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The two bloggers behind snarky romance review blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wrote this. I don't know if the book matches the expectations of their readers, since I don't read the blog, but it is definitely snarky and full of man-titty, swearing, and double intendres.

I also read this two or three weeks ago and returned it to the library, so I tack on my usual warning that my memory is like a sieve.

Much of the territory in the book is not particularly surprising to me, even though I don't read as many romances as most romance fans. Wendell and Tan go through the origin of the term "bodice ripper," talk about the alpha hero and the TSTL heroine, and mention the problem of rape in romances. They are more feminist and snarky than most romance reviews I have seen in the past, but they are still not feminist and snarky enough to satisfy me. I kept wanting to push them on the alpha hero and "forced seduction" and the status of the heroine, because yes, like them, I am glad of the changes that have been taking place in the genre, but I want it to go SO MUCH FURTHER. Also, I think they are much more tolerant of asshat heroes than I am.

I vaguely remember them discussing sexual agency in the hero and the heroine, but I am not sure if they mention how rarely we get a dominant woman (either in terms of BDSM or just taking the lead in the bedroom).

There's also a chapter on race and sexual orientation in romance that didn't go nearly as far as I wanted. Wendell and Tan talk about bookstore categorization and the way Black romances are usually shelved in African-American fiction, but I don't think they go much into racism in romances themselves, from Orientalism and exoticism to Magical Indians and we-sha-sha to What These People Need Is a Honky. They talk a little about the rise of gay romances, but I wish they would examine the appropriation of gay romance more closely.

I say all this, but I was also very entertained by the book. There's a Choose Your Own Romance game, there's snark at covers, there's poking fun at all the same things I poke fun of even as you can tell Wendell and Tan love romances.

So... a fun and fast read, and with more critique than other books on the romance genre I've read, but I keep wanting a much more radical critique than I get.

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Steve Almond is a self-professed candy freak—he longs for the discontinued candies of his past and admits to stashing who knows how much candy in various nooks of his house. And so, he decides to write a book about candy, all the better to get access to various candymakers.

I'm not actually the biggest candy fan (give me plain dark chocolate any time of the day), but Almond makes these bars sound so good that I'm almost tempted to mail order them. He reminisces about candy from his childhood, rails against the Big Three of the candy world, and wishes there were more independent candy makers still around. However, thanks to prohibitively high stocking fees, it's nearly impossible for independent candy makers to get their products on chain store shelves, so many of them are stuck with a very limited regional audience.

Almond doesn't focus on the economics of candy making, nor of the colonialist implications some candy has (cacao), but it does appear in the book (the economics more than colonialist implications, though). Instead, he's incredibly good at describing various candy bars and how they're manufactured, from the very weird Twin Bing and Idaho Spud to the amazingly tasty-sounding Five Star Bar.

Also, it helps that he too dislikes dried coconut as much as me!

This isn't a particularly deep book, but Almond has a very distinctive and funny narrative voice (read a sample in Rachel's post, link below). It cheered me up reading it, which is really all I was asking for.

Links:
- rachelmanija's review

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As with the other Lisa Nakamura books, I read this months ago and don't remember it well.

This was published in 2008, so it's much more recent than the other two books. It still feels a little dated given the gap between research and publication, but less so at least!

The book covers race and the use of AIM icons, the Alllooksame test, UIs and race in Matrix and Minority Report, the creation of forum avatars for pregnant women and their babies, and finally, how we count race on the Internet and how it could be improved.

I was extremely puzzled by the inclusion of the forum avatars for pregnant women, as the women in question are almost all white and I do not remember Nakamura talking about the construction of whiteness very much in the chapter. The study fits into the book's subtitle of visual cultures, but not much with digitizing race. The chapter was an interesting read, but confusing when I tried to connect it to the other chapters in the book.

The look at race in the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report weren't as new to me, given the amount of media studies critique in the other two books I've read on race and the Internet. And I sadly do not remember much at all about the AIM icons chapter, the Alllooksame chapter, or the final chapter. However, a quick glance at the final chapter on Amazon has a better discussion of how to think about the "digital divide," particularly how Asian Americans are probably underrepresented in censuses due to potential language difficulties. Nakamura also discusses how censuses on technology use fail to take into account how many Asians are there behind the scenes, manufacturing the technology being used. I think most of her writing focuses on Asians; there's mention of the online petitions against Abercrombie and Fitch, as well as talk of outsourcing manufacturing so that the risks involved are taken by Asian bodies. I don't remember enough to say how much she discusses other POC though.

Mostly I remember thinking this was interesting although not necessarily always exciting in its conclusions.

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I read this several months ago, so my already bad memory is now even worse. This is a relatively early book examining race and cyberspace; it was published in 2000, and the research is no doubt a few years older.

As with Nakamura's Cybertypes, this book was compiled when much of the rhetoric about the Internet and email and Usenet espoused how cyberspace would eradicate identity politics and allow all of us to only be seen via our personalities or our text or whatnot. I keep saying this, but oh, I laugh so bitterly at that!

