Description
Book SynopsisA study of the Ellis Island museum, its gift shop, and the Statue of Liberty form the basis of reflections on sex, nation, and immigration
Trade Review“
The Ellis Island Snow Globe is a wonderfully creative, playful, and serious piece of scholarship. Demonstrating that pleasure and critique need not be incompatible, Erica Rand offers not only a model for thinking about contemporary capitalism but a way to live in it.”—Miranda Joseph, author of
Against the Romance of Community“
The Ellis Island Snow Globe is quite simply a great book. Destined to become a classic in contemporary cultural studies, it is one of the few books I’ve read in the last year or so that has taught me something new on every page.”—Henry Jenkins, coeditor of
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture“Much as she did in her earlier book,
Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Erica Rand turns a kitsch artifact of consumer culture into a powerful tool for cultural analysis. In this insightful and engaging new work, she transforms an Ellis Island snow globe into a window through which we see how state control of borders and migrations structures sexuality, gender, desire, and family in unexpected ways. One of the best cultural studies books I’ve read in a long time.”—Susan Stryker, producer and codirector of
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria“Rand clearly demonstrates how the categories of liberty and citizenship depend precisely on particular kinds of exclusions—those individuals whose sexual identities and behaviors do not correspond with the dominant gendering and sexualizing of the statue herself.” -- Sarah Banet-Weiser * American Quarterly *
Table of ContentsPreface: Respect and Reverence ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Coming to Ellis Island 1
1. Breeders on a Golf Ball: Normalizing Sex at Ellis Island 41
2. Getting Dressed Up: The Displays of Frank Woodhull and the Policing of Gender 67
3. The Traffic in my Fantasy Butch 107
4. Green Woman, Race Matters 130
5. A Nation of Immigrants, or Whatever 153
6. Immigrant Peddlers 181
7. Product Packaging 207
8. "Decide an Immigrant's Fate" 239
Notes 263
Bibliography 311
Index 325
