Announcing a New Series—Latinx: The Future is Now

Latinx: The Future Is Now is a new interdisciplinary series devoted to the evolving field of Latina/o/x studies, including Central American, Afro-Latinx, and Asian-Latinx studies. Situated at the nexus of cultural, performance, historical, food, environmental, and textual studies, the series will focus on ways in which the racial, cultural, and social formations of historical Latinx communities can engage and enhance scholarship across geographies and nationalities. The series editors invite projects that consider the multiple queer and gender-fluid possibilities that are embodied in the “x”; projects that have a feminist critique of patriarchy at the center of their intellectual work; projects that deploy a relational approach to ethnic and national groups; and projects that address the overlapping dynamics of gender, race, sexual, and national identities.

Submissions or queries may be directed to the series editors, Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, nicole.m.guidotti-hernandez@emory.edu and Lorgia Garcia-Peña, garciapena@fas.harvard.edu in addition to Senior Acquisitions Editor, Kerry Webb, kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

Forthcoming books in the series will be listed here as they are published: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/series/latinx-future-now.

# # #


Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Professor in the Department of English at Emory University. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration. As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. and the feminist blog The Feminist Wire, covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, and the Dream act. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of  award-winning book The Borders of Dominicanidad and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a modern-day freedom school created to support undocumented students.  

www.utexaspress.com

Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy wins the Popular Culture Association's Susan Koppelman Award

We are delighted to announce that Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant's book Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy has won the Popular Culture Association's Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture.

Ideal for classroom use, Hysterical! is an anthology of original essays by the leading authorities on women’s comedy. The book surveys the disorderly, subversive, and unruly

More info

performances of women comics from silent film to contemporary multimedia.

Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens large and small, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren’t funny. But today’s funny women aren’t a new phenomenon—they have generations of hysterically funny foremothers. Fay Tincher’s daredevil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg’s sly twinkle, and Tina Fey’s acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women’s bodies and behaviors.

Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field’s leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women’s comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women’s comedy.

About the Popular Culture Association

The Popular Culture Association was founded by scholars who believed the American Studies Association was too committed to the then existing canon of literary writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman. They believed that the American Studies Association had lost its holistic approach to cultural studies; there was little room, as they saw it, for the study of material culture, popular music, movies, and comics.

To remedy this situation, Professors Ray Browne (Bowling Green State University) and Russell Nye (Michigan State University) started an organization that would be open to more subjects and forms of cultural studies. The Association’s first meeting was in East Lansing, Michigan at Michigan State University in 1971. Aiding the efforts of Browne and Nye were early pioneers such as Jane Bakerman, Carl Bode, Pat Browne, John G. Cawelti, George N. Dove, Marshall W. Fishwick, M. Thomas Inge, Susan Koppelman, Peter C. Rollins, Fred E. H. Schroeder, Emily Toth, Tom Towers, Daniel Walden, and many others.

In 1979, the American Culture Association became a partner in the study of Popular Culture and the two organizations have held joint conferences since that time. Under the tutelage of Ray Browne, the organization grew. The national conference has over 2,000 participants. Moreover, the organization has seven regional organizations: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Far West, Southwest/Texas, and Oceanic. The regional organizations range in size from 200 to 1,000 participants. The PCA is closely affiliated with four international popular culture organizations in Australia/New Zealand, East Asia, Canada, and Europe. PCA also supports two prestigious, peer-reviewed journals—The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of American Culture—and maintains an international organization that meets in the summer of odd numbered years.

In 2003, Ray and Pat Browne stepped down as the leaders of the PCA after many years of building and nurturing the organization. Today, the PCA continues to nurture the study of popular and American culture, champion new and established scholars in both their research and teaching, and support the publication of its two prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of American Culture.

www.utexaspress.com

Nadia Yaqub Remembers Her Friend and Co-Editor Rula Quawas

Read the New York Times piece on Rula Quawas here.

Remembering Rula Quawas

By Nadia Yaqub

On July 25, 2017, Rula Quawas, my close friend and the coeditor of Bad Girls of the Arab World, passed away suddenly. The volume was scheduled to appear just a few weeks later. She never got to hold it in her hands.

Rula Quawas in 2016 with students at the University of Jordan. Credit Leen Quawas

I first met Rula in September 2005 when she came to UNC–Chapel Hill as a visiting scholar. A professor of American literature at the University of Jordan, she was researching connections between Margaret Fuller and Huda Sha`rawi, two feminists—one American and the other Egyptian—who, despite the temporal and geographic distances that separated them, shared many traits that Rula valued, including a passion for knowledge and education and a commitment to activism. I did not know it when I met her, but these were Rula’s defining passions as well. 

Rula and I hit it off immediately. As any of her numerous friends and acquaintances will tell you, she was extraordinarily friendly, with a welcoming smile and a ready store of witty phrases (“witty” was one of her favorite words). I was drawn to something instantly familiar and comfortable in her manner—a practical aesthetic (short hair, simple attire) that was immediately familiar from my childhood in Beirut, and a conversational manner that invited reflection and engagement and was free of judgment. Rula welcomed brilliance, but one did not have to be brilliant to be her friend. 

