Browse

Why are there so few women in science? This book uses the experiences of successful women scientists and engineers to answer the question of why elite institutions have so few women scientists and engineers tenured on their faculties. Women are highly qualified, motivated students, and yet they have drastically higher rates of attrition, and they are shying away from the fields with the greatest demand for workers and the biggest economic payoffs, such as engineering, computer sciences, and the physical sciences. The book shows that these continuing trends are not only disappointing, they are urgent: the U.S. can no longer afford to lose the talents of the women scientists and engineers, because it is quickly losing its lead in science and technology. Ultimately, these biases and barriers may lock women out of the new scientific frontiers of innovation and technology transfer, resulting in loss of useful inventions and products to society.

Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion. This book takes the reader onto the competition floor of ballroom dancing and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world's top competitors to social dancers, the book examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. It shows that, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

Argentinean tango is a global phenomenon. Never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism. Tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor. This book shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to the dancers as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. It shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South in which Argentinean tango is—and has always been—embroiled. The book also explores a sense of uneasiness about a passion for a dance whichseems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. The book uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. It concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the “elsewhere.”

Dignity is having a moment. It pervades our cultural, political, and legal imagination and has become a basis for LGBTQ+ rights and visibility. How has the word been invoked? Who has done so and why? Should the recognition of LGBTQ+ people as dignified be a cause for celebration or, ironically, a cause for concern? Put differently, does this recognition foster equality, equity, and inclusion, or does it expand boundaries? Beginning with an episode in HIV/AIDS history—the shuttering of bathhouses in the mid-1980s—we trace dignity’s generative work as a rhetorical and neoliberal tool to police queer bodies and practices. We map the consequences of this practice for queer logics and worldmaking in contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We explore how the term is brandished by state and cultural authorities in public health policy, cultural representations, and law. While some understand dignity as an unalloyed good, we are skeptical of what dignity requires. Because it often demands sameness as the foundation for valuing LGBTQ+ life, some political and cultural authorities, as well as some LGBTQ+ people, denigrate the value of queer life and its position of difference. Despite this pressure, the queer penchant for difference has never fully dissipated. Instead of an adoption of sameness, contemporary LGBTQ+ practices and representations often reveal a dynamic tension between dignity’s seductive rhetoric of homogenization and efforts to reclaim a historical potential for transgression and a celebration of difference. This tension creates one possible pathway to understand who we have been and who we might become.

Family Secrets is a thought-provoking feminist-informed sociological study exposing the deeply troubling, hidden, and unspoken issues of incest and sexual violence in Mexican families. Based on 60 in-depth individual interviews the author personally conducted in Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Monterrey, she exposes the rich life stories of people who are as complex and multilayered as the incestuous experiences themselves. Incest may include a wide spectrum and highly nuanced and diverse expressions of coercion, as well as secrets around sex and romance within families. The sexual cultures of incestuous families in Mexico take place within a context of silence around sexual activity, creating an atmosphere of ambivalence and ambiguity in which sexual secrets fester. These cultural ambiguities are reinforced by the double standards of morality that disadvantage women within both the family and society. The author examines these stories through interconnected concepts such as gender servitude, family and social codes of honor and vergüenza, the family as the symbolic hacienda and el derecho de pernada, kinship reassignments, heterosexual incestuous lifestyles of romantic love and sex, visible and underground patriarchies, historical constructions of the paterfamilias and sexual slavery, cultural rituals of misogyny, family cultures of rape, family sexual harassment, family genealogies of incest, homophobia and family hate crimes, and kinship sex, among other intellectually provocative and revealing concepts. The sexual politics of incestuous families take place in a nation historically exposed to Christian-based values shaping sexual morality, and a flawed, corrupt, and outdated legal system.

Fashioning Fat takes us through a model’s day-to-day activities, first at open calls at modeling agencies and then through fashion shows and photo shoots. This bookshows that the mission of many of these models is to challenge our standards of beauty that privilege the thin body; they show us that fat can be sexy. Many plus-size models do often succeed in overcoming years of self-loathing and shame over their bodies, yet these women are not the ones in charge of beauty’s construction or dissemination. At the corporate level, the fashion industry perpetuates their objectification. Plus-size models must conform to an image created by fashion’s tastemakers, as their bodies must fit within narrowly defined parameters of size and shape—an experience not too different from that of straight-size models. Ultimately, plus-size models find that they are still molding their bodies to fit an image instead of molding an image of beauty to fit their bodies.

