Books published by Duke University Press

In Sex, or the Unbearable two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture engage in intense and animated dialogue about living with-and imagining alternatives to-what's overwhelming in sex, friendship, social inequality, and one's relation to oneself.

B. Ruby Rich has been involved with queer filmmaking-as a critic, film-festival curator, publicist, scholar, and champion-since it emerged in the 1980s. This volume collects the best of her writing on New Queer Cinema from its beginning to the present.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States, David Novak traces the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise, an underground music genre combining distortion and electronic effects.

Argues that a commitment to diversity is frequently substituted for a commitment to actual change. This title traces the work that diversity does, examining how the term is used and the way it serves to make questions about racism seem impertinent.

This volume explores how contemporary governments, particularly in settler nations such as Australia and the United States, deflect social responsibility for the crushing harms experienced by communities living at the margins.

A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory.

Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, this title looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. It focuses on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, and boundaries.

Explores how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were outlawed in medieval England. This work demonstrates how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to contemporary issues in cultural studies. It also attempts to make connections between past and present cultures.

Opening with David Mancuso's seminal "Love Saves the Day" Valentine's party in February 1970, this title tells the definitive story of disco - from its murky subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell's Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to the out-of-town networks that emerged in the suburbs and alternative urban hotspots.

Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed explores how willfulness is often a charge made by some against others. By following the figure of the willful subject, who wills wrongly or wills too much, Ahmed suggests that willfulness might be required to recover from attempts at its elimination.

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action.

Katherine Verdery analyzes the 2,781 page surveillance file the Romanian secret police compiled on her during her research trips to Transylvania in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading it led her to question her identity and also revealed how deeply the secret police was embedded in everyday life.

This ethnography shows how the struggle to practice clinical medicine in a resource-strapped public hospital in Papua New Guinea is complicated by the attempts of doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to others-kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers-as socially recognizable and valuable persons.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and postcolonial theory, Sarah A. Radcliffe centers the experiences of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to show how the efforts of development agencies to reduce social and economic equality fail because they do not reckon with the legacies of colonialism.

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this important West African nation, emphasizing Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations and its ethnic and cultural diversity.

Offers an account of development in action. Focusing on experts' attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, this title exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform.

A groundbreaking collection of sixteen essays that examines the productive intersection of the fields of black and queer studies