University of Michigan Press Blog

Q&A with Ruth A. Miller, author of 'Seven Stories of Threatening Speech'

In her new book Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code, Professor Ruth A. Miller examines the functions and implications of speech divorced from any human speaker, as well as from any ideological content it might contain.

University of Michigan Press: First, Ruth, what does it mean for speech to be “threatening,” aside from a specific verbal threat against another person?

There are three ways to approach this question.  The first is to think about what sort of speech, historically, has been criminalized or denied protection.  Even in the United States, where free speech is often characterized as the fundamental right, a person can be convicted of treason solely because of speech.  In other national and transnational contexts, hate speech is similarly illegal.  Both of these are instances of speech itself, regardless of context, speaker, or audience, defined as a materially criminal act against a particular legal or political order. 

A second, and related, way to approach this question is from the direction of classical discourse analysis.  Here, speech is threatening if it contributes to a discursive field in which a particular, and particularly oppressive, mode of embodied subjectivity becomes the norm.  Hate speech, then, becomes threatening not because it undermines a legal ideal—say, political equality—but because it produces or re-produces violent modes of existence.

Both of these interpretations of threatening speech recognize the material or physical quality of language.  Each assumes speech to be an act in and of itself.  Each also limits speech to the human sphere, and thereby misses an aspect of threatening speech that Seven Stories tries to highlight.  Namely, a third way to describe speech, or speech acts, as dangerous is to discuss the work of language not on political or biological bodies (or political or biological bodies alone) but on systems and environments.  Indeed, one of the running themes of the book is that as much as historical writing on or about threatening speech may have been concerned with sovereignty or subjectivity, it has been equally concerned with systems and environments.  We just have to expand our definition of “materiality” to recognize this interest.

British Press Adores 'First Actresses' Exhibition

The First Actresses, an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery celebrating the first women to take to the stage in Britain following the Restoration in 1660, has set tongues wagging in the major UK newspapers. Focusing largely on two portraits of Nell Gwynn, an actress and mistress of King Charles II, The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Daily Telegraph have all weighed in with praise for the exhibition. From The Times (subscription required):

From Lely to Lawrence, the leading artists of the day took them into their studios, the singers and dancers as well as the actresses, there to capture to our enduring benefit something at least of what it was they had, that so charmed their world. ...

Yet this is a show not about them, but about the beautiful and talented women they celebrated ... and first among them all, lovely Nell Gwyn. The full package indeed.

In October, the University of Michigan Press published Gil Perry, Joseph Roach, and Shearer West's The First Actresses: From Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons to coincide with the NPG's exhibition. The book offers new insights on the often controversial nature of women on the stage in Restoration theatre and examines how celebrity culture emerged around female performers in the 18th century.

'Elly Peterson' author celebrates 40 years of the National Women's Political Caucus

Sara Fitzgerald is a former Washington Post reporter and author of Elly Peterson: "Mother" of the Moderates, a biography of one of the leading ladies in the Republican Party, who set the stage for a new generation of women in politics. She was a panelist recently at the 40th anniversary gathering of the National Women's Political Caucus.

Forty years ago this summer, 300 women gathered at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

In her memoir Getting Better All the Time, Liz Carpenter recalled, “It was a day that changed my life.” If she had not gotten so involved, she wrote, “I would have missed out on so much, so many friendships with remarkable women of all income levels, so much learning as we hammered at the doors of Congress and the legislatures, so much understanding of my own country and how the other great movements for fairness and equality took place.”

By the end of that hot weekend in July 1971, the caucus had committed itself to diversity—and that included Republican women.

Betty Friedan tried to recruit Elly Peterson to attend the founding meeting, but Peterson declined. Friedan wanted Peterson involved, she wrote a few years later, because she “had been the most powerful woman in the Republican party—its traditionally powerless lady vice-chairman.” Peterson, she said, was among the “politically oriented women who hadn’t been interested in women’s rights before,” who “were ready now to organize such a caucus.”

Recently the NWPC gathered at another Washington hotel to celebrate its 40th anniversary. There were workshops on campaign skills, and rousing speeches from feminist leaders such as Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood. But for me the high point was the Saturday luncheon, when four women who had been present at the first gathering shared their memories of it.

