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Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Some of these bloggers have not only received big popularity within the online community, but have also attracted the interest of independent and mainstream publishing houses, and have made their way into the Arab cultural field. Previous research on the impact of the Internet in the Middle East has been dominated by a focus on politics and the public sphere, while its influence on cultural domains remains very little explored. Blogging From Egypt aims at filling this gap by exploring young Egyptians’ blogs as forms of digital literature. It studies a corpus of 40 personal blogs written and distributed online between 2005 and 2016, combining literary analysis with interviews with the authors. The study reveals that the experimentation with blogging resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. The book explores the aesthetic features of this genre, as well as its relation to the events of the “Arab Spring”. Finally, it discusses how blogs have evolved in the last years after 2011 and what is left of the blog in Arabic literary production. The book includes original extracts and translation from blogs, made available for the first time to an English-speaking audience.

The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital role in the field-imaginary of sexuality studies. This historical etiological approach recovers a multiplicity of patterns, models, and categories of sexuality, recording their sites of production, tracing synchronic relations between sexual formations, and theorizing the contours of these sexualities by attending to the accounts of their origins. At its broadest, this project seeks not to rationalize what Eve Sedgwick calls “the unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexuality, but to understand how their coexistence occurred. This book contends that historical etiology is a crucial tool — if not the crucial tool — for periodizing and narrativizing the invention of sexuality. It provides an account of the process by which the gender of object choice becomes the basis of classification and definition for sexuality and a description of the simultaneous speciation of what Michel Foucault calls “minor perverts” who fit “no order”: zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and numberless more. These minor perverts bring into focus largely vestigial models of sexuality, making visible the formation of and competition between different models of sexuality and helping us to imagine it otherwise.

Bathhouses (hamams) play a prominent role in Turkish culture, because of their architectural value and social function as places of hygiene, relaxation and interaction. As architectural spaces, hamams have been continuously shaped by social and historical change at many scales. The life story of Mimar Sinan’s Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul provides an important example: established in 1583/4, it was modernized in the Turkish Republic (since 1923) and now is a tourist attraction. As a social space shared between tourists and Turks, it is a critical site through which to investigate how global tourism affects local traditions and how places provide a nucleus of cultural belonging in a globalized world. This book constitutes the first in-depth, monographic study of a single hamam, espousing an original and experimental biographical approach.

Contemporary Chinese voices approach the topic of happiness from many diverse positions and perspectives. Happiness, often represented by the Chinese character fu 福‎, is part of the visual propaganda campaign of the Chinese Dream, and raising levels of happiness has become an official government target. Much is written and said about happiness by the Chinese government, but also by authors of self-help books, by journalists, TV chat show hosts, pop psychologists and China’s netizens. This book is the first attempt at analyzing these various writings and related images to see what concepts and agendas inform this proliferation of happiness discourse. Through comprehensive analysis of text and images in multimedia formats, the essays in this volume reflect the diversity and pervasiveness of Chinese happiness discourse enacted by different social groups and actors. The aim of this volume is to analyse out what different social actors, different philosophical, psychological, cultural, political ideas bring to the subject of happiness in contemporary China. The authors bring a number of theoretical perspectives and conceptual approaches to this endeavour, resulting in a multidisciplinary and multi-methodological volume. The different chapters illuminate how the recent discourse of happiness encompasses both motifs of individual self-interest and collective socialist ethics. The volume shows that happiness has emerged as a culturally and historically specific and relevant topic for China’s population that resonates across class divisions. As such, the book make a significant contribution from the perspective of the Humanities to the understanding of individual and collective happiness in China today.

When survivors are seen as agents in their own stories, they will be seen as agents in their own recovery. A better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because stories that are widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover. This book shows how the public understands and remembers large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, discussing unique contexts in which personal narratives about the storm are shared: interviews with survivors, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, and public commemoration during the storm’s 10^th anniversary in New Orleans. In each case, survivors initially present themselves in specific ways, counteracting negative stereotypes that characterize their communities. However, when adapted for public presentation, their stories get reduced back to stereotypes. As a result, people affected by Katrina continue to be seen in limited terms, as either undeserving of or incapable of managing recovery. This project is rooted in the author’s own experiences living in New Orleans before and after Katrina. But this is also a case study illustrating an ongoing problem and an innovative solution: survivors’ stories should be shared in a way that includes their own engagement with the processes of narrative production, circulation, and reception. In other words, we should know—when we hear the dramatic tale of disaster victims—what they think about how their story is being told to us.

