A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for May 11, 2024, is “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory,” a roundtable with Erique Zhang, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVele Ridley. The article appears in “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” a recent special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (10:3-4), edited by Abraham B. Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, and Jules Gill-Peterson.

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On November 12, 2022, a group of trans women and femme scholars of color held a roundtable session titled “For the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory” at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in Minneapolis. Organized by Erique Zhang and featuring Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley, the roundtable sought to intervene into the growing field of trans studies to carve out a space that centers, rather than marginalizes, trans femme of color perspectives and experiences. The panelists represent various academic traditions and disciplinary backgrounds: Black studies, Asian American studies, literary theory, performance studies, philosophy, women and gender studies, queer and trans studies, and media and communication studies.

In this written dialogue, the authors build on the initial roundtable discussion to articulate what a trans femme of color theory might look like, one that positions trans femmes of color not only as objects of study but also as producers of knowledge and subjects central to the field of trans studies. While there are numerous overlaps, the authors do not theorize in unison or reach a consensus on the topics discussed. These divergences reveal the individual and collective intellectual strengths of the contributions without rendering the differences and distinctions to be threatening or antagonistic. Furthermore, the multiplicity of the authors’ theorizations reflects their ongoing commitment to tethering theory with praxis to reflect the boundless embodied knowledge that characterizes trans of color communities.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly offers a high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives. It publishes interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship. Its mission is to foster a vigorous conversation among scholars, artists, activists, and others that examines how “transgender” comes into play as a category, a process, a social assemblage, an increasingly intelligible gender identity, an identifiable threat to gender normativity, and a rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Transnational Queer Materialism | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 27, 2024, is “Transnational Queer Materialism” by Rana M. Jaleel and Evren Savci. The article is the introduction to a recent special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited by the authors.

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The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, founded amid controversy in 1901, provides bold analyses of the current intellectual scene, both nationally and worldwide. Published exclusively in guest-edited special issues, this award-winning centenarian journal features some of the most prominent contemporary writers and scholars tackling urgent political, cultural, and social questions. Some issues grow out of current academic debates, concerning, for example, the growing power of finance, narratives of black leadership, and the politics of austerity.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Save on New Titles in Asian American Studies

We look forward to meeting authors, editors, and friends of the Press in person at the 2024 AAAS conference! Courtney Berger is joining you in Seattle, and you can find us in the exhibit hall. Browse books and journals in Asian American studies on our conference landing page. Or, check out our complete list in the field.

Use coupon code AAAS24 to save 40% on books and journal issues when you order on our website through June 7, 2024. Customers in the UK and Europe can order books with this code from our UK partner, Combined Academic Publishers.

Don’t miss the editors of our forthcoming BTS reader, Bangtan Remixed, who will be in the exhibit hall and around the conference. Show proof that you’ve preordered the volume and claim free swag (while supplies last)!

If you are looking to connect with any of our editors about your book project, see our editors’ specialties and contact information and our online submissions submission portal.

“If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous”: Sex Worker Community Defense | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 20, 2024, is “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” by Heather Berg. The article appears in “Feminists Confront State Violence” a recent issue of Radical History Review.

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Abstract
Refusing both sex workers’ state-produced vulnerability to violence and the state’s monopoly on protection, sex worker radicals articulate community defense as a practice of care. Grounded in interviews with thinkers of the sex worker Left and in sex workers’ cultural production, this article explores sex worker community defense with an eye to its relationship to past struggles and contributions to future ones. Chief among those is the abolitionist struggle for a world beyond prisons and policing. Sex worker abolitionists identify a tension between a vision of transformative justice that rejects violence and the understanding that transformation might not come without injury to those who do violence on behalf of the state. Sex worker abolitionists seek resources for navigating this tactical ambivalence in Black radical, decolonial, and queer and feminist traditions. Many wonder if building new worlds will require a transitional program of militant community defense, even retribution.

For more than forty-five years, Radical History Review has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians with diverse backgrounds, research interests, and professional perspectives. Articles in RHR address issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non-Western histories. RHR includes sections devoted to public history and the art of teaching as well as reviews of a wide range of media—from books to television and from websites to museum exhibitions—thus celebrating the vast potential for historical learning in the twenty-first century.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Save on New Titles in Geography

We look forward to celebrating authors, editors, and friends of the Press virtually at the AAG 2024 annual conference. Browse books and journals in geography on our conference landing page. Or, check out our complete list of geography titles.

Use coupon code AAG24 to save 40% on books and journal issues when you order on our website through June 2, 2024. Customers in the UK and Europe can order books with this code from our UK partner, Combined Academic Publishers.

The 2024 Association of American Geographers conference features Black Geographies as a curated track, and Duke Press is proud to celebrate work in this transformative subfield. Don’t miss the author meets readers session on Celeste Winston’s book How to Lose the Hounds at 9:00am on April 18.

If you are looking to connect with any of our editors about your book project, see our editors’ specialties and contact information and our online submissions submission portal.

Smallpox and the Choctaw Civil War | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 13, 2024, is “Smallpox and the Choctaw Civil War” by Matthew J. Sparacio. The article appears in “Indigenous Responses to Disease: Ethnohistory Inspired by COVID” a recent issue of Ethnohistory.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
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Abstract
The presence of chilakwa (smallpox) in Choctaw villages between 1747 and 1748 complicated factionalism and civil war. Utilizing Sharla Fett’s approach to health culture—defined as “the social relations of healing”—this article outlines how eighteenth-century Choctaws arrived at acceptable contingency plans when faced with illness and argues that community responses to smallpox helped ease factional tensions. Iksa (moiety) obligations for funeral rites—embodying the notion of iyyi kowa (generosity)—bridged political differences, accounting for a period of collaboration between groups best understood as the “smallpox peace.” Smallpox, therefore, surprisingly did not immediately contribute to political instability, although its indirect consequences proved significant during later stages of the civil war. Choctaw health culture informed individual and communal responses to chilakwa, which in turn shaped Choctaw factionalism.

