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In The Small Book of Hip Checks Erica Rand uses multiple meanings of hip check-including an athlete using their hip to throw an opponent off-balance and the inspection of racialized gender-to consider the workings of queer gender, race, and writing. Explicitly attending to processes of writing and revising, Rand pursues interruption, rethinking, and redirection to challenge standard methods of argumentation and traditional markers of heft and fluff. She writes about topics including a trans shout-out in a Super Bowl ad, the heyday of lavender dildos, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, the criticism received by figure skater Debi Thomas and tennis great Serena Williams for competing in bodysuits while Black, and the gendering involved in identifying the remains of people who die trying to cross into the United States south of Tucson, Arizona. Along the way, Rand encourages making muscle memory of experimentation and developing an openness to being conceptually knocked sideways. In other words, to be hip-checked.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Hip Check. An Introduction in Four Parts 1
1. If Men Don't Have Hips, How Can They Hip-Check?
2. Showing and Telling: Debi Thomas's Unitard and the Racing of the Obscence
3. Deep into Drivel: A Burger King Pride Stunt, Mundane Racism, and the Rainbow
4. TV Evidence for the Transgender Tipping Point
5. A Lothario in Gendered Jeans
6. Hide and Seek: In the Afterlives of the Dorothy Hamill Haircut
7. Consensual Gender
8. Clocking the Natural
9. Gifts and Givens
10. Page 27 of
The Godfather and the Evidence of Memory
11. Queer Indirections
12. Clocking the Unnatural: On the History of the Lavender Dildo
13. Cis-Skeletal
14. It's on the Template
Conclusion. Hip-Checked
Afterword. Hip-Check Your Writing—An Exercise
Notes
Index
About the author
Erica Rand is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College and author of
Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure on and off the Ice,
The Ellis Island Snow Globe, and
Barbie's Queer Accessories, all also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
Erica Rand uses multiple meanings of hip check—an athlete using their hip to throw an opponent off balance and the inspection of racialized gender—to consider the workings of queer gender, race, and writing.
