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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...

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...

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...

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...

Unfinished Business

The Fight for Women's Rights

By Polly Russell, Margaretta Jolly

For centuries, women and their allies have fought for women’s rights in all areas of life—bodily autonomy, education, work, culture, science, politics, and history. Their efforts have fundamentally changed the world we live in. And...

Citizens of Beauty

Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China

By Louise Edwards

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew...

Yumeji Modern

Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan

By Nozomi Naoi

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan’s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching...

Troubling Borders

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what...

Axis of Hope

Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders

By Catherine Z. Sameh

Political tensions between Iran and the United States in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror have set the stage for Iranian women’s rights activists inside and outside Iran as they seek full...

Outriders

Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West

By Rebecca Scofield

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness...

Resisting Disappearance

Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir

By Ather Zia

In Kashmir’s frigid winter a woman leaves her door cracked open, waiting for the return of her only son. Every month in a public park in Srinagar, a child remembers her father as she joins...

Tea and Solidarity

Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka

By Mythri Jegathesan

Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line...

Unruly Figures

Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala

By Navaneetha Mokkil

The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of...

Holy Science

The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism

By Banu Subramaniam

Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each...

Heroines of the Qing

Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories

By Binbin Yang

Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary...

Seawomen of Iceland

Survival on the Edge

By Margaret Willson

Finalist for the 2017 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction / History

The plaque said this was the winter fishing hut of Thurídur Einarsdóttir, one of Iceland's greatest fishing captains, and that she lived from...

Gold Rush Manliness

Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope

By Christopher Herbert

The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of...