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In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? This book examines how a range of underlying mechanisms — gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories — afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, the book reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, the book offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, “accidental” developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. The book examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist. In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, the book forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.

This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, the book contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. The book explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison’s and Hollywood’s Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California’s Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the “Widows of 9/11” in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietàs as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, states this book, U.S. citizen-subjects are born—and reborn.

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, the author of this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state's legitimization of austerity and women's everyday experiences, the book reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, the book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity. Delivering a timely account of the misconceptions of policies, discourses and representations around austerity in the UK, the book illustrates the complex ways through which austerity is experienced by women in their everyday lives.

In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

In this book, GerShun Avilez argues that queerness, here meaning same-sex desire and gender nonconformity, introduces the threat of injury and that artists throughout the Black diaspora use queer desire to negotiate spaces of injury. The space of injury does not necessarily pertain to a particular architecture or location; it concerns the perception and engagement of a body. Black queer bodies are perceived as social threats, and this perception results in threats (physical, psychological, socioeconomic) against these bodies. The space of injury describes the potential threat to queer bodies that lingers throughout the social world. Attending to such threats and challenging them constitute defining elements in Black queer artists’ work. In each of the two parts to the book, the author examines how perceptions of the Black queer body in different environments create uncertainty for that body and make it a contested space because of racial and sexual meaning. Part 1 focuses on movement through public space (through streets and across borders) and on how state-backed interruptions seek to inhibit queer bodies. Part 2 explores movement through institutional spaces (prisons and hospitals), which seek to expose the queer body to make it vulnerable to control. Ultimately, the book insists that desire and artistic production function as means to queer freedom when actual policies and legislation fail to ensure civic rights and social mobility.

This book is a compilation of contemporary and previously unpublished scholarship on Black sexualities. The sixteen essays work to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic lenses that assess sexuality as it intersects with race. Some of the essays trace the historical and contemporary markets for sexual labor and systems of erotic capital. Other essays illuminate how forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation, which render black sexualities both desirable and deviant, also provide the spaces, networks, and relationships that have allowed black people to revise, recuperate, and re-articulate their sexual identities, erotic capital, and gender and sexual expressions and relations. The collection focuses on three themes linked by the major theory of black sexual economy: sex labor and race play; drag and hypersexual performance; and the erotics of life and death.

What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this question further still. How, it asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—it answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing the author to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

Why are there so few women in science? This book uses the experiences of successful women scientists and engineers to answer the question of why elite institutions have so few women scientists and engineers tenured on their faculties. Women are highly qualified, motivated students, and yet they have drastically higher rates of attrition, and they are shying away from the fields with the greatest demand for workers and the biggest economic payoffs, such as engineering, computer sciences, and the physical sciences. The book shows that these continuing trends are not only disappointing, they are urgent: the U.S. can no longer afford to lose the talents of the women scientists and engineers, because it is quickly losing its lead in science and technology. Ultimately, these biases and barriers may lock women out of the new scientific frontiers of innovation and technology transfer, resulting in loss of useful inventions and products to society.

How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how women navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world’s largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women’s groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm but by forcing them to become “capable”: to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury’s book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India but in large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent and incapacitated criminal justice systems.

Women’s agency: Is it a matter of an individual’s capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book investigates what exactly makes an agent and how that agency influences the ways women make inherently sensitive and difficult choices—specifically in instances of domestic violence, assisted reproduction, and sex work. In this book’s analysis, women’s agency emerges as an individual and social construct, rooted in concrete experience, complex and changing over time. It traces the development and deployment of agency, illustrating how it plays out in the messy workings of imperfect lives. In a series of case studies, it considers women within situations of intimate partner violence, reproductive decision making, and sex work such as prostitution and pornography. Each narrative offers insight into how women articulate their self-understanding and political needs in relation to the pressures they confront.

This book confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and criticizes dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. It does this through an investigation of oral histories, life narratives, web blogs, and other rich and varied sources. The book highlights the deep cultural anxiety that exists around public expressions of maternalism. It examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and asks why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women’s claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, the book details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. The book uses the interpretive framework of memory studies to examine the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. It describes the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, the book challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centred on a politics of care.

