A TALE OF LOVE follows the quest of a woman in love with ‘Love’. The film is loosely inspired by THE TALE OF KIEU, the Vietnamese national poem of love marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination. Exposing the fiction of love and the process of consumption, the film marginalizes traditional narrative conventions and utilizes interaction of reality, memory and dream.

Taking as their subject the Gurunsi people of Upper Volta, the authors provide case studies of eight ethnic groups. The authors describe for each group such topics as the history and founding of the village, the spatial and social organization for the compound, the design and construction of dwellings, and the use of private and communal space in everyday life.

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal.

Moallem refers to the gendered notions of brother and sister as keys to understanding the invention of the Islamic ummat as a modern fraternal community. Using magazines, novels, and films, she offers a feminist transnational analysis of contemporary Iranian culture that questions dominant binaries of modern and traditional, West and East, secular and religious, and civilized and barbaric.

In Between Woman and Nation constructions such as nationalism, homeland, country, region, and locality are for the first time examined in the context of gender.

(20-min Digital video in Bodyscapes) The term “body art” often conjures rude images of radical piercings and raunchy tattoos on “modern primitives.” Bourdier tries a completely different task: to create haunting photographic images that allow viewers to see the environment from inside out by painting the bodies of models, making them one with the desert landscape.

In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the “infinite relation” of word to image. Cinema Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning “the space between”–between viewer and film, image and text, interviewer and interviewee, lover and beloved.

Volume edited by Radha S. Hegde. Minoo Moallem contributes a chapter titled Objects of Knowledge, Subjects of Consumption: Persian Carpets and The Gendered Politics of Transnational Knowledge. It is one of a collection of sixteen essays that collectively advance a discussion about sexual politics, media, technology, and globalization.

Architect Jean-Paul Bourdier and cultural critic and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha take us into the traditionally built dwellings of African society in this richly illustrated book. Through this “life-in-architecture” we see material evidence of a culture, its socio-economic and cosmological organization, its way of living, and its world view.

Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders–as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee—in a pre- and post-9/11 world. The author examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile.

This collection of thirteen life stories recaptures the history of a political and intellectual movement that created feminist sociology as a field of inquiry. The life history is a crucial tool for sociological thought. Life histories can be a bridge between individual experience and codified knowledge, between human agency and social structure.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor.

Framer Framed brings together the scripts and detailed visuals of three of Trinh Minh-ha’s provocative films: Reassemblage, Naked Spaces, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Offers a selection of related interviews in which Trinh discusses visual creativity and the politics of documentary practice as well as questions of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodernist art and culture.

The three essays in this volume offer a detailed account of women who are active in the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti. It analyses differences in their, and the RSS’s articulation of the place that women occupy in their ideology, in symbolic space, and in a Hindu Rashtra. A theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich contribution to an analysis of the nation and the RSS.

Breaking with familiar conventions for thinking about children and gender, Gender Play develops fresh insights into the everyday social worlds of kids in elementary schools in the United States. Thorne draws on her daily observations in the classroom and in the playground to show how children construct and experience gender in school.

Her careful ethnographic work, personal voice, and sophisticated analysis capture the feel of life inside the maquiladoras and make a compelling case that transnational production is a gendered process. The research grounds contemporary feminist theory in an examination of daily practices and provides an important new perspective on globalization.

There may be no consensus on the status of the embryo-only a tacit agreement to disagree-but the debate now takes place in a context in which human stem cell research and related technologies already exist. In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the US and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science”.

The book offers a comprehensive discussion of women in the work force, covering unpaid domestic work and paid labor, blue collar workers and professionals, and the ways the institutions affect them all. The book addresses the intersection between work and family life and the supermom syndrome, reports on sexual harassment, the impact technology has had on clerical jobs, and more.

In this study of Japanese American women employed as domestic workers, Nakano-Glenn reveals how the careers of these strong but oppressed women affected the history of Asian immigration in the San Francisco-Bay Area. Three generations of women speak in their own words about coping with degraded employment and how this work related to family and community life.

In this new work, renowned feminist filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory.

Drawing on science and technology studies, feminist theory, and historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction.

This volume presents a perspective on mothering as a socially-constructed relationship focused on caring and nurturing. It addresses different ideas and practices of mothering, the need to go beyond biological determinism and family values, and the conditions and resources of mothering; central to the reproduction of social relations, and contested terrain.

Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). Sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent, the private interaction of people in their living spaces.

This provocative digital tale tells the story of three young friends traveling for a brief moment together on the train between life and death. Their journey into and out of the land of ‘awakened dreams’ occurs on a long ride on a night train.

Out There addresses the theme of cultural marginalization – the process whereby various groups are excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. It engages fundamental issues raised by attempts to define such concepts as mainstream and minority, and opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation.

Rodríguez documents the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained.

Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, REASSEMBLAGE reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.

Contributors from a range of disciplines address issues such as the increase in divorce and single-parent families, employment of married women and mothers, the relationship of poverty to family structure, controversy over access to abortion, the increasing visibility of varied family forms, and debates over the very meaning of “family.”

An oft-neglected subject, right-wing women are an important component in understanding the many racist, fascist, and anti-feminist movements of the 20th century. Providing original research on an array of right-wing groups around the world, the contributors paint a disturbing and complicated portrait of the women involved in these movements.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha blends different forms of writing and narrating; the mutual challenge of the theoretical and the poetical, discursive and “non-discursive” languages tell of her resistance against categorizations and limitations, which is carried out right across ethnicities and cultures. She shows five films at the Secession and gives an insight into her publications from recent years.

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures.

Shades of Difference addresses the widespread but little studied phenomenon of colorism—the preference for lighter skin and the ranking of individual worth according to skin tone.

The film—whose title refers in part to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. It ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by Tiananmen Square events.This meditative documentary realizes on screen the shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.

This documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. The film explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing traditional society and life since the war.

Endless travel in cyberspace, virtual reality, and the dream of limitless speed: technology changes our sense of self. In her new book, Trinh Minh-ha explores the way technology transforms our perception of reality.

An elegant meditation on time, travel, and ceremony. Minh-ha deconstructs the role of ritual in mediating between the past and the present. She explains, -Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations,…religious rite and theatrical performance, rituals involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the world of meaning.

-the mixing of different modes . . . ; the mutual challenge of theoretical and poetical, discursive and nondiscursive languages.- Her first theoretical work, Un art sans oeuvre, illustrates this mixing; one chapter links writings by the French theorist Jacques Derrida and the playwright Antonin Artaud to those of Zen Buddhist healers such as Krishnamurti.

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II.

When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live “a difference that has no name and too many names already.”

“Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color.” —Chandra Talpade Mohanty