Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. #identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

"Reading with a Difference is a collection of eighteen essays that examines how issues of gender, race, and cultural identity inform texts from the seventeenth century to the present. Together the contributions document recent significant shifts occurring in the theoretical approach to the texts they study and illustrate how shifts in each of these categories affect how the others are viewed." "The first section of this anthology explores the notion that identity - particularly gender identity - is a cultural construct. The essays in the second section consider ways in which race and gender intersect with cultural identity and how encounters between different cultures challenge any identity constructed in isolation." "First published in the journal Criticism, these essays offer no blueprint for reading. Instead they encourage a rereading of canonical texts and a questioning of how these texts face matters of gender, race, and cultural identity; how they respond to the differences and the incongruities within the cultures from which they arise; and to which they speak."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up—in different ways and to different degrees—to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry—increasingly understood as mixed—loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history. This collection builds on decades of interdisciplinary work by historians of African American women as well as scholars of feminist and critical race theory, bridging the gap between well-developed theories of race, gender, and power and the practice of historical research. It examines how racial and gender identity is constructed from individuals' lived experiences in specific historical contexts, such as westward expansion, civil rights movements, or economic depression as well as by national and transnational debates over marriage, citizenship and sexual mores. All of these essays consider multiple aspects of identity, including sexuality, class, religion, and nationality, amongothers, but the volume emphasizes gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history. Contributors: Deborah Gray White, Michele Mitchell, Vivian May, Carol MoseleyBraun, Rashauna Johnson, Hélène Quanquin, Kendra Taira Field, Michelle Kuhl, Meredith Clark-Wiltz. Carol Faulkner is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Syracuse University. Alison M. Parker is Professor and Chairof the History Department at SUNY College at Brockport.

In African American Girls and the Construction of Identity, Sheila Walker closely examines socioeconomic class and explores the way it shapes how African American girls experience race and gender in the process of their identity formation. While all the girls who participated in the two-year study are African American, their lives are racialized and gendered in significantly different ways, in both public and private spaces. Affluence is not a guaranteed protection against the identity-damaging effects of racism, and poverty is not necessarily a risk factor for an irresolute identity. By examining identity through the lens of class, Walker provides researchers, educators, and parents a more in-depth appreciation of what is a very complex, multi-layered phenomenon.

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

This book examines links between gender, race and national identity by analyzing a range of mass-mediated and pop-cultural ‘texts’ in four nations: Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the USA.