University of California Press Blog

National Day of Silence

On April 17th, Kate Harding of Salon.com wrote an article called "No One Will Miss You," highlighting the 13th Annual National Day of Silence "to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment and effective responses." In the article, Harding mentions a few teens who took their lives after being repeatedly taunted and ridiculed by their peers and even school adminstrators.

Harding also quotes The New York Times blogger, Judith Warner and C.J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (UC Press, June 2007). Harding writes:

"Judith Warner wrote about both Carl Walker-Hoover and Eric Mohat, a 17-year-old who shot himself after a bully flat-out suggested he should, adding 'no one will miss you.' And once again, the tormenters were focused on the victim's failure to conform to gender norms, so the bullying manifested as vicious homophobia. 'Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of "'gay,' 'fag,' 'queer' and 'homo.'" As Warner puts it, 'The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today's poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy's guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.' She quotes one teenage boy who told author C.J. Pascoe, ' To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that's like saying that you're nothing.' Pascoe herself, who spent 18 months studying the culture in a Northern California high school, says that the boys there 'have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important ... To not be a man is to not be fully human and that's terrifying.' To not be a man is to not be fully human. To be gay is to be nothing. In case anyone was unclear on the connection between homophobia and misogyny, there you go."

Read the article "No One Will Miss You" in it's entirety.

Read the article "Dude You've Got Problems."

Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

Charles Upchurch is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. He is also the author of Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (UC Press, March 2009). In his blog entry below, Upchurch talks about his motivation for the book.

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By: Charles Upchurch

In some ways this book harkens back to an earlier tradition of “gay history,” because at its core is the idea that there is value in demonstrating that same-sex desire and the individuals motivated by it were always visible within society. I could have finished it years earlier, but I extended the primary research phase to be able to prove that in this period between 1820 and 1870, when most scholars believed that discussion of same-sex desire was all but nonexistent within the public sphere in Britain, mainstream newspapers reported on trials related to sex between men multiple times in almost every year. You couldn’t read the newspaper, especially in the 1840s, and not encounter these reports. Sure, this behavior was “unspeakable” in most all of the novels, personal letters, and other written records surviving from the early and mid nineteenth century, but here it wasn’t.

In many ways, I think what I’ve tapped into is the conversation that allowed the broader silence to exist. Norms of gender and sexuality are often presented within the culture that spawns them as “natural” and “self-evident,” and yet what the research of the past two generations has shown is that they’re anything but. Norms of behavior change over time, and the lessons have to be relearned or re-inscribed on a continual basis. The way the state enforced laws related to sex between men changed in the 1820s, and the courts and the newspapers were central to disseminating the new rules over what was and what was not acceptable. 

I’ve also been able to find unpublished court documentation and personal letters of involved individuals, and while this has helped me to flesh out my understanding of motivations, in many ways I’m less excited about it than what I’ve found in the public sphere. The ubiquity of this material in the newspapers has to change what we assume the average nineteenth-century Briton knew.

Not only was I surprised by the amount of material I found publicly circulating, but equally surprising was the degree to which women and families were central to these stories of sex between men. Usually when family is a topic in these kinds of studies, it’s about the new families that men have created with other similarly motivated men. While that’s an important story to tell, at least for my period the actions of mothers, sisters, wives, and fathers are a lot more prominent. It has been a revelation for me to get beyond the rhetoric of the elite men of the time, and discover that ties of family were often stronger than the cultural stigma attached to “the worst of crimes.” 

I’ve been piecing together a very different image of sex between men in the mid Victorian period for some years, and I’m very happy to finally be at the point where I can share it with other interested readers.

Secrets of Successful Women Coaches

Michael A. Messner is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of several books including Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. His latest title, It's All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports, will be published by UC Press in March 2009. Below, is an excerpt from the conclusion of his blog entry entitled, Secrets of Successful Women Coaches, from the youth sports website, MomsTeam.

