Drawn from extensive interviews with paid gestational surrogates, women employed to carry children who are not genetically their own, Labor of Love reveals the challenges they face as they deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. The book demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth.   

From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Extreme Cinema draws from interviews with film festival programmers, distributors, critics, and directors to demonstrate how these seemingly transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, translating global notoriety into success within a competitive marketplace, and perpetuating a system that runs on provocation.

In this provocative new study, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of late twentieth-century Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Considering works by everyone from Cynthia Ozick to Woody Allen to Michael Chabon, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Of Forests and Fields tells the story of the Mexican guest laborers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants who worked to transform the Pacific Northwest into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez reveals both the struggles and the many accomplishments of these workers, offering valuable historical precedents for understanding the activism of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.  

Abstinence Cinema tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. Locating these regressive sexual politics in everything from Twilight to Taken to Superbad, Casey Ryan Kelly examines how these films echo the rhetoric of the evangelical abstinence-only movement, then analyzes how they are particularly disempowering to young women, who are judged strictly on the basis of their sexuality.  

Covering everything from Batman to Zorro’s Fighting Legion, Matinee Melodrama is the first scholarly study of the cinematic adventure serial as a distinct artform, one that uniquely encouraged audience participation and imaginative play. It suggests that the serial’s incoherent plotting and reliance on formula, far from being faults, should be understood as some of its most appealing attributes, helping lay the groundwork for today’s blockbuster action movies, interactive videogames, and active fan cultures. 

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Girls Will Be Boys examines over 400 examples of women dressed as men in American films made between 1908 and 1934, revealing that Cross-Dressed women were once viewed as wholesome and used to lend respectability to the fledgling film industry. 

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Girls Will Be Boys examines over 400 examples of women dressed as men in American films made between 1908 and 1934, revealing that Cross-Dressed women were once viewed as wholesome and used to lend respectability to the fledgling film industry. 

Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer explores the historical, ideological, economic, and technical developments that led Hollywood filmmakers of the late 1940s and 1950s to increasingly head outside the studio and capture footage of real places. Examining works ranging from Sunset Blvd. to The Searchers, Shot on Location discovers the massive influence that wartime newsreels had on the postwar Hollywood film, as the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories. 

In Santería, entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr—who underwent this initiation herself—offers a wealth of insight into this remarkable year-long religious transformation. Carr draws on in-depth interviews, many online surveys, and nearly a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, shedding light not only on Santería, but on religion in general.