How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women's histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of "private violence" should merit asylum - despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors. Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of "private violence" to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America's broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women's resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law.
Explores the contours of Latinx Catholic environmentalism Home-based conservationist measures such as cultivating backyard gardens, avoiding consumerism, and limiting waste are widespread among Spanish-speaking Catholics across the United States. Yet these home-based conservationist practices are seldom recognized as "environmental" because they are enacted by working-class immigrant communities and do not conform to the expectations of mainstream environmentalism. In Falling in Love with Nature, Amanda J. Baugh tells the story of American environmentalism through a focus on Spanish-speaking Catholics, shedding light on environmental actors who have been hidden in plain sight. While dominant narratives about environmental activism include minorities, primarily in the realm of environmental racism and injustice, Baugh demonstrates that minority communities are not merely victims of environmental problems. They can be active agents who express love for nature based on inherited family traditions and close relationships with the land. Baugh shows that Spanish-speaking Catholics have values that have been overlooked in global discourses, grassroots movements, and the highest echelons of the US Catholic Church. By drawing attention to the environmental knowledge that is already abundant within Spanish-speaking Catholic communities, Falling in Love with Nature challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about who can be an environmental leader and what counts as environmentalism.
Frames restorative justice as a form of moral and spiritual practice with the capacity to transform injustice In the United States "restorative justice" typically refers to small-scale measures that divert alleged wrongdoers from a standard path through the criminal justice system by funneling them into alternative justice programs. These aim not to punish the offender, but to constructively address the harm that wrongdoing may have caused to individuals or to the community, engaging with the wrongdoer to come to a response that might heal and repair the harm. Yet restorative justice initiatives generally fail to challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration. This book argues that these initiatives have the potential to do so, but that we need to better understand what restorative justice is, and how it should be implemented. It claims that restorative justice can achieve its desired effect only insofar as it provides a mode of association between people that is, at its core, moral and spiritual. The book explores the ways in which restorative justice ethics and practices exhibit moral and spiritual dynamics, and what difference such "lived religious" dynamics can make for purposes of transforming structural violence. Looking to Chicago's restorative justice network as a model for developing these transformational and sustainable social changes, the volume showcases real-life examples of the kinds of practices and initiatives needed to shift the entrenched dynamics that fuel the prison-industrial complex across the United States.
Offers a Black male response to the challenge of womanist thought Although much Black religious scholarship has engaged with feminist theory and womanist thought, a gap remains where little work has been done in religious studies to investigate the Black male experience. A Misrepresented People explores how African American men grapple with identity and masculinity in relation to Black religious thought. This book counters the dominant portrayal of Black men in American society as suspicious, morally defective, and irredeemable, and showcases the strength and relevance of Black religious thought in developing alternative notions of Black manhood. Drawing on womanist discourses, African American religious thought, literature, and Black male studies, as well as an examination of the writings and sermons of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., Darrius D'wayne Hills offers a vision of Black male identity that is grounded in interpersonal relationships and connection. Positioning identity formation as a religious concern, Hills expands the application of religious scholarship toward the complex social and material realities faced by Black men. In doing so, this volume offers a much-needed new model for understanding Black male gender identity, illustrating how religious thought fosters more holistic and livable futures for African American men.
A harrowing political history of Kurdish Iraq told through the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of a childhood refugee In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people, the Iraqi Kurds. Five thousand people died in what became known as the Halabja Massacre, which has been deemed the worst chemical attack in history. Nicole F. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives. Republic of Dreams is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa's story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide. Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland.