Many of the pieces in the book come from media studies people and examine the portrayal of cyberspace in popular movies, books, and video games. I cannot really remember what they cover, since I read this right after Cybertypes and get the two mixed up at times. What I found the most interesting was a study of whiteness online in terms of Confederate websites, a study of an "electronic village," which attempted to emulate the experience of a small shopping center, and one on the role of computers in education and how that affected the digital divide.

Like most anthologies, I got frustrated by the length; I always wanted more. This was particularly the problem with Kolko's piece on trying to include "@race" in online MUDs to get rid of the frequent assumption that if someone doesn't specify their race, they must be white. She talks about designing the @race tag and how the system would use it, but notes that she only began implementing it and has no results for the study yet.

Overall, the book is very dated, and while I appreciated the media studies look at things, I also wanted more about class and race and how it impacts people's experiences online, not just how they are portrayed as being online. I think I wanted something more like The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.

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I think this book grew out of Anderson's thesis work about Native women, and in it, she explores the ways Native women's identities have been constructed pre-colonization, how colonization destroyed many of Native women's roles and enforced white patriarchy, and how Native women are reclaiming their identities.

In the introduction, Anderson introduces the idea of the subjective reader and writer. You would think this wouldn't be so revolutionary, but grad school classes on sociology seem to indicate otherwise! Going with this, Anderson introduces herself as a light-skinned Cree/Mé woman who grew up without much contact with Native communities and notes how this affects her as an author and as a researcher. She also asks readers of the book to examine their own motives for reading the book. Are they Native women looking for support or affirmation? Are they non-Native people looking to learn about "Native culture"? Are they white feminist? Etc.

My own personal reading context is as a Chinese woman who knows very little about Native cultures looking for more information on Native feminism (there is probably also a better term for this I do not know) after reading Andrea Smith's Conquest and reading blogs and posts from Native women online. I'm also looking for alternatives to "mainstream" feminism, not to adopt, but to have a better feel for where I'm ignorant.

As I had expected, there were times when it was hard for me to read this book because I had to stomp on the part of my brain that was like, "But! Excluding women from blahdiblah means blahdiblah! Clearly delineated male and female roles means blah!" It helped that Anderson herself was also working through her own understanding of past traditions and how to adopt them to today, on what things have changed and should stay changed and on what things have changed and should be reverted.

As an example: I saw her explanations of keeping women on their period outside of drum circles and sweat lodges as a veiled "I roll my eyes at the white women who keep wanting to join the sweat lodge or drum circle and protest their exclusion while having no idea what it actually means." Anderson's explanation is that women on their period already have a great deal of power, and not as a negative thing. But she also notes that in the present day, keeping menstruating women out of a specific activity can be done in a misogynist fashion not in the spirit of tradition and adds that the menstruating women should have their own area to retreat to, that they should not be ignored or ostracized. It looks like a fairly complicated situation trying to balance imported misogyny and return to tradition and how notions of tradition change over time, and I bet it is not a situation where it is helpful for white feminists to barge in and say, "This is what is feminist."

Anderson structures the book in three parts: examining the past, looking at the present, and envisioning the future. She goes through the general gender equity in many Native societies pre-colonization and talks about exceptions and norms, which was very helpful for me, because I have zero background in this. She also covers what happened once white colonization began and what that did to many Native societies, particularly the use of white patriarchy as a tool of colonization, which was more familiar to me. Although some of the book talks about Anderson's own journey, she has also talked to quite a few other Native women (mostly Canadian) about their own experiences.

I'm not doing the book justice; I found it thought-provoking and challenging. I value it for making me continue to rethink what I normally conceptualize as "feminist" and for offering a non-white feminism, especially one that emphasizes community child-raising, family, and the overall community.



I also posted a list of all the Native authors in the bibliography if people are interested.

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Steinberger is a geek girl: gamer, cosplayer, shoujo manga fan, Volks doll fan. Ever since she got into the Volks doll scene, she's been dying to visit the Volks store in Tokyo. One day, she writes to Volks and gets an enthusiastic reply; they actually know of her through her doll articles in the US! So she and two friends head off to Japan. Their plan: dress as geisha, go see Takarazuka performances, dress up in Tokyo, eat, and go see dolls!

This is more of a sketchbook rather than a comic; there's some sequential art involved, given that it's a trip, but most of the art is not in the form of panels. It's also incredibly fun to read. Steinberger's art is extremely friendly and round and happy, and she notices odd things that I enjoy. One of the slightly unfortunate things is that she can't read or write Japanese—I'm not sure if other people will care, but I really wanted to know what the Japanese on particular drawings was.

I am still not sure what to think of dressing up as a geisha. On the one hand, it is something I would love to do. Also, there's the factor that it's being done in Japan, probably making money for the Japanese people running the business, in a context in which people know a lot more about who and what geisha are. On the other hand, I do not know.

