Who are we, where do we come from, and why does it matter?From whom do I come? Our Blood describes the central importance of our sense not just of our heritage, but our embodied heritage: that our past is in our bodies and runs in our blood, and that our embodied past is central to our futures. Deeply felt heritas, as Michael M. Bell, Loka Ashwood, and Jay Orne call it, can be a source of great love and kindness for one another. But it ca...

From neighborhoods as large as Chelsea or the Castro, to locales limited to a single club, like The Shamrock in Madison or Sidewinders in Albuquerque, gay areas are becoming normal. Straight people flood in. Gay people flee out. Scholars call this transformation assimilation, and some argue that we—gay and straight alike—are becoming “post-gay.” Jason Orne argues that rather than post-gay, America is becoming “post-queer,” losing the radical lessons of sex.In Boystown, Orn...

If you’re woke, you’re left. If you’re left, you’re woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you’re one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake.The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. But those emotions are undermined by widespread philosophical assumptions with reactionary sources. As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas th...

For fans of Sapiens and The Dawn of Everything, a groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat itFor centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality—our imagined past and contested present— look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women? If we saw inequalit...

The long-simmering crisis that grips our culture has exploded in recent years, leaving us divided and intransigent. Discourse seems futile when we are no longer a people with shared principles or even a shared understanding of reality. What seems obvious to one person is patently absurd to the next.This collapse of meaning is not accidental. It has been plotted and documented for decades, and now presents in its current form as Woke ideology.Awake, Not Woke unmasks...

The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of “w...

World-renowned philosopher A. C. Grayling explores the messy politics of the ‘culture wars’It seems like we can’t talk about anything nowadays… Whether it’s war or something utterly inconsequential, the internet is primed for furore. And the results can be horrifying – from online pile-ons and doxing to job loss and, in some cases, death. But how did we end up here?Nuanced and historically grounded, A. C. Grayling searches for middle ground in an o...

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopherIn this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in ...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction aims to offer a concise introduction to Comparative Law—its objectives, methods, concepts and uses. After an overview of the fundamental definitions, key concepts and basic lexicon of the discipline, the book proposes an analysis of the most successful techniques adopted in legal comparison for mapping the world's legal systems and for explaining legal change and diffusion of ...

"An extraordinary volume that provides nothing less than a detailed cognitive mapping of the terrain for everyone who wants to engage in radical politics."-Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End TimesKeywords for Radicals recognizes that language is both a weapon and terrain of struggle, and that all of us committed to changing our social and material reality, to making a world justice-rich and oppression-free, cannot drop words such as democracy,’ occupatio...

Antoinette Burton argues that gender history is hiding in plain sight, at work everywhere we look. This volume introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s. Inevitably po...

Politicians, judges, and citizens commonly use the phrase "rule of law" to describe some good that flows from a legal system. But what precisely is that good? Even in Aristotle's time, there was no agreement on either its nature, and on whether it counted as an unqualified good. Even now, a core rule-of-law aspiration is that law can constrain how power is flexed. But how or when? Disagreement persists as to whether the rule of law is a matter of how law is used or why it is deployed. In c...