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"In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers who as young women turned to communism during the Great Depression. Over decades of national crisis, they spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide thought-provoking guidance and bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice"--

"The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers' organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, Rosemary Hennessy was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification. What precisely is the "affective" dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated? Fires on the Border takes up these questions of labor and community organizing--its "affect-culture"--on Mexico's northern border from the early 1970s to the present day. Through these campaigns, Hennessy illuminates the attachments and identifications that motivate people to act on behalf of one another and that bind them to a common cause. The book's unsettling, even jarring, narratives bring together empirical and ethnographic accounts--of specific campaigns, the untold stories of gay and lesbian organizers, love and utopian longing--in concert with materialist theories of affect and the critical good sense of Mexican organizers. Teasing out the integration of affect-culture in economic relations and cultural processes, Hennessy provides evidence that sexuality and gender as strong affect attractors are incorporated in the harvesting of surplus labor. At the same time, workers' testimonies confirm that the capacities for bonding and affective attachment, far from being entirely at the service of capital, are at the very heart of social movements devoted to sustaining life."--

Taking sexuality and affect as its focus, this article leads us into the uncharted terrain of 'outlawed affects', those unspeakable sensations that do not fall easily into established categories and yet meddle with social relations. They are in this sense 'open secrets'. The article explores some of the challenges for feminist methodology in representing the space where affective and other needs meet in the context of the cultures of labour organizing in the factory communities on Mexico's northern border

Argues that the materiality of postmodern ambivalence & the desiring subjects produced by this ambivalence are properly understood as ideological effects linked to the persistent & contradictory structures of capitalism in a reading of Neil Jordan's movie, The Crying Game. The movie is interpreted as a mythic representation of sexual ambivalence connected to the eruption of a postmodern sexual imaginary in industrial centers transformed by the processes of late capitalism. It is also taken to represent a neoimperialist postcolonial imaginary that is connected to Western anxieties over the breakdown of the colonial order. Together, these narratives are read as mythologizing the social structures of late capitalism through the fetishization of ambivalence, the naturalization of difference, & the displacement of third terms of collective subjectivity & social transformation with romantic individualism. The representation of ambivalence in the work of Slavoj Zizek (1993) & Judith Butler (1994) is shown to propose neoidealist or neoculturalist tales of ambivalence, respectively, that end in offering alibis for the historical & material conditions out of which new identities arise. It is concluded that this theoretical work, like the movie, participates in the mythologizing strategies of a broad-based postmodern imaginary. D. M. Smith