Some other parts of the book occasionally hit my "please do not make fun of Engrish" button, from the making fun of Engrish to Steinberger getting annoyed at being stared at. For the latter, I completely don't begrudge her getting annoyed at being stared at; it's probably annoying as hell. However, I still have a kneejerk reaction of "Yeah, welcome to my world!" inherited from homestay in Japan with two tall white guys who were all "We stick out! We miss American food!" after I had gone through a year of depression and lost a lot of weight thanks to a combination of culture shock, homesickness for Taiwan, and literally not being able to eat all the non-Chinese food. But I digress! Although I spend a lot of space here writing this reaction up, I didn't really hit it that often. Much of this is because you can tell Steinberger loves it there, and the overall feeling I got from her excitement wasn't "OMG this is so exotic and foreign!" but "OMG I have heard about this for forever and FINALLY I AM HERE!"

Instead, I had a lot of fun through most of the book. It made me remember being in Japan and exploring Harajuku and Shibuya and Akihabara, it made me miss the food and the public transportation, it made me wish I had had enough money when I was there to buy awesome clothes at Harajuku and the like. It also interestingly made me incredibly homesick for Taiwan. A lot of the things in Japan are different, of course, but a lot of things have either been imported to Taiwan or are shared characteristics, from the squatting toilets of DOOM and ladies on the street handing out advertisements on tissue packets to sock stores to the food. I miss the food so much!

Most of all, I loved all the geeking out, from cosplaying and Takarazuka and dolls (not my areas of geekdom) to assorted manga and anime references. I laughed so hard when they visited Tokyo Tower thanks to CLAMP, although they went because of Magic Knight Rayearth and my friends and I went because of X (sadly fortunately, when we went, no necrocuddling was involved). I am also extremely jealous that she got to see Takarazuka! Some day...

Also, if you read this, check out the omake as well! Actually, check out the omake even if you haven't read it; it's a pretty good preview of what the book itself is like. Cute and fun.

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I may get parts of this book (2002) confused with Digitizing Race (2008, also by Nakamura) or Race in Cyberspace (2000, co-edited by Nakamura), as I read all of them together.

From my vague impressions of scholarship on race and online communities, Nakamura's one of the first people who really started writing about race and the Internet. Prior to this and to Nakamura's other work, I think there was a fair amount about gender and the Internet, in terms of how the Internet impacted gender identification, acting out gender online, and etc, but not much on race.

Nakamura comes from a background in visual studies, and this book is less ethnographic and far more culture-focused. She analyzes the portrayal of race in works that affect how we think about the Internet, such as the fun times of Asian landscapes and languages without the actual people in Gibson's Neuromancer and Bladerunner and how later on, we get more mixed-race Asian protagonists (Matrix, Snow Crash). I very much liked her reading of the Matrix, particularly of Agent Smith as white male kyriarchy, but can't comment much on the others, as I only vaguely remember the Gibson and Bladerunner and have never read Stephenson.

She also dissects some of the early ads for Internet access, starting from MCI's apparently famous "Anthem" ad, which claims the Internet as a space free of those pesky things like gender and race. I am sure you all laugh bitterly at this. She notes that there's a great deal of what she calls cybertourism involved in many of them, in which the ads posit that the viewer is white, middle-class, and American and contrast that audience to the people in the ads, who are frequently POC from countries in the Global South dressed in their "traditional" wear and often posed next to animals like elephants and camels and etc.

Kali Tal (link below) notes that Nakamura is much better with Asian stuff than she is with Black stuff, and I dearly want to read a book by someone well-versed in cyberculture and African-American studies and how the latter applies to the former, as mentioned in the review.

I vaguely remember that I disagreed with some things in the book, but final papers took up my mind and I forgot. It was also kind of funny reading it, because I felt like constantly saying, "Dude, people on my reading list could tell you that" when she left media analysis and started talking about online spaces.

Interesting groundwork for the field, rather dated, and not broad enough in terms of coverage (as noted, she's good with Asian. Anything other than that tends to get the shaft).

Links:
- Kali Tal has a way better review than I do

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This is a collection of essays by First Nations writers on Native sex and sexuality, as noted in the subtitle. Unfortunately, I read this book over the span of a month or so and procrastinated on writing it up, so my memory is really fuzzy.

In terms of representation, I think there was a 60/40 male/female split, a handful of essays by two-spirit or LGBT people, and one or two by older people. I don't particularly recall essays that focused on disability or class, although I could also be remembering wrong.

The essays I remember most are the one on boarding school abuse and its affect on the author's sexuality, one on a Native woman choosing to striptease to earn money, and one on older Native sexuality. I also very vaguely remember one citing a myth on incest and hide-and-seek.

Wow, my memory is teh suck!

Oh wait! There was an absolutely hilarious one on the stereotype of Native sexuality in romance novels, and even though the collection is from Canada, I think many of the romances are either the same or extremely similar. That one I did have context for and therefore found it extremely amusing and insightful; I'm guessing many of the rest would have been as well had I known enough. Except possibly the stripteasing one, which I don't think fully encompasses the potential for abuse in the industry, even as women (usually of a higher class) can choose to participate for empowerment. I don't dismiss the potential for empowerment, but I also don't think that's all there is to the story.