The book is divided into three sections: The first section, Cultivating Feminist Accountability, explores practices of accountability that embrace critical engagement of the power lines that shape our identities, relationships, and communities as we engage in feminist movement building and social change. The second section, Building Community Accountability and Transformative Justice, explores the concept and practice of community accountability and transformative justice within the context of U.S.-based feminist antiviolence movements. It introduces the feminist-of-color led efforts to shift from the dominant paradigm of institutionalized social services and carceral legal reform to community-based support, intervention, accountability, and transformation. The third section, (Re)Imagining Feminist Solidarity Politics, explores how a framework of feminist accountability can serve to disrupt and disentangle US-based feminist storytelling about the issues facing women of the global south from US imperial logics. Such a shift is essential for making visible the deep and historic relationship between and across these global divides and for creating possibilities for a solidarity based in mutuality, reciprocity and respect.

The rapid increase in public support for gay marriage in the United States between 1988 and 2015 is unprecedented in modern polling. How and why did an idea that was once nonsense become a political reality supported by a majority of the population in such a short period of time? This book analyzes historical data, public opinion data, and qualitative interview data to explain the role of generational change in causing the legalization of gay marriage. Despite the evidence of generational change we see all around us, social scientists have struggled to document and explain generational change thoroughly; this has allowed myths and stereotypes about generations to run amok in popular culture. This book corrects this shortcoming and explains America’s cultural revolution in attitudes about gay marriage. It argues that the rapid shift in public support for gay marriage was caused by a change in the social imagination of homosexuality. Americans coming of age during different historical periods developed understandings of homosexuality that were consistent with the cultural common sense of the era, thus making them more or less likely to support gay marriage. The story of gay marriage’s rapid ascent offers profound insights about how the continuous remaking of the population through birth and death, mixed with our shared history and culture and our individual life experiences, produces a society that is continually in flux and constantly reinventing itself anew.

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

In recent decades, homeschooling in the United States has grown, as parents with varying stances in terms of politics and religiosity—and particularly, with distinct perspectives on childhood gender and sexuality—come to the same practice of homeschooling their children. How can we understand the rising popularity of homeschooling, and what does this trend indicate about broader cultural beliefs about childhood, parenting, and education? The Homeschool Choice examines contemporary debates about childhood and education from the perspective of parents who have chosen—for a variety of reasons—to opt out of the public school system and homeschool their children. Drawing on mixed-methods research that includes survey data, participant observation at homeschooling events, and in-depth interviews with parents, it examines the ideologies (some contested, some shared) of childhood, motherhood, education, and the state that parents reference when they talk about homeschooling, offering a glimpse into how parents feel both empowered and constrained by recent changes in education policy motivated by the ethos of school choice. The book demonstrates that the ideology of school choice operates in the daily lives of American families in ways that reinscribe gender, sexual, race, class, and age inequalities. It illuminates the changing relationships among the family, the state, and public schools under a neoliberal policy model, highlighting how trust in, and reliance upon, public services are changing, and what this means for the changing burdens families face as the state divests from public education.

The popular debate around contemporary U.S. immigration tends to conjure images of men waiting on the side of the road for construction jobs, working in kitchens or delis, driving taxis, and sending money to their wives and families in their home countries, while women are often left out of these pictures. This book is a national portrait of immigrant women who live in the United States today, featuring the voices of these women as they describe their contributions to work, culture, and activism. Through an examination of U.S. Census data and interviews with women across nationalities, we hear the poignant, humorous, hopeful, and defiant words of these women as they describe the often confusing terrain where they are starting new lives, creating architecture firms, building urban high-rises, caring for children, cleaning offices, producing creative works, and organizing for social change. Highlighting the gendered quality of the immigration process, the book interrogates how human agency and societal structures interact within the intersecting social locations of gender and migration. The book recommends changes for public policy to address the constraints these women face, insisting that new policy must be attentive to the diverse profile of today's immigrating woman: she is both potentially vulnerable to exploitative conditions and forging new avenues of societal leadership.