In El Techo de la Ballena, María C. Gaztambi depresents an account of the visual arts production of the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961−69). In spite of evident convergences with other global art tendencies, these radicalized artists from Venezuela anchored their multidisciplinary interventions in a fundamental retrograde stance which, in the author’s view, represented a deliberate inversion of an internationallyaligned modernity hinging on the need for constant evolution and progress in the visual arts. El Techo’s against-the-grain position became the basis for a disorderly project of grief that counteracted the swiftness by which Venezuela fast-tracked its modernization (in the sense of material and technological progress) and consumed international modernism (its cultural production). Against this fragmentary development, El Techo deployed an integrated approach to art-making that included artworks with multiple meanings, alternative exhibition spaces, politicized actions, as well as highly confrontational printed materials. All these elements came together into a single, indivisible body of work merging the visual, the poetic, the performative, and the political. Yet Venezuela’s eroded local environment required an outright unsettling through extreme scatological content and strategies that the balleneros qualified as “a biological art, violently exuded from our bowels…” Theirs was a total output that tested the limits of art to provoke an anesthetized local public under the motto of cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad(to change life, to transform society).

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, black gay men produced a rich and diverse body of cultural work—poetry, fiction, literary journals and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual art—to narrate their experiences with and everyday struggles against racism, homophobia, capitalism, and HIV/AIDS. This book discusses this cultural renaissance, and focuses on activities in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Drawing on literary analysis, archival materials, oral histories, and interviews, the book demonstrates how black gay men used these literary and cultural forms to address trauma and violence in their communities, build connections among black gay men, engage in political mobilization, and assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood. Individual chapters focus on the magazine Blacklight and the performance group Cinque; the works of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam; the history and cultural production of writers’ group, Other Countries Collective; and the diaries of poet, novelist, translator, and scholar Melvin Dixon.

This intimate portrait examines the tracks, journeys, and experiences of child runaways in northern India. The book situates children's decisions to leave home and flee for the city in their larger cultural, social, and historical contexts, and considers histories of landlessness and debt servitude in narratives of child dislocation. The resulting work is an original perspective on the sociological trends in postcolonial India and a unique treatment of a population of individuals who live on the margin of society.

This book seeks to chart how the Scottish legal system responded to what were deemed ‘illicit and unnatural practices’ after 1900. Using a wide range of prosecution and trial records, along with more recent newspaper coverage of court proceedings, it furnishes a fascinating insight into the relationship between the law, sex, and society in modern Scotland. Case studies of sex-related offences, including abortion, bestiality, brothel-keeping, child sexual assault, and wilful HIV transmission, reveal how far the legal process both reflected and reinforced contemporary moral panics and how far it was shaped by the interplay between law officers and forensic experts, by the prejudices of the local community and civic leaders, and by Scotland’s distinctive legal and moral identity. The law in practice is seen to have sustained important norms of sexual behaviour and masculinity along with an enduring double moral standard with respect to female sexuality. This volume thus affords a remarkable new perspective on the sexual behaviours and ideologies of Scottish society across the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

What is a miracle? Who believes in their possibility? What is the historical context within which they emerge?These and related questions have vexed, puzzled and, indeed, enthused scholars and believers, atheists and non-believers alike down the ages.This book examines this perennially fascinating subject of miracles with a comparative focus on two of the world’s great monotheistic religions, Islam and Christianity. Other texts have often approached the subject from a strictly theological, faith or, alternatively, rationalistic, perspective and made it their concern to prove or disprove the possibility of an alleged miraculous event. The approach adopted in this volume is quite different. It is strictly anthropological and phenomenological and the miracles are viewed in a new and dynamic fashion through the lens of narratology. The book examines the stories behind these miracles, the contexts which gave rise to them and allowed them to garner belief and flourish. Perspectives covered include the views of believers and non-believers alike in these phenomena. Similarities and differences in context and approach are explored with a primary focus on the five main anthropological topoi of food, water, blood, wood and stone, and cosmology. A range of intertextual elements in both these Islamic and Christian traditions is discerned.

Mulata Nation traces the figure of the mulata, the woman of mixed racial heritage in Cuban artwork and performance from the colonial era through the modern to the contemporary. While perhaps most widely linked with sensuality and sexual desirability, the mulata also serves as the embodiment of Cuba’s spirituality, and as emblematic of Cuban identity. Through close readings of representations of the mulata in fine and graphic art, mulata performers and the performance of mulata characters at distinct historical and ideological moments, the book claims that far from being a static, flat figure, images of the mulata have shifted over time and continue to find new expressions. Different expressions of the mulata are linked to specific historical moments. Representations of the mulata on cigarette packaging, marquillas cigarreras, and in the musical theater form zarzuela of the late colonial era, cabaret performance, fine art and popular magazine covers during the Republic, as an icon of Mexican cinema in the first wave of the diaspora of Cuban artists and Cuban cultural forms, and as an icon of the new (wo)man of revolutionary Cuba in Cuban cinema of the 1960s and 70s all figure the mulata as crucial figures in national culture. At present, both the significant diaspora of Cuban artists and others to the US and other countries have been re-inscribing the mulata and mulataje to bear, contest and sometimes reinforce the tropic positions explored in previous chapters. Furthermore, the performance of mulataje on and off the island is no longer limited to women; the performance of mulataje is prominent in highly popular drag shows and film in contemporary Cuba.

