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Already Doing It: Intellectual Disability and Sexual Agency

Michael Gill

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 ... More

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.Less

Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self

Paul Roquet

Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools ... More

Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools to tune this atmospheric self. The book traces the emergence of mood-regulating media in Japan from the environmental art and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 70s to the more recent emphasis on “healing” styles. Focusing on how ambience reshapes those dwelling within it, Ambient Media explores the working of atmospheres designed for affective calm, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. The book argues for understanding ambient media as a specifically neoliberal response to mood regulation, serving as a way to atmospherically shape collective behavior while providing resources for emotional autonomy and attention restoration at the individual level. Ambient Media considers the adaptive side of atmosphere as an approach to self-care and social mobility. At the same time, the book considers the limits of mood regulation and the low-affect lifestyle when it comes to interpersonal life. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and writers in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s original idea of a style affording “calm, and a space to think,” providing materials to cultivate sensory serenity within the uncertain horizons of the contemporary social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding Japanese social demands to “read the air,” the book documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of this turn to mediated moods.Less

Beautiful Fighting Girl

Saito Tamaki

From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always ... More

From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. This book offers an interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. The beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, this book understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.Less

The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America

Sarah Deer

The book explores the history of rape and sex trafficking in North America, and provides historical and contemporary examples of federal complicity in the high rate of rape committed against Native ... More

The book explores the history of rape and sex trafficking in North America, and provides historical and contemporary examples of federal complicity in the high rate of rape committed against Native women. The book considers a wide range of colonial violence, including rape, sex trafficking, and incarceration, Deer explores how tribal nations and anti-rape activists can leverage the tribal self-determination efforts of the 21st century to end violence against women. Deer bridges the gap between Indian law and feminist theory by explaining how intersectional approaches are vital to addressing the rape of Native women. The book offers specific recommendations for tribal legal reform and concludes with a consideration of how to document success.Less

Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

Ellen Willis

Written by New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic, this book presents the perspective of a radical and rational political realm, to look at rock-and-roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. ... More

Written by New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic, this book presents the perspective of a radical and rational political realm, to look at rock-and-roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here the text captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and 1970s.Less

Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More Than Human World

Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson

Being Together in Place explores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests. Using ethnographic ... More

Being Together in Place explores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests. Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, this book shows activists in three sites learning how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being—particularly to those who are intent on damaging these places.Less

Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway

Arthur Kroker

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture ... More

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture through their writings. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species. This book states that the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented. Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, this text reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.Less

Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture

P. David Marshall

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success but also the ultimate construction of false value. This book questions the impulse to become ... More

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success but also the ultimate construction of false value. This book questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. The text also investigates the viewing public’s desire to associate with celebrity and addresses the explosion of instant access to celebrity culture, bringing famous people and their admirers closer than ever before.Less

Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Deborah Cohler

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did ... More

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? This book illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, the text maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. It integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.Less

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

Shannon Mattern

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her ... More

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.Less

Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade

Carly A. Kocurek

Coin-Operated Americans centers on the reframing of boyhood that took place in the popular discourse surrounding early video gaming, but it is not another story about young men. Rather, it charts ... More

Coin-Operated Americans centers on the reframing of boyhood that took place in the popular discourse surrounding early video gaming, but it is not another story about young men. Rather, it charts Americans’ efforts to make sense of video gaming as an emergent medium through news coverage, films, television programs, and other media. The book explains how video gaming both challenged and reinforced existing ideals of masculinity, and how efforts by industry advocates and cultural critics alike to make sense of gaming helped shape and restrict gamer identity. Using diverse archival sources alongside popular films and television programs and a series of original oral history interviews, Coin-Operated Americans offers insight into the construction of gaming in popular imagination. Early coin-operated video games like PONG (Atari, 1972) emerged from the same industry that popularized pool and foosball tables and pinball machines in bars and bowling alleys. As this book details, the transition by which video gaming became strongly associated with boyhood was heavily influenced both by the coin-op industry’s efforts to establish respectability and by existing cultural narratives surrounding technology, masculinity, and youth.Less

Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity

Shelley E. Garrigan

This book centers on the ways in which aesthetics and commercialism intersected in officially sanctioned public collections and displays in late nineteenth-century Mexico. The book approaches ... More

This book centers on the ways in which aesthetics and commercialism intersected in officially sanctioned public collections and displays in late nineteenth-century Mexico. The book approaches questions of origin, citizenry, membership, and difference by reconstructing the lineage of institutionally collected objects around which a modern Mexican identity was negotiated. In doing so, it arrives at a deeper understanding of the ways in which displayed objects become linked with nationalistic meaning and why they exert such persuasive force. Spanning the Porfiriato period from 1867 to 1910, the text illuminates the creation and institutionalization of a Mexican cultural inheritance. Employing a wide range of examples—including the erection of public monuments, the culture of fine arts, and the representation of Mexico at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889—the text pursues two strands of thought that weave together in surprising ways: national heritage as a transcendental value and patrimony as potential commercial interest.Less

The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City

Jennifer Mack

In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have altered the Swedish city’s built environment “from below.” Combining ... More

In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have altered the Swedish city’s built environment “from below.” Combining architectural, urban, and ethnographic tools through archival research, site work, participant observation, and interviews, Mack provides a unique take on urban development, social change, and the immigrant experience in Europe over a fifty-year period.Less

Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina

Regina A. Root

Following Argentina’s revolution in 1810, the dress of young patriots inspired a nation and distanced its politics from the relics of Spanish colonialism. Fashion writing often escaped the notice of ... More

Following Argentina’s revolution in 1810, the dress of young patriots inspired a nation and distanced its politics from the relics of Spanish colonialism. Fashion writing often escaped the notice of authorities, allowing authors to masquerade political ideas under the guise of frivolity and entertainment. This book maps this pivotal and overlooked facet of Argentine cultural history, showing how politics emerged from dress to disrupt authoritarian practices and stimulate creativity in a newly independent nation. Drawing from genres as diverse as fiction, poetry, songs, and fashion magazines, the text offers a sartorial history that produces an original understanding of how Argentina forged its identity during the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829—1852), a critical historical time. The book closely analyzes military uniforms, women’s dress, and the novels of the era to reveal fashion’s role in advancing an agenda and disseminating political goals, notions the book connects to the contemporary moment.Less

Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid

Jill Robbins

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. ... More

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. This book examines how lesbian literary culture fares in this mix from the end of the countercultural movement la movida madrileña in 1988 until the gay marriage march in 2005. This book traverses the various literary spaces of the city associated with queer culture, in particular the gay barrio of Chueca, revealing how it is a product of interrelations—a site crisscrossed by a multiplicity of subjects who constitute it as a queer space through the negotiation of their sexual, racial, gender, and class identities. The book recognizes Chueca as a political space as well, a refuge from homophobia. It also shows how the spatial and literary practices of Chueca relate to economic issues. In examining how women’s sexual identities have become visible in and through the Chueca phenomenon, this work is a revealing example of transnational queer studies within the broader Western discussion on gender and sexuality.Less

Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses

Margaret Schwartz

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike ... More

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike sociological or anthropological studies of death and funerary practice, this work takes as its starting point the special role of the photograph in modern mourning practices, particularly those surrounding public figures. Arguing that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in death than others. An Iconography of the Flesh ultimately argues that death without a body is specific to the capitalist mode of social reproduction and its attendant alienation of meaningful representations of death in favor of ghostly figures of bare life that reflect the exploitation of those whose bodies are considered expendable.Less

Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Miranda Joseph

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society?” How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent ... More

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society?” How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students? This book explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, the book argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives. Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, this text exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within American society. It demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.Less

Digital Memory and the Archive

Wolfgang Ernst

Jussi Parikka (ed.)

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of ... More

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of memory and time. The archivological approach focuses on the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. With an extended concept of the archive, a media archaeological and archivological approach to the past means that media can not be made into “historical” objects of research only. Different media systems, from library catalogues to micro-filming, have influenced the content as well as the understanding of the historical remains of the archive itself. Alphabetic writing which has dominated the archive for centuries has dramatically been challenged by signal recording (photography, the phonograph, cinematography) and puzzled the archivists at the beginning of the age of media reproduction. Now, in the digital age, we are faced with further challenges concerning cultural memory, remembering and forgetting. Time is not registered only through historical writing but also through the microtemporality of the machines themselves. Instead of narrative and historical accounts of media history, Archives, Media and Cultural Memory that we need a more medium-specific account of the interaction of past and current media cultures. Media studies is extended into an analysis of their scientific and technological roots, while combining such specificity with exciting insights into contemporary philosophy and media theory.Less

Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

Jeff Scheible

Emoticons matter. Equal signs do, too. This book takes them seriously and shows how and why they matter. Digital Shift explores the increasingly ubiquitous presence of punctuation and typographical ... More

Emoticons matter. Equal signs do, too. This book takes them seriously and shows how and why they matter. Digital Shift explores the increasingly ubiquitous presence of punctuation and typographical marks in our lives-using them as reading lenses to consider a broad range of textual objects and practices across the digital age. Jeff Scheible argues that pronounced shifts in textual practices have occurred with the growing overlap of crucial spheres of language and visual culture, that is, as screen technologies have proliferated and come to form the interface of our everyday existence. Specifically, he demonstrates that punctuation and typographical marks have provided us with a rare opportunity to harness these shifts and make sense of our new media environments. He does so through key films and media phenomena of the twenty-first century, from the popular and familiar to the avant-garde and the obscure: the mass profile-picture change on Facebook to equal signs (by 2.7 million users on a single day in 2013, signaling support for gay marriage); the widely viewed hashtag skit in Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night show; Spike Jonze’s Adaptation; Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know; Ryan Trecartin’s Comma Boat; and more. Extending the dialogue about media and culture in the digital age in original directions, Digital Shift is a uniquely cross-disciplinary work that reveals the impact of punctuation on the politics of visual culture and everyday life in the digital age.Less

The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence

Randall Williams

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. ... More

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.Less