Micaela di Leonardo

The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families and the Work of Kinship

Many thanks to Cynthia Costello, Rayna Rapp, Roberta Spalter-Roth, John Willoughby, and Barbara Gelpi, Susan Johnson, and Sylvia Yanagisako of Signs for their help with this article. I wish in particular to acknowledge the influence of Rayna Rapps work on my ideas. 1 Acknowledgment and gratitude to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for my paraphrase of her title, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29. 2 Ann Landers letter printed in Washington Post (April 15, 1983); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 17.

Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era

Contributors: Margaret Conkey, Susan Gal, Jane Guyer, Micaela di Leonardo, Nadine Peacock, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rayna Rapp, Harold Scheffler, Irene Silverblatt, Susan Sperling, Ann Stoler, Kay Warren, Patricia Zavella.

The gender/sexuality reader : culture, history, political economy

The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. Ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo. New York: Routledge, 1997. x + 574 pages.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE POLITICAL ECONOMY MAKES: FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE POSTMODERN ERA

27.95 paper. Robert Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardos compilation of essays for The Gender/Sexuality reader is nothing short of an accomplishment. They have gathered thirty-seven essays from various disciplines related to gender, sexuality, race, and culture and have organized them into groups that highlight both their differences and similarities. The commonalities among the essays include their high quality, their concern with the complicated intersections of race, gender, power, and nation, and the fact that these essays reveal the current intellectual endpoints of these late twentieth-century transformative movements. This anthology, a locus for the diverse considerations of identity politics, draws from and informs anthropology, history, politics, literature, and science. Its contributors represent the best in their fields currently engaging in the dialogue of considerations of the body, and the result is a book that is essential for anyones library. The editors explain in the introduction their careful method of grouping the essays. They have arranged the works into nine thematic sections under three larger headings, which they call frames. Although a bit tedious, a brief description of the organizational pattern, the names of the essayss authors, and a suggestion of the essayss concerns may assist readers in making personal decisions about the books worth. The first larger frame is Embodiments of History: Local Meanings, Global Economies, and it deals generally with the placement of culture in time. Part One within the first frame is Moving Borders: Genders, Sexualities, Histories, and it contains three essays: one by Ann Laura Stoler on gender and race in colonial Asia, one by Siobhan Somerville that traces the invention of the homosexual body, and a particularly engaging piece by co-editor Micaela di Leonardo. Part Two in the first frame is called Modes of Reproduction: Kinship, Parenthood, States. The six essays in this section all deal with families or the body politic in some way: Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako question the idea of the family, Nancy Scheper-Hughes presents a situation of child death in Brazil, and Amartya Sen examines the problem of population increases. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Deven explore Singapores national sexual identity as fatherland, and two essays deal with abortion: Susan Gal looks at abortion in Hungary, and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky talks about the use of the visual in the abortion debate (especially the movie documentary Silent Scream). The final part of the first grouping is called The Social Construction of Identities: Comparative Sexualities. Its four essays discuss sexual identities in various contexts: Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp look at sex, society, and how understanding sexuality requires critical attention to the idea that sex is a lived and changing relationship; John DEmilios essays Capitalism and Gay Identity argues that gay men and lesbians are a product of history; David F. Greenberg reminds us in his essay that categorical schemes differ not only between cultures; but that they also vary within the cultures of complex societies, and can be the site of political contest in his essay Transformations of Homosexuality-Based Classifications, and Matthew C. Gutmann offers an interesting look at Seed of the Nation: Mens Sex and Potency in Mexico. The second large frame around which this book is organized is called Making Marks and Drawing Boundaries: Corporeal Practices. Part Four (the first section of this frame.) Bodies of Knowledge and the Politics of Representation, presents seven essays that discuss everything from photography to orgasm to rhetoric as a way to help readers see the importance that representation makes on our identities. …

NEOLIBERALISM, NOSTALGIA, RACE POLITICS, AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SPHERE: The case of the Tom Joyner Morning Show

Bien que le tournant postmoderne en anthropologie ait largement ignore leconomie politique, lanalyse des genres ainsi que ses propres antecedents theoriques, il a mis en evidence un important bouleversement. La perspective post-structuraliste/postmoderne nous fait prendre conscience de la problematique des textes ethnographiques. Cette perspective peut en outre etre appliquee a linvestigation de notre production culturelle informelle. Cet essai souligne la necessite pour leconomie politique de donner sens a la perspicacite du post-structuralisme.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: DOMESTIC DOMAINS AND URBAN IMAGINARIES IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

February 1, 2005, Tom Joyner Morning Show, aired on WVAZ in Chicago, a station owned by Clear Channel. Tom Joyner talks about a woman who lost both her husband and son in the Iraq war, and Bush’s recent advocacy of an increased death benefit and extending troops’ stay. J. Anthony Brown: Now, I went to trade school, and this is not hard to figure out. Joyner: Yeah. J. Anthony Brown: Bring’em home! Sybil Wilkes: You’ll save more money that way.