This book argues that the rampant hate-filled attacks against women online are best understood as patterned resistance to women’s political voice and visibility. This abuse and harassment coalesces into an often-unrecognized form of gender inequality that constrains women’s use of digital public spaces, much as the pervasive threat of sexual intimidation and violence constrain women’s freedom and comfort in physical public spaces. What’s more, the abuse exacerbates inequality among women, those from racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other minority groups, are disproportionately targeted. Drawing on in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of digital hate, Credible Threat shows that the onslaught of epithets and stereotypes, rape threats, and unsolicited commentary about their physical appearance and sexual desirability come at great professional, personal, and psychological costs for the women targeted—and also with underexplored societal level costs that demand attention. When effective, identity-based attacks undermine women’s contributions to public discourse, create a climate of self-censorship, and at times, push women out of digital publics altogether. Given the uneven distribution of toxicity, those women whose voices are already most underrepresented (e.g., women in male-dominated fields, those from historically undervalued groups) are particularly at risk. In the end, identity-based attacks online erode civil liberties, diminish public discourse, limit the knowledge we have to inform policy and electoral decision making, and teach all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided.

Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion. This book takes the reader onto the competition floor of ballroom dancing and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world's top competitors to social dancers, the book examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. It shows that, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

Argentinean tango is a global phenomenon. Never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism. Tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor. This book shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to the dancers as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. It shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South in which Argentinean tango is—and has always been—embroiled. The book also explores a sense of uneasiness about a passion for a dance whichseems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. The book uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. It concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the “elsewhere.”

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

Born into a poor Jewish family, folklorist Gershon Legman (1917-99) made an independent career for himself in the study of erotic literature and obscene folklore. The book is the first full biography of this major figure in twentieth-century folklore study. Drawing on unprecedented research in Legman’s papers, the author traces his working and personal life from the 1930s American landscape of underground publishing, through midcentury sex research, through to his recovery and publication, in the 1960 and 1970s, of suppressed and censored folklore texts. Gershon Legman expanded the study of folklore in a series of authoritative works on topics ranging from limericks, folk songs, and jokes to the history of erotica publishing. Legman’s work prefigured the history of sexuality and the body, while he used the language of folklore to create a romantic outsider’s vision of American culture freed from repression. The book places Legman in the censorship battles of his times, connecting him to other important thinkers on sex and to the expansion of folklore as an academic discipline in the twentieth century. As it weighs the effect of Legman’s long exile in France, the book describes the twentieth century’s narrowing intellectual space for marginal, contrarian thinkers.

Issues of social and spatial gendered justice have never been more pertinent in contemporary post-industrialist societies. This book which marks an intervention in contemporary debates about women’s bodies, public space and rape culture, in order to think through ways in which the normalization of violence against women might be contested. It brings together a rich web of thought about politics, embodiment and public space to examine social and spatial justice in the context of the female body in public. Transforming rape culture is not easy; the problems outlined in this book are not things that can be fixed by policy changes or legal reform (alone). They necessitate an overhaul in the ethics of the way in which we think and act in public spaces, including attending to the exclusions that everyone, in part, is complicit in enacting. Through analyses of three provocative case studies (pregnancy in public space, the female body as protest, and BDSM in public spaces), this book opens up generative ideas about transgression and revolt and advances a transformative politics of the possibilities of living without rape culture.

As new forms of family and ‘non-traditional’ families grow in number, there is a need for understanding of these “new” arrangements and models of parenthood. This ground-breaking book discusses, using a comparative and a sociological perspective, examples of the relationship between changing gender identities and processes of family formation in the Western experience: including asexual couples; childfree women and men; living apart together (LAT) couples; lone mothers and fathers; homosexual and trans parents. The book shows that, in the 21^st century, it is possible to live, love, form a family without sex, without children, without a shared home, without a partner, without a working husband, without a heterosexual orientation or without a “biological” sexual body. This unique book also discusses the political implications—in terms of social movements characteristics and demands—of these emerging dimensions of family life. Such changes are likely to be of interest for a wide range of educational and policy areas which impact on families, women, men, and children and the book will therefore be of interest to a wide readership.

In this book, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of “who does what” needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.