Rula and I met several times during her semester at Carolina. She visited my course on Arabic literature in translation, and together we attended public presentations on geisha by students in Jan Bardsley’s first-year seminar. We enjoyed numerous meetings over coffee or dinner. A few days after we met, we were both invited to speak on a panel about Arab feminist writers that was organized by a campus student group. I promptly emailed her, expecting that she would take the lead because I was no expert on Arab feminism, and she

More info

responded in kind. We did not know at that point how much our scholarly interests would converge in the ensuing years. For me, a scholarly interest in Arab feminism was very much a product of my relationship with Rula, and developed alongside my friendship with her. Rula, of course, was just being modest; she was already an ardent, practicing feminist, and just two years later she would be selected to found and direct the Women’s Studies Center at the University of Jordan, the first center of its kind in Jordan.

Bad Girls of the Arab World was born during the summer of 2006. I was conducting research in the region and attending the World Congress of Middle East Studies, which took place in Amman, Jordan, that year. Bad Girls of Japan had just come out and we–Rula, Elizabeth Bishop, and I—discussed, with great enthusiasm, the need for such a volume about the Arab world. But we would not feel ready to take on the project for another eight years.

'Books that Made Me a Feminist'

To celebrate International Women's Day (and Pretty/Funny coming out in paperback), we're

re-blogging our friends at bookscombined.com to feature our author Linda Mizejewski on the most formative texts of her career as a gender studies scholar.

Books that Made Me a Feminist

By Linda Mizejewski
Originally posted on bookscombined.com

The books that made me a feminist were the books that got me into trouble. I lost a lover, alienated friends, angered students, got into arguments with teachers—all because of books that followed through on the clichés: something clicked, a light snapped on. But sometimes the click turns into a slammed door, and what we find in the bright light is something we hoped not to see.

When I was in college in the early 1970s, the women in my dorm were passing around books that nobody assigned in classes—Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). We were fascinated with the anger of the narrators who—unlike the heroines of our reading lists (Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre), didn’t believe that marriage or love or even sex (Jong’s famous “zipless fuck”) was the answer to their seething discontent.

In an English class, a professor told us that novels about women ended with the main characters married or dead. That was the larger cultural sentiment about women, too. But this was also the era of free love and the birth control pill. The Bell Jar and Fear of Flying struck a chord because these heroines were caught up in mixed messages. One of my all-time favorite literary images is Plath’s alter-ego character Esther tossing designer clothes from a rooftop in Manhattan. The things in her life that were supposed to make her pretty and special instead were making her crazy. The arguments started when I went to graduate school and was told these books weren’t “real” literature.

Oveta Culp Hobby and Women’s History Month

Oveta Culp Hobby
By Debra L. Winegarten

For Women's History Month, we asked author Debra Winegarten to write about the accomplishments of Oveta Culp Hobby and her contributions to women's history. Oveta was the second woman in the US appointed to a Cabinet-level position thanks to President Eisenhower upon whom she made a lasting impression while she was a Colonel. Debra Winegarten's new book, Oveta Culp Hobby: Colonel, Cabinet Member, and Philanthropist, will publish in April.

Oveta Culp Hobby and Women’s History Month
by Debra L. Winegarten

National Women’s History Month traces its beginnings to 1978, when the Sonoma County, California’s Commission on the Status of Women’s Education Task Force declared a “Women’s History Week” celebration and scheduled the event to coincide with “International Women’s Day,” March 8th. The idea took root so quickly that by February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued a Presidential Proclamation designating the week of March 8, 1980 as “National Women’s History Week.” By 1987, Congress designated March as National Women’s History Month in perpetuity. [1]

The first wave of feminism occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with the Seneca Falls, New York Convention in 1848 the rallying event, which launched the modern-day US women’s movement. The second wave of feminism ran from the 1960s to the 1990s, beginning with protests of the Miss American Pageant in the late 1960s. By 1978, the second wave of feminism in the United States was already going full throttle and had moved away from a “middle-class white women’s movement” to one that included women of color and women from developing nations. The third wave of feminism began in the 1990s informed by post-modern and post-colonial thinking. [2]

While we often know the names of the heroines of the modern-day women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, I’d like to put forward a new name into the mix, one whose accomplishments helped propel women forward during World War II, at a time when the ideal of Rosie the Riveter is known to us, but the name of Oveta Culp Hobby has yet to be writ large in the books of women’s history.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the first peacetime draft by signing into law the “Selective Service and Training Act on September 16, 1940. [3] This action set in motion an unexpected flurry of activity when the first male soldiers were conscripted in the fall of that year. “The War Department started receiving thousands of letters a day from women all over the country, wanting to know what, exactly, the government would be doing with their sons and brothers who were being forced into military service.”

The White House was ill-prepared to respond to this sea of inquiry, and started the Women’s Interest Section of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations to answer these letters. Oveta Culp Hobby, who, with her husband, the former Governor Will Hobby of Texas, was in Washington, D.C. at this time. The Hobbys owned and ran The Houston Post in addition to other local media interests. They were attending a meeting of the Federal Communications Commission regarding one of their Houston radio stations. General Surles met Oveta and asked her to run the Women’s Interest Section for the Army.