Overall, I don't think I got as much as I could have out of the book, largely because I lack the right background knowledge and context to appreciate much of it. Still, that's on me and not on the book, and at least it has given me some places to start with, and many more questions than I have answers.

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I found this to be very eye opening, but I also don't know much about global agriculture or environmental justice, so YMMV. I admit that I've been a bit skeptical of various environmental movements before, not because they're wrong, but because there are way too many examples of privileged white people espousing environmentalism while culturally appropriating and especially not thinking about how their movement fits in with other social justice movements. Patel specifically addresses these issues, especially in terms of class, colonization, and global agriculture.

Patel touches on a huge number of topics, from the rise of soy in everything we eat to high-fructose corn syrup to how big agricultural companies use genetically modified crops to control small farmers. But the central threads through the book are Patel's critique of the system that rewards big agricultural companies and the middlemen between farmers and consumers, how they are privileged over farmers and consumers, and his understanding of how this works globally. I find the last bit most helpful; Patel doesn't just look at the UK and the US, but focuses a lot on the Global South*. He also makes an effort to focus not just on the "big" players, but also on grassroots organizations and farmers themselves.

I had a problem with Sonia Shah's The Body Hunters, which is on big pharma, because I felt the focus was so much on those organizations that the people they were testing medicine on became a faceless crowd of victims. Patel does do this more in some chapters than others, but the sense I got from his writing was that he's worked very closely with the farmers he's writing about. As such, they come across as people, not victims. It also helps that he continually returns to solutions that small farmers and consumers have come up with; he focuses on how they help themselves, not on how the same international organizations that contributed to the poverty of the Global South are "saving" them.

One thing I took away from this book and others I've been reading (ex. Conquest, Dragon Ladies) is the power of bottom-up movements, how important it is for movements to focus on the people who are the most oppressed and have the least power in the system, because it generally seems easier to start there and end up with solutions that benefit everyone, whereas going from top-down tends to generate solutions that help those on top, but overlooks those on the bottom, particularly people who suffer more than one oppression. For example, feminism's focus on middle-class white women, the male focus in a lot of anti-racism and LGBTQ movements, etc. Of course, this is not saying that those of us who are more privileged should just not do anything, but just that we cannot center movements on the more privileged. I am still trying to figure out how to apply all this to my own attempts at social change and to IBARW, but right now, I have more questions than answers.

Anyway, highly recommended and very eye opening for me.

Links:
- furyofvissarion's review
- sanguinity's review


Note: Patel uses the term "people of colour" to describe non-white people (he is from the UK). I can't tell if this is only in the US edition, because it preserves the British spelling of "colour." I also can't remember if Patel footnoted or explained this usage or not; I, uh, already returned it to the library.

* He notes that he prefers this term over "developing countries" or "third-world countries." I have the same problems he does with the prior two terms, and I like that "Global South" does not sound like it is passing judgment, but I think it may overlook countries in the Northern hemisphere that also suffer the effects of colonization.

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Like Cunningham's Crowns (same photographer, different interviewer), this is a a gorgeous book of photography coupled with personal interviews, only this time, it is on... hair! Yes, Actual Black Women (tm) talking about their Actual Hair (tm)! Hopefully those tormented by curiosity about the subject will at least read this instead of springing unwelcome questions on random Black women.

You can see many of the portraits on his webiste, and they really are gorgeous. But as with Crowns, I love the interviews the most. This book has a larger age and geographical range than Crowns, probably because I got the sense in Crowns that church hats were not being picked up as much by the younger generation (is this true?). I also love that he has several Ghanan women from a hair-braiding school included. There are pictures of women in their every-day hair, pictures of women in showcase hair, pictures of women in ceremonial hair. And there are also pictures of the hairdressers themselves, along with interviews.

There's discussion of natural hair and good hair and "nappy" hair and "bad" hair, of jheri curls and afros and straight perms and locs and braids and cornrows and ringlets (and one mohawk, yay), dyeing and cutting and shaving, and the importance of the local hairdresser and barbershop. There are stories from women of all ages, all of whom have decided to do different things to their hair for different reasons.

It's just a lovely collection; go read. Or if you can't find it, definitely visit his site and check out the pictures.

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This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large—there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages, although I could be remembering wrong. I was especially pleased to see good representation of South and Southeast Asian women. I think there could have been more by and about queer women and differently-abled women, though I really loved the round-table with three punk queer Asian women.

I had read about half of this maybe half a year ago; I reread most of it and dashed through the rest to cope with some RL race-related unfunness. I find I don't read these kinds of collections of fairly personal essays by WOC very often, but when I do, they are so inspiring and so life-saving. Maybe that's why I can't read them often... I have to save them up so I have something to turn to when it feels like everything is working against me. I'm not going to be particularly academic in this write up because my reaction is so emotional. This book inspires me and makes me want to do more and to do better, to keep working at things, to try to give back some of the support that I've found within.

