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Labor of Love
While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation. Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the ...
Queering Marriage
Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. The first large-scale occurrence of legal same-sex marriage, these unions galvanized a movement and reignited the debate about whether same-sex marriage, as some hope, challenges heterosexual privilege or, as others fear, preserves that privilege by assimilating queer couples. In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the a...
Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers
In Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers, Barbara Wells examines the work and family lives of Mexican American women in a community near the U.S.-Mexican border in California’s Imperial County. Decades earlier, their Mexican parents and grandparents had made the momentous decision to migrate to the United States as farmworkers. This book explores how that decision has worked out for these second- and third-generation Mexican Americans. Wells provides stories of the struggles, triumphs, and everyday experiences of these women. She analyzes their narratives on a broad canvas that includes the social structures that create the barriers, constraints, and opportunities that have shaped th...
"Raising Sexually Pure Kids"
Raising Sexually Pure Kids: Sexual Abstinence, Conservative Christians and American Politics analyzes pro-abstinence discourses issued by the conservative Christian community and the G.W. Bush administration, to underline that abstinence is not a peripheral matter, but is a cultural and political issue of great significance in US society, especially in the past decade. This book seeks to bring to light how pro-abstinence discourses coalesce most of the core agendas of conservative Christians - like creationism, parental rights or the culture war - and enabled them and the Bush administration, to on the one hand, preserve traditional hierarchies and on the other hand, maintain the sense of threat necessary to the protection of the status quo and to the enduring commitment of the conservative Christian constituency.
Saving Face
Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hard-working male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother who raises obedient children. The other demonizes Asian families around these very same cultural values by highlighting the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures. Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait...
The Elephant in the Room
In The Elephant in the Room, Eviatar Zerubavel sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial--the keeping of "open secrets." Zerubavel shows how conspiracies of silence evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events.
Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan
In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Amy Brainer provides an in-depth look at queer and transgender family relationships in Taiwan. Brainer is among the first to analyze first-person accounts of heterosexual parents and siblings of LGBT people in a non-Western context.
The End of International Adoption?
Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the United States has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. Many parents, activists, and scholars have questioned whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect. In the face of such concerns, international adoption has not only become more difficult, but also more politically and ethically fraught. The mothers interviewed for this book found themselves navigating contemporary American family life in an unexpected way, caught between the double-bind of work-family life and a new paradigm of thinking about the method—international adoption—that they used to create those families.
Selves, Symbols, and Sexualities
Offering an anthology of original articles on sexuality from a sociological perspective, Selves, Symbols, and Sexualities: An Interactionist Anthology focuses on the diverse and multi-layered meanings of sexuality, sexual behaviors and sexual identities. Thomas S. Weinberg and Staci Newmahr bring you essays that explore sexuality as a social process. As a whole, the book takes the perspective that what each of us understands to be sexual is constructed through everyday social processes and interaction, situated in particular spaces and moments, identified through our social-sexual presentations, and symbolized through language, objects and practices. The book is organized around these four distinct but interrelated processes, and augmented by personal narratives around relevant issues. The authors’ goals for the book are to engage students in the sociological enterprise by providing interesting and insightful entries that emphasize the importance of meaning-making in human sexuality, and to provide them with conceptual tools to understand human sexuality in a complex and quickly changing sexual landscape.
The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience
A fascinating exploration of the breadth of social, emotional, and spiritual experiences of atheists in America Self-identified atheists make up roughly 5 percent of the American religious landscape, comprising a larger population than Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. In spite of their relatively significant presence in society, atheists are one of the most stigmatized groups in the United States, frequently portrayed as immoral, unhappy, or even outright angry. Yet we know very little about what their lives are actually like as they live among their largely religious, and sometimes hostile, fellow citizens. In this book, Jerome P. Baggett ...
