Transporting the reader to worlds in which Komodo dragons prey on menstruating women, artists prowl the streets of Spain in blood-stained pants, and the myths of women bleeding in synchrony with each other are drawn and redrawn, these eleven essays on menstruation and resistance evoke thought-provoking tensions between silence and confrontation, shame and rebellion, and compliance and disobedience. Fusing together gender and feminist theory, critical body studies, political activism, and menstrual anarchy, Breanne Fahs illuminates the troubling omissions of menstrual coming-of-age narratives...

The last decade has witnessed a global explosion of immigrant protests, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This volume considers the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship and borders. Scholars, visual and performance artists, and activists explore the ways in which political activism, art, and popular culture can work to challenge the multiple forms of discrimination and injustice faced by "illegal" and displaced peoples. They focus on a wide range of topics, including desire and neo-colonial violence in film,...

The writing and performance of spoken word poetry can create moments of productive critical engagement. In The Fifth Element, Crystal Leigh Endsley charts her experience of working with a dynamic and diverse group of college students, who are also emerging artists, to explore the connection between spoken word and social responsibility. She considers how themes of activism, identity, and love intersect with the lived experiences of these students and how they use spoken word to negotiate resistance and to navigate through life. Endsley also examines the local and transnational...

Rooted in the initial struggle of community members who staged a successful hunger strike to secure a high school in their Chicago neighborhood, David Omotoso Stovall's Born Out of Struggle focuses on his first-hand participation in the process to help design the school. Offering important lessons about how to remain accountable to communities while designing a curriculum with a social justice agenda, Stovall explores the use of critical race theory to encourage its practitioners to spend less time with abstract theories and engage more with communities that make a concerted effort to...

Rooted in the initial struggle of community members who staged a successful hunger strike to secure a high school in their Chicago neighborhood, David Omotoso Stovall's Born Out of Struggle focuses on his first-hand participation in the process to help design the school. Offering important lessons about how to remain accountable to communities while designing a curriculum with a social justice agenda, Stovall explores the use of critical race theory to encourage its practitioners to spend less time with abstract theories and engage more with communities that make a concerted effort to...

From the events of May 1968 to the Arab Spring and Occupy, we have seen social movements develop spontaneously around the globe propelling thousands and, at times, millions of people into the streets to demand an end to oppression.

"In order to make sense of such events, the authors draw on George Katsiaficas's conception of the 'eros effect, ' which picks up and takes off from concepts developed by Herbert Marcuse. This effect describes moments in which the instinctual human need for justice and freedom undergoes a massive spontaneous awakening. Drawing on Marcuse, the concept...