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Tracing the history of efforts in the United States to limit the sexual freedoms of such persons, using methods such as forced sterilization, invasive birth control, and gender-segregated living arrangements, Michael Gill demonstrates that these widespread practices stemmed from dominant views of disabled sexuality, not least the notion that intellectually disabled women are excessively sexual and fertile while their male counterparts are sexually predatory. Analyzing legal discourses, sex education materials, and news stories going back to the 1970s, Gill shows, for example, that the intense focus on “stranger danger” in sex education for intellectually disabled individuals disregards their ability to independently choose activities and sexual partners, including nonheterosexual ones, which are frequently treated with heightened suspicion. He also examines ethical issues surrounding masturbation training that aims to regulate individuals’ sexual lives, challenges the perception that those whose sexuality is controlled (or rejected) should not reproduce, and proposes recognition of the right to become parents for adults with intellectual disabilities. A powerfully argued call for sexual and reproductive justice for people with intellectual disabilities, Already Doing It urges a shift away from the compulsion to manage “deviance” (better known today as harm reduction) because the right to pleasure and intellectual disability are not mutually exclusive. In so doing, it represents a vital new contribution to the ongoing debate over who, in the United States, should be allowed to have sex, reproduce, marry, and raise children.

Taking a critical view of a venerated international principle, this book shows how the concept of human rights—often taken for granted as a force for good in the world—corresponds directly with U.S. imperialist aims. Citing internationalists from W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to, more recently, M. Jacqui Alexander and China Miéville, the text insists on a reckoning of human rights with the violence of colonial modernity. Despite the emphasis on international human rights since World War II, the text notes that the discourse of human rights has consistently reinforced the concerns of the ascendant global power of the United States. It demonstrates how the alignment of human rights with the interests of U.S. expansion is not a matter of direct control or conspiratorial plot but the result of a developing human rights consensus that has been shaped by postwar international institutions and debates, from the United Nations to international law. The book probes high-profile cases involving Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo, as well as offering readings of works such as Hotel Rwanda, Caché, and Death and the Maiden that have put forth radical critiques of political violence.

The contemporary animal rights movement encompasses a wide range of sometimes-competing agendas from vegetarianism to animal liberation. For people for whom pets are family members—animal lovers outside the fray—extremist positions in which all human–animal interaction is suspect often discourage involvement in the movement to end cruelty to other beings. This book argues that in order to achieve such goals as ending animal testing and factory farming, activists need to be better attuned to the profound emotional, even spiritual, attachment that many people have with the animals in their lives. Offering an alternative to both the acceptance of animal exploitation and radical animal liberation, the text shows that a deeper understanding of the nature of our feelings for and about animals can redefine the human–animal relationship in a positive way. The text explores five realms in which humans use animals: as pets, for food, in entertainment, in scientific research, and for clothing. In each case it presents new methods of animal advocacy to reach a more balanced and sustainable relationship association built on reciprocity and connection.

It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Seattle, this book offers the first analysis of how housing insecurity becomes organized as a legible, governable social problem. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a significant conceptual shift; whereas earlier social science and service discourse focused on individual pathologies as the locus for intervention, today a homeless population has replaced the individual as the primary object of knowledge and governance. In the realm of population management, how to most efficiently allocate resources to manage ongoing insecurity becomes the goal, rather than the eradication of the social, economic, and political bases of housing needs. Putting the work of Michel Foucault on biopower in dialogue with Marxist accounts of neoliberalism and critical race and ethnic studies analyses of the racial state and racial capitalism, the book argues that homelessness today constitutes a form of “surplus life,” populations made redundant as labor but valuable as a problem to be known and managed.

Human rights are usually understood to be that which Americans deliver unto others elsewhere, with little direct meaning for U.S. legal discourse, domestic political struggle, or American literary and cultural studies back at home. Writing Human Rights instead proposes human rights as a method for reading “minor literatures,” or fiction authored by contemporary U.S. writers of color from the closing years of the Cold War to the early years of the U.S. war on terror. It takes as its premise that—unlike a benevolent humanitarianism, which views its objects as pure victims—human rights provide deeply meaningful modes of ethical imagining for political subjects. By engaging the ethical deliberations that these minor literatures stage, Writing Human Rights explores the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political community emerge. Beginning with writers such as Toni Morrison and ending with Aimee Phan, each chapter pairs works of minor literature with one human rights text, considering the specific principles that have been articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties. It offers close readings of the transnational political subjects and communities conceived in minor literature as they bear upon the legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights, and vice-versa. Affiliating the “minor” subjects of American literary studies with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights, freedoms, and good life that have been made global by the twenty-first century.

Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic enclosures. She argues that reform belongs to the story of cities and feelings toward many of their human inhabitants. In Zoo Renewal, Uddin demonstrates how efforts to make the zoo more natural and a haven for particular species reflected white fears about the American city—and, pointedly, how the shame many visitors felt in observing confined animals drew on broader anxieties about race and urban life. Examining the campaign against cages, renovations at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Zoo, and the cases of a rare female white Bengal tiger and a collection of southern white rhinoceroses, Uddin unpacks episodes that challenge assumptions that zoos are about other worlds and other creatures and expand the history of U.S. urbanism. Uddin shows how the drive to protect endangered species and to ensure larger, safer zoos was shaped by struggles over urban decay, suburban growth, and the dilemmas of postwar American whiteness. In so doing, Zoo Renewal ultimately reveals how feeling bad, or good, at the zoo is connected to our feelings about American cities and their residents.