Explores how elites restrict access to public beaches around the globe Beaches are a beloved form of public space. Yet there has been an alarming global trend of restricting access to public sections of beaches to ensure that waterfront property owners can enjoy the shoreline exclusively or develop the land for commercial use. Beach Politics examines how over the past forty years, privatization of public space has accelerated with the help of both local governments and national corporations. On a local level, this can entail a group of wealthy neighbors purposely blocking off public beach access in their neighborhood: hiring security guards, building fences, or putting up "No Trespassing" signs to turn away members of the public who have every right to be there. On a state or national level, it can manifest as gated communities owned by private corporations sectioning off huge swaths of land, limiting access, or governments promoting private, rather than public, development along the shoreline. Whenever disputes about land use arise, the powers that be often side with private interests and the wealthy over those with fewer resources and, frequently, people of color. Focused on beaches, access to public space, and social justice, this book brings together powerful contributions illustrating how these issues are inextricably bound with socioeconomic status, racial segregation, and climate justice. Together they highlight how, through illegal actions and exclusionary legislation, the beach can be transformed from "a strip of nature" into a palimpsest of greed, racism, ecological disregard, and socioeconomic discrimination.
A cutting-edge volume on current trends in sex work, from sugar relationships and cyber brothels to financial domination, sex worker activism, and feminist porn Sex is for sale in more ways than ever. It can be bought and sold online, in sex clubs, on the street, and around the world. As with many industries, discrimination, exploitation, and inequality persist in sex work. Yet it also offers autonomy, job satisfaction, and even pleasurable experiences for those involved. Sex Work Today explores these contradictions, offering an intimate look at the benefits and challenges of sex work across geographic contexts. Featuring thirty-one original essays by sex workers, advocates, researchers, and activists, Sex Work Today is the first compilation of research on new forms of digital sex such as camming, sugar dating, and AI sex dolls. Providing a lens to understand contemporary labor dynamics and the nature of sex work itself, this collection captures formerly ignored aspects of the sex industry including: fatphobia and disability; transmasculine and nonbinary sex workers; racialized emotional labor in the digital sex industry; high job satisfaction among professional dominatrixes; and sex worker scholars. With federal policies ostensibly aimed at combating sex trafficking-affecting all sex workers-understanding this industry is more vital than ever. Decentering Western, white, cisgender voices, Sex Work Today underscores the global repercussions of these misaligned policies, which make sex work more challenging and less safe, and provides valuable insights for those seeking to shape policies, challenge prejudices, and foster a safer and more equitable world for all.
Examines the significance of sports in the lives of diasporic Filipino Americans Organized sports have occupied a central place in Filipino American life since US colonialism began in the Philippines in 1898. For Filipino diasporas in the United States, sports are important cultural sites through which men and women cultivate a sense of ethnic community and belonging to the American national fabric. Sports studies focused on Asian America have tended to focus on East Asians, largely ignoring Filipinos. Thus, we know very little about how sports work as critical arenas to understand larger questions about Filipino identity formations, racialization, gender dynamics, diasporic contours, and post-colonial sporting cultures. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic examination of the significance of sports to the lives of Filipino Americans under the shadow of US empire and neocolonial inequities. Through a close examination of Filipino American sportingcultures--from boxing and the Manny "Pac-Man" Pacquiao phenomenon to men's basketball leagues to women's flag football--this book shows how engagements with sports reveal the shifting nature of Filipino Americanness and Filipino American subjectivity. Drawing on over four years of data collected in Southern California, Las Vegas, Urbana-Champaign, and Arlington, Constancio R. Arnaldo, Jr. documents the intimate connections among Filipino American sports, transnationalism, and diasporic belonging. Filipino American Sporting Cultures adds an important voice to the body of work using sports as a lens to look at US culture and communities of color.
How deviant materials figure resistance Yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition. Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories-- gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication--to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art. Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.
Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all First Lady of Laughs tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish. When Carroll was ninety-five she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family. Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll's personal scrapbook, First Lady of Laughs restores Jean Carroll's remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance.
