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Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost oncology treatments. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured ethnography, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after they are unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong’s cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
Feminist Cyberlaw reimagines the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens. Essays crafted for this volume by emerging and established scholars and practitioners explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. This vibrant and visionary volume promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.
Meg Leta Jones is the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Ctrl+Z: The Right to Be Forgotten and The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy.
Amanda Levendowski is Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the founder of the Cyberspace and Technology (CAT) Lab.
Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price for progress throughout war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future's promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers' laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugee writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees' inhabitation of history.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. While Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual's legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought—from sexual crimes to consent to marriage—to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead to think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on the city edges. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle-class, The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original qualitative and ethnographic field research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer writes a detailed exposition of how the "suburban frontier" has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. This book offers a new lens on the African middle classes, making significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
In the late fifth century, a nameless girl was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader social world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland.
Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a much larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing, multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record and, through the life of the Empress Dowager, paints a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under her leadership.
In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating "real" food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public's lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public's concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched "food scientism" in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.
In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Sociologists, NGOs, and left-wing politicians tend to view Mizrahim as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the problem within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their behavior is read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality—with the grammar of Mizrahi rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.
Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers’ skillful use of resources and on addressees’ willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood.
This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance "Yesenia." The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes "Yesenia"’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing Yesenia argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.
For years the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. In Life at the Center, Erica Caple James traces this aid work and discovers at its heart a fundamental paradox, arising from what she calls "corporate Catholicism": social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients, which can deepen aid recipients' dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence. James documents how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers, yet also how modes of philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild "charitable brands." The culmination of over a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians of Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations strengthened—but also eroded—Haitians' civic power.