SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory

The post-2016 election era in the United States is commonly presumed to be an era of crisis. Reclaiming Time argues that the narratives used to make this crisis a meaningful national story (e.g., Hillbilly Elegy, Strangers in Their Own Land) are not only gendered and racialized but also give a thin account of time, one so superficial as to make the future unimaginable. Examining the work of feminist theorists, performance artists, writers, and activists-from Octavia Butler and Jesmyn Ward to the Combahee River Collective and Congresswoman Maxine Waters-Tanya Ann Kennedy shows how their work disturbs dominant temporal frames; rearticulates the relations between past, present, and future; and offers models for "doing" the future as reparation. Reclaiming Time thus builds on while also critiquing feminist literary critical practices of reparative reading. Kennedy further aligns the method of reparative reading with the theories and aims of reparative justice, making the case for more fully engaging with social movement activism.

Argues that expectations for mothering include a new core principle of "body work." The requirements of "good" motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers' contributions both at home and in professional contexts. O'Brien Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers' revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance.

First book to study rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War. Rape has long been a part of war, and recent conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur demonstrate that it may be becoming an even more integral strategy of modern warfare. In contrast to the media attention to sexual violence against women in these recent conflicts, however, the incidence and consequences of rape in the Vietnam War have been largely overlooked. Using testimony, oral accounts, literature, and film, Ideologies of Forgetting focuses on the rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam war, and argues that the erasure and elision of these practices of sexual violence in the U.S. popular imagination perpetuates the violent masculinity central to contemporary U.S. military culture. Gina Marie Weaver claims that recognition of this violence is important not just for an accurate historical record, but also to truly understand the Vietnam veteran's trauma, which often stems from his aggression rather than his victimization.

Deconstructs fiction and nonfiction to further understandings of how aging and old age are created. In lively, accessible prose, this book expands the reach and depth of age studies. A review of age studies methods in theory, literature, and practice leads readers to see how their own intersectional identities shape their beliefs about age, aging, and old age. This study asks readers to interrogate the "texts" of menopause, self-help books on aging, and foundational age studies works. In addition to the study of these nonfiction texts, the poetry and prose of Doris Lessing, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Erdrich serve as vehicles for exploring how age relations work, including how they invoke readers into kinships of reciprocal care as othermothers, otherdaughters, and otherelders. The literary chapters examine how gifted storytellers provide enactments, portrayals, and metaphorical uses of age to create transformative potential.

Examines how postfeminism and postracialism intersect to perpetuate systemic injustice in the United States. Historicizing Post-Discourses explores how postfeminism and postracialism intersect in dominant narratives of triumphalism, white male crisis, neoliberal and colonial feminism, and multiculturalism to perpetuate systemic injustice in America. By examining various locations within popular culture, including television shows such as Mad Men and The Wire; books such as The Help and Lean In; as well as Hollywood films, fan forums, political blogs, and presidential speeches, Tanya Ann Kennedy demonstrates the dominance of postfeminism and postracialism in US culture. In addition, she shows how post-discourses create affective communities through their engineering of the history of both race and gender justice. Tanya Ann Kennedy is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Maine at Farmington and the author of "Keeping Up Her Geography": Women's Writing and Geocultural Space in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture.

Provides encyclopedic coverage of female sexuality in 1940s popular culture. Popular culture in the 1940s is organized as patriarchal theater. Men gaze upon, evaluate, and coerce women, who are obliged in their turn to put themselves on sexual display. In such a thoroughly patriarchal society, what happens to female sexual desire? Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies unearths this female desire by conducting a panoramic survey of 1940s culture that analyzes popular novels, daytime radio serials, magazines and magazine fiction, marital textbooks, Hollywood and educational films, jungle comics, and popular music. In addition to popular works, Steven Dillon discusses many lesser-known texts and artists, including Ella Mae Morse, a key figure in the founding of Capitol Records, and Lisa Ben, creator of the first lesbian magazine in the United States.

From Blues to Beyoncé amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women's sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.

Reveals the rhetorical strategies African American writers have used to promote Black women's recovery and wellness through educational and entertainment genres and the conservative gender politics that are distributed when these efforts are sold for public consumption. Since the Black women's literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and expansive market of self-help books, inspirational literature, family-friendly plays, and films marketed to Black women has emerged. Through messages of hope and responsibility, the writers of these texts develop templates that tap into legacies of literacy as activism, preaching techniques, and narrative formulas to teach strategies for overcoming personal traumas or dilemmas and resuming one's quality of life Drawing upon Black vernacular culture as well as scholarship in rhetorical theory, literacy studies, Black feminism, literary theory, and cultural studies, Tamika L. Carey deftly traces discourses on healing within the writings and teachings of such figures as Oprah Winfrey, Iyanla Vanzant, T. D. Jakes, and Tyler Perry, revealing the arguments and curricula they rely on to engage Black women and guide them to an idealized conception of wellness. As Carey demonstrates, Black women's wellness campaigns indicate how African Americans use rhetorical education to solve social problems within their communities and the complex gender politics that are mass-produced when these efforts are commercialized.