One piece that particularly stood out for me was "Bringing Up Baby: Raising a 'Third World' Daughter in the 'First World'" by the mother-daughter team of Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Das Dasgupta and how jealous I was that Sayantani Das Dasgupta had her mother when she was growing up, how she had a personal role model for radical politics. I hate envying other people's positions, because I'm sure they have problems I do not, and because I am and will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Taiwan. But my family and almost everyone I grew up with were not particularly radical (or liberal even), and I wish I had had something outside of ink and paper, someone human and alive and breathing and talking to go to when I was growing up.

Other themes that struck me were all the mentions of grassroots organization and community outreach; several groups described in the book are grassroots organizations started by women of color to fight sexual violence in communities of color or lower-class women of color mobilizing to fight racism and classism and sexism. It reminds me of how Andrea Smith starts from Native women in Conquest and works out from there, and how by doing so she finds solutions that help those women and help many other communities as well. But I was thinking of activism and fighting oppression and how important it is to start from the ground up, especially because of how oppression works from top down. I am also not sure I am making sense here; I'm still working through what I can do and how I can do it.

One of the pieces was annoying, with the American woman author talking about a group of women in another country, and it just felt so condescending and "I am the outsider talking about these foreign people." I am pretty sure it was Deila D. Aguilar's "Western Feminism and Asian Women," but I am not entirely sure because I do not have my copy of the book next to me.

That said, overall I very much liked how international the book was, how so many of the pieces recognized that many of us might have been born in the US, but we still have families in other countries, still have stakes there that we cannot give up. I also liked how the book not only pointed out racism in the US, but also global structures that support racism, such as the piece on Canadian healthcare and how much of the cost of national healthcare has been offloaded onto immigrant Filipina nurses.

I found this book so personally necessary and so comforting that I have no idea how useful this write up will be to anyone who's not me. Still, recommended!

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I picked this up after reading sanguinity's write up and after becoming more aware of the subject after reading Conquest and Killing the Black Body, particularly the chapters about the forced sterilization of Native and Black women (and I am sure of other women of color) and the unethical means of getting those women to agree to Norplant or Depo-Provera.

Shah's book focuses less on reproductive health and more on Big Pharma and the drug testing industry. She goes through recent history, from the rise of testing with the Salk vaccine to the Nazi and WWII-Japanese experiments on human subject to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to testing nowadays in "third-world" countries.

She explains the many factors that led to this: the more and more stringent requirements for drug companies to first prove that their medicines do not harm and then to prove that they actually do what they say they do and the growing protection of patients. But only patients in the right countries, only patients with money, only patients with power. Points she especially emphasizes are testing experimental drugs against placebos versus testing them against the best proven treatment, as companies have found ways to worm their way around "best proven treatment." After all, if they're testing in Africa or India, those people couldn't access the best treatment anyway, so a placebo really is their best treatment. And it would be unethical to provide access to good drugs during the trial and then to take them away afterward.

I agree with her analysis, particularly the way companies take advantage of the ravages of colonialism to subject even more testing and experimentation upon the very people hurt most by colonization. However, I think at times her argument gets a little confusing, particularly when she first argues against siccing experimental drugs that may or may not hurt patients on test subjects, and then argues that a drug study was unethical because they did not provide experimental drugs they thought might or might not help, as opposed to a placebo. I think I needed a little more data and a clearer picture of what counted as "known to help" and what didn't before I could quite figure out what was going on.

The other problem I had with the book was the lack of individuality of the people submitted to drug tests. She has several portrayals of individuals within the drug industry (none flattering), a few of people protesting the lack of ethical standards, Peter Lurie in particular, and a few of regulators and doctors in assorted countries. I wanted portraits of the individuals hurt by the drug tests as well, because although I do not think it is at all her intention to do the "third world as teeming masses of oppressed people who need to be saaaaved!" some of that still came out in the book. There is a lot of contempt for the people being tested on from the drug companies and the regulators, and it would have been nice to see the people as people, with their own stories and pain and difficulty. That said, they are in the book and they are quoted, but I still felt they were less individualistic.

I also wish her portion on drug testing in the US had focused more on things like testing on the poor, on women of color, on populations least equipped to say no. She does mention testing in prisons and on the homeless, but much of that chapter is on university students taking up drug testing for money. While it does prove her point about how someone can make an informed decision when there is money involved and that person needs the money, I think the argument would have been much, much stronger had she focused on populations that not only need the money, but are also caged by issues of social justice. I was thinking mostly about forced sterilization on the mentally ill and the differently abled, drug testing and monetary compensation on the lower class, Norplant and women of color (and how frequently the categories overlap and are the same).

Still, a good read, and I think I need to find more books on this subject.

