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Fake Geek Girls offers a timely survey of the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as tastemakers and promotional partners over the past decade as fan culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Through an exploration of the subtle and interconnected ways in which media industries, journalists, and other fans have cultivated an androcentric vision of fan identity and participation, Fake Geek Girls surveys the politics of participation within contemporary fan cultures and reasserts the importance of feminism to fan studies. Fake Geek Girls additionally contends that there are meaningful connections to be made between the recent influx of gendered boundary-policing practices within fan and geek culture and broader cultural pushback against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors” within the growing alt-right and “Men’s Rights” movements.

Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia centralizes fashion and beauty in the shaping of Asian modernities and the formation of the so-called Asian Century. The authors assembled here train our eyes on sites as far-flung and varied and yet as intimate and intimately connected as Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto, in order to map the transnational and transregional connections that have made new worlds and life paths possible. By connecting individual stories to large-scale circuits, this interdisciplinary anthology moves beyond common characterizations of Asians and Asian diasporic subjects as simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers of fashion and beauty. Instead, this collection analyzes what modern subjects look like, what they wear, how they work, move, eat, and shop, helping us to see the forms of modernity taking shape in Asia—the aspirations it expresses and the sensibilities it endorses—and the ways they inform our understanding of race, nation, and the global.

“This content is not available in your country.” Media consumers around the world regularly run into this reminder of geography’s imprint on digital culture. Despite utopian hopes of a borderless digital society in an era of globalization, DVDs, video games, and streaming platforms include digital rights management mechanisms like region codes and IP address detection systems that block media access within certain territories. Although propped up by national and transnational intellectual property regulation, these technologies of “regional lockout” are designed primarily to keep the entertainment industries’ global markets distinct. Beyond this, they frustrate consumers around the world and place certain territories on a hierarchy of global media access. Drawing on extensive research of media-industry strategies, consumer and retailer practices, and media regulation, Locked Out explores regional lockout in DVDs, console video games, and streaming video and music platforms. The book argues that regional lockout has shaped global media culture over the past few decades in three interrelated ways: as technological regulation, media distribution, and geocultural discrimination. As a form of digital rights management, regional lockout builds in limitations on the affordances of digital software and hardware. As distribution, it seeks to ensure that digital technologies accommodate media industries’ traditional segmentation of markets. Finally, as a cultural system, regional lockout shapes and reflects long-standing global hierarchies of power and discrimination.

It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, this book resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of erotic fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the long and complex historical entanglement of concepts of faith, race, and secular love is urgent to contemporary debates about normativity, agency, and subjectivity. Queer Faith puts Christian theology and Renaissance lyric poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer theory and scholarship.

Contestations over “the future” and “futurity” have been central to formulations of time throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Queer Times, Black Futures considers the implications of scholarly, artistic, and popular investments in the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation that have persisted in Euro-American culture. Of specific interest are those Afrofuturist cultural forms and logics through which creative engagements with Black existence, technology, space, and time might be accessed and analyzed.Punctuated throughout by meditations on Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener,”his project thinks with and through a vibrant concept of the imagination as a way to open onto perceptions of queer times and black futures, and of the spatial politics that might be associated with them.

Racial Immanence is about how and why artists use the body in contemporary Chicanx cultural production. The book explores disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience in Chicanx visual, verbal, and performing arts from the late 1980s to the early 1990s in order to ask whether it is possible to think of race as something other than a human quality. This attention to the body is a way to push back against two distinct modes of identity politics: first, the desire for art to perform or embody an idealized abstraction of oppositional ethnicity; and second, the neoliberal commodification of identity in the service of better managing difference and dissent. While these two modes seem mutually exclusive, the resistance the artists in Racial Immanence exert toward both suggests a core similarity. By contrast, the cultural objects examined in the book assert human bodies as processes, as agents of change in the world rather than as objects to be known and managed. Within Chicanx cultural production the author locates an articulation of bodily philosophies that challenge the subject/object dualism leading to a global politics of dominance and submission. Instead, she argues, Chicanx cultural production fosters networks of connection that deepen human attachment to the material world, a phenomenon the author terms “racial immanence” that creates the possibility of progressive social change.

This book argues that Ricanness is a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism, unfolding via aesthetic interventions in time. Uncovering what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, colonized, racialized, and sexualized enduring body, Ricanness moves among theater, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art. Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic merge at the site of aesthetics and temporality. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in these artists’ and activists’ work, illustrating how they reformulate time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices. Either stopping or waiting with time, or running from exhaustion, or dragging the spectator through dread and despair, all of these artists and activists live at the horizon of existence. Consequently, Ricanness reshifts the colonization of time and normative assumptions of death through spaces of negation, incompletion, violence, and endurance, alongside moments of pleasure and redemption. Theorizing an existential entry into the Rican future, Ricanness traverses aesthetic strategies and nonlinear time.