose style; the ideas in How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism are notions that all self-styled activists, left and right, should consider, but Fetner’s dry writing makes it tremendously difficult to get through the book.

Nevertheless, the relationship Fetner is examining makes her book worth the effort. Though her book itself may not be a substantive addition to the non-fiction canon, her ideas make a substantial and interesting contribution to queer thought and to social movement theory, whether its consumers be academics or lay readers.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, October 13th 2008

Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy

admin — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:51:00 +0000

By Candace M. Jenkins

University Of Minnesota Press

Why is contemporary African American literature — particularly that produced by black women — continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety? Her first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candace M. Jenkins looks at how African American writers express the political consequences of intimacy for the susceptible black subject. Jenkins argues that this fascination grew from recurrent beliefs about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a basic aspect of the racial self: an often unexpressed link between the intimate and the political in black culture.

Jenkins’s analysis of black women’s narratives — including Ann Petry’s The Street, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man — offers a theory of black subjectivity. Here Jenkins describes how the middle-class tries to save the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic oddity by embracing traditionally “normal” values and behavior. Unfortunately behind those efforts there is the implied “doubled vulnerability” of the black intimate subject: racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy.

This book was not an easy read for me. I had a very hard time getting into it. I must say, however, that the content is illuminating and definitely worth the time invested if you stick with it. For anyone interested in Women’s Studies and studies of gender, sexuality and class in African American literature, particularly that of the 20th century, this book is for you. _Private Lives, Proper Relations _is a powerful contribution to the crucial effort to end the distortion still surrounding black intimacy in the United States.

Written by: Gina Hobbs, September 7th 2007

Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy

admin — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:04:00 +0000

By Samantha King

University Of Minnesota Press

Who hasn’t done it? Who hasn’t bought that extra cup of yogurt or that pink scarf that matches nothing in the closet just to show support for the breast cancer cause? Most women have seen what breast cancer can do in the lives of real women, whether we have endured it first-hand or watched a loved one struggle to survive. I have always felt that sweet inner glow after making a purchase if I knew that a small percentage of the proceeds would go to support breast cancer research. As a consumer, I felt that I was doing my part. I never questioned why my philanthropy needed to be tied directly to my consumerism. I never questioned it, that is, until I read Pink Ribbons, Inc.

What do big corporations and politicians have in common? According to Samantha King, an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Physical and Health Education, both groups have profited from our society’s fascination with breast cancer. King offers a searing discussion of the push toward “strategic philanthropy” in the last two decades of the 20th Century. With the current stress on cause-related marketing, corporations exploit the public’s civic goodwill as they fight “to gain ownership over the issue.”

According to King, politicians have not failed to cash in on the moral authority of the breast cancer cause. Many “women’s issues” are viewed as political landmines for legislators. Breast cancer, however, has proven to be a safe issue, allowing legislators to present themselves as “pro-woman” without the danger of being associated with the “F” word—Feminism.

King also focuses on the effect of the recent “tyranny of cheerfulness” surrounding the issue of breast cancer. Because society desires to see the results of its philanthropy, women are perhaps not allowed to acknowledge the flood of emotions that accompanies the diagnosis and the struggle against the disease. Our focus has shifted to the “survivor.” Anything less is unacceptable. In this struggle to find the cure, we have lost sight of the importance of prevention. Reading King’s analysis of the issue made me for the first time question who really benefits when I “think pink” at the cash register. Who really wins in what the_ New York Times_ termed “the battle for the breast?”

Written by: Misty McCormick Chisum, May 9th 2007

Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman

admin — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:06:00 +0000

By Susan Manning

University Of Minnesota Press

Through her extensive research, Susan Manning is able to paint a portrait of the person that Mary Wigman was. Her career was based on her development of a unique style of movement which became a strong influence of American modern dance. Mary Wigman refused to conform to the standard norms of dance, she didn’t rely on elaborate costumes and lightning; at times she wouldn’t use music either. She stripped the theatrics from her performances, leaving only her body and face to transmit her message. She shunned the notion of femininity and masculinity in dancing and instead strived for movement and the body’s relation to space.

Her solo performances were powerful exhibits of nonconformity and uniqueness. All of this resulted in the creation of a dancing style truly unique which has transcended throughout time. Both loved and hated by members of the dance community alike, her definition of dance has remained alive in the form of controversy. Some see her as genius, others as a degenerate. One thing that can be agreed on, however, is how different her corporal style was.