"These successful strategies can be summed up in a single quote from a woman softball coach:  'You gotta be tough.' As I spoke with these women, I came to see them as courageous pioneers. But I also concluded that the individual strategies they developed are very limited.  Not all women are willing to be 'tough,' just to be able to coach their kids.  Nor should they have to be.  Moreover, the women who did act more competitive, tougher,and more assertive than many of the men found that they ran head-on into the same sort of double-standard that women face in corporate life or the professions:  if you are not competitive and aggressive, you are not taken seriously; if you are overly so, you are seen as pushy, or as having, as one woman told me, 'a chip on my shoulder.'"

To read the entire blog entry and other subsequent blogs, please visit, Messner's MomsTeam blog.

Including More Women Coaches in Youth Sports: Why it Matters

Michael A. Messner is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of several books including Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. His latest title, It's All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports, will be published by UC Press in April 2009. Below, is an excerpt from his blog entry entitled, Including More Women Coaches in Youth Sports: Why it Matters, from the youth sports website, MomsTeam.

"Unlike in my day, when all of the kids playing Little League were boys, there are now a substantial number of girls playing. Today, LLB/S is an organization that boasts 2.7 million children participants worldwide, 2.1 million of them in the United States.  There are 176,786 teams in the program, 153,422 of them in baseball and 23,364 in softball. But the dramatic growth of girls on the field has not been matched by a growth of women coaches. 

In the community I studied for eight years — South Pasadena, California — only 2% of boys’ baseball teams were coached by women, while 11% of girls’ softball teams had women coaches.  I discovered that prospective women coaches faced barriers—mostly informal and unspoken — that diverted them away from coaching.  Most of the few women who did coach left after a year or two, after finding the league to be dominated informally by a less-than-supportive “old boys’ network” of coaches.  I came to see this as a problem."

To read the entire blog entry and other subsequent blogs, please visit, Messner's MomsTeam blog.

Women of the Klan

Kathleen M. Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Blee's book, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920's, was first published with critical acclaim in July of 1992 by UC Press. The second edition, published by UC Press in December of 2008, was updated with a new preface. In her blog entry below, she recounts a meeting with a man during her research for the book.

By Kathleen Blee

I spent years digging up information about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, a decade when racial and religious hatred became organized on a mass scale in America. One day stands out in my memory. An elderly man, a long-time leader in his small town, agreed to meet with me to tell me what he could remember. I don’t know if he had been in the Klan. But I had seen a picture of him from that time. He was standing in a large crowd of white people: men, women, even children. A few seemed angry, some just curious. Most didn’t display any particular emotion. Above them, a black man swung from a tree, a rope around his neck. It was one of the country’s last lynchings.

I was worried about how he would react when I mentioned the photo. Would he deny it? Throw me out of his house? Break down with shame? In fact, he did none of these. He simply asked if I would like an autographed copy; he had plenty. This man would not likely be regarded in his community as a racist or a hater and he would not think of himself this way. The way he saw it, the lynching was an unfortunate incident, probably a mistake, but also, for him, a moment of fame.

Women of the Klan tries to make sense of how someone could look back at the horror of lynching with such indifference. By looking at how so many “ordinary” white Protestant native-born women got swept up into the Klan’s vicious crusades, I try to understand how racial hatred and religious bigotry could become part of the fabric of daily life for so many people, how collective cruelty could be practiced so casually with so little reflection or regret.

Audio and Video Interviews with Pamela Stone, author of Opting Out?

Pamela Stone, author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (UC Press, May 2008) was interviewed on July 18th by Dr. Kevin Keough, host of The North Star Guardians. While a day later, Stone was interviewed by CBS News reporter, Kelly Wallace.

Audio Interviews with authors Jennifer Heath and David Carle

Two UC Press authors were recently interviewed by Eric Tomb of BookTown, which is an affiliate of radio station KVMR 89.5 FM of Nevada City, CA. On July 7th, Tomb interviewed Jennifer Heath, author of The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (UC Press, May 2008), and on July 21, Tomb interviewed David Carle, author of Introduction to Fire in California (UC Press, June 2008).