Links:
- sanguinity's review

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For coffeeandink

Roberts writes about reproductive freedom for poor black women and how that reproductive freedom often differs from the standard definition used by most white feminists, particularly the mainstream feminist movement for the right to abortion and birth control versus the right to not be coerced or deceived into sterilization or into taking birth control drugs you did not agree to. From there, she examines the meaning of liberty in the United States and what to do when the idea of negative liberty butts up against the idea of social justice.

I suspect I would have found this book much more mind-blowing had I not read Andrea Smith's Conquest first (read it! READ IT!); as such, I still think it's a very necessary read, although it's a bit more dated and Roberts doesn't synthesize her argument quite as well. The book goes through the history of black reproductive freedom, particularly black female reproductive freedom, from the days of slavery, when a black woman's reproductive system was, along with the rest of her, property of white men, when masters could and would whip their pregnant slaves even as they dug holes in the dirt to protect the property in their wombs. And while slavery is over, Roberts shows again and again that the same attitude about black women's bodies and reproductive systems are perpetuated.

She goes on to show that if black women's babies cannot be the property of white people, they are instead portrayed as a burden ("crack babies" and "welfare mothers"). While I completely agree with her argument, I felt she could have drawn more parallels with how race and sex and class intersect; frequently she would point to classist language ("welfare mothers") and note that they were racially coded, even if not explicitly so in the language. It's not to say that she ignores class; class is a constant throughout the book, as it is always the poorest black women who have the worst choices forced upon them. I think I just wanted a more detailed connection.

I had the same issue with ablism. Roberts cites several cases in which black mothers are classified as "mentally disabled" as a convenient way to convince others of the need to sterilize them. In some of the cases, the mother was not differently abled, but in some of the others, she may have been, and I think the book would have been stronger had Roberts incorporated a critique of the ablism inherent in many of the arguments for sterilization. This goes doubly when she discusses the eugenics movement, which she mainly writes about as being a barely coded means for white people to talk about black genocide. Again, I completely agree with her here and in no way want to lessen the strength of her argument. But I think synthesizing classism and ablism further into her analysis of racism and sexism would only make it stronger, a la Andrea Smith drawing parallels among sexual violence against Native women, Native American genocide, and environmental violence.

Many of the chapters on medical experimentation on black women, forced sterilization, uninformed drug trials, and coerced birth control are familiar from Smith, and though I don't have the book with me anymore, I'm fairly certain Roberts is talking about present-day happenings. Norplant and Depo-Provera again, and who knows what big Pharma is doing in Africa (thank you, Sonia Shah). She also links the present with the past, from owning black bodies to the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies.

Still, the most painful part of the book is when she shows how the interests of poor black women and middle-class white women have collided, particularly when it comes to a waiting period for sterilization and informed consent for birth control. This is where I think Roberts does her best work; this is where she takes the idea of negative liberty and contrasts it with social justice:

This notion of liberty rests on the assumption that privileging individual autonomy over social justice is essential to human freedom. [...] The primacy of liberty over equality, then, accepts the possibility that inequality may be inevitable in a liberal society. Although the pursuit of equality, once liberty is assured, is commendable, liberalism cannot guarantee its realization.

She manages to critique the mainstream feminist movement and how it has historically ignored issues central to the well-being of poor black women while still arguing for a need of both increased access to abortion and birth control along with protecting those who have historically been the most abused. I'm still thinking over many of her points about liberty and justice and especially wondering how it works in places that promote positive liberty instead of negative.

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*looks at date*

Er. Better late than never?

Once again, I read fewer books this year. On the other hand, only two books less than last year, so I think that is not bad, considering that I started grad school and all! And I managed to blog every book I read, with the exception of rereads.

The biggest change for me in 2008 was starting the 50books_poc challenge; namely, to read 50 books by POC in a year. I had originally done it from IBARW to IBARW (August 2007 to August 2008), but it's nice to know that I met it for the calendar year of 2008 as well. If anyone's interested about why, I wrote up why I count and how the challenge affected me during IBARW 3. Next year, my goal is to increase the percentage of books by POC so that it's over 50% of all the books I read, total. I'm still trying to make it enough of a habit that I won't have to count, and it's rather embarrassing to see the huge jump in numbers once I started making an effort. The gap between 13 books by POC versus 64 is enormous and indicative of my own aversive racism; it didn't actually take that much effort to find those 51 additional books (although a large part of that is thanks to my local libraries, and aversive racism plays its own role in book selection in libraries as well).

It is nice to see that I do not have to worry much about the percentage of women I'm reading.

As always, feel free to ask about anything here.

• ( Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian )



• ( M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: The Pox Party )



• ( Atul Gawande, Complications and Better )



• ( Justina Chen Headley, Girl Overboard )



• ( Maggie Helwig, Where She Was Standing )



• ( Angela Johnson, The First Part Last )



• ( David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach )



• ( Andrea Smith, Conquest )



• ( Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales )



• ( Elizabeth E. Wein, The Mark of Solomon )

( Also recommended )

Total read: 129 (6 rereads)
51 by women of color, 64 by POC, 104 by women

( Complete list of books read in 2008 )

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Thanks to ladyjax for the rec!

