Title: Above the clouds: status culture of the modern Japanese nobility
Author: Lebra, Takie Sugiyama 1930-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | Japan | Gender  Studies
Publisher's Description: This latest work from Japanese-born anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra is the first ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. Lebra gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. She has woven together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world.As Lebra explores the culture of the kazoku , she places each subject in its historical context. She analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders.But this book is not simply about the elite. It is also about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.   [brief]
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Title: After the lovedeath: sexual violence and the making of culture
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender  Studies | Literature | Music
Publisher's Description: This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.To make his case, Kramer uses operatic lovedeaths, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the Tolstoy novella named after it; the writings of Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, psychoanalysis, and the logic of dreams. In formal and informal reflections, he explores the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he imagines alternatives that could allow gender to be freed from the existing system of polarities that inevitably promote sexual violence.Kramer's writing avoids the conventional dress of intellectual authority and moves between music and literature in a style that is both intimate and effective. He combines informed scholarship with candid personal utterance and makes clear what is at stake in this crucial debate. After the Lovedeath will have a profound impact on anyone interested in new ways to think about gender.   [brief]
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Title: American homo: community and perversity 
Author: Escoffier, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Gender  Studies | Sociology | American Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture. Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture - inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens - to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.   [brief]
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Title: Annihilating difference: the anthropology of genocide
Author: Hinton, Alexander Laban
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Asian Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender  Studies | History | Sociology | Media Studies | Religion | Religion
Publisher's Description: Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.   [brief]
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender  Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France, 1570-1715 
Author: Dewald, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Gender  Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations.Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life.   [brief]
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Title: The art and politics of Wana shamanship
Author: Atkinson, Jane Monnig
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia | Religion | Gender  Studies
Publisher's Description: Rituals are valued by students of culture as lenses for bringing facets of social life and meaning into focus. Jane Monnig Atkinson's carefully crafted study offers unique insight into the rich shamanic ritual tradition of the Wana, an upland population of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
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Title: Bad girls and sick boys: fantasies in contemporary art and culture
Author: Kauffman, Linda S 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Literature | Cinema and Performance Arts | Popular Culture | American Studies | Gender  Studies
Publisher's Description: Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.   [brief]
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Title: Best friends and marriage: exchange among women 
Author: Oliker, Stacey J
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Gender  Studies | Popular Culture | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this fascinating book, Stacey Oliker delves into the intimate realm of women's friendships and explores the complex relation between friendship and family life. Based on a series of interviews with women from the middle and working classes, this work reveals the distinctive values of best friendship and marriage, how husbands and their wives' friends feel about each other, and how women friends talk about marriage problems. Best Friends and Marriage suggests that close friendships provide women with unique sources of intimacy, affection, identity, and community. Contradicting a widespread view of families as isolated and self-contained private worlds, Oliker suggests that "companionate marriage" did not replace the friendship and intimacy that pervaded communities of past times, but rather, that intimate friendship and companionate marriage evolved intertwined. Examining the cultures and dynamics of friendship, Oliker shows how women's position in society constrains the choices they make at home and in friendship, and shapes how best friends perceive each other's best interests. Best Friends and Marriage breaks ground in linking together the institutions of family and friendship, and in explaining intimacy in sociological and historical as well as psychological terms. In this way, a richly descriptive book also extends theory in the areas of family, community, and gender inequality.   [brief]
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Title: Between feminism and labor: the significance of the comparable worth movement 
Author: Blum, Linda M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Gender  Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: "Equal pay for equal work" has long been a forceful slogan of the feminist and labor movements. Now, however, as the American economy depends more and more on "women's work," it has become clear that this objective does not benefit the majority of women, who are employed in sex-segregated jobs. In Between Feminism and Labor , Linda M. Blum examines the movement for comparable worth, or equal pay for comparable work, as a strategy to raise wages for the "pink-collar" jobs that are most frequently occupied by women. She explores the larger political implications of the movement and provides the first study of pay equity to focus directly on the mobilization of the female work force at the grass-roots level.Through two case studies of local comparable worth movements - in San Jose and Contra Costa County, California - Blum probes several important issues. She asks whether comparable worth can contribute to the formation of active labor-feminist alliances, and after a nuanced, intelligent analysis of the complexities and contradictions of comparable worth, endorses its radical potential to improve women's wages and forge links between gender- and class-based politics. Between Feminism and Labor also situates comparable worth in the context of the limitations of affirmative action, a strategy seeking to move women into male jobs as opposed to raising the value of women's work. It is the first study to contrast these two strategies and to place them within the theoretical and political debates over the validation of gender difference versus the requirement of gender neutrality. As such, the book should stimulate debate among those concerned with the future of the feminist movement, as well as those interested in the future of organized labor and progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: Between marriage and the market: intimate politics and survival in Cairo 
Author: Hoodfar, Homa
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender  Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Homa Hoodfar's richly detailed ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of Arab Muslim families. Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.   [brief]
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Title: Bewitching women, pious men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia
Author: Ong, Aihwa
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Gender  Studies | Women's Studies | Southeast Asia | Gender  Studies