Partyin’ with a purpose: Black respectability politics and the tom joyner morning show

In this article, I attempt to adumbrate shifting race, class, and gender politics in the United States through a “world in a grain of sand” focus on one American city and through the fulcrum of what Marx labeled the “historical and moral element” that must always be considered in gauging class formation and capitalist development: the gendered construction, across class and race, of the workings of the “proper home.” In so doing, I both document ethnographically the counter-empirical nature of much public–cultural representation of American race/class/gender lived realities and demonstrate the ways in which we can and should consider “the political” both in terms of our older understandings of politics and political organizations and in the newer sense of cultural politics—but without succumbing to the etiolated idealism of political economy-less postmodernism.In this article, I attempt to adumbrate shifting race, class, and gender politics in the United States through a “world in a grain of sand” focus on one American city and through the fulcrum of what Marx labeled the “historical and moral element” that must always be considered in gauging class formation and capitalist development: the gendered construction, across class and race, of the workings of the “proper home.” In so doing, I both document ethnographically the counter-empirical nature of much public–cultural representation of American race/class/gender lived realities and demonstrate the ways in which we can and should consider “the political” both in terms of our older understandings of politics and political organizations and in the newer sense of cultural politics—but without succumbing to the etiolated idealism of political economy-less postmodernism.

Commentaries on “Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion”

We often imagine black respectability politics as a suffocating hegemon, opposed only by small, usually youthful, groups of artists, intellectuals, and activists. But for more than the last two decades, the most popular syndicated black American radio show, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, has openly dissented from respectability politics—while simultaneously “flying under the radar” of both black and mainstream public sphere attention. This invisibility may be due to the show’s commercial status and mixed format—but most importantly, because of its low-status medium, radio, combined with the “unsexy” nature of its huge audience: middle aged and definitely working class.We often imagine black respectability politics as a suffocating hegemon, opposed only by small, usually youthful, groups of artists, intellectuals, and activists. But for more than the last two decades, the most popular syndicated black American radio show, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, has openly dissented from respectability politics—while simultaneously “flying under the radar” of both black and mainstream public sphere attention. This invisibility may be due to the show’s commercial status and mixed format—but most importantly, because of its low-status medium, radio, combined with the “unsexy” nature of its huge audience: middle aged and definitely working class.

Introduction: The force of a thousand nightmares

Commentaries on “Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion” Lesley Gill a; Terence Turner b; Micaela di Leonardo c; Catherine Lutz d; Ananthakrishnan Aiyer e a Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA b Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA c Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA d Department of Anthropology and Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA e University of MichiganFlint Flint, Michigan, USA

Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity

This Introduction provides a thematic overview of this special issue. It draws attention to the multiplicity of forces that produce new and complicated forms of oppression and exploitation in post-Cold War, post-9/11 America and provides brief descriptions of the articles collected here, highlighting their contributions to Americanist critical theory and ethnography and anthropology in general. Early versions of the articles collected in this special issue were presented at the session “The Force of A Thousand Nightmares: Global Inequalities and the American Scene,” organized by Micaela di Leonardo and Jeff Maskovsky, at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2002. We wish to thank the Society for the Anthropology of North America and the Society for Feminist Anthropology for co-inviting this session. We also thank Identities editors Jonathan Hill and Thomas Wilson for their support and encouragement and for shepherding this project through the peer-review process. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Catherine Kingfisher for her brilliant commentary. Finally, we dedicate this special issue to the memory of our comrade and friend, Dwight Conquergood, who had planned to contribute an article to this special issue. His untimely death from colon cancer last year prematurely silenced one of the most eloquent, passionate, and persuasive academic voices of the left. We celebrate his compassionate spirit, inspired intellect, and unwavering pursuit of social justice.