Washington University Press Search Results Page

India's Mithila Painting

By David L. Szanton, Paula Richman

A woman's art form transforms from home to high art

Since at least the fifteenth century, Hindu women in the Mithila region of northern India have been painting images of deities, flora and fauna symbolizing fertility...

Waves of Belonging

Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup

By Lydia Heberling, David Kamper, Jess Ponting

Showcases surfing as a site of social belonging and power formation

The surf zone—the place between ocean and shore—offers a powerful space to reflect on the dynamic contemporary politics of our worlds. Surfing always occurs on...

Caring for Caregivers

Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis

By Valerie Francisco-Menchavez

A transformative look at the lives of Filipina care workers and their mutual aid practices

Migrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their own health to provide care in facilities and private homes throughout...

Refusing Settler Domesticity

Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program

By Caitlin Keliiaa

Traces young Native women’s lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workers

In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor...

Good Wife, Wise Mother

Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule

By Fang Yu Hu

Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices

In Good Wife, Wise Mother, female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and...

From Forest Farm to Sawmill

Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State 

By Shuxuan Zhou

A worker-centered, woman-centered history of China's economic transformation

Socialist China’s state forestry and timber industries employed men as state workers and women as family dependents and collective workers who, beginning in the 1950s, turned rural land...

Botany of Empire

Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

By Banu Subramaniam

An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields...

Oregon's Others

Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century

By Kimberly Jensen

Nativism, pseudoscience, and the campaign against the enemy within

In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed...

Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence

By Sally L. Kitch, Dawn R. Gilpin

Highlights the role of creative expression in exposing, preventing, and combatting sexual violence

Since 2017 the #MeToo movement has expanded cultural awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual assault and tacit support for rape culture in the...

Queer World Making

Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

By Andrew Gayed

An abundantly illustrated look at how queerness is performed within artistic practice

Premodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality....

Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

By Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield

Unapologetically brings gay rodeo out of the closet

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and...

Queer Data Studies

By Patrick Keilty

Untangles how data shapes and is shaped by queer worlds

Data, perilous and powerful, is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. The collection of data about queer lives and bodies, the consequences of data analysis...

Hacking the Underground

Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System

By Raquel Velho

Reveals how knowledge from the margins shapes infrastructures

"Minding the gap" while using a wheelchair on the London Underground goes beyond a sharp eye and careful foot placement to avoid a fall: it can entail carrying...

Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid

By Willyce Kim. Foreword by Eunsong Kim

A sapphic novel ahead of its time that delights in queer joy, love, and adventure

Dancer Dawkins is a swift-footed, weed-smoking football stud. Her lover, Jessica, left their place in Los Angeles to join a Napa...

Modified Bodies, Material Selves

Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai

By Julie E. Starr

A comparative analysis of body politics, selfhood, and the pursuit of consumer-based agency

Thin body, white skin, and big eyes. Such beauty ideals are ubiquitous across Shanghai, where salons and weight-loss clinics offering an array of...

Wide-Open Desert

A Queer History of New Mexico

By Jordan Biro Walters

Reveals the untold stories about New Mexico’s queer past

Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at...

The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön

A Woman of Power and Privilege

By Alison Melnick Dyer

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war,...

Picture Bride

A Novel

By Yoshiko Uchida. Foreword by Elena Tajima Creef

Seeking an escape from life in her small village in Japan, Hana Omiya arrives in California in 1917, one of thousands of Japanese “picture brides" whose arranged marriages brought them to the United States. When...

Fixing the Image

Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh

By Jenna Grant

Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information...

Unshaved

Resistance and Revolution in Women's Body Hair Politics

By Breanne Fahs

Gross. Dirty. Monstrous. Manly. Authentic. Beautiful. Natural. Powerful.

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and...