Publisher Description

The United States, and the West in general, has always organized society along bipolar lines. We are either gay or straight, male or female, white or not, disabled or not.
In recent years, however, America seems increasingly aware of those who defy such easy categorization. Yet, rather than being welcomed for the challenges that they offer, people living the gap are often ostracized by all the communities to which they might belong. Bisexuals, for instance, are often blamed for spreading AIDS to the heterosexual community and are regarded with suspicion by gays and lesbians. Interracial couples are rendered invisible through monoracial recordkeeping that confronts them at school, at work, and on official documents. In Hybrid, Ruth Colker argues that our bipolar classification system obscures a genuine understanding of the very nature of subordination. Acknowledging that categorization is crucial and unavoidable in a world of practical problems and day-to-day conflicts, Ruth Colker shows how categories can and must be improved for the good of all.

Author Biography

Ruth Colker is Distinguished University Professor and the Heck-Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University. She is the author of Hybrid, The Disability Pendulum, and American Law in the Age of Hypercapitalism, all available from NYU Press.

Table of Contents

Preface1. Introduction2. Age 15-16 Months: Doing a Lot with a Little3. Age 17-18 Months: Just One of the Family4. Age 19-20 Months: Emerging Skills5. Age 21-22 Months: Self Concept and Object Concepts6. Age 23-24 Months: Consequences of Self-Awareness7. Age 25-26 Months: Two-year-old Talk8. Age 27-28 Months: Talking About People and Talk9. Age 29-30 Months: Gaining Control over a Complex World10. Age 31-32 Months: Preparing for Second Order Thinking11. Age 33-34 Months: The Emergent Preschooler12. Age 35-36 Months: Preschooler Paradoxes13. The Path from Infancy to ChildhoodEpilogueReferences

Review

"Ruth Colker's Hybrid is an ambitious study of the U.S. legal system and the binary lens through which it determines justice. U.S. Courts, according to Colker, not only neglect to address the reality of bisexuals, multiracials, transgenderists, and many people with disabilities, but also fail to acknowldedge the varied ways that race, sex and ability are constructed in U.S. society. She offers a critique of the U.S. legal system and suggests strategies for working with these issues in the future." --Committee on Lesbian and Gay History Newsletter

Long Description

The United States, and the West in general, has always organized society along bipolar lines. We are either gay or straight, male or female, white or not, disabled or not. In recent years, however, America seems increasingly aware of those who defy such easy categorization. Yet, rather than being welcomed for the challenges that they offer, people living the gap are often ostracized by all the communities to which they might belong. Bisexuals, for instance, are often blamed for spreading AIDS to the heterosexual community and are regarded with suspicion by gays and lesbians. Interracial couples are rendered invisible through monoracial recordkeeping that confronts them at school, at work, and on official documents. In Hybrid, Ruth Colker argues that our bipolar classification system obscures a genuine understanding of the very nature of subordination. Acknowledging that categorization is crucial and unavoidable in a world of practical problems and day-to-day conflicts, Ruth Colker shows how categories can and must be improved for the good of all.

Review Quote

"This inspired, sophisticated, provoking book should command the attention of anybody interested in American Italianness in particular or the cultural consequences of ethnicity in general. Joseph Stella and Frank Sinatra, Maria Barbella and Giancarlo Esposito, Madonna and the good people who brought you the Corleones and Sopranos;they and others appear here, often seen in startlingly fresh ways, as creators and exemplars of the aesthetic Tom Ferraro calls 'feeling Italian.' Wise, funny, contagiously enthusiastic, Ferraro takes us far beyond the narrow pieties of the identity police or anti-defamation types as he traces the development of a widely accessible American cultural style that still bears the marks of distinctively Italian ways of making do and making sense." - Carlo Rotella, author of Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

New Feature

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Details