Angela C. Pao's 'No Safe Spaces' and Kate Davy's 'Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers' to be honored at theater conference

Two new books from The University of Michigan Press will be honored by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education on August 11 at their conference in Chicago.     

Angela C. Pao’s No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater will receive the ATHE Outstanding Book Award for 2011. The book explores the subject of non-traditional casting prac tices and innovative conceptions of dramatic character in light of theories of cultural identity.  The study is organized around various forms of theatrical performance, including classical tragedy, Shakespeare, modern domestic drama, African-American drama, twentieth-century anti-realist theater, and Broadway musicals. Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.    

Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Theatre Café received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book from ATHE. Davy’s book provides the first  critical history of this downtown New York venue that nurtured some of the most important avant-garde theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and ‘90s. Theater scholar Kate Davy is Provost at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Vodcast with Sara Fitzgerald, author of "Elly Peterson: Mother of the Moderates"

This is a vodcast with Sara Fitzgerald, the author of the forthcoming University of Michigan Press title, Elly Peterson: "Mother" of the Moderates. It chronicles the life and political history of Elly Peterson, one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.

 

A native of Michigan, Sara Fitzgerald worked for the Washington Post for 15 years as an editor and new-media developer. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter and editor for National Journal magazine, the St. Petersburg Times, the Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon Journal.

See more Q&As with other University of Michigan Press authors at our YouTube page.

"Everyday Leadership" author and First Gentleman Daniel Mulhern receives 2010 Philip A. Hart Award

On the 19th of October, 2010, Daniel Mulhern, author of Everyday Leadership: Getting Results in Business, Politics, and Life and the first First Gentleman of Michigan, was presented with the 2010 Philip A. Hart Award at the 27th Annual Michigan Women's Hall of Fame Dinner and Induction Ceremony. The award is presented annually to male citizens who have demonstrated a unique understanding of women's issues and concerns and have contributed to the advancement of women's rights and interests.

Q&A with Diane Torr, co-author of Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance

Why would women want to perform as men? Why is gender crossing so compelling, whether it happens onstage or in everyday life? What can drag performance teach, and what aesthetic, political, and personal questions does it raise?

Performance artist Diane Torr has been experimenting with the performance of gender for thirty years—exploring everything from feminist go-go dancing to masculine power play. One of the key pioneers of "drag king" performance, Torr has been celebrated internationally for her gender transformation workshops, in which she has taught hundreds of ordinary women how to pass as men on city streets around the world. This cultural subterfuge appeals to participants for many different reasons: personal confidence-building, sexual frisson, gender subversion, trans-curiosity, or simply the appeal of disguise and role play.

Sex, Drag, and Male Roles documents the evolution of Torr's work by blending first-person memoir and commentary from Torr with critical reflections and contextualization from leading performance critic Stephen J. Bottoms. The book includes a consideration of the long cultural history of female-to-male cross-dressing and concludes with Torr's "Do-It-Yourself" guide to becoming a "Man for a Day."

Diane Torr developed her cross-disciplinary art in the downtown New York art scene from 1976 to 2002. Now living in Scotland, Torr has earned an international reputation for her performances and gender transformation workshops (featured on HBO, BBC, and This American Life on NPR, among others). Her work is the focus of a feature film, Man for a Day.

Listen to the podcast

Prop 8: Just Beginning to Get At Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families

Prop 8 has been ruled unconstitutional, and it's a good start. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage. More

Professors: Request Exam Copy Here

Paper: 978-0-472-03061-3
Ebook Formats: 978-0-472-02489-6

Q&A with Lorraine Lopez, author of An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots

An Angle of Vision is a compelling anthology that collects personal essays and memoir by a diverse group of gifted authors united by their poor or working-class roots in America.

Throughout this collection, the authors describe delicate balances of work and family, men and money, motherhood and sexuality.

Editor Lorraine M. Lopéz is the prize-winning author of two novels, The Gifted Galabon Sisters and Call Me Henri, and a short-story collection, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories. She is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and Associate Editor of the Afro-Hispanic Review.

Listen to the podcast

Clerical Work: Historical Roots and in Modern Life

During the buildup to the Iraq War in 2003, critics of the Bush administration repeatedly complained that the press had become “stenographers,” copying the their talking points, rather than investigating or questioning.  Despite my agreement with the critics, I cringed every time I heard “shorthand” and “stenographer” used as an epitaph.