Uniforms are perhaps the most widely worn garments in the world. Craik looks at the meaning of uniforms as well as how they have influenced fashion, and shows the centrality of uniforms to cultural politics. She draws on historical and contemporary examples of uniforms across different cultures.

Defining the political and aesthetic tensions that have shaped Cuban culture for over forty years, Linda Howe explores the historical and political constraints imposed upon Cuban artists and intellectuals during and after the Revolution. Focusing on the work of Afro-Cuban writers Nancy Morejón and prominent novelist Miguel Barnet, Howe exposes the complex relationship between Afro-Cuban intellectuals and government authorities as well as the racial issues present in Cuban culture.

Transgression as a Mode of Resistance provides the conceptual mapping for scholars, students, and practitioners to participate in the growing debate between hegemony and transgression. Through a broad perspective on philosophy, communication and cultural studies (primarily rhetorical criticism and social movement rhetoric) and history, this book demonstrates that these two modes of resistance are sometimes conflicting, oftentimes inter-related practices. Through alternative social relationships and political performances, transgressive resistors may reinvent daily life.

The popular writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry examines how people who stand outside of society because of their sexual orientation, physical appearance, ideas, artistic inclinations, or ethnic heritage, often achieve lasting and even profound influence upon the culture at large. He combines his own experience as a gay Native American with sources in the arts, literature, biology, psychology, and anthropology. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The rhetorical power of camp in American popular culture Making Camp examines the rhetoric and conventions of “camp” in contemporary popular culture and the ways it both subverts and is co-opted by mainstream ideology and discourse, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and sexuality. Camp has long been aligned with gay male culture and performance. Helene Shugart and Catherine Waggoner contend that camp in the popular media—whether visual, dramatic, or musical—is equally pervasive. While aesthetic and performative in nature, the authors argue that camp—female camp in particular—is also highly political and that conventions of femininity and female sexuality are negotiated, if not always resisted, in female camp performances. The authors draw on a wide range of references and figures representative of camp, both historical and contemporary, in presenting the evolution of female camp and its negotiation of gender, political, and identity issues. Antecedents such as Joan Crawford, Wonder Woman, Marilyn Monroe, and Pam Grier are discussed as archetypes for contemporary popular culture figures—Macy Gray, Gwen Stefani, and the characters of Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess and Karen Walker from Will & Grace. Shugart and Waggoner find that these and other female camp performances are liminal, occupying a space between conformity and resistance. The result is a study that demonstrates the prevalence of camp as a historical and evolving phenomenon in popular culture, its role as a site for the rupture of conventional notions of gender and sexuality, and how camp is configured in mainstream culture and in ways that resist its being reduced to merely a style.