In recent years, members of legal, law enforcement, media and academic circles have portrayed rape as a special kind of crime distinct from other forms of violence. In Framing the Rape Victim, Carine M. Mardorossian argues that this differential treatment of rape has exacerbated the ghettoizing of sexual violence along gendered lines. Both a critical analysis and a call to action, Framing the Rape Victim shows that rape is not a special interest issue that pertains just to women but a pervasive one that affects our society as a whole.

Over the past fifty years, feminism has revolutionized the lives of American women. Yet much of our popular culture seems to be set in an alternate universe filled with retro images of femininity: suburban Stepford wives, maniacal career women, and alluring amnesiacs. Feminism and Popular Culture investigates why contemporary media is being haunted by the ghosts of feminism’s past—and considers what this means for its future.

 In this groundbreaking new book, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán, Xóchitl Bada reveals how Mexican hometown associations, groups consisting of immigrants from the same small towns, have become a surprisingly powerful force for mobilizing social change in both the United States and Mexico. By giving voice to the members of a group of Chicago-based hometown associations from the state of Michoacán, Xóchitl Bada draws much larger conclusions about the emergence and global impact of new transnational forms of community activism. 

 Through analysis of the production, funding, and content of thousands of films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, Monica White Ndounou reveals the process of history and film development where race-based economics and the politics of distribution hamstring the making, the expression, and the creative freedom of films about, by, or for people of color.

Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. In Gender and Violence in Haiti, award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visits Haiti to discover why these women act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. In Gender and Violence in Haiti, award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visits Haiti to discover why these women act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Thousands of academic studies reveal that stressful life events, ongoing strains, and even daily hassles affect every aspect of our physical and emotional well-being. Cutting through a sea of scientific research and theories, Worried Sick answers many questions about how stress gets under our skin, makes us sick, and how and why people cope with stress differently. Included are several standard stress and coping checklists, allowing readers to gauge their own stress levels.

A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed—understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.

A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed—understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.

 In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience.On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters helps underscore Carson’s enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates who influenced and were influenced by her and Silent Spring.

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

 Among the miners of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the U.S.—anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston reveals how the mining industry, though heavily masculinized, generates new configurations of the “working family”—a kind of kinship based on the shared burdens of shift work and concerns for safety, which challenges and reproduces gender differences in everyday working and family life.

In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines Holocaust representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States.

 The mentally ill might not go to Shutter Island or the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting the best care they can.  With extensive, unique ethnographic research at two community-based organizations that provide the bulk of such care, Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the true nature, effects, and costs of our fragmented mental health system and provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the system today.

Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of “man’s best friends” (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.

 In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in south Florida. Using in-depth ethnographic data, she underscores the difference between the global response to this public health crisis—where everyone is implicated as a potential carrier of risk—and the uncontested existence of racial and ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS rates, access to treatment and care, and, especially, the stigma borne by carriers of the disease.

In American Melancholy, Laura D. Hirshbein traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. This is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.

Drawing on repeated interviews with forty-nine women newly released from prison, Leverentz explores the conflicting messages these women receive about who they are and who they should be—from prison staff, workers at halfway houses and drug treatment programs, family members, and friends.  These messages, she shows, shape the narratives the women create to explain their past records and guide their future behavior.

In this provocative new book, Maria Acosta Cruz investigates why the rhetoric of independence is so pivotal to Puerto Rican culture, despite the fact that the island’s voters have consistently rejected calls for national sovereignty. Weaving together texts from literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how this seemingly revolutionary and populist iconography of independence has become an established orthodoxy.