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Love Your Asian Body

AIDS Activism in Los Angeles

By Eric C. Wat

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s and radicalized a new generation of queer Asian Americans with a broad vision of health equity and sexual freedom. Even amid the...

Tradition and Triumph

Japanese Women Artists from the John Fong and Colin Johnstone Collection

By Andrew L. Maske. with a contribution by Patricia Fister

In pre-1900 Japan few women were encouraged to become professional artists and pursue art seriously. In some situations, male family members who recognized and supported the artistic talent of a female relative could arrange for...

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

Making Livable Worlds

Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice

By Hilda Lloréns

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple...

Single Mothers and the State’s Embrace

Reproductive Agency in Vietnam

By Harriet M. Phinney

In the mid-1980s, after the Indochina Wars, a shortage of men meant that many single women in Vietnam found themselves without suitable marital prospects. A number of these women chose to pursue single motherhood by...

Racial Erotics

Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire

By C. Winter Han

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within...

Arranged Companions

Marriage and Intimacy in Qing China

By Weijing Lu

Although commonly associated with patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages have adapted over the centuries to changing cultural norms and the lived experiences of men and women. In Arranged Companions, historian Weijing Lu chronicles how marital behaviors...

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

By Mytheli Sreenivas

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial...

The Borders of AIDS

Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

By Karma R. Chávez.

As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as...

The Empress in the Pepper Chamber

Zhao Feiyan in History and Fiction

By Olivia Milburn

Zhao Feiyan (45–1 BCE), the second empress appointed by Emperor Cheng of the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE), was born in slavery and trained in the performing arts, a background that made her appointment as...

Bad Dog

Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice

By Harlan Weaver

Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to...

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood

Afro-Indigeneity and Community

By Rain Prud'homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé, Andrew J. Jolivétte

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness...

Dancing Transnational Feminisms

Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice

By Ananya Chatterjea, Hui Niu Wilcox, Alessandra Lebea Williams, D. Soyini Madison

Through empowered movement that centers the lives, stories, and dreams of marginalized women, Ananya Dance Theatre has revealed how the practice of and commitment to artistic excellence can catalyze social justice. With each performance, this...

Divine, Demonic, and Disordered

Women without Men in Song Dynasty China

By Hsiao-wen Cheng

A variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused...

Nisei Radicals

The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake

By Diane C. Fujino

Demanding liberation, advocating for the oppressed, and organizing for justice, siblings Mitsuye Yamada (1923–) and Michael Yasutake (1920–2001) rebelled against respectability and assimilation, charting their own paths for what it means to be Nisei. Raised...

South Asian Filmscapes

Transregional Encounters

By Elora Halim Chowdhury, Esha Niyogi De

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947...

One Left

A Novel

By Kim Soom. Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Foreword by Bonnie Oh

During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in “comfort stations” across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to...

Awake in the River and Shedding Silence

By Janice Mirikitani. Foreword by Juliana Chang

Fierce, raw, and unapologetic, Janice Mirikitani’s poetry and prose are as vibrant and resonant today as when these two collections were first published in 1978 and 1987. Now back in print in one volume, Awake...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

A Fashionable Century

Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

By Rachel Silberstein

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an...