Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body

(Boston University, 2016)

By Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

2016 Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG)

Argues that expectations for mothering include a new core principle of “body work.”

The requirements of “good” motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers’ contributions both at home and in professional contexts. Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers’ revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance.

“Bikini-Ready Moms contributes a great deal to understanding both the obsession with celebrity mom profiles and the pressure that mothers are under to conform to and perform intensive mothering as it shifts into another gear to control women.” — Fiona Joy Green, author of Practicing Feminist Mothering

Lynn O’Brien Hallstein is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University and the author of White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity: Purging Matrophobia.

Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America

(University of Chicago Press, 2021)

By Caley Horan

Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.

Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World

(Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Edited By Gillian MacNaughton and Diane F. Frey

The rise of neoliberal policy and practice simultaneous to the growing recognition of economic and social rights presents a puzzle. Can the rights to food, water, health education, decent work, social security and the benefits of science prevail against market fundamentalism? Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World is about the potential of these rights to contest the adverse impacts of neoliberal policy and practice on human wellbeing. Cutting across several lines of human rights literature, the chapters address norm development, court decision making, policymaking, advocacy, measurement and social mobilization. The analyses reveal that neoliberalism infiltrates management practices, changes international policy goals, flattens public school curriculum and distorts the outputs of UN human rights treaty bodies. Are economic and social rights successful in challenging neoliberalism, are they simply marginalized or are they co-opted and incorporated into neoliberal frameworks? This multidisciplinary work by a geographically diverse group of scholars and practitioners begins to address these questions.

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment: Detention, Deportation and Border Control

(Columbia University Press, 2018)

Edited by David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas

The events of 2016 catapulted immigration policy to the forefront of public debate, and Donald Trump’s administration has signaled a harsh turn in enforcement. Yet the deportation, detention, and border-control policies that North American and European countries have embraced are by no means new. In this book, sociologists David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to reconsider the immigration policies of the Obama era and beyond in terms of a decades-long “age of punishment.”

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment takes a critical, interdisciplinary, and transnational look at current issues surrounding immigration in the U.S. and abroad. It examines key features of this age of punishment, connecting neoliberal governance, global labor markets, and the national obsession with securing borders to explain critical research and theory on immigration enforcement. Contributors document the continuities between presidential administrations and across countries from many perspectives, with chapters discussing Canada, Australia, France, the UK, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in addition to the U.S. They offer macro-level analyses of deportations and border enforcement, analyses of national policy and jurisprudence, and ethnographic accounts of the daily life experience of the prison-to-deportation pipeline, the making of deportability, and post-deportation transitions for noncitizens. This book highlights new directions in critical immigration policy and enforcement and deportation studies with the aim of problematizing the age of punishment that currently reigns over borders and those who seek to cross them.

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building

(Routledge, 2017)

By Cinzia D. Solari

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers is a global ethnography of Ukrainian transnational migration. Gendered migrant subjectivities are a key site for understanding the production of neoliberal capitalism and Ukrainian nation-state building, a fraught process that places Ukraine precariously between Europe and Russia with dramatic implications for the political economy of the region. However, processes of gender and migration that undergird transnational nation-state building require further attention. Solari compares two patterns of Ukrainian migration: the "forced" exile of middle-aged women, most grandmothers, to Italy and the "voluntary" exodus of families, led by the same cohort of middle-aged women, to the United States. In both receiving sites these migrants are caregivers to the elderly.

Using in-depth interviews and ethnographic data collected in three countries, Solari shows that Ukrainian nation-state building occurs transnationally. She examines the collective practices of migrants who are building the "new" Ukraine from the outside in and shaping both Italy and the United States as well. The Ukrainian state, in order to fulfil its First World aspirations of joining Europe and distancing itself from all things Soviet, is pursuing a gendered reorganization of family and work structures to achieve a transition from socialism to capitalism. This has created a labor force of migrant grandmothers who carry the new Ukraine on their shoulders. Solari shows that this post-Soviet economic transformation requires a change in the moral order as migrant women struggle to understand how to be "good" mothers and grandmothers and men join women in attempts to teach their children to be successful and honorable people, now that the social rules have drastically changed.

Looking at individual migrant women and men and their families in Ukraine allows us to see the production of neoliberal capitalism and new nationalism from the ground up and the outside in for a region that promises to be a flashpoint in our century.