Category: Recent Publications

Recent publications by faculty, students, and alumni.

[Other] Lynn Chancer – Feminist Revival and the Year of the Woman

Lynn Chancer, author of After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism, on American feminism and moving the gender revolution forward

Chancer Featured Image

March 9, 2017-  Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi  and House Democratic Women Representative colleagues  wear white in honor of women’s suffrage. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist consciousness has grown so rapidly in the last decade that it is hard to keep up with the fast pace of unfolding developments in popular culture, academic writing, law and feminist-influenced blogging. More and more people are willing to embrace the term ‘feminism’ as representative of a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional movement. Feminism is experiencing a cultural renaissance even amidst concurrent backlash. In terms of progress, perhaps no example is clearer than what happened in American politics before and immediately following the mid-term elections of November 2018, when a record number of women were elected to the now Democratically- controlled US House of Representatives. Media coverage of their January 2019 swearing in referred to the ‘year of the woman1,’ and projected a new era of greater participation and gender-related political consciousness as dawning.

In some ways, new energies have indeed been activated. Perhaps never before has the desire for an American President who is a woman been stronger: hopes for this historical ‘first’ were raised but not fulfilled by Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote though not the Electoral College.   Eagerness for women to enter politics has also been catalyzed by a sense of threat that hovers, somewhat ominously, over the security of feminist gains made over the last half century since the second wave. There is good reason to fear that reproductive options encompassing abortion rights could be turned back if President Donald Trump is able to appoint more conservative justices to the Supreme Court who are committed to overturning 1973’s iconic Roe v. Wade. 

Read more here 

Source: Feminist Revival and the Year of the Woman – Stanford University Press Blog

[Article] Benjamin Haber – The Digital Ephemeral Turn: Queer Theory, Privacy, and the Temporality of Risk

Benjamin Haber  (Alum)

The Digital Ephemeral Turn: Queer Theory, Privacy, and the Temporality of Risk.” Media, Culture & Society. Online first.

Social media’s shift from storing media permanently by default, to supporting increasingly diverse temporalities of display and interaction has important implications for understanding the political economy of the digital. In this article, I use queer theory to complicate the normative dimensions of the privacy discourses that popularly frame digital ephemerality, suggesting instead that we understand the ephemeral as redistributing the pleasures and dangers of risk. To demonstrate, I do a close reading of the functions, design choices, and aesthetics of popular digital communication platforms, which increasingly provide the affective texture and context for everyday life. Using Snapchat and Apple’s Find My Friends and iMessage as case studies, I highlight a profitable dynamic between promiscuous exposure and monogamous retrenchment.

[Book] Jean Halley – Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses

Jean Halley  (Faculty)

Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses (University of Georgia Press, 2019)

Horse Crazy explores the meaning behind the love between girls and horses. Jean O’Malley Halley, a self-professed “horse girl,” contends that this relationship and its cultural signifiers influence the manner in which young girls define their identity when it comes to gender. Halley examines how popular culture, including the “pony book” genre, uses horses to encourage conformity to gender norms but also insists that the loving relationship between a girl and a horse fundamentally challenges sexist and mainstream ideas of girlhood.

Horse Crazy looks at the relationships between girls and horses through the frameworks of Michel Foucault’s concepts of normalization and biopower, drawing conclusions about the way girls’ agency is both normalized and resistant to normalization. Segments of Halley’s own experiences with horses as a young girl, as well as experiences from the perspective of other girls, are sources for examination. “Horsey girls,” as she calls them, are girls who find a way to defy the expectations given to them by society-thinness, obsession with makeup and beauty, frailty-and gain the possibility of freedom in the process.

Drawing on Nicole Shukin’s uses of animal capital theories, Halley also explores the varied treatment of horses themselves as an example of the biopolitical use of nonhuman animals and the manipulation and exploitation of horse life. In so doing she engages with common ways we think and feel about animals and with the technologies of speciesism.