Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labor and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile s latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. Heidi Tinsman analyzes differences between men s and women s participation in Chile s Agrarian Reform movement and considers how conflicts over gender and sexuality shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics.
Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men,...

Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labor and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile s latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. Heidi Tinsman analyzes differences between men s and women s participation in Chile s Agrarian Reform movement and considers how conflicts over gender and sexuality shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics.
Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men,...

Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In" Figurations, " Claudia Castaneda shows how this malleability is itself generated--how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a remarkable map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of...

A major postcolonial feminist theorist explores the gendered nature of citizenship and the state.

"The Scandal of the State" is a revealing study of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women's actual needs and lives. Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women's identities and how, reciprocally, women and "women's issues" affect the state's role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the...

A theory-driven study of the invisibility of lesbians in post-WW2 American culture.

With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film "Sylvia Scarlett" was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she...

The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary...

An interpretive history of the way competing ideas of reproduction as a biological and sexual process became central to the organization of knowledge about the flow of capital, labor power, human bodies, and babies both within nations and across national

"Wayward Reproductions" breaks apart and transfigures prevailing understandings of the interconnection among ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. Alys Eve Weinbaum demonstrates how these ideologies were founded in large part on what she calls "the race/reproduction bind"--the notion that race is something that is biologically reproduced. In revealing the centrality of ideas about women's reproductive capacity to modernity's intellectual foundations, Weinbaum highlights the role that these ideas have played in naturalizing oppression. She argues that attention to how the...