In her book, Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman, Susan Manning presents us with her extensive research of Wigman, illustrating the type of intense and driven woman that she was. Manning begins by taking the reader from the early years of Wigman’s life, details her career from beginning to end and discusses the impact she has had on future generations, bringing the effect of Mary Wigman full circle. Her research is as extensive as it is compelling, and she exhibits it as transparent as possible, giving the reader an opportunity to make their own observations as opposed to instilling her own opinion of Wigman. Although at times the text can get rather scholarly and intricate, this a book that can be a great asset to the academic community, dance aficionados and those who just want to read about an interesting woman who decided to follow her own rules and how she has impacted the dance world.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, May 7th 2007

Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks

admin — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 17:23:00 +0000

By Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, Herbert Reiter

University Of Minnesota Press

On November 30, 1999, roughly 50,000 demonstrators descended upon Seattle, Washington, to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. The mission of the conference was to increase global market liberalization, and every imaginable progressive activist group was in attendance—from Greenpeace and the AFL-CIO to the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, whose members donned turtle costumes and patrolled the crowds to promote non-violence. As the authors of Globalization from Below note, the 1999 WTO protests ignited a global movement that has since surfaced, both in protest and participation, at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, and the 2002 European Social Form in Florence. The authors surveyed activists at the two events in order to analyze the means and motivation of global protest. The results from those surveys, along with other anecdotal and epistolary information, are presented and analyzed in this book. Reader be warned: this is not a Newsweek article or any other easily-digestible political analysis. However, despite the density of the subject matter, the authors, all researchers or professors at the European University Institute, skillfully create a framework around their data to establish the means, medium and message of the global justice movement that calls for "an alternative globalization based on principles different from economic growth and free market . . . and focuses especially on social justice." Chapters like "Global-Net for Global Movements?" and "Media Conscious and Nonviolent?" help ground the data within the particular strategies and repertoires of the movement. The global justice movement has been successful in appealing for debt relief for poor nations and bringing increased environmental standards to the global conversation, if not (alas) to the board room. While analyzing the movement, Globalization from Below offers a cogent critique of neo-liberalism run amok without resorting to conservative isolationism as a cure. There is a way, the activists say, to use globalization to foster human connections and interdependency versus independence and exploitation. "Another world is possible," they chant, and we may want to listen.

Written by: Rachel McCrystal, December 3rd 2006

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

admin — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:26:00 +0000

By J.K. Gibson-Graham

University Of Minnesota Press

Materialist feminist geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham who write as J.K. Gibson-Graham have reissued their postmodern critique of representations of capitalism and economy. Using an Althusserian lens of over-determination, Gibson-Graham show that capitalism is not an inevitable tendency or hegemonic in diverse post-Fordist societies, as it has often been constituted in triumphalist right-wing discourses or in Marxian analyses, but that alternative non-capitalist economies are possible. Gibson-Graham’s project is to propose a language of the diverse economy incorporating counter-discourses from alternative traditions of economic thought, feminism, and working-class, third-world, and social and community movements such as the Zapatistas in México. For this, they use case studies and deconstruction of essentialist concepts such as class, which they formulate as a process of intersecting sites for gender, orientation, income-status, and other oppression markers. The authors have to be careful not to centralize their privileged white feminist locations in the academies. In analyzing the feminist rape script, for example, which characterizes the domination of MNCs in today’s globalized economy as phallocentric, Gibson-Graham’s study of the semi-conductor industry in southeast Asia leads to their claim that "the economic ‘rape’ wrought by globalization in the Third World is a script with many different outcomes - we might read the rape event as inducing a pregnancy, rather than initiating the death and destruction of indigenous economic capacity." As Gibson-Graham’s next phases are to cultivate subjects for non-capitalist spaces and to build community economies, it is wrong to conclude that the inclusion of academicians in the movement can be sufficiently explained by an "erotics of desirability" on the part of other participants who may see them as exploitative, arrogant, detached and careerist. Some dislocation is needed within western academia and its own discourses before the distances between enunciators of theory and community can be bridged satisfactorily.

Written by: Ahmad Saidullah, November 25th 2006