This book originated in Michael Cunningham's photography exhibition of black women in church hats; the interviews came later, as did a stage play (which I wish I could see!). The women mostly range from 40-60 in age, with a few over 60 and a few under 40, and very few under 30. Most of them are from the South, although we have several New Yorkers as well.

The hats are gorgeous, as are the stories that go with them. Some women reminisce about watching their mothers don their church hats, they remember being forced to wear a hat or envying the ones they saw, they recall the one hat they let someone else borrow or the one passed down to them from their grandmother. They remember the first hat they bought. Many of the stories take place during the days of Jim Crow and segregation, but even then, the focus is on the church community and the family.

I didn't know very much about church hats or black churches, and I very much didn't know about the Church of God in Christ hats. Yay imperialist documentation of history and "what's important." But it was very good finding out about it via the book, and hopefully it's nostalgic and brings up fond memories for people, like it seemed to for the interviewees.

Check out some of the portraits at his website; they're gorgeous, and I can't decide which one I like best.

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David Masumoto wrote an epitaph for the Sun Crest peach in a newspaper (apologies for the vague references; I returned the book already), mourning how its short shelf life and lack of red blush meant that firmer but less tasty peaches were taking its place on shelves. He apparently received enough responses to persuade him to devote a year to try and save his peaches; the book is in some ways a story about how he does so, but it's really more the chronicle of a year of life on a farm. That's probably one of the few criticisms I can offer of the book—I desperately want to know what happened to his goal to save the Sun Crest, and I wish the edition I read had some sort of "ten years later" epilogue telling me what happened.

Other than not having an answer to my question, this book is wonderful. Masumoto's prose is lyrical, but he deals with the hard realities of farm life as well. It's still not quite the same as someone whose entire living depends on the farm (Masumoto's wife works in another industry to support the farm), but he captures the struggle between trying to act environmentally and naturally and trying to keep the farm going.

I also love the snippets of Japanese American history in the book. Masumoto is sansei, and though the book isn't about the Japanese-American experience, it's hard to keep out of the book, since so much of his family history has to do with internment and his grandparents not being able to own property.

But mostly, I love the story of the farm, of freak rainstorms that can ruin raisin crops, of cover crops and wildflowers, of peach-eating pests and fertilizer. Reading this book made me feel happy and fulfilled and at peace. Highly recommended.

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After living in China for a few years, Jen Lin-Liu decides to take a class in Chinese cooking and ends up interning at fancy restaurants and noodle stands, all the while dealing with class, gender, and race in a rapidly changing nation. The book's a combination of memoir, food journalism, and China studies, and it includes recipes.

My very favorite parts were, of course, about the food, particularly Lin-Liu's stint as a noodle-maker, in which she worked at a street-side shaved noodle stand! Though I also loved a look at the fancy Shanghainese restaurant she later interned at, part of me wished she had done a working tour of many different street stands and/or small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants. But mostly, I loved reading about making dumplings, the quest for the perfect xiao long bao in Shanghai, discovering Huaiyang cuisine, and adventurous eating. She tries dog, yes, but the meal that probably takes the cake is one that serves penis in everything. I got the impression that the meals including dog and penis and whatnot were considered weird by Chinese standards as well, whereas ones including offal or various internal organs or fish heads are not. I am guessing this holds in Taiwan as well, as I do not know anyone who's eaten the first two and many people who have eaten the latter, myself included.

Also, fish head is tasty.

The bits when the author learns more about China's history and the aftermath of the Communist Revolution were interesting to me, but slightly less so, possibly because I've heard a lot of stories of the Cultural Revolution growing up, and possibly because I was just in Shanghai this summer. I do like the way she writes things up, but there's always the barrier of her Chinese-American childhood and class, as even her paltry salary as a journalist in China put her solidly in the upper-middle class. The class issues are particularly emphasized when she is in cooking class, as it's a vocational class for an non-prestigious, difficult job.

She also writes about migrants from more rural areas coming to Beijing to try to make it and how they're frequently talked about like immigrants (legal and illegal) are talked about in the US. And, well, there's a lot of stuff in the book. There was an incidence of ablism that was disturbing, and there's the class thing, but I did think that Lin-Liu was trying to think about these issues, as well as think about her own role as a Chinese-American woman living in China.

And did I mention the food? Reading this made me so hungry and homesick that I went through old trip photos to drool.

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Ann Marie Fleming found a few reels of old film when she was recovering from a car accident, and portrayed in those reels was Long Tack Sam, magician extraordinaire and her great-grandfather. After researching his life a little, she left with even more questions: who was Long Tack Sam? How did he negotiate being Chinese while touring worldwide during the turn of the century? And why was this world-famous magician almost completely forgotten today?

