Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence In American Home Care
New York University Press, 2018. 263 pages.
Elana Buch’s critical and thoughtful analysis of the American home care system highlights the ways in which older adults try to simultaneously maintain their independent identities and generate new relations with the home care workers who assist them with assigned …
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages.
Jasbir Puar’s second book, The Right to Maim, examines the relationship between life, debility, and death. On a spectrum between life and death, according to Puar, there is the production of the “living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, and life itself”—this is …
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages.
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When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign in 2010, it triggered a backlash by conservatives anxious about the so called “nanny state” interfering unduly in the private sphere. The campaign was a national initiative “dedicated …
On January 13th, Gillette, a razor blade brand, released a new ad campaign called, “We Believe.” The video ad opens with a collage of news clips that—unlike the voiceover narrator—explicitly use the words, “toxic masculinity” and “#MeToo movement.” The narrator then asks, “Is this the best a man can get?” In the short film, Gillette plays on their decades-old slogan…
Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
MIT Press, 2017, 416 pages.
Neoliberal policy in the United States sometimes seems internally contradictory. Why oppose the estate tax if you support a meritocracy based on how the market values individuals? Why oppose universal health coverage or public education if you want everyone to have an equal …
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
University of Chicago Press, 2017, 400 pages
…“An innocent he was not. He eventually told health investigators that during the 1970s he’d had some 2,500 sexual contacts with men in Europe, Canada, South America – and in the large centers of gay lifestyle in New York and California.