The Cost of Beauty Bias in India

This week in North Philly Notes, Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, coeditors of Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, write about their awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct.

“I have read that Indian women bleach their skin to appear lighter. Is that true?” 

“You should reduce a bit, else no one will marry you!”

When asked, we invoke colonialism, colorism, and a caste bias to explain the light-skin preference in India. But we may not confess that perhaps some of us bleached our skin as teenagers or had even used the highly controversial but bestselling Indian face cream, Fair and Lovely*, for years! Nor would we confess that we were asked to avoid tea and coffee out of the irrational fear of making our skins darker. 

Similarly, India has no dearth of older men and women admonishing younger girls to appear slim and pretty. Fat shaming in schools and colleges is rampant and goes unchecked. Ironically, in a tropical country where women’s bodies are genetically wired to be voluptuous, girls and women are perpetually reminded of the desirability of the slim body. No doubt, many of us have at various periods, practiced stringent diet regimes and succumbed to exercise mania to obtain popular body proportions. 

The beauty bias runs deep, and while we often subscribe to it, we rarely own up to it!

We grew up in India in the 1990s, when the country was ushering in economic liberalization. We were bombarded with images of Euro-American bodies through satellite television and print and digital media. We saw increasing airtime given to beauty contests. We even celebrated in 1994 when both Miss Universe and Miss World were women of Indian origin. The pageants perhaps had a momentous influence on our adolescent selves. We knew what a universal beauty ideal was and realized, with some despair, how impossible it was for us to attain those ideals realistically.

Beauty pageants were indeed not the first exposure we had to beauty bias. Women and girls have been routinely scrutinized over skin tone, weight, and youthfulness, to name a few, in our communities. We were keenly aware that girls who were not conventionally “good looking” could be perceived as a liability by their parents for being rejected by the marriage market. Looks matter in cases where dowry is concerned. Furthermore, if a girl child is disabled, then the premium goes up many notches.

An awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct came quite late for us. We studied feminist scholars and read feminist fiction and films to understand how women and females with alternate sexual identities are conditioned to internalize self-loathing. Our lived experiences with our body image in many ways pushed us to pursue academic interests in exploring the vexed issue of body image in creative ways.  

Body image issues could seem like a trivial issue when women in India grapple with burning problems, beginning with domestic violence, female foeticide, and caste-based violence to income inequality, nutritional inequality, and so on. However, if we were to look at the scale of the number of women who suffer body shaming and the emotional cost of beauty labor, the count would far outweigh the tactile and material forms of violence and injustice mentioned. And this being the case, the implications of body shaming being a trivial matter vanishes.   

In Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, we bring together essays by expert feminist scholars of the field that analyze literary texts, memoirs, magazines, blogs, advertisements, and Bollywood films, among others. We chose essays from the post-liberalization era to the present. These essays showcase how body image shapes women’s lives and identities in contemporary India. They also explore how the subject position of women, their age, fertility, caste, sexual orientation, sexual expression, physical ability, and class have unequal repercussions on a body image.

In conclusion, we claim that “body positivity” has been a buzzword on social media in India and worldwide. On one hand, young women are handed down the message that accepting one’s body is essential; on the other, celebrity culture and social media fetishize hard-to-attain beauty standards mediated with expensive beauty regimes, surgical interventions, extreme diets, and image manipulation.

Would we have grown up differently if we knew how beauty politics manipulate us and what body positivity truly entails? We surely may have been more comfortable in our bodies or our skins. Our book, then, starts the crucial conversation toward understanding the cost of beauty bias in India, and aspires to a day when women and girls feel more empowered in their bodily selves. 

 *Now Glow and Lovely

Celebrating Independent Bookstore Day!

This week in North Philly Notes, we honor the independent bookstores that support Temple University Press. Please visit them on April 27 for Independent Bookstore Day!

Harriet’s Bookshop, 258 E. Girard Avenue in Philadelphia, PA, celebrates women authors, women artists, and women activists.
While you’re there, grab a copy of BLAM! Black Lives Always Mattered.

Headhouse Books, 619 South 2nd Street, in Philadelphia, PA, was founded in 2005 on the belief that no community is complete without the inspiration and exchange of ideas that only a locally-owned, independent bookstore can provide.
Shop there for Jim Murphy’s Real Philly History, Real Fast.

Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books, 5445 Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, PA, offers Cool People. Dope Books. Great Coffee.
Swing by to get Amy Jane Cohen’s Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape.

Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Lane, Mt. Airy Village in Philadelphia, PA, has a full selection of thousands of titles—and take advantage of their booksellers’ decades of experience to discover what your next great read might be.
Stop by and buy Beth Kephart’s My Life in Paper.

The Doylestown Bookshop, 16 South Main Street in Doylestown, PA, is a locally owned and operated bookstore dedicated to preserving the heritage and traditions of independent bookstore ideals. 
Pick up Rebecca Yamin’s Digging in the City of Brotherly Love.