21^st Century feminists are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. This volume presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power. The authors take materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues, such as intersectionality, representation, performativity, methodology, post-colonialism, and biopolitics. The authors also apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neural plasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs. They also address the histories of toxicology and neuroenhancement, and the use of neuropsychiatric drugs in prisons. The volume presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing.

A straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity? This book looks deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is a reality: there's fraternity and military hazing rituals; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For the author, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can, and do, have sex with other straight white men; in fact, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity. The book illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. The book's analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality, not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege.

Hundreds of thousands of straight American men have had sex with multiple men. Not all are closeted gay or bisexual men. Nor are they all just experimenting. This book examines the stories of sixty such men in rural areas and small towns across the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West, and the Midwest. They identified as straight primarily because they are embedded in institutions and communities that reward male heterosexuality and masculinity. The author refers to all of this as “straight culture.” Most identified as straight not because they hated gay or bisexual men. Instead, they felt that most aspects of their lives were heterosexual. Those married to women wanted to stay that way and saw their role as a husband as key to their straightness. They considered their sex with men mostly irrelevant to their identity. All described themselves as masculine, too, and many felt that identifying as gay or bisexual would have threatened their masculinity. Wanting to avoid discrimination and enjoying being part of a socially dominant group played roles as well. Most of these men were also primarily or exclusively attracted to women. Many began having sex with men only later in life to continue having sex but without feeling as though they were cheating on their wives. The stories of the men interviewed are filled with irony and paradox yet are also genuine. Overall, the book explores this question: What if heterosexuality, and particularly male heterosexuality, is not always what it seems?

Since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the politics of sexual identity in America have drastically transformed. But the changes wrought by a so-called “post-closeted culture” have not just affected the queer community—heterosexuals are also in the midst of a sea change in how their sexuality plays out in everyday life. This book argues that heterosexuals can neither assume the invisibility of gays and lesbians, nor count on the assumption that their own heterosexuality will go unchallenged. The presumption that we are all heterosexual, or that there is such a thing as “compulsory heterosexuality,” the book claims, has vanished. The book explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selves in this new landscape, particularly with an understanding of how race does and does not play a role in these conceptions. It provides a historical understanding of heterosexuality and how it was first established, then moves on to examine the changing nature of masculinity and femininity and, most importantly, the emergence of a new kind of heterosexuality—notably, for men, the metrosexual, and for women, the emergence of a more fluid sexuality. The book also documents the way heterosexuals interact and form relationships with their LGBTQ family members, friends, acquaintances, and co-workers. Although homophobia persists among straight individuals, the book shows that being gay-friendly or against homophobic expressions is also increasingly common among straight Americans.

Over the last four decades, the fashion modeling industry has become a lightning rod for debates about Western beauty ideals, the sexual objectification of women, and consumerist desire. Yet, as Wissinger contends, existing theories of commercialism and gender norms fail to fully explain the enduring appeal and significance of fashion models. Instead, in the growth of informational capitalism, the transformation from print to film to the internet has had an enormous impact on what kind of body counts as “fashionable.” From Twiggy’s iconic angularity to the supermodels’ “glamazonian” contours to the waif’s hollowed out silhouette, to Kim Kardashian's curves, technologies change the fashioning of bodies, and how they are valued. The book masterfully weaves together in-depth interviews, participant observation at model castings, photo shoots, runways shows, and a careful examination of “how-to” texts to offer a glimpse into the life of the model. This life involves a great deal of physical and virtual management of the body, or what Wissinger terms “glamour labor.” Traditional forms of “glamour labor’—specialized modeling work of self-styling, crafting a ‘look,’ and building an image—have been amplified by the rise of digital media as the power of pixilation afforded unprecedented access to tinkering with the body’s form and image. As lines blur between life, work, and body management in the participatory culture of Web 2.0, the street becomes a runway and being “in fashion” a route to success. In an era where self-fashioning, self-surveillance, and self-branding are presented as a means to “the good life,” this book urges us to take seriously the presentation of bodies and selves in the digital age.