Affiliate Books & Film

Recent Books & Films by CSWS Affiliates and Staff
We include here books, film, and other creative publications that relate to our mission: Generating, supporting and disseminating research on the intersecting nature of gender identities and inequalities. Many of these projects received CSWS funding.
Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography
California Medieval: Nearly a Nun in 1960s San Francisco
The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing
Unhomely Life: Modernity, Mobilities and the Making of Home in China
"Unhomely life, different from houselessness, refers to a fluctuating condition between losing home feelings and the search for home—a prevalent condition in post-Mao China. The faster that Chinese society modernizes, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This is the central paradox that Xiaobo Su explores: how mobile individuals—lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China’s big cities, displaced natives and rural migrants in peripheral China—handle the loss of home and try to experience a homely way of life."
Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia
"Since the late twentieth century, multicultural reforms to benefit minorities have swept through Latin America; however, in Colombia ethno-racial inequality remains rife. Becoming Heritage evaluates how heritage policies affected the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque after it was proclaimed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005. Although the designation partially delivered on its promise of multicultural inclusion, it also created ethno-racial exclusion and conflict among groups within the Palenquero community."
Coloring into Existence: Queer of Color Worldmaking in Children's Literature
"Coloring into Existence documents the emergence of a North American queer of color children’s literary archive, focusing on the creation, distribution, and potential impact of picture books by and about queer and trans of color authors. This comparative study across Canada, the United States, and Mexico from 1990 to 2020 fuses literary criticism and close readings with historical analysis and interviews. Millán engages LGBTQ+ picture books through the hermeneutic of autofantasía, a framework developed throughout the book that usefully entangles fiction and nonfiction."
Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire
"This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean."
The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
The Songs of Clara Schumann
"Focusing on Clara Schumann’s central contributions to the genre of the Lied (or German art song), this is the first book-length critical study of her songs. Although relatively few in number, they were published and reviewed favorably in the press during her lifetime, and they continue to be programmed regularly in recitals by professional and amateur performers alike. Highlighting the powerful and distinctive features of the songs, the book treats them as a prism, casting light not just on them but also through them to explore questions that foster a deeper understanding of the work of female composers."
Women in Japanese Studies: Memoirs from a Trailblazing Generation
"Most books present research and pedagogies. We do something different: We share lives—personal stories of how women scholars earned graduate degrees and began careers bridging Japan and North America between the 1950s and 1980 and balanced professional and personal responsibilities. We challenge the common narrative that Japanese Studies was established by men who worked for the US military after World War II or were from missionary families in Japan. This is only part of the story—the field was also created by women who took advantage of postwar opportunities for studying Japan."
Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh
"Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention on the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh. Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents."
Chabelita’s Heart/El corazón de Chabelita
How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies
The Art of the News: Comics Journalism
The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
"In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. Arguing that medical practice must be understood within its broader cultural context, Reis demonstrates how deeply physicians have been influenced by social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and same-sex desire throughout American history."
Indigenous Women and Violence
Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Form Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost
"Japan on American TV explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. Japan on American TV takes a historical perspective to understand the diversity of Japan parodies and examines six main categories of television portrayals representing different genres and comedic forms..."
Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics
"Littlejohn’s work encompasses the often-overlooked experiences of people who identify as women, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary who have used birth control to prevent pregnancy. Those experiences range from the societal pressure for women to be solely responsible for birth control to unsupportive partners and the importance of access to both birth control and abortion. She contends that preventing pregnancy is something that should be understood as shared between the individuals engaging in sexual activity that could potentially lead to a pregnancy."
Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture
Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763
Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas
The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic
“On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked.... [As] Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated ‘new woman’ exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city....The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an illfated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.”
The White Devil
Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation
"Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood."
Countering Violent Extremism in Pakistan: Local Actions, Local Voices
Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater
"The book tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the 20th century as it argues for theater’s potential power in the age of climate change. Using cultural and environmental history, seven chapters illuminate key moments in American theater and American environmentalism over the course of the 20th century in the US. It focuses in particular on how drama has represented environmental injustice, and how inequality has become part of the American environmental landscape."
Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games
How a Woman Becomes a Lake: a novel
Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools
Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology
Living with Animals: Rights, Responsibilities, and Respect
Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty
Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation
"Spain has for too long been considered peripheral to the human catastrophes of World War II and the Holocaust. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary, scholarly collection to situate Spain in a position of influence in the history and culture of the Second World War. Featuring essays by international experts in the fields of history, literary studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, and film studies, this book clarifies historical issues within Spain while also demonstrating the impact of Spain’s involvement in the Second World War on historical memory of the Holocaust."
Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic
Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas
HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth
La Serenata
"A Mexican-American boy learns from his parents about serenatas, and why demonstrating romantic affection proudly, publicly, and through song is such a treasured Mexican tradition. One day, the boy asks his parents if there is a song for a boy who loves a boy. The parents, surprised by the question and unsure of how to answer, must decide how to honor their son and how to reimagine a beloved tradition."
Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America
"Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men. American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place, Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender."
Motivating Students on a Time Budget
"This book begins with a section of research-based, broad-level considerations of student motivation as it relates to short-term information literacy instruction, both in person and online. It then moves into activities and lesson plans that highlight specific motivational strategies and pedagogies: Each encourages the spirit of play, autonomy, and active learning in a grade-free environment. Activities and plans cover everything from game-based learning to escape rooms to role playing to poetry, and are thoroughly explained to be easily incorporated at your campus."
Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action
The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities
A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics
Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance
"While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity."
Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event
Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends
Philosophy of Race: An Introduction
Reviving the Social Compact: Inclusive Citizenship in an Age of Extreme Politics
Seeing Species: Re-presentations of Animals in Media & Popular Culture
When We Love Someone We Sing to Them
British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest
Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families
Development Drowned and Reborn
How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs
Introducing Japanese Popular Culture
Kohnjehr Woman
Marriage Vows and Racial Choices
The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity
"The Life of Paper offers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have written letters to remake themselves—from bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being. Exploring the evolution of racism and confinement in California history, this ambitious investigation disrupts common understandings of the early detention of Chinese migrants (1880s–1920s), the internment of Japanese Americans (1930s–1940s), and the mass incarceration of African Americans (1960s–present) in its meditation on modern development and imprisonment as a way of life."
Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice
Directions in Number Theory
Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema
Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change
Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima
"Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record. She complicates the way we think about life under slavery and demonstrates the degree to which slaves were able to exercise their own agency, despite being caught up in the Atlantic slave trade."
Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu
"The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women’s and girls’ rights, including the right to a life free of violence. Yet local, national and regional gender values are not always consistent with the principles of gender equality and women’s rights that undergird these globalising conventions."
Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora
"This book examines a group of multicultural Jewish poets to address the issue of multilingualism within a context of minor languages and literatures, nationalism, and diaspora. It introduces three writers working in minor or threatened languages who challenge the usual consensus of Jewish literature: Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman. Each of them—Lévy in French and Hebrew, Matitiahu in Hebrew and Ladino, and Gelman in Spanish and Ladino—expresses a hybrid or composite Sephardic identity through a strategic choice of competing languages and intertexts."
My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind
Raising the Barre: Big Dreams, False Starts, and My Midlife Quest to Dance The Nutcracker
Sad Happiness: Cinthya’s Transborder Journey
"This documentary explores the differential rights that U.S. citizen children and their undocumented parents have through the story of one extended Zapotec family. Shot in Oregon and Oaxaca, Mexico, and narrated by eleven-year old Cinthya, the film follows Cinthya’s trip to her parent’s home community of Teotitlán del Valle with her godmother, anthropologist Lynn Stephen."
The Write Path: Essays on the art of writing and the joy of reading
UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage
“In recent years, UNESCO and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) have become key terms for the analysis of expressive culture, with folklorists and anthropologists playing increasingly significant roles in the theorization, creation and implementation of global cultural policy. While UNESCO meetings are generally held in cities such as Paris and New York, their decisions affect people in communities around the globe, where they can have unforeseen ramifications for national and regional politics, economics, and ethnic concerns."
White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide
Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan
Irish Women Dramatists: 1908-2001
"One of the few collections of plays by Irish women, this volume contextualizes the political and sociological climate in which these playwrights developed. As theatre practitioners—actors and directors—as well as scholars, Kearney and Headrick have devoted years of research to discovering and rediscovering the contributions these women have made—and continue to make—in the Irish and world theatre scenes."
Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles
Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed
"After a devastating fish kill on the Klamath River, tribal members and theatre artist Theresa May developed a play to give voice to the central spiritual and cultural role of salmon in tribal life. Salmon Is Everything presents the script of that play, along with essays by artists and collaborators that illuminate the process of creating and performing theatre on Native and environmental issues. This revised and expanded second edition includes a new introduction by the author, and new chapters by Kirby Brown and Marta Lu Clifford."
Sexing the Media: How and Why We Do It
Skein of Light
Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833
“With the help of recent theories of space and place, the book examines the writings of planters, enslaved people, soldiers, sailors and travelers whose diverse geographical and social locations inflect their representation of British slavery, analyzing the ways in which these writers use discourses of aesthetics, natural history, cultural geography, and gendered domesticity to intervene in Britain's protracted national debate over slavery.”
Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror
“Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender. It is neither a natural essence nor merely a social construct. Gender is first and foremost an operation of justification which binds the lived existence of the individual subject to the aspirations of the regime."
The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work
The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education
Agents of Change: A legacy of feminist research, teaching, and activism at the University of Oregon
Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled
Counterclockwise: One Midlife Woman's Quest to Turn Back the Hands of Time
Development Challenges Confronting Pakistan
From Enron to Evo: Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia
Keep Your Eyes on Guatemala
Life Writing and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning
“This book examines work in several genres of life writing—autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction—focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and ‘treat’ people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores how writers who hear voices and experience delusions write their identities into narrative, despite popular and medical representations of schizophrenia as chaos, violence, and incoherence."
Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan
Otros Sabreres: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics
Prowler
Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies
Trafalgar
We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements
Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels
“Gender, Sex, Liebe in poetischen Dialogen des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts” (Gender, Sex, Love in Poetic Dialogues of the Early Twentieth Century)
This book project, supported by a CSWS Faculty Research Grant, “puts actual poetic dialogues…at the center of contemporary theoretical debates about sex and gender. The book recovers the poems’ original dialogic setting, and by freeing them from the limitations of conventional aesthetic discourses it empowers the poems to participate in more complex cultural debates.”