Explores the religious activism of the Stop Shopping Church performance group Since the dawn of the new millennium, the grassroots performance activist group the Stop Shopping Church has advanced a sophisticated anti-capitalist critique in what they call "Earth Justice." Led by co-founders, Reverend Billy and Savitri D, the Church of Stop Shopping have sung with Joan Baez and toured with Pussy Riot and Neil Young. They performed at festivals around the world, and been the subject of the nationally released documentary, What Would Jesus Buy? They opposed the forces of consumerism on the global stage, and taken on the corporate practices of Disney, Starbucks, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Walmart, Amazon, and many others. While the Church maintains an anti-consumerism stance at its core-through performances, street actions, and social activism-the community also prioritizes work for racial justice, queer liberation, justice and sanctuary for immigrants, First Amendment issues, the reclaiming of public space, and in an increasingly central way, environmental justice. In The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism, George González draws on interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography to offer insight into the Church, its make up, its activities, and in particular, how it has shifted over time from parody to a deep and serious engagement with religion. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping maintain that corporations and their celebrity spokespeople operate in much the same way churches do. González uses the group's performance activism to showcase the links between religion, the culture of capitalist consumerism, and climate catastrophe and to analyze the ways in which consumers are ritualized into accepting capitalism and its consequences. He argues that the members and organizers of the Church of Stop Shopping are serious theorizers and users of religion in their own right, and that they offer keen insights into our understanding of ritualistic consumerism and its indelible link to the rising sea levels that threaten to engulf us all.
Offers Bioethics a bold approach to redress its failing Black women Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women- across almost every health indicator- fare worse than others. We must not only include, but center, Black women's experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice. To this end, Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics' privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women.
How Black women celebrate their natural hair and uproot racialized beauty standards Hair is not simply a biological feature; it's a canvas for expression. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled, waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, and relaxed. Yet, its significance extends beyond mere aesthetics. Hair can carry profound moral, spiritual, and cultural connotations, serving as a reflection of one's beliefs, heritage, and even political stance. In Natural, Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson delves into the complex world surrounding Black women's hair, and offers a firsthand look into the kitchens, beauty shops, conventions, and blogs that make up the twenty-first century natural hair movement, the latest evolution in Black beauty politics. Johnson shares her own hair story and amplifies the voices of women across the globe who, after years of chemically relaxing their hair, return to a "natural" style. Johnson describes how many women initially transition to natural hair out of curiosity or as a wellness practice but come to view their choice as political upon confronting personal insecurities and social stigma, both within and outside of the Black community. She also investigates "natural hair entrepreneurs," who use their knowledge to create lucrative and socially transformative haircare ventures. Distinct from a politics of respectability or Afrocentricity, Johnson's argument is that today's natural hair movement advances a politics of authenticity. She offers "going natural" as a practice of self-love and acceptance; a critique of exclusionary economic arrangements and an exploitative beauty industry; and an act of anti-racist political resistance. Natural powerfully illustrates how the natural hair movement is part of a larger social change among Black women to assert their own purchasing power, standards of beauty, and bodily autonomy.
How the queer Chicano punks of post-1960s Los Angeles developed a unique politics of style In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Javier Guzmán explores the queer punk and Chicano/Latino avant-garde art scenes in post-1968 Los Angeles from the rise of Ronald Reagan to the height of the AIDS epidemic. He demonstrates how style-as a cultural form and sensibility-becomes essential to Latino politics at the moment the utopian impulses of the 1960s begin to fade. Guzmán uncovers how queer Latinos in Los Angeles used performance, underground media, experimental art, and literature to interrogate the limits of Chicano nationalism and the burgeoning politics of gay liberation. These subcultural forms give rise to a theory of what he calls "stylized discontent," expressed as nausea, lo-fi, ambivalence, and malaise. Each chapter of the book is framed by a specific stylized discontent, demonstrating how they were repurposed by queer punk Latinos as responses to the AIDS crisis and the rise of neoliberalisms. Dissatisfactions highlights the middle ranges of political agency strategically utilized by queer racialized historical actors to underscore how negative feelings become instrumental to social change. Revealing new forms of activism and art that continue to structure the way we understand systemic violence and survival, Dissatisfactions insists on the significance of both the politics of style and the different styles politics may take.
The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party. In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot. Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins's political journey, shedding light on Ericka's use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In prison, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement. Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world.
New results and interpretations challenging the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Ancient Western Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200-900 BCE) presents select essays originating in a two-year research collaboration between New York University and Paris Sciences et Lettres. The contributions here offer new results and interpretations of the processes and outcomes of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in three broad regions: Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Together, these challenge the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by the regeneration of political powers. Current research on newly discovered or reinterpreted textual and material evidence from Western Asia instead suggests that this transition was characterized by a diversity of local responses emerging from diverse environmental settings and culture complexes, as evident in the case studies collected here in history, archaeology, and art history. The editors avoid particularism by adopting a regional organization, with the aim of identifying and tracing similar processes and outcomes emerging locally across the three regions. Ultimately, this volume reimagines the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition as the emergence of a set of recursive processes and outcomes nested firmly in the local cultural interactions of western Asia before the beginning of the new, unifying era of Assyrian imperialism.
Reveals the possibilities and challenges of civic education in circumstances of extreme polarization, and how civic learning and political divisiveness can interact and influence each other As fears about polarization--and its contribution to democratic crisis and corrosion--rise, many people have posited civic education as a possible remedy. In a time of increasing political polarization, what should the goals of civic education be, and how should they be implemented? In the latest installment of the NOMOS series, Eric Beerbohm and Elizabeth Beaumont bring together a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars across philosophy, politics, and law, inviting us to think deeply about the complex promises and pitfalls of civic education. Contributors raise a variety of crucial considerations not only about how to educate citizens in a polarized era but also for a polarized era. What types of civic learning hold promise for preparing students to navigate their way through a political landscape of escalating hostile factions, distrust, truth decay, and disagreement about basic facts? Could or should civic education attempt to reduce or counteract polarization, or should it focus on other aims? Beaumont and Beerbohm show us that the dynamics and circumstances of polarization do not stop at the schoolhouse gates, but bring new urgency together with added pressures and constraints to all civic education. As political polarization continues to intensify across the globe, this riveting volume illuminates the significance, the possibilities, and the challenges of civic education in the contemporary era.
Shows how domestic identity narratives and political polarization shape the sociopolitical response to refugees The United States once played a major role in global refugee resettlement, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all refugees resettled worldwide. However, in recent years, it has dramatically cut refugee admissions and implemented discriminatory policies on refugee protection. These policies have been justified amid intensifying xenophobic rhetoric against specific groups. In this book, Alise Coen explains why the monumental shift around refugee resettlement occurred, particularly in response to the high-profile conflict in Syria. She shows how refugees--and broader global migration debates--became contentious political issues in the US, revealing the many ways in which refugees have been increasingly weaponized as partisan symbols by Democrats and Republicans. The book calls attention to the power of rhetoric and identity narratives, and shows how the language used to talk about refugees fuels divisivepolicies. From the years leading up to the Trump administration's policies targeting Muslim refugees to debates during the Biden administration around who deserves access to asylum, Coen examines how ideas about race, gender, and nativism shape US approaches toward migration. As arguments for "closing the border" continue to gain traction and politicians continue to use global displacement issues to further their agendas, Reconfiguring Refugees explores the ideas, meanings, and policies that undermine and influence US responsibility-sharing.
A state-by-state analysis of the expansion of medical marijuana access in the United States As of 2023, thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized the medical use of marijuana. Twenty-three have legalized recreational use, supporting what is now a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry. In Green Rush, Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah offer a fascinating history of cannabis legalization in America, highlighting the people, states, and policies that made these victories possible. With sharp insight, Mallinson and Hannah explore the backdrop to this sea change in policy, including shifts in public opinion, growing opposition to the War on Drugs, the promise of new revenue streams, and more. They examine the complex web of state actors--and the steps they took--to chart a path forward for marijuana legalization, from grassroots activists and interest groups to elected officials and other key policymakers. Mallinson and Hannah show us how states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia not only created, legitimized, and spread medical marijuana policy but also learned from each other's successes and failures throughout the process. As marijuana legalization increasingly finds its way onto state ballots, Green Rush offers fresh insight into how we got here as a country and where we are going--one state at a time.
