SUNY in Feminist Criticism and Theory

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. “Feminists Reclaim Mentorship” will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.

Remnants of Refusal traces an affective discourse of feminist refusal across a series of French and Chinese works of film and literature. Developing an inventive comparative approach, Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf argues that this discourse takes shape in response to two national traumas and their aftermath: the German Occupation and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, respectively. In both contexts, events associated with the trauma were effectively erased from the official historical record and replaced by an unwritten code of public secrecy. And, in both contexts, three affects-melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion-provide means of expressing mourning without breaking the taboo of direct representation. In films and literary texts by Wang Anyi, Chen Ran, Jia Zhangke, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, and others, mourning is most frequently borne by and through the bodies of women, generating a broader feminist counternarrative to historical forgetting and burgeoning neoliberalism.

This book provides a timely new transnational lineage of Jewish feminist revolutionary legacies. Using extensive research, deep thinking, and a bold methodology, Marla Brettschneider tousles with a host of anti-colonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer troublemakers-Jamaica Kincaid, Golda Meir, Hannah Arendt, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, and Emma Goldman. Brettschneider brings together these feisty women's lives, work, politics, thinking, and art to wrestle with big questions: How can we make our lives, individually and collectively, in our diversity as Jews and in grounded solidarity with others? How do these women bring out otherwise unidentified, unnamed, and underexamined issues in Jewish studies, feminism, politics, and a range of critical theories? “Revolutionary Legacies” invites Jews, feminists, anti-racists, and all manner of justice seekers to think, and create common cause, with these rabblerousers.

Broken Record brings together narratives of gendered abuse in academia from across disciplines, at every career stage, around the United States and the world. Individually and collectively, contributors describe harrowing experiences of bullying, mobbing, harassment, and assault in a range of institutional spaces, including classrooms, offices, library stacks, conferences, interviews, and out on field research. Their abusers are teachers, mentors, students, colleagues, chairs, administrators, and even representatives of the very offices tasked with protecting them. Beyond using storytelling to expose the ubiquity of abuse, these writers also theorize its causes and proffer strategies for resistance and healing. With an afterword by Sara Ahmed, author of the groundbreaking Complaint!, Broken Record forms its own powerful collective-a chorus of nearly fifty academics with highly varied yet strikingly consistent narratives, united in a clarion call for change.