First book on gender and academic service. All tenured and tenure-track faculty know the trinity of promotion and tenure criteria: research, teaching, and service. While teaching and research are relatively well defined areas of institutional focus and evaluation, service work is rarely tabulated or analyzed as a key aspect of higher education's political economy. Instead, service, silent and invisible, coexists with the formal "official" economy of many institutions, just as women's unrecognized domestic labor props up the formal, official economies of countries the world over. Over Ten Million Served explores what academic service is and investigates why this labor is often not acknowledged as "labor" by administrators or even by faculty themselves, but is instead relegated to a gendered form of institutional caregiving. By analyzing the actual labor of service, particularly for women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, contributors expose the hidden economy of institutional service, challenging the feminization of service labor in the academy for both female and male academic laborers. Michelle A. Massé is Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Katie J. Hogan is Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Carlow University. She is the author of Women Take Care: Gender, Race, and the Culture of AIDS and coeditor (with Nancy L. Roth) of Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS.

Addresses the absence of Jewish subjects in intersectionality studies and demonstrates how to do intersectionality work inclusive of Jewish perspectives. Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality explores a range of opportunities to apply and build intersectionality studies from within the life and work of Jewish feminism in the United States today. Marla Brettschneider builds on the best of what has been done in the field and offers a constructive internal critique. Working from a nonidentitarian paradigm, Brettschneider uses a Jewish critical lens to discuss the ways different politically salient identity signifiers cocreate and mutually constitute each other. She also includes analyses of matters of import in queer, critical race, and class-based feminist studies. This book is designed to demonstrate a range of ways that Jewish feminist work can operate with the full breadth of what intersectionality studies has to offer.

Looks at how violent women characters disrupt cinematic narrative and challenge cultural ideals. In The Violent Woman, Hilary Neroni brings psychoanalytically informed film theory to bear on issues of femininity, violence, and narrative in contemporary American cinema. Examining such films as Thelma and Louise, Fargo, Natural Born Killers, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Neroni explores why American audiences are so fascinated-even excited-by cinematic representations of violent women, and what these representations reveal about violence in our society and our cinema. Neroni argues that violent women characters disrupt cinematic narrative and challenge cultural ideals, suggesting how difficult it is for Hollywood-the greatest of ideology machines-to integrate the violent woman into its typical narrative structure.

New directions in thinking about mothering. Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse brings together essays that focus on mothering as an intelligent practice, deliberately reinvented and rearticulated by mothers themselves. The contributors to this watershed volume focus on subjects ranging from mothers in children's picture books and mothers writing blogs to global maternal activism and mothers raising gay sons. Distinguishing itself from much writing about motherhood today, Mothers Who Deliver focuses on forward-looking arguments and new forms of knowledge about the practice of mothering instead of remaining solely within the realm of critique. Together, the essays create a compelling argument about the possibilities of empowered mothering. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Pegeen Reichert Powell is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago.

Argues that institutional change must accommodate women's professional and personal life stages. Staging Women's Lives in Academia demonstrates how ostensibly personal decisions are shaped by institutions and advocates for ways that workplaces, not women, must be changed. Addressing life stages ranging from graduate school through retirement, these essays represent a gamut of institutions and women who draw upon both personal experience and scholarly expertise. The contributors contemplate the slipperiness of the very categories we construct to explain the stages of life and ask key questions, such as what does it mean to be a graduate student at fifty? Or a full professor at thirty-five? The book explores the ways women in all stages of academia feel that they are always too young or too old, too attentive to work or too overly focused on family. By including the voices of those who leave, as well as those who stay, this collection signals the need to rebuild the house of academia so that women can have not only classrooms of their own but also lives of their own. Michelle A. Massé is Dean of the Graduate School, Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University, and President of the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages. She is the coeditor (with Katie J. Hogan) of Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces, also published by SUNY Press. Now retired, Nan Bauer-Maglin was Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and Academic Director of the City University of New York Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. Her books include Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make (coedited with Donna Perry).

Follows a Black woman's 40-year career in academia, sharing how race and gender can disrupt and enhance the professional and the personal, from leadership and policies to family life.

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps. Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings- sometimes quite transgressive meanings-in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment. Andrea L. Press is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her books include The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (coedited with Tasha Oren). Francesca Tripodi is Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science and Senior Researcher at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Provides a contemporary response to such landmark volumes as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave and This Bridge Called My Back. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. Given the growth of women's and gender studies in the last thirty-plus years, this updated and responsive collection expands upon this transformation of consciousness through multiracial feminist perspectives. The contributors here reflect on transnational issues as diverse as intimate partner violence, the prison industrial complex, social media, inclusive pedagogies, transgender identities, and (post) digital futures. This volume provides scholars, activists, and students with critical tools that can help them decenter whiteness and other power structures while repositioning marginalized groups at the center of analysis.