Towne Book Center and Cafe, 220 Plaza Drive, Suite B-3, in Collegeville, PA, has been serving the greater Trappe & Collegeville area for almost 30 years.
Go there to get a Ray Didinger’s One Last Read.

Words Matter Bookstore, 52 South Broadway, in Pitman, NJ, is your local portal to the Universe!
Visit and ask for Bob Angelo’s The NFL Off-Camera.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase titles for Women’s History Month. Use promo code TWHM24 for 25% off all our Women’s Studies titles. (Sale ends April 1, 2024.)

Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States, by William J. Scarborough, reveals how distinct cultural environments shape the patterns of gender inequality

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by Sharon D. Wright Austin, examines the crucial role that Black women have carried out in the cities they govern

Solidarity & Care: Domestic Worker Activism in New York City, by Alana Lee Glaser, shows how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in the domestic work sector and other industries

Forthcoming Titles:

Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran, by Fae Chubin, provides an intersectional analysis of Iran’s feminist activism through an ethnographic study of an NGO-led women’s empowerment program (May)

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity (May)

Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism: How Progressive Era Feminists Redefined Who We Are, and What It Means Today, by Wendy Sarvasy, theorizes a useable radical past for intersectional activists today (June)

Presenting Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we present Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 catalog.

Below are our forthcoming books, arranged alphabetically by title. You can also view the catalog online here.

Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories, by Marianne Novy

Bringing together birthmothers’, adoptees’, and adoptive parents’ portrayals of their experiences in memoirs

Beyond Left, Right, and Center: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Germany, by Christina Xydias

Debunks our assumptions about ideology and women’s representation in democracies

Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy, by Amy Jane Cohen

Philadelphia’s Black history as seen through historical markers, monuments, murals, and more

Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration, by Wendi Yamashita

Critiques how Japanese American public memorializations unintentionally participate in maintaining and justifying a neoliberal racial order

Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder, by John D. Fairfield

Forging a path forward toward modes of production and ways of life, less dependent on despoliation and manic consumption, that will be genuinely sustaining

Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal, by Jeevan R. Sharma

How the changing political economy of rural Nepal informs the desire and agency of young male migrants who seek work in cities

Death Penalty in Decline?: The Fight against Capital Punishment in the Decades since Furman v. Georgia, Edited by Austin Sarat

Examines how the politics of capital punishment have changed in America since 1972 and the current prospects for abolition

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes: Fitting Policy to People and Place, by David C. Campbell

Turning deeply rooted governance dilemmas into practical policy results

Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism, Edited by Tatiana Konrad

Explores discourses related to gender, race, imperialism, and climate across the colonial era

Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, by Linh Thủy Nguyễn

How American children of Vietnamese refugees connect and express their experiences of racialization using the tropes of family, war, and grief

Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society, by Rebecca A. Glazier

Showing how community engagement can build stronger congregations and improve democracy

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, Edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg

Initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity

From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City, by Adam Baird

How longstanding socio-economic vulnerability in Belize City created fertile grounds for embedding deported Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles

The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking, Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno

Exploring improvisation as a fundamental practice for teaching and learning

Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm, by Tongyu Wu

A critical exploration into the gamification in modern workplaces as a means of control

Temple University Press’ Annual Holiday Give and Get

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press close out 2023 by suggesting the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to receive and read this holiday season. 

Will Forrest, Rights and Contracts Coordinator/Editorial Assistant
Give: I’m giving Beth Kephart’s magnificent My Life in Paper to my mother, who has had her eye on this book since she got a copy of our Fall catalog. This is a very special book, exploring the everyday paper items that populate our lives with grace and lucidity. It’s the kind of book that I look at and can’t believe that I worked on. It’s a book I would recommend even if it wasn’t from Temple.

Get: I already have too many books I need to work my way through, so I’m not asking for any more. My reading list includes Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which traces the history of acting technique from Stanislavsky through to the Group Theatre and Lee Strasberg and Brando. I have always found acting books to be hard to parse, so I’m looking forward to this book giving clarity to an often obfuscated (perhaps intentionally so) world.

Shaun Vigil, Editor
Give: The Press has published so many volumes this year that warrant a place on holiday lists that it’s nearly impossible to choose just one. That said, The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee will certainly be among those I’m gifting this year. Bringing Mukherjee’s complete short fiction under one cover for the first time, this work is sure to offer something new to readers for many years to come.

Get: This year our fellow university press colleagues at the University of New Mexico released The Official Cookbook of the Chile Pepper Institute. The breadth of recipes and chiles represented from across the world will make this an essential in my kitchen, especially in helping to keep me warm during these cold winter months.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief
Give: Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology, Second Edition, by Rebecca Yamin. Wherever you go in Philadelphia, there’s a good chance history is sleeