Books published by State University of New York Press

A 2018 Over the Rainbow Selection presented by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library AssociationLGBT Americans now enjoy the right to marry-but what will we remember about the vibrant cultural spaces that lesbian activists created in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s? Most are vanishing from the calendar-and from recent memory. The Disappearing L explores the rise and fall of the hugely popular women-only concerts, festivals, bookstores, and support spaces built by and for lesbians in the era of woman-identified activism. Through the stories unfolding in these chapters, anyone unfamiliar with the Michigan festival, Olivia Records, or the women's bookstores once dotting the urban landscape will gain a better understanding of the era in which artists and activists first dared to celebrate lesbian lives. This book offers the backstory to the culture we are losing to mainstreaming and assimilation. Through interviews with older activists, it also responds to recent attacks on lesbian feminists who are being made to feel that they've hit their cultural expiration date.

More than thirty years have passed since the publication of All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. Given the growth of women's and gender studies in the last thirty-plus years, this updated and responsive collection expands upon this transformation of consciousness through multiracial feminist perspectives. The contributors here reflect on transnational issues as diverse as intimate partner violence, the prison industrial complex, social media, inclusive pedagogies, transgender identities, and (post) digital futures. This volume provides scholars, activists, and students with critical tools that can help them decenter whiteness and other power structures while repositioning marginalized groups at the center of analysis.

Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Division B Outstanding Book Recognition AwardWinner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book AwardIn today's China, education is translated into both acute social desires and profound disenchantment. Shanghai's stellar performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment paints a celebratory image of educational success yet tells only a partial story. For many in rural China who are schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, education remains an elusive ideal and offers a hollowed promise of social mobility. Fabricating an Educational Miracle laces together complex accounts of how compulsory education produces dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this book examines the manifold and contradictory agendas that have captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads.

Frequently understood in simplistic and often highly negative terms, the concept of power has proven to be both uncommonly intriguing and maddeningly elusive. In Power, Raymond Angelo Belliotti begins by fashioning a general definition of power that is refined enough to capture the numerous types of power in all their multifaceted complexity. He then proceeds in a series of discrete yet thematically connected meditations to explore the meaning of power in ancient, modern, and contemporary thought. In grappling with the critical questions surrounding the accumulation, distribution, and exercise of personal and social power, this work allows us to confront fundamental questions of who we are and how we might live better lives.