What is the American dream, and why has it proven so elusive for many people? By examining popular culture’s portrayal of the dark side of the American dream, this book seeks to answer these questions. Only when we see people fail in their pursuit of the American dream do we begin to understand its limitations and its inner contradictions. This book explores five representative examples of the American dream gone awry: (1) Huckleberry Finn; (2) the films of W. C. Fields; (3) the Godfather films;(4) Breaking Bad; and (5) The Walking Dead (and other “end-of-the-world” narratives). As these cases suggest, America, as the fresh-start nation, always threatens to become the land of the false start. America gives its people the freedom to reinvent themselves, but that easily turns into a license to imposture. The American ideal of the self-made man is shadowed by the specter of the con man, and the line between legitimate business and criminal activity sometimes becomes hard to draw clearly. Although the American dream is to achieve success in both family and business, the Godfather films and Breaking Bad show these goals tragically at odds. With its Hollywood endings, American popular culture is often thought to be naively optimistic; this book demonstrates that film and television creators have been capable of raising thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.

This book attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, using a version of phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism to give a radical description of touchability and untouchability in terms of a rhetoric and semantics of touch. Written in minimalist style, it attempts to see if regulations on touchability can be seen as generalizable, and not seen merely as an Indian phenomenon. It also argues that, upon examination, several traditional sociological, political, and moral categories do not prove to be useful for understanding touchability and untouchability.

This book examines social media companies’ policies against cyberbullying or digital bullying in the context of children and youth. It bases its arguments upon an analysis of written corporate documents of fourteen major social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Ask.fm, among others, and interviews with social media company representatives, non-governmental organizations and e-safety experts that collaborate with companies to assist them in preventing bullying. Furthermore, the book provides an analysis of five cases where bullying and cyberbullying were linked to suicides of children in several countries (so-called “high profile cyberbullying incidents”) indicating a narrowing and simplification of the public debate around digital bullying which can result in policy outcomes that do not necessarily help children. The book raises transparency concerns around company self-regulation and how companies address the issue. While the more established companies tend to have more developed approaches and raise fewer concerns among regulators, a lack of evidence of effectiveness of companies’ policies and continuous independent evaluation is present with the more and less established companies alike. The book sets the results in the framework of dignity theory, arguing that digital bullying is a wider social and cultural problem, cautioning against vilifying technology and consequently moral and technopanics that can take place in the context of high-profile cyberbullying cases. Most importantly, the book sets the issue in the context of children’s rights and critically evaluates companies’ policies and “digital citizenship” educational strategies against their ability to advance children’s rights to protection and participation.

A foundational belief in America—that competitive success in education and career is a ticket to a good life—is not supported by research on happiness, but that research omits crucial considerations. This book investigates the relationship between success and happiness by leveraging a 46-year mixed-methods follow-up of a study of Harvard undergraduates from the 1960s (called the Harvard Student Study and unrelated to the Grant Study). It pioneers a qualitative and longitudinal approach to the study of happiness, drawing on unparalleled clinical life history interviews and survey data. The book reaches a similar finding to prior happiness research that success beyond meeting basic needs does not deliver happiness, but it goes much further by providing a developmental explanation of what does shapes happiness. Part 1 illustrates a spectrum of well-being visible in participant life histories and trajectories of stability and change over time. Part 2 presents the study’s key innovations in happiness research: a qualitative method for capturing well-being, two models explaining well-being, and a new paradigm linking worldview, well-being, and development. Part 3 significantly alters conventional accounts of adult life offered in human development, personality psychology, and happiness scholarship. The book generates a host of new tools for investigating happiness: an interview method, a procedure for assessing well-being in narrative, a method for displaying well-being in psychobiographical sketches, and constructs useful resources for further study. This book’s findings are supported by research on general samples and apply to varied demographic groups. Psychobiographical sketches illustrate each major concept and finding.

‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’ This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.

Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, legal prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels frequently face oppression and unfair labor practices while managing stigma and isolation associated with their occupational identities. Rooted in organizational communication and feminist theories, this book engages with stories of women living and working in these “hidden” organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, stigma, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system. Widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. Moral judgments about legal prostitutes are so pervasive that many women struggle to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. At the same time, legal brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and individuals must contend with balancing work and nonwork commitments, organizational cultures, and managerial relationships. Although legal prostitutes are independent contractors, they often live in their workplaces and must adhere to scheduling requirements, mundane job tasks, and emotional labor, like employees in other organizational settings. Ethnographic observations in the brothels and interviews with current and ex-brothel workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, lobbyists, and others provide a broad data set for analysis. The book includes a photo-elicitation project, featuring images captured by legal prostitutes about their lives in the brothels. Thorough archival research fills in gaps left from inconsistencies, illegal practices, and laws about brothel prostitution. In addition, the third author works as a legal prostitute, providing a deep (and deeply personal) autoethnographic insider look at the industry. As such, this book serves as both an updated resource about the laws and policies which guide legal prostitution in Nevada, and an intimate look at life and decision-making for women performing sex work.