Synopses & Reviews
Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother “just another lifestyle choice,” President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for “heroic work,” and positive on-screen representations of single mothers abound, from
The Gilmore Girls to
Sex and the City to
American Idol.
Single Mother describes the recent cultural valorization of this figure that—in the midst of demographic changes in the U.S.—has emerged as the unlikely heroic and seductive voice of the new American family. Drawing on her own life as a single mother, interviews with dozens of other single mothers, cultural representations, and policies on welfare, immigration, childcare, and child custody, Juffer analyzes this contingent acceptance of single mothers. Finally, critiquing the relentless emphasis on self-sufficiency to the exclusion of community, Juffer shows the remarkable organizing skills of these new mothers of invention. At a moment when one-third of all babies are born to single moms, Single Mother is a fascinating and necessary examination of these new “domestic intellectuals.”
Review
“Illuminating cultural study of single motherhood. . . . [Juffer] explores the experiences of single mothers across various social and economic conditions, taking a critical look at current social policy.”
-Library Journal,
Review
“Juffer points to a new formation—the domestic intellectual—and in that gesture opens up the concept of the intellectual to a more complicated theoretical engagement. With it, she re-imagines marriage, mothering, and the spatial dynamics of private life, and returns them to a possibly radical and liberatory space. This powerful and transformative work adds to our understanding of the value of learning from ordinary life.”
-Wahneema Lubiano,Duke University
Synopsis
Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother "just another lifestyle choice," President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for "heroic work," and positive on-screen representations of single mothers abound, from
The Gilmore Girls to
Sex and the City to
American Idol.
Single Mother describes the recent cultural valorization of this figure thatin the midst of demographic changes in the U.S.has emerged as the unlikely heroic and seductive voice of the new American family. Drawing on her own life as a single mother, interviews with dozens of other single mothers, cultural representations, and policies on welfare, immigration, childcare, and child custody, Juffer analyzes this contingent acceptance of single mothers. Finally, critiquing the relentless emphasis on self-sufficiency to the exclusion of community, Juffer shows the remarkable organizing skills of these new mothers of invention. At a moment when one-third of all babies are born to single moms, Single Mother is a fascinating and necessary examination of these new "domestic intellectuals."
Synopsis
Mainstream academic criticism has usually failed to engage gay work without distorting or ignoring its most central features. In gay men's writing, tenderness lies side by side with rage, and existential rejection of convention rubs shoulders with sexual hedonism. This groundbreaking work takes us on an unprecedented tour--in clear, lively, and non-technical language--of classic and little-known texts from the perspective of gay experience, sensibility, and desire.
Beginning with Wilde's and Byron's existentialist outlaw, the theme of social rebellion and the fight against conformity forms a common link among the literary works of the twentieth century. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century presents us with a unified analysis of these, and other, shared themes in the works of James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Jean Genet, Joe Orton, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, and Constantine Cavafy, and in the love poetry of the first world war.
This is the most unified treatment of gay men's writing to date, written to appeal to the general reader, but based on scholarship so original that it is vital reading for anyone interested in gay studies and gender studies.
About the Author
Jane Juffer is an associate professor of English and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (also available from NYU Press).