The graphic novel is actually based on a film Fleming wrote and directed, albeit adapted to take advantage of the different format. It's a combination of memoir, biography, and cultural history, as Fleming ties together the story of her own search and how it affected her with the not-always-factual story of Long Tack Sam and the history of the world at the time. Long Tack Sam lived through the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the Republic of China, two world wars, the rise of movies and the downfall of vaudeville and other travelling acts like his. His story is particularly interesting because it is so international; he married an Austrian (I think) woman and raised three biracial children, two of which ended up marrying Chinese (I forget about the third). And he was travelling at a time when it was just as common to see a white man playing a Chinese man than an actual Chinese man.

I'm not sure if you get a cohesive story out of this book, but I also don't think that's the point. Information about Long Tack Sam is piecemeal and untrustworthy; Long would tell different peopel different stories, his advertisements would say something else, and all of it had to be rediscovered. What we see is what Fleming had to puzzle together, and as such, I think the patchwork nature of the story works.

Fleming doesn't go as into issues of race and racism as I wanted. It's perpetually there in the background, but I suspect that one of the ways Long Tack Sam dealt with it was to use it to his advantage and capitalize on his own "exoticness" to the non-Chinese world. He also incorporated his daughters in his act later, changing their names to more "Chinese" stage names. I wish there had been more about Fleming's grandmother and what she thought of all this, but I suspect that would have been difficult, given that her grandmother had passed away before she started the project.

Still, an interesting look at an interesting life lived during an interesting period.

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Lee begins the book by telling the story of an unprecedented number of winners for a lottery, all of whom had gotten their winning numbers off of fortune cookies. She goes on to examine Chinese food, although despite what the title says, it's more American Chinese food, with occasional forays into other diasporan Chinese foods. Hopefully no one here is surprised to learn that American Chinese food classics such as fortunes cookies, chop suey, and General Tso's chicken aren't very Chinese at all, in that they were born in the USA. On the other hand, Lee argues that you can't define them as un-Chinese. (Although fortune cookies were actually invented by some Japanese Americans, which I hadn't known.)

Since I am a snob, I still refuse to think of most Chinese food in the US as actual Chinese food, despite Lee's arguments. And she does note that Chinese food in the US is sweeter, saltier, and deep fried more often than Chinese food from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, along with noting that it's somewhat sanitized for USian taste—no bones, no gristle, no dark meat, no strange body parts.

I have to admit, the breezy tone ended up being off-putting for me, along with the lack of depth, although the book may be more interesting to someone who doesn't know about the differences between American Chinese food and Chinese/Hong Kong-ese/Taiwanese Chinese food (Lee distinguishes between food from China/HK/Taiwan and food from anywhere else). I also had a hard time reading some of the history because the breezy tone often goes along with history, and that history mostly consists of Japanese internment (or why Chinese Americans ended up marketing the fortune cookie instead of its Japanese-American inventors), the Chinese Exclusion Act, illegal immigration, and other fun things. On the other hand, I did not know that Chinese delivery men are frequently robbed, beaten, and/or killed on the job, so I did learn that.

Lee seems to be more apolitical than anything, though of course "apolitical" is still a political choice. Still, because of that, I wanted a different kind of examination of Chinese food in the US, one that doesn't necessarily conclude that the changes it went through were good, but I also have a great deal of vested interest, thanks to being made fun of for what I eat.

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The short version: Too much metaphorical hunger, not enough actual hunger and food.

The long version: Kim Sunee was abandoned in South Korea by her mother when she was three and was adopted by a white American couple later on. Then she moved to France for ten years or so to live with her French lover. She's found comfort in food, though most of the time, she's felt uprooted and torn among her many identities.

I always find it hard to critique memoirs when I find myself disliking the character of the author. Sunee writes very well, but it's a literary fiction first-person-POV present-tense style that I tend to dislike, and that coupled with existential angst really threw me off. Despite some angst about her unknown Korean heritage and her distant adoptive family, most of the book is actually about Sunee's successive unsuccessful love affairs and her search to find a family for herself.

While I usually sympathize with the search for family, this one in particular irritated me because it wasn't about disparate people becoming a family; instead, it was about a very lost woman attempting to fit into pre-existing families by changing who she was. It also didn't help that Sunee in the book tends to be attracted by older married men. I think I winced through most of the book, and most of the time I was thinking, "NOOOO! Don't do it! BAD IDEA!"

Sunee writes a little about her depression, but it's in a form that I find very difficult to read about; in the book, she tends to latch on to people, have them define her, and feel uncomfortable with the definition. Ergo my discomfort with critiquing the memoir; my problems with it are personal ones, as Sunee's situations are ones that I would not touch with a ten-foot pole, and that includes when I was depressed (one lover keeps telling her he will provide her with everything, that she is his everything, that all she needs is what he'll give her to be happy, that she shouldn't have to think about getting a job or anything because he'll provide. Another keeps telling her he'll divorce his wife despite massive evidence to the contrary). Yet, I feel awkward judging her choices.

Also, I was very disgruntled because I picked this up for loving food descriptions and got very few.

Possibly this will work for people who do like stories about melancholy, doomed love affairs, but it's hard for me to tell, because to me, the love affairs are doomed in such horrific, unromantic ways that I cannot be impartial.