An article by Gayle Greene, author of Insomniac

In the Spring edition of Ms. Magazine, Insomniac author Gayle Greene examines how women are more affected by the sleep disorder than men, which is partly due to the high levels of estrogen. You can read the article Why We Can't Sleep, here. For more information on insomnia, you can check out Gayle Greene's website, Sleep Starved.

The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics

Jennifer Heath is the author of eight books, an activist, curator and editor of The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (UC Press, May 2008). In her book and the blog below, Jennifer explores the meaning and mystery of veils worn by women and men across the globe. You can also check out the book's website here.

Please Note:  Embedded at the end of the blog is a silent, loop video called AmbiVEILant by Tania Kamal-Eldin  

By Jennifer Heath

In Turkey and France, it is outlawed. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is mandated.

The veil is deeply polarizing, a locus for the struggle between Islam and the West and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam.

Yet veiling – of women, of men, and of sacred places and objects – has existed in countless cultures and religions for centuries. Perhaps it began when humans watched eclipses and observed the periodic shedding of animals’ outer bodily layer (feathers, skin, fur or horn, even pupas). Veils and veiling are found in the oldest myths, in folklore and fairytale and in the arts. The veil itself is mystery, even as it is the shroud that guards the mystery. As much as the veil is fabric or a garment, it is also a concept. Veils are the ethers beyond consciousness, the hidden hundredth name of god, the final passage into death, even the biblical apocalypse – the lifting of god’s veil to signal the “end times.”

I grew up in heavily Roman Catholic and later in Muslim countries, where veiling was common. In those days – as Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi observed in an earlier decade – a rural Italian or Greek woman looked not much different from, say, a rural Egyptian woman. How and why have we politicized customs so ancient their origins and meanings cannot necessarily be traced and certainly can’t be “blamed” on any group or event? When I say “we,” I do indeed mean all of us, East and West. We all collude in turning women’s bodies into battlegrounds – nowadays signified by the veil.

For The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, I assembled twenty writers and scholars – Kecia Ali, Michelle Auerbach, Sarah C. Bell, Barbara Goldman Carrel, Eve Grubin, Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, Jana M. Hawley, Jasbir Jain, Mohja Kahf, Desiree Koslin, Laurene Lafontain, Shireen Malik, Maliha Masood, Marjane Satrapi, Aisha Shaheed, Rita Stephan, Pamela K. Taylor, Ashraf Zahedi, Dinah Zeiger and Sherifa Zuhur – to engage received wisdom about the veil, to explore its multiple histories and layered sacred, sensual, and socio-political truths in memory- and research-based chapters that speak to the veil throughout human imagination. These marvelous contributors, who represent a wide range of societies, religions, ages, location, races, and accomplishments, examine the veil in its myriad guises; they elucidate, criticize, and/or praise the practice.

The overriding concern expressed in these chapters is the exploitation of the veil for political agendas. Across time, veiling and unveiling have been forced upon women. Demonization seems especially virulent today with respect to the Muslim veil, perceived by the West as a challenge to modernity and secular enlightenment and even as a terrorist threat, while among some Muslims, it has become a symbol of solidarity and resistance.

But today’s ideological battles are merely subterfuge, distraction hindering feminist progress and blinding us to the increasing feminization of poverty. Conflicts over covering actually veil the realities we must face -- and fix -- of women’s disadvantages, which feed a destructive spiral of impoverishment, population growth, and environmental degradation worldwide.

Meanwhile, veiling is a woman’s – or a man’s – right to choose.

AmbiVEILant by Tania Kamal-Eldin

Audio Interview with Gayle Greene, author of Insomniac

In the latest installment of NPR's Talk of the Nation, author Gayle Greene offers insight into the condition, while elaborating on her book, Insomniac (UC Press, March 2008), in this audio interview. Additionally, you can read more about Gayle and the disorder, including tips and shared experiences on her website, Sleep Starved.