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A considerable amount of attention and money has been spent on programs aimed to improve the technical skills of girls of color. The impact of such efforts is not clearly understood. This book illustrates how one of the first technology programs for girls of color, COMPUGIRLS, shaped and is shaped by its adolescent participants. As a series of narratives exemplifying how intersectionality is more than a theory of multiple identities and resilience, the African American, Latina, and Native American stars of this book challenge many of the taken-for-granted ideas of girlhoods in this digital age. Navigating a program that emphasizes both technical and “power skills,” the stories reveal how culturally responsive computing practices succeed and, in some instances, fail to prepare the next generation to become the techno-social agents our society requires. To this end, the book challenges broad audiences to recognize and embrace the uniqueness of girlhoods of color theoretically and programmatically.

This book introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. The book suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing Filipino migrantsas critics of the family and cultural constructions of sexuality, as consumers and investors, as philanthropists, as activists, and, as historians. They have been able to transform fundamental social institutions and well-entrenched traditional norms, as well as alter the business, economic and cultural landscapes of both the homeland and the host countries to which they have migrated. The book tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, tapping into hitherto underused primary sources from the “migrant archives” and more than seventy interviews. Bringing the fields of Filipino migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies together, the book analyzes some of the areas where Filipino migrants have forever changed the status quo.

Drawing on fresh and previously undiscovered sources, this book fills an important gap. It reveals that from 1956 to 1991 doctors, educators, jurists and police officers discussed the issue of homosexuality. At the heart of their discussions were questions which directly affected the lives of homosexual people in the USSR. Was homosexuality a crime, disease or a normal variant of human sexuality? Should lesbianism be criminalised? Could proper sex education prevent homosexuality? What role did the GULAG and prisons play in spreading homosexuality across the USSR? Far from being abstract questions, these discussions often had practical implications – doctors designed and offered medical treatments for homosexuality in hospitals, while prison workers used these treatments in prisons.

Underdogs traces the roots of queer theory in studies of social deviance conducted in the social sciences in the United States after World War II. Scholars in anthropology, sociology, and history have argued that the emergence of queer criticism in the humanities around 1990 built on a foundation of empirical research on sexual practices and sexual communities, as well as earlier claims for the constructed and contingent nature of social identity. This book extends these claims through a close examination of the afterlife of microanalytic, interactionist, and observational methods in the first wave of queer theory. With a focus on the work of Erving Goffman, and in particular his analysis of the operations of stigma in everyday life the book explores the influence of deviance studies on a queer vision of politics: coalitional, comparative, and based on a model of shared marginality. In borrowing its model of power from deviance studies while dropping its emphasis on empirical research in favor of attention to discourse, the book argues, queer studies failed to grapple adequately with its institutional entanglements or the ethics of studying social outsiders. By illuminating forgotten or suppressed lines of influence, Underdogs argues that acknowledging the inheritance of midcentury social science will help to address impasses regularly encountered in contemporary queer studies: false universalism, disconnection from political and lived praxis, and bad faith regarding its institutional and other forms of privilege.