2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Despite All Adversities examines a representative selection of notable queer films by Spanish America's most important directors since the 1950s. Each chapter focuses on a single film and offers rich and thoughtful new interpretations by a prominent scholar. The book explores films from across the region, including Tomas Gutierrez Alea's and Juan Carlos Tabio's Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Marcelo Pineyro's Plata quemada (Burnt Money, 2000), Barbet Schroeder's La Virgen de los...

Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women's lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities.

This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world's Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization,...

The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jauregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European "coming out" narrative--and interrogates the centrality of the "coming out" story as the regulating metaphor for gay, lesbian, or queer identities. In its place, the book looks at other strategies--from silence to circumlocution, from disavowal to indifference--to theorize queer subject formation in a Latino American cultural context. The analysis...

Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women's lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities.