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Object Lessons: How to Do Things With Fetishism,
by E.L. McCallum
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Object Lessons begins with the question, What can fetishism
teach us? One answer, as this book makes clear, is that fetishism is a
form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies
of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western
culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together
peculiarly modern anxieties—especially those about sexuality,
gender, belief, and knowledge—fetishism reveals how our basic
categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and
mutually exclusive terms. By foregrounding concerns about sexual
differences in examining fetishism's unique intersection of desire and
knowledge, Object Lessons seizes on the promises fetishism
offers to those who want to call into question the resurgence of
conservative and even reactionary drives to lock down absolute
definitions of sexual differences through either biological or
cultural essentialism.
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Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood,
by Carl P. Eby
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Demonstrates in painstaking detail and with reference to stunning
new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction
and negotiation of identity and gender in Hemingway's life and
fiction.
Critics have long acknowledged Hemingway's lifelong erotic obsession with hair, but this book is the first to explain in a theoretically coherent manner why Hemingway was a fetishist and why we should care. Without reducing Hemingway's art to his psychosexuality, Eby demonstrates that when the fetish appears in Hemingway's fiction, it always does so with a retinue of attendant fantasies, themes, and symbols that are among the most prominent and important in Hemingway's work.
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Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities,
by Robin Patric Clair
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Organizing Silence is a thought-provoking look at how silence
is embedded in our language, society, and institutions. It provides an
overview of the varied philosophical approaches to understanding the
role of silence and communication. One particular view of
silence/communication, as grounded in political and patriarchal
frameworks, is given special attention. The author questions now only
how dominant groups silence marginalized members of society, but also
how marginalized groups privilege and abandon each other. Sexual
harassment is given as an example of material and discursive practices
that articulate both a micro and macro level of silence, and accounts
of both women and men who have been sexually harassed are
provided. The book provides an alternative aesthetic perspective as a
way of understanding the realities we create, encouraging alternative
ways to listen to the silence, and presenting novel possibilities for
future research.
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Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women's Travel in American Literature,
by Marilyn C. Wesley
- Travel is the root metaphor for Western progress, a fact
particularly evident in a colonizing and immigrant nation like the
United States. Despite changing historical circumstances from one
American epoch to another, men have generally been associated with
adventurous movement and women with domestic stasis, a bias that has
obscured recognition of a significant trope: the woman traveler
throughout American literature.
Secret Journeys examines the subversive and constructive narrative of female journey from the seventeenth century to the present in such works as John Greenleaf Whittier's Snowbound, Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Edith Wharton's Summer, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Eudora Welty's short fiction, and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. In recognizing the figure of the woman traveler, Wesley produces new readings of canonical texts that subvert social and political assumptions in texts by men and construct alternative arrangements in texts by women.
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Eating Culture,
Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, editors
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Explores the relationship between eating and culture from a variety
of perspectives, including anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender
studies, race studies, architecture, and AIDS discourse.
Eating has never been simple, and contemporary eating practices seem more complicated than ever, demanding a multidimensional analysis that strives not for a reductive overview but for a complex understanding. Eating Culture offers a number of diverse outlooks on some of the prominent practices and issues associated with the domain of eating.
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Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change,
by Nah Dove
- This book highlights the integrity of some Afrikan mothers who,
under European domination within the United States and the United
Kingdom, have used their own experience as a foundation for
understanding the impact of cultural imposition on their children's
lives. Most of these mothers have chosen to place their children in
school environments that will educate their children about their
cultural roots, in order that their cultural memory and knowledge of
Afrikan people will be handed down intergenerationally. This book
looks sensitively at the herstories of women who are undergoing their
own process of transformation and offers insights into the historical
and continuing struggle of Afrikan people as a cultural entity living
within European-oriented societies.
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Sport and Postmodern Times,
Geneviéve Rail, editor
- This book provides critical insight into the questions of race, gender, sexuality, and locality in sport and society. Topics discussed include postmodern sport writing; sport and the postmodern deconstruction of gender and sexuality; virtual sport and the postmodern mediascape; discipline, normalization, rationalization, surveillance, panopticism, and other forms of power used to "invest" postmodern sporting bodies; and new perspectives on sport and physical culture, consumer culture, and postmodern geography.
