Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system that is entrenched in and reinforces racial capitalism and patriarchy.

Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives about traveling for gender reassignment from 1952 to the present, showing how transgender fantasies about reinvention and mobility are racialized as white and often rely on violent colonial global divisions.

Gayatri Gopinath traces the interrelation of affect, aesthetics, and diaspora through an exploration of a wide range of contemporary queer visual cultural forms by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza.

Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production—from the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art"— to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life.

In Metroimperial Intimacies Victor Román Mendoza shows how America's imperial incursions into the Philippines fostered social and sexual intimacies between Americans and native Filipinos, that along with representations of Filipinos as sexually degenerate, were crucial to regulating both colonial subjects and gender norms at home.

Gil Z. Hochberg examines films, photography, painting and literature by Israeli and Palestinian artists. Israel's greater ability to control what can be seen, how, and from what position drives the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The artists Hochberg studies challenge Israel's visual and social dominance by creating new ways to see the conflict.

Examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces.

In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.

Rather than using displays of masculinity to counter portrayals of Asian American men as passive and effeminate, Nguyen Tan Hoang develops a concept of bottomhood that opens up political alliances based on risk, vulnerability, and receptiveness.

Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela.

Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.

A historical and ethnographic account of how LGBT activism for safe neighborhoods inadvertently dovetailed with and reinforced anticrime measures harmful to the poor and people of color.

Mel Y. Chen draws on studies of sexuality, race, and affect to consider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise "wrong," animates cultural life in important ways.

Explores the relationship between race, knowledge, and violence that underpins U.S. modernity.

A collection of essays analyzing the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or strange affinities, afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations.

An ethnography of sexual identity formation in contemporary Cuba.

By foregrounding bodily pleasure in the experience of time and its representation in queer literature, film, video, and art, Elizabeth Freeman challenges queer theorys recent emphasis on loss and trauma.

An analysis of self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison.

Christina Sharpe interprets Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that grapple with the sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation, and their present-day legacies.

This exploration of the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers reveals in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women.

Through an analysis of filmic representations of Black femininity, and the Black Femme in particular, this book highlights the ways "the cinematic" structures both racist and sexist portrayals, and their potential undoing.

An ethnography of gender, sexuality, and consumption in post-socialist China.

A comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in Taiwan and the United States, as well as in immigrant Asian American writing.

Argues for the centrality of theater and performance in the American national imaginary.

Argues for the uses of queer, feminist transnational theory in order to understanding South Asian and South Asian diasporic identities and cultural production.

A collection of essays by Alexander addressing the implications of transnational thinking for our understanding of gender, sex, sexuality, and race.

A psychoanalytic study that argues for the centrality of sexuality in the construction of Asian-American identity, and of racial identity in general.