Publisher's Description: This impressive array of essays considers the contingent and shifting meanings of gender and the body in contemporary Southeast Asia. By analyzing femininity and masculinity as fluid processes rather than social or biological givens, the authors provide new ways of understanding how gender intersects with local, national, and transnational forms of knowledge and power.Contributors cut across disciplinary boundaries and draw on fresh fieldwork and textual analysis, including newspaper accounts, radio reports, and feminist writing. Their subjects range widely: the writings of feminist Filipinas; Thai stories of widow ghosts; eye-witness accounts of a beheading; narratives of bewitching genitals, recalcitrant husbands, and market women as femmes fatales. Geographically, the essays cover Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The essays bring to this region the theoretical insights of gender theory, political economy, and cultural studies.Gender and other forms of inequality and difference emerge as changing systems of symbols and meanings. Bodies are explored as sites of political, economic, and cultural transformation. The issues raised in these pages make important connections between behavior, bodies, domination, and resistance in this dynamic and vibrant region.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond recognition: representation, power, and culture
Author: Owens, Craig
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Art Theory | Gender  Studies | Sociology | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Art Criticism
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Title: Beyond second opinions: making choices about fertility treatment 
Author: Turiel, Judith Steinberg 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Gender  Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Beyond Second Opinions is both an exposé of the risks, errors, and distortions surrounding fertility medicine and an authoritative guide for people seeking treatment. Accessible, comprehensive, and extremely well-informed, this book takes the reader beyond hype to the hard data on diagnoses and treatments. Judith Steinberg Turiel, a consumer health activist and herself a veteran of fertility treatments, uses the most up-to-date medical literature to shed new light on difficult decisions patients face today and on reproductive questions society must begin to address now. Those who are seeking a more balanced perspective to help them make better, more informed decisions will find a wealth of information about current reproductive interventions - from simple fertility pills to dazzling experimental options - as well as a discussion of the non-medical forces (economic and political) that shape an individual's treatment choices and reproductive outcomes. Despite quantities of information showered upon patients, they remain woefully misinformed; some fertility treatments may actually reduce chances for a successful pregnancy and threaten a patient's health. Turiel looks beyond surface claims to the real information, often uncovering counterintuitive findings and sometimes scandalous revelations. She exposes a realm of unregulated expansion, unscientific experimentation, and recent scandal over stolen embryos. Weaving together first-hand accounts, compelling stories, a range of scientific information, and lively anecdotes, Turiel addresses the persistent gulfs that separate medical professionals and health care consumers. In the process she arms laypeople with what they might not learn about infertility practices from doctors, patient education brochures, and the newspaper.   [brief]
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Title: Birth as an American rite of passage
Author: Davis-Floyd, Robbie
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender  Studies
Publisher's Description: Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth - routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? And why, in spite of the natural childbirth movement, has hospital birth become even more intensely technologized? Robbie Davis-Floyd argues that these obstetrical procedures are rituals that reflect a cultural belief in the superiority of science over nature. Her interviews with 100 mothers and many health care professionals reveal in detail both the trauma and the satisfaction women derive from childbirth. She also calls for greater cultural and medical tolerance of the alternative beliefs of women who choose to birth at home.   [brief]
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Title: Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India
Author: Van Hollen, Cecilia Coale
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Gender  Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Asian Studies | South Asia | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?   [brief]
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Title: Bodies out of bounds: fatness and transgression
Author: Braziel, Jana Evans 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | Gender  Studies | Ethnic Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Since World War II, when the diet and fitness industries promoted mass obsession with weight and body shape, fat has been a dirty word. In the United States, fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose. Bodies Out of Bounds challenges these dominant perceptions by examining social representations of the fat body. The contributors to this collection show that what counts as fat and how it is valued are far from universal; the variety of meanings attributed to body size in other times and places demonstrates that perceptions of corpulence are infused with cultural, historical, political, and economic biases. The exceptionally rich and engaging essays collected in this volume question discursive constructions of fatness while analyzing the politics and power of corpulence and addressing the absence of fat people in media representations of the body. The essays are widely interdisciplinary; they explore their subject with insight, originality, and humor. The contributors examine the intersections of fat with ethnicity, race, queerness, class, and minority cultures, as well as with historical variations in the signification of fat. They also consider ways in which "objective" medical and psychological discourses about fat people and food hide larger agendas. By illustrating how fat is a malleable construct that can be used to serve dominant economic and cultural interests, Bodies Out of Bounds stakes new claims for those whose body size does not adhere to society's confining standards.   [brief]
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Title: Body work: beauty and self-image in American culture
Author: Gimlin, Debra L 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender  Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of "body work." Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned "beauty myth." Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth. Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities. This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.   [brief]
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Title: Broken silence: voices of Japanese feminism
Author: Buckley, Sandra 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Gender  Studies | Women's Studies | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Broken Silence brings together for the first time many of Japan's leading feminists, women who have been bucking the social mores of a patriarchal society for years but who remain virtually unknown outside Japan. While Japan is often thought to be without a significant feminist presence, these interviews and essays reveal a vital community of women fighting for social change.Sandra Buckley's dialogues with poets, journalists, teachers, activists, and businesswomen exemplify the diversity of Japanese feminism: we meet Kanazumi Fumiko, a lawyer who assists women in a legal system that has long discriminated against them; Kora Rumiko, a poet who reclaims and redefines language to convey her experiences as a woman; Nakanishi Toyoko, founder of the Japanese Women's Bookstore; and Ueno Chizuko, a professor who has tackled such issues as pornography and abortion reform both in and out of the academy.These women speak to a host of issues - the politics of language, the treatment of women in medicine and law, the deeply entrenched role of women as mothers and caregivers, the future of feminism in Japan, and the relationship between Japanese feminists and "western" feminisms. Broken Silence will do much to dispel Western stereotypes about Japanese women and challenge North American attitudes about feminism abroad. With a timeline, glossary, and comprehensive list of feminist organizations, this is a long overdue collection sure to inform and excite all those interested in feminism and Japan.   [brief]
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Title: Buddha is hiding: refugees, citizenship, the new America
Author: Ong, Aihwa
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Asian American Studies | Gender  Studies | Urban Studies | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions - of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry - affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.   [brief]
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