Ethnohistory, the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory, reflects the wide range of current scholarship inspired by anthropological and historical approaches to the human condition around the world, but with a particular emphasis on the Americas. Of particular interest are those analyses and interpretations that seek to make evident the experiences, organizations, and identities of indigenous, diasporic, and minority peoples that otherwise elude the histories and anthropologies of nations, states, and colonial empires. The journal welcomes a theoretical and cross-cultural discussion of ethnohistorical materials and publishes work from the disciplines of art history, geography, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and history, among others.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Save on New Titles in US History

We’re joining you for the 2024 Organization for American Historians conference! Alejandra Mejia is joining you in New Orleans. Browse books and journals in US history in the exhibit hall at booth lite 1, or on our conference landing page. Or, check out our complete list of US history titles.

Use coupon code OAH24 to save 40% on books and journal issues when you order on our website through May 28, 2024. Customers in the UK and Europe can order books with this code from our UK partner, Combined Academic Publishers.

If you are looking to connect with any of our editors about your book project, see our editors’ specialties and contact information and our online submissions submission portal.

POEM OF THE WEEK

In continued celebration of National Poetry Month we are featuring a weekly poem on the blog. This week, a poem by Yokota Hiroshi, and a corresponding research article by Andrew Campana, published in positions: asia critique, volume 30, issue 4.

Hieru kokoro 冷える心 (Cold Heart)

“Today was so nice out
I could see Mt. Fuji, clear as day”
said my aunt, who just came back from an outing
“Oh, it’s not just today!
You can see it all the time around the end of fall.”
It was in the mid-afternoon
with a late November chill
I do not know the real Fuji
so when someone says Fuji
the prints of Hokusai are what immediately come to mind
but in my head
even though there’s Fuji through Hokusai’s careful eye
there is no form left to its own nature
even though there’s the beauty of his deformed ridges
there is no joy in following smooth slopes with a naked eye
and I
came to believe that was the real thing
convinced that this was the real Fuji
my heart
is always full
of these deformed things

“I want to climb Mt. Fuji, even just once”
said my cousin
me too even just once
I think I want to see the real Mt. Fuji
I think I want to know the real world

Further Reading:

“You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi’s Disability Poetics” by Andrew Campana.

This article, published in positions: asia critique and made freely available through May 31, explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan’s disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and “able‐bodiedness” itself.

Adorno’s “Urbanism and Societal Order” and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949 | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 30, 2024, is “Adorno’s ‘Urbanism and Societal Order’ and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949” by Lynnette Widder. The article appears in the recent “Visual Culture Issue” of New German Critique.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
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Less than a month after his return to Frankfurt in the winter of 1949, Theodor Adorno gave a lecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt at the invitation of the urban designer Karl Gruber. Titled “Urbanism and Societal Order,” the lecture is noteworthy as one of the very few Adorno texts that addresses architecture. It might be considered a minor text if not for the fact that each issue Adorno raised in it has a corollary in the early postwar practice and discourse of architecture in West Germany. The qualities of urban beauty, the legitimacy of historical and historicizing urban fabric, the nature of housing worthy of a free citizenry, the importance of self-determinacy and participation in the planning of cities: these are among the topics that Adorno’s text interrogates. Each consideration is discussed relative to specific contemporaneous texts, debates, and projects by the architects who ultimately rebuilt West Germany’s cities.

Widely considered the leading journal in its field, New German Critique is an interdisciplinary periodical that focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German studies and publishes articles on a wide array of subjects, including literature, mass culture, film, and other visual media; literary theory and cultural studies; Holocaust studies; art and architecture; political and social theory; and intellectual history and philosophy. Established in the early 1970s, the journal has played a significant role in introducing US readers to the Frankfurt School and remains an important forum for debate in the humanities and the social sciences.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 23, 2024, is “Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop” by Sandra Kurfürst. The article appears in “the good life in late-socialist asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities” a recent issue of positions: asia critique.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
Buy this special issue and use coupon code SAVE30 for a 30% discount.

Abstract
Rap and hip-hop’s diverse dance styles have been practiced in Vietnam since the 1990s, shortly after the country’s integration into the world economy. What started out as a sphere of popular culture dominated by men was soon appropriated by female artists. The female rapper Suboi, Vietnam’s “Queen of Rap,” is internationally renowned, and more and more young women are engaging in dancing on the streets. This article investigates the aspirations of female hip-hop practitioners in Vietnam’s major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. What does leading the good life mean to them, and how do they navigate the ambiguous moral landscape coproduced by authoritarianism and liberalism? Drawing on Aihwa Ong’s (2008) concept of self-fashioning and AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2019) practices of crafting, harvesting, and detachment, this article examines how young women use hip-hop as a creative device to achieve personal freedom and make a career for themselves. Carving out spaces for themselves in the male-dominated rap industry and dance community, they negotiate existing gender norms in both the music genre and Vietnam’s urban society.

Offering a fresh approach to Asia scholarship, positions develops theoretical, philosophical, historical, and critical approaches in a forum open to debate. In expansive scholarly articles, commentaries, poetry, visual art, and political and philosophical debates, contributors consider a broad variety of pressing questions. Thematic issues tackle new, sometimes pathbreaking areas of concern (or traditional areas from a fresh vantage point) and are interspersed with general issues offering scholarship that calls our scholarly assumptions into question and expands our various archives. The breadth and pace of the journal ensure that readers seeking to add “Asia” to their areas of critical competency are included in our debates, challenged and informed.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.