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Courting Disaster: Intimate Stalking, Culture, and Criminal Justice by Jennifer Dunn (2002)

This book is a wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and sensitive examination of the lived experience of intimate stalking victimization. It explores how it feels and what it means to be stalked by a former intimate and how this situation creates dilemmas for victims and their advocates. What is it like to try to become a "victim" in the eyes of the law, and then to remain one, when almost anything a woman does to manage the violent emotions of an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend can backfire and discredit her claims? The author draws upon a broad array of rich data, including a survey of college women, courtroom testimony, prosecutors' case files, interviews with victims, and observations in a prosecutor's office and a stalking survivors' support group, to illustrate the difficulties women face as they work to cope with danger-and to negotiate the hazardous terrain of legal systems-simultaneously. For some victims of stalking, Dr. Dunn shows, prosecution processes are more traumatic than the events that brought them to seek legal help, and her analysis of the historical, cultural, and gendered frameworks in which stalking victimization and prosecution take place accounts for the additional trauma. Definitions of situations and identities are contested rather than given, in these arenas where lives and self-concepts rest in the balance. The ways in which we socially construct and confer meaning upon intimate violence and its victims profoundly shape what happens to ordinary women facing extraordinary circumstances. Courting Disaster illuminates what we can learn from their experience, whether we are working in these arenas or theorizing about how they do, and sometimes do not, work. It will be useful in sociology and criminology courses, and also in women's studies and counseling courses.

Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity by Julie Bettie (2002)

In this examination of white and Mexican-American girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head and offers new tools for understanding the ways in which class identity is constructed and, at times, fails to be constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, Women Without Class, refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.

Fatherhood Arrested: Parenting from Within the Juvenile Justice System by Anne Nurse (2002)

Crime and young fatherhood have generally been viewed as separate social problems. Increasingly, researchers are finding that these problems are closely related and highly concentrated in low-income communities. Fatherhood Arrested is an in-depth study of these issues and the difficulties of parenting while in prison and on parole. By taking us inside the prison system, Nurse shows how its structure actively shapes an inmate's relationship with his children. For example, visitation is sometimes restricted to blood relatives and wives. Because relationships between unmarried men and the mothers of their children are often strained, some mothers are unwilling to allow their children to go to the prison with the inmate's family. Or the father may be allowed to receive visits from only one "girlfriend," which forces a man with multiple relationships, or with children by different women, to make impossible choices. Special attention is paid to the gendered nature of prison, its patriarchal and punitive structure, and its high-stress environment. The book then follows newly paroled men as they are released and return to their children. The author spent four years doing research at the California Youth Authority, during which time she surveyed 258 paroled fathers. The group included young white, black, and Latino men, ages sixteen to twenty-five. She conducted in-depth interviews with men selected from this group, participated in forty parenting class sessions, and observed visiting hours at three different institutions. The data provide fascinating information about the characteristics of the men, their attitudes toward fatherhood, and the ways they are involved with their children. The diversity of the fathers allows for an analysis of racial and ethnic variation in their attitudes and involvement. The study concludes with a series of policy suggestions, especially important in light of the large number of fathers now living under the care and control of the juvenile justice system.

Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online by Lori Kendall (2002)

Lori Kendall is one of the first to explore the brave new world of social relations as they have evolved on the Internet. In this highly readable ethnography, she examines how men and women negotiate their gender roles on an online forum she calls BlueSky. The result is a first-rate analysis of the emerging social phenomenon of Internet-mediated communication and a ground-breaking study of the social and cultural effects of a medium that allows participants to assume identities of their own choosing. Despite the common assumption that the personas these men and women craft for themselves bear little resemblance to reality, Kendall discovers that the habitués of BlueSky stick surprisingly close to the facts of their actual lives and personalities.

Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America by Cecilia Menjivar (2001)

In one of the most comprehensive treatments of Salvadoran immigration to date, Cecilia Menjívar gives a vivid and detailed account of the inner workings of the networks by which immigrants leave their homes in Central America to start new lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. Menjívar traces crucial aspects of the immigrant experience, from reasons for leaving El Salvador, to the long and perilous journey through Mexico, to the difficulty of finding work, housing, and daily necessities in San Francisco. Fragmented Ties argues that hostile immigration policies, shrinking economic opportunities, and a resource-poor community make assistance conditional and uneven, deflating expectations both on the part of the new immigrants and the relatives who preceded them. In contrast to most studies of immigrant life that identify networks as viable sources of assistance, this one focuses on a case in which poverty makes it difficult for immigrants to accumulate enough resources to help each other. Menjívar also examines how class, gender, and age affect immigrants' access to social networks and scarce community resources. The immigrants' voices are stirring and distinctive: they describe the dangers they face both during the journey and once they arrive, and bring to life the disappointments and joys that they experience in their daily struggle to survive in their adopted community.

Visions of Charity: Volunteer Workers and Moral Community by Rebecca Allahyari (2000)

In the United States, public talk about charity for the poor is highly moralistic, even in our era of welfare reform. But how do we understand the actual experience of caring for the poor? This study looks at the front lines of volunteer involvement with the poor and homeless to assess what volunteer work means for those who do it. Rebecca Allahyari profiles volunteers at two charities--Loaves & Fishes and The Salvation Army--to show how they think about themselves and their work, providing new ways for discussing charity and morality. Allahyari explores these agencies' differing ideological orientations and the raced, classed, and gendered contexts they provide volunteers for doing charitable work. Drawing on participant observation, intensive interviewing, and content analysis of organizational publications, she looks in particular at the process of self-improvement for these volunteers. The competing visions of charity Allahyari finds at these two organizations reveal the complicated and contradictory politics of caring for the poor in the United States today.

Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Biography by Diane Bjorklund (2000)

Bjorklund, Diane. 2000. Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Biography. University of Chicago Press. (Ph.D. 1993) In this ambitious study, Diane Bjorklund explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. Bjorklund draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of self.

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