Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In her debut poetry collection, IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH, Sgro explores a vision of motherhood severed from conventional ideas of partnership and family. Between tales of fraught monogamy and fleeting first fucks, she depicts the mother as a figure steeped in loss, depression, and dynamic sexual identity, bearing memory and trauma as their own kind of offspring. Collaging words from plant life experts, adolescent psychologists, and scholars, Sgro reckons with a longing for the future that is invested in queer desire, maternal drives, and the spaces in between. "Why are the poet and the poem so toxic and damned? Because they are carriers, processing liquid flushed from pleasure and damage. Sgro is opening space inside toxicity. When the space is born an impure baby, the poet wants the baby. The baby is a fetus, a fetish, a trauma-processing plant, a poem. The poems within IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH rage, pull back, smash down. It's an open system. Sgro's thrilling, monstrous poems are coming to touch you."--Catherine Wagner "For trauma survivors, our futures eroticize that which we lived through, scored as we are by our bodies' pasts. Survival must affirm that future. In IF THE FUTURE IS A FETISH, we experience a gravid violence, Sgro's speaker the queer anorexic mother pulsating meaning into 'basement operas' and 'tenderilous' growth. This is a psychosexual novel-in-verse, one displeased with its phenomenologies but chanting them anyway. It wretches in Plathian disgust; coats its throat in 2 mg of Xanax; and consumes its daughters with Goya-level anguish. Paperclips itch under wrist skin, women soak through their True Religion jeans, an assemblage of lovers--J., A., M., and X.--function as a Greek chorus of S.'s sexual failings; and still, 'the world returns like a dog to its vomit.' Rarely do I read a collection so succinct in its viscera, where there is a math to every gory line. How lucky am I to have read Sgro who writes with annihilating purpose about the body in absence, violation, vexation, abundance, and martyrdom. This debut collection is a lingual maelstrom, its music a steady waltz over the future's piss."--Natalie Eilbert

At the dawn of the new millennium, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies form part of a rapidly growing discourse about the future of the human form, the disappearing boundary between the human and the technological and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration. This book is about those cultural fantasies of fetishism, the different forms they take and the various ways in which the transformative processes they depict can reaffirm accepted definitions of identity or reconfigure them in an entirely new fashion.

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. She has slept with most of her male friends. Most of her male friends have slept with most of her female friends. Sexual promiscuity is the norm. But up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience achieving a sense of finality, 'like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center'. Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, 'and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future'.But, as we all know, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently unreciprocated. Sexual acquisitiveness is risky and can be hurtful. And generalizing about what women want or don't want or should want or should do seems to lead nowhere. Don't our temperaments, our hang-ups, and our histories define our lives as much as our gender?In Future Sex, Witt captures the experiences of going to bars alone, online dating, and hooking up with strangers. After moving to San Francisco, she decides to say yes to everything and to find her own path. From public health clinics to cafe conversations about 'coregasms', she observes the subcultures she encounters with awry sense of humour, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality - open, forgiving, and unafraid.

Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

A fascinating survey of the enduring human love affair with the exotic and the strange, and its impact on Western culture Exotic explores our obsession with the lure of distant lands and their promise of the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and grotesque. Through a host of evocative images, this book shows how the absorption of 'the foreign,' through arts, design, architecture, and other cultural elements, has consistently enriched Western society, contributing to it cultural dynamism and artistic energy. Exotic's focus is especially relevant to the modern globalized world in which our engagement with cultures and traditions from around the globe is easier – and potentially more fraught – than ever before.

The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category—academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents—the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and envisions a different way forward. Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gabrielle Cabrera, Gabriela Garcia Cruz, Lucía León, Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Grecia Mondragón, Gabriela Monico, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Maria Liliana Ramirez, Joel Sati, Audrey Silvestre, Carolina Valdivia

"The Problem of the Fetish gathers William Pietz's innovative writing on the fetish object and the history of the "fetish" as a concept. Engaging extensively with historical documents, Pietz traces the genealogy of fetishism from encounters between European colonizers and African communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the emerging social sciences. Discussing the role of fetishism in anthropology, political economy, psychiatry, and law, he analyzes the relationship between the fetish and value, violence, sacrifice, and debt. To accompany Pietz's seven essays, this long-awaited volume includes a foreword by Francesco Pellizzi, editor of RES, the journal in which several of the essays originally appeared, and it also includes an introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Ben Kafka, who provide an invaluable guide to Pietz's thought. This book will speak to Pietz's multidisciplinary readership, continuing his legacy of engaging with questions of material culture, object agency, merchant capitalism, and spiritual power, and introducing the work of a powerful theorist to new generations of scholars and thinkers"--

With Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner explores the boundary the poem marks between poet and audience on the map of desire.

It’s 1932, and the Great Venus Island Fetish, a ceremonial mask surrounded by thirty-two human skulls, now resides in a museum in Sydney, Australia. But young anthropologist Archie Meek, recently returned from an extended field trip to Venus Island, has noticed something amiss: a strange discoloration on some of the skulls. Has someone tampered with the fetish? Is there a link between it and the mysterious disappearance of Cecil Polkinghorne, curator of archaeology? And how did Eric Sopwith, retired mollusks expert, die in the museum’s storeroom? Could Archie’s life be at risk as well? But these are not the only concerns that weigh upon the assistant curator’s mind. Why hasn’t his beloved Beatrice—registrar, anthropology—accepted his proposal of marriage and the love token he brought back from Venus Island? Has something been lost in translation? Tim Flannery's The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish is a delightfully risqué caper, full of eccentric characters, intrigue, and adventure.