Examines reggae culture as an expression of cultural, racial, and gender empowerment in the West Indian Diaspora In popular media Caribbean culture has either been reduced to stereotypes of laziness, marijuana, and reggae music, or conversely, to an identity centered around a refutation of colonialism. Both are oversimplifications, and do not explain the enduring Caribbean identity and empowerment throughout the diaspora. Vibes Up offers an exploration of Caribbean culture as it is felt, understood, and expressed, centered on research conducted in Brooklyn and Costa Rica. Sabia McCoy-Torres demonstrates how reggae culture--which encompasses the music and performance modes of both "roots" and "dancehall"--helps to shed light on dynamics relating to migration, diaspora, queerness, Blackness, and Caribbean cultural subjectivity. Through an examination of elements of the Black outdoors, including nightlife venues, sidewalks, and streets in front of homes, the book shows the important role that reggae plays in articulating the frustrations of migration, establishing community and belonging, and forming transnational relationships. Although reggae's creators and producers are often perceived as homophobic, Vibes Up also offers a more nuanced examination of the transforming relationships between hetero and LGBTQ+ people in reggae spaces and the accommodation of an array of queer intimacies. The framing of Caribbean Blackness as an expression of perseverance, agency, joy, and the erotic, as opposed to a reaction to colonization, oppression, and enslavement, is a distinctly important and timely view.
Highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the "Unite the Right" rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist and sexist harassment of Star Wars' Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or betrayed by the content they've intertwined with their own identities, or they may simply feel that they're speaking truth to power. Regardless, by connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate, which often results in severe real-world consequences. Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Mel Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments.
Uncovers the inherently religious structure of the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and dispossessed peoples Most popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police and prisons as purely social or political phenomena. While such accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as ever. White Property, Black Trespass argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates. The story of criminalization, Krinks shows, begins with the eurochristian aspiration to become God at the expense of all others--an aspiration that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, Krinks reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell. At once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work deepens understanding of racial capitalism and mass criminalization by illuminating the religious mythologies that animate them. It concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion rooted in rejection of the religious idolatry of mass criminalization--a religion of abolition.
Explores global migration through the concept of "return" The current global moment is characterized by both forced and desired returns, whether it's the United States' mass deportations to Mexico, ships carrying North African migrants turned back en route to Spain and Italy, urban Chinese migrants going back to their rural home communities, or domestic workers returning to their families in Bolivia and Ghana. Yet, the majority of migration research still centers unidirectional movement, which assumes settlement in a host country. States of Return addresses the many political, economic, and cultural transitions that have accelerated and transformed return during the first decades of the twenty-first century, including new migratory routes, new forms of violence, changing economic conditions, new regulatory regimes of incarceration and deportation, and generational transitions. This volume features contributions from leading scholars and offers a new theorization of the idea of return. It centers migrants' own understandings of what return movement is and is not, and how it is experienced in terms of impacts on family relationships as well as state interventions that guide return migrations and create new configurations of citizenship and belonging, especially as migrant workers tend to return to states that lack strong infrastructures to support them or welcome them back. At its core, States of Return highlights the ways in which different migrants' returns reflect conditions of power, privilege, injustice, and violence. The result is a broad and deep account of returns--imagined, achieved, thwarted, or impossible--that captures movement across borders in the world today.
A compelling exploration of materiality and semiotics in Latinx inscriptions Writers and artists from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Latinx New York operate under the pressures of inscription: the material and semiotic entanglement of making a mark as a marked artist. By employing layered material tropes and figures, such as stone, dust, viscera, and animality, their works do not represent a singular Latinx experience and instead, must be read at the margin of language and matter. Matters of Inscription explores feminist and queer inscriptions of Latinidad, encompassing the intersections of materiality and semiotics in art, performance, poetry, plays, and fiction. By delving into these figural matters, Christina A. León highlights how writers and artists such as Zilia Sánchez, Ana Mendieta, Manuel Ramos Otero, MarÃa Irene Fornés, Justin Torres, and Roque Salas Rivera forge material inscriptions that transcend individual lives and call for a broader analytical perspective unmoored from biographical anchors. The book urges readers to reevaluate the notion of difference, which has momentarily sought solace in identitarian terminology. León engages in rhetorical analysis that reassesses how the terms of Latinx studies have been challenged and how they are failing. Rather than categorizing texts based on predetermined taxonomic terms or individual subjects' lives, the book tracks figures situated at the edges of materiality and semiosis. This approach addresses the continuous marginalization and dispossession that shape the phenomenon of Latinx identity ("latinidad") by recentering conceptual questions of origin, diaspora, pedagogy, and belonging. The book contends that losses and deprivations should be rendered incommensurate to avoid collapsing the richness of different experiences or scales of ontological debasement. By focusing on the interplay of materiality and semiotics, Matters of Inscription challenges conventional approaches that seek to homogenize and anticipate what Latinx might mean and instead calls for a more capacious and nuanced analysis that goes beyond individual biographies.
How a grassroots abolitionist project of cultural healing counters the carceral state in a Chicanx community in CaliforniaFor many, gang involvement can be a guaranteed life sentence, a force which traps them in an inescapable cycle of violence even if it does not lead to actual prison time. Healing Movements explores the work of formerly gang-involved Chicanx men and women in California who draw on the social connections made during their gang-involved years to forge new pathways for cultural healing and countering the carceral system. Known colloquially as the "movement of healing," this Chicanx-Indigenous abolitionist project based in Salinas, California, was spurred on by a series of four police homicides of Latino men in 2014. Organizing around such issues as police brutality and mass incarceration, these collectives-two of which are discussed in this book, one mixed-gender, and the other women-only-turned to their often obscured Mesoamerican ancestry to find new resources for building a different future for themselves and subsequent generations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Salinas, Healing Movements reveals how these communities have taken shape in large part through a conscious effort to uplift Chicanx-Indigenous culture and ceremonial practices. By tapping into their Indigeneity, the members of these collectives access a wealth of new resources to shape their future, opening up novel ways to organize and build strong relational ties that are noteworthy to anyone invested in abolitionist work.
"This book offers a sweeping and in-depth look at the global movement to curtail LGBTI rights, exploring both how this moral conservative movement functions-in terms of its key actors, claims, and venues of resistance-and how the LGBTI movement responds to it"--
Explores ways faith communities offer protection and services for Latina/o communitiesThe New Sanctuary Movement is a network of faith-based organizations committed to offering safe haven to those in danger, often in churches, often outside the law, and often at risk to themselves. The practice of sanctuary, with its capacity to provide safety, shelter, and protection to society's most vulnerable, gained significant prominence after the 2016 presidential election and the ushering in of particularly harsh anti-immigration policies. Since 2017, Ohio has had some of the highest numbers of public sanctuary cases in the nation. Sanctuary People explores these sanctuary practices in Ohio and locates them in broader local and national efforts to provide refuge and care in the face of the challenges facing Latina/o communities in a moment of increased surveillance, migrant detention, displacement, and economic and social marginalization. Perez argues for a conceptualization of sanctuary that is capacious, placing support of Puerto Ricans displaced in the wake of Hurricane Maria within the broader practices of sanctuary and expanding our understandings of the movement that addresses the precarious conditions of Latinas/os beyond migration status. Based on four years of ethnographic research and interviews at the local, state, and national levels, Sanctuary People offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which faith communities are creating new activist strategies and enacting new forms of solidarity, working within the sometimes conflicting ideological space between religion and activism to answer the call of justice and live their faith.
"F*ck the Army! resurrects the history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show led by Jane Fonda in 1971, building a new theory of revolutionary activism out of the theatrical acts of solidarity and resistance that soldiers and civilians performed together, on stage and off, as they sought to end the U.S. war in Vietnam by connecting struggles for liberation across the lines of race, gender, and nationality"--
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