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Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.

Early June begins the Southern Hemisphere hurricane season. Stretching into November, it can often be a time of weary waiting and cautious optimism for coastal residents. Clear skies and calm seas can quickly give way to disaster. On August 27, 2017, a Category 4 hurricane (Harvey), targeting the Texas Gulf Coast and packing winds of over 130 miles per hour, wreaked havoc and created a path of destruction with bands of rain that seemingly went on forever. Lives were lost, neighborhoods devastated, resiliency cracked; yet people continued helping each other, and the recovery process began. Fitzpatrick and Spialek tell a complicated story of heartache, destruction, resiliency, recovery, and hope. Through over 300 interviews from Hurricane Harvey survivors living along the Texas Gulf Coast, their stories tell an all-too-familiar tale. Interviewing survivors with diverse displacement experiences, the authors create a narrative around who, what, where, and why residents sought refuge in shelters, hotels, and other alternative locations. Some residents have since moved back. Others have been rebuilding for months and even years. And there are some residents who will never return home. Their stories, circumstances, and insight into the recovery processes are all very different, yet intimately tied together through an understanding of how race and place come to define their experiences. This book tells survivors’ stories while emphasizing that who those survivors were and where they lived had a major impact on these tales of destruction, resiliency, and recovery.

Working on behalf of women of color, the movement for reproductive justice incorporates intersectionality and human rights to advocate for women’s right to bear children free from coercion or abuse, terminate their pregnancies without obstacles or judgment, and raise their children in healthy environments as well as the right to bodily autonomy and gender self-identification. The movement for reproductive justice takes health advocacy further by pushing for women’s human right to access health care with dignity and to express their full selves, including their spiritual beliefs, as well as policies that address social inequalities and lead to greater wellness in communities of color. The evidence is drawn from ethnographic research with thirteen organizations located throughout the United States. The overall argument is that the organizations discussed here provide a compelling model for negotiating across differences within constituencies. This movement has built a repertoire of “ready-to-work skills” or methodology that includes cross-sector coalition building, storytelling in safer spaces, and strengths-based messaging. In the ongoing political clashes in which the war on women’s reproductive rights and targeting of immigrants seem particularly egregious and there are widespread questions about whether “the resistance” can maintain its cohesion, the movement for reproductive justice offers a model for multiscalar politics in opposition to conservative agendas and the disparagement of specific social categories. Using grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocacy, this movement also offers visions of the strength, resiliency, and dignity of people of color.

This book examines the design (imagining and producing), delivery (distribution, gatekeeping, and cultural mediation), and decoding (reception, consumption, and debate) of varied genres and styles of contemporary racialized media. In line with what the late great media sociologist Stuart Hall called the “circuit of culture,” the authors herein collectively analyze, first, the production side of imagining and encoding ideological meanings and narratives, the material structures, the people involved, and global political economy of media; second, the arena of distribution in which marketing strategies, gatekeeping traditions, laws and policies, and professional customs structure where and how media is framed; and third, the practices of consumption whereby audience receive, interpret, and debate racialized media. Despite pronouncements that we have reached a “postracial” or “colorblind” society or that racial—and racist—meanings are only the domains of extremist activism and political rhetoric, we demonstrate how dominant racial meanings are deployed, negotiated, and contested in the behind-the-scenes productive activity with, distributive processes regarding, and consumer reactions to racialized media. The chapters highlight the multidirectional influences between media, the racialized climate of politics and culture, reverberations of media meanings in society, and experiences of media consumption along the lines of race, class, and gender positionalities. To analyze these complex relationships, contributing authors utilize various forms of media, including film, television, books, newspapers, social media, video games, and comics, among others.

From upscale restaurants to community gardens, food often reflects shifts in taste that are emblematic of gentrification. The prestige that food retail and urban agriculture can lend to a neighborhood helps to increase property values, fostering the displacement of long-term residents while shifting local culture to create new inclusions and exclusions. And yet, many activists who oppose this dynamic have found food both a powerful symbol and an important tool through which to fight against it at scales ranging from individual consumption to state and national policy. The book argues that food and gentrification are deeply entangled, and that examining food retail and food practices is critical to understanding urban development. A series of case studies, from super-gentrifying cities like New York, to oft-neglected places like Oklahoma City, show that while gentrification always has its own local flavor, there are many commonalities. In the context of displacement, food reflects power struggles between differently situated class and ethnoracial groups. Through the lens of food, we can see that who has a right to the gentrifying city is not just about housing, but also includes the everyday practices of living, working, and eating in the places we call home.

In a world that is responding to ever-changing ideas and expressions of gender, this book adds new insights on transgender children and the parents who support them. Drawing on in-depth interview data with more than fifty parents, the book examines parents’ shifting understandings of their children’s gender and how they come to help their children make sense of their identities and their bodies. Throughout these processes, the book shows that parents’ meaning-making and decision-making often challenge LGBT rights discourses, as well as queer political tenets, in unexpected ways. These dynamics surface in three key areas: (1) gender and sexuality, (2) the gender binary, and (3) the body. Throughout parents’ understandings, gender identity and sexual orientation do not always present as radically separate aspects of the self, but are more fluid and open to reconsideration, given new cultural contexts, opportunities, and phases of the life course. And despite increasing cultural visibility around nonbinary identities, “gender-expansive” child-rearing often looks, fundamentally, very binary and gender-stereotypical, per the children’s own assertions and expressions. Lastly, parents often utilize highly medicalized understandings of transgender embodiment, which nevertheless resonate with some children’s sensibilities. Altogether, these families depart from conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and the binary, but in ways that prioritize child-centered shifts, meanings, and parenting models, not necessarily LGBTQ politics or paradigms. This marks new ground for understanding the mechanisms and parameters of the (trans)gender change afoot.

A growing body of research finds that upward of half of transgender people experience intimate partner violence (IPV)—psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in romantic and sexual relationships—in their lifetimes, and consequences can be severe. Despite this, the movement to end IPV has focused almost exclusively on cisgender individuals, resulting in many transgender IPV (T-IPV) survivors being underserved and overlooked by the very laws and victim agencies tasked with protecting survivors. Research has illuminated a variety of unique aspects of T-IPV regarding the predictors of perpetration, the specific forms of abuse experienced, barriers to help seeking for survivors, and policy and intervention needs. As the first of its kind, this volume brings together leading T-IPV researchers and service providers to offer a comprehensive overview of past research and identify evidence-based strategies to foster systemic change in how transgender abuse is addressed in our policies and services. First the volume details known patterns of transgender abuse and examines, through an intersectional framework, the myriad ways in which discrimination and social inequality promote and enhance T-IPV. Second, the volume discusses how transphobia and cisnormativity impact the causes of T-IPV, survivor resiliency, and help seeking. Third, the volume reviews and critiques existing practices in how health care, shelters, policing, and the legal system intervene in T-IPV. The volume concludes with recommendations for transforming public health prevention, service provision, and research to ultimately build a safer and more inclusive world for transgender communities.