Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, contending that black feminists should let go of their possession and policing of the concept in order to better unleash black feminist theory's visionary and world-making possibilities.

Clare Hemmings examines the significance of the anarchist activist and thinker Emma Goldman for contemporary feminist politics, showing how the contradictory and ambivalent aspects of Goldman's thought for feminism can be used to open new avenues for theorizing gender, sexuality, and race.

Caren Kaplan traces the cultural history of aerial imagery—from the first vistas provided by balloons in the eighteenth century to the sensing operations of military drones—to show how aerial imagery is key to modern visual culture and can both enforce military power and foster positive political connections.

In this tenth anniversary expanded edition of Jasbir K. Puar’s pathbreaking book—which features a new preface by Tavia Nyong’o and a new postscript by the author—Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism.

Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism, under which everyday life is militarized, humanitarianism serves imperial aims, and white Christian men become exceptional citizens tasked with protecting the nation from racialized others.

Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war, in which new forms of wounding necessitate the continual development of treatment and prosthetic technologies while the military justifies violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge.

Attiya Ahmad examines the practice of conversion to Islam by South Asian migrant domestic workers in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region and how these women's conversions stem from an ongoing process rooted in their everyday experiences as migrant workers rather than a clean break from their preexisting lives.

In Sexual States Jyoti Puri uses the example of the recent efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the Indian state.

Elizabeth A. Wilson shakes feminist theory from its resistance to biological and pharmaceutical data and urges that now is the time for feminism to critically engage with biology. Doing so will reanimate feminist theory, strengthening its ability to address depression, affect, gender, and feminist politics.

An ethnography of women in the city of Mumbai who look for work at nakas, street corners where day laborers congregate and wait to be hired for construction jobs. Often chosen last, after male workers, or not at all, some women turn to sex work in order to make money, at the nakas, on the street, or in brothels. Svati P. Shah argues that sex work should be seen in relation to other structural inequities affecting these women’s lives, such as threats from the police and lack of access to clean water.

In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma

Securing Paradise analyzes how cultures of U.S. imperialism are produced and sustained in Asia and the Pacific, particularly in Hawaii and the Philippines, by the mutually reinforcing dynamics of tourism and militarism.

Revisiting the rhetoric about and from within the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Victoria Hesford argues that contemporary accounts of the movement obscure its diversity.

In this long-awaited work, the queer theorist Annamarie Jagose demonstrates that attention to orgasm as an object of queer and feminist thought reveals much about gender, agency, history, and modernity.

Mimi Thi Nguyen examines the self-interested claims of the United States to provide freedom to others, even as it does so by generating violence and displacement through overpowering warfare.

This work starts with a substantial historical account of the different ways that freedom, race and gender were intertwined in Jamaica and Haiti after the end of slavery. Newly free men and women were rebound into a racialized class order with acceptable and unacceptable forms of masculinity and femininity. Sheller traces these histories of racialized and sexualized forms of freedom to the present.

Chandra explores how English became an Indian language during the colonial period of 1850-1930. Using archival and literary sources, she focuses on elite language education for girls and women.

A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, Robyn Wiegman turns her attention in Object Lessons to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. In a series of case studies drawn from womens studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, she examines the unspoken belief that better theory will produce progressive social change in order to consider the political desire that fuels current scholarly debate. Her metacritical analysis is neither a defense nor a dismissal of such political commitment but a sustained inquiry into the hope it generates, the thinking it inspires, and the conformity it inadvertently demands.

Scrutinizes spectacular rhetoric, the use of visual images and imagery to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners.

A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory.

Interpreting South Asian and diasporic texts, Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization.

By examining how Indians formulated notions of citizenship across the British empire from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, Sujatha Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled from the rights-conferring nation-state.

A study of the colonial state's imposition of regimes of sexuality, as seen through archives of law, literature and pornography.

A collection that examines the global phenomenon of the Modern Girl that emerged in the 1920s and 30s.

A preeminent science studies scholar shows how feminist and postcolonial science studies challenge the problematic modernity versus tradition binary.

A critical analysis of contemporary racial and sexual politics involved in post-9/11 laws and culture, where practices of liberal tolerance and the inclusion of gay, lesbian, homosexual, and queer subjects into the nation-state have developed into a type

Antoinette Burton uses a mid-twentieth-century Indian-American authors career to analyze broader issues of postwar Americas understanding of itself and the wider world.

The story of how the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves has been adapted and reworked by women of different cultures around the world.

Examines how notions of femininity and masculinity and heterosexual norms produced ethnicity in the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and also looks at how words and images created by the media are just as influential as violent practices in constructin

Essays by a leading post-colonial theorist on topics including gender, diaspora, film and Israel.

A study of the changes in women’s roles in postcommunist Bulgarian society and the workplace, focusing on the tourism industry.

A study of South Asian Americans which views both their identity and that of America as constructed transnationally between the U.S. and India.

Essays on the relationship between temporatlity and feminism that focus on the political and philosophical ramifications of being future oriented.

A history of women's political organizing and state formation in Mexico before and during the populist regime of Cardenas, challenging assumptions that all Mexican women were conservative and anti-revolutionary.

The author analyzes punishment as a way to explore the dynamic of state formation in a colonial society making the transition from slavery to freedom.

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

Barlow documents the history of “woman” as a category in twentieth century Chinese history, tracing the question of gender through various phases in the literary career of Ding Ling, a major modern Chinese writer.

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

An interdisciplinary examination of debates surrounding the figure of the child in transnational politics and culture.

The future of a retheorized women's studies in an increasingly institutionalized context.

Analyzes differences between men's and women's participation in Chile's Agrarian Reform movement, examining how conflicts over gender shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics.

Argues against the use of male/female gender categories to characterize public and domestic life.