"This book is an examination of how American mass media, including advertising, presents Otherness – anyone or anything constructed as different from an established norm – in terms of gender, race, sex, disabilities, and other markers of difference. Using a mythological lens, the book looks below the surface of media content to explore the psychological, social, and economic underpinnings of a system of beliefs that result in prejudice, discrimination, and oppression."

"The authors of the essays in this unique collection explore the lives and cultural contributions of gay Latino men in the United States, while also analyzing the political and theoretical stakes of gay Latino studies. In new essays and influential previously published pieces, Latino scholars based in American studies, ethnic studies, history, performance studies, and sociology consider gay Latino scholarly and cultural work in relation to mainstream gay, lesbian, and queer academic discourses and the broader field of Chicano and Latino studies."

"In The Aroma of Righteousness, Deborah Green explores images of perfume and incense in late Roman and early Byzantine Jewish literature. Using literary methods to illuminate the rabbinic literature, Green demonstrates the ways in which the rabbis’ reading of biblical texts and their intimate experience with aromatics build and deepen their interpretations. The study uncovers the cultural associations that are evoked by perfume and incense in both the Hebrew Bible and midrashic texts and seeks to understand the cultural, theological, and experiential motivations and impulses that lie behind these interpretations."

"These memoirs all come from women forced to live lives of impropriety, often after ill-treatment from unscrupulous men. Their tales of survival in the face of extreme hardship and privations make inspirational and compelling reading."

"Grounded in both theoretical and political practices—in the lived realities of people’s experience—Identity Complex reinvigorates identity as a key concept and as a tool for the pursuit of social justice. Hames-García draws on a wide range of examples to show that social identities are central to how exploitation works, such as debates about the desirability of sexual minority identities in postcolonial contexts, questions about the reality of race, and the nature of the U.S. prison crisis. Unless we understand precisely how identities take shape in relation to each other and within contexts of oppression, he contends, we will never be able to eradicate discrimination and social inequality."

"Examining how gender enables the globalization of markets and how emerging forms of service labor are changing women’s social status in China, this book reveals the forms of social inequality produced by shifts in the economy. No longer working for the common good as defined by the socialist state, service workers are catering to the individual desires of consumers. This economic transition ultimately affords a unique opportunity to investigate the possibilities and current limits for better working conditions for the young women who are enabling the development of capitalism in China."

"In a series of ethnographic cases, Karim shows how NGOs use social codes of honor and shame to shape the conduct of women and to further an agenda of capitalist expansion. These unwritten policies subordinate poor women to multiple levels of debt that often lead to increased violence at the household and community levels, thereby weakening women’s ability to resist the onslaught of market forces."

“A ground-breaking collection of essays focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Leading scholars and practitioners explore ways that familiar and new works of theatre and dance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how performance helps us understand the way our bodies are integrally connected to the land. ”

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
A “superlative collection of essays that…takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously.”