Gender
Axis of Hope
Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders Catherine Z. Sameh Series edited by Piya Chatterjee
Decolonizing Feminisms December 2019 192pp 9780295746326 £23.99 / $30.00 PB 9780295746302 £79.00 / $95.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Axis of Hope recounts activists’ struggles through critical analysis of their narratives. Catherine Sameh examines how Iranian women’s rights activists have cultivated ways of thinking of and being with each other that rupture the relentless differencemaking and violence of coloniality through local and transnational networks along axes of feminist solidarity, friendship, and love. These stories are particularly germane in such precarious times, marked by war, isolation, sanctions, and the intense demonization of Iranians and Muslims, as well as authoritarianism, militarism, and patriarchal nationalisms around the world. Situating postreform women’s rights activism within the unfolding, decades-long project to democratize Iran from within, Axis of Hope makes a timely contribution to studies of feminist movements, women’s human rights in Muslim contexts, activism and new media, and the relationship between activism, civil society, and the state.
Fall / Winter 2019
Defining Girlhood in India A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws Ashwini Tambe
October 2019 224pp 9780252084560 £19.99 / $24.95 PB 9780252042720 £82.00 / $99.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum.Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe takes a transnational feminist approach to legal history, showing how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, Tambe argues, the well-meaning focus on child marriage has been tethered less to the interests of girls themselves and more to parents’ interests, achieving population control targets, and preserving national reputation. Excludes SE Asia, Indian sc & ANZ
Her Neighbor's Wife
A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage Lauren Jae Gutterman
Politics and Culture in Modern America December 2019 352pp 10 illus. 9780812251746 £34.00 / $39.95 HB UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor’s Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay communities and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with the wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their suburban neighborhoods.In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives’ relationships with other women, Her Neighbor’s Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.
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What's the Use? On the Uses of Use Sara Ahmed
October 2019 288pp 52 illus. 9781478006503 £23.99 / $26.95 PB 9781478005841 £88.00 / $99.95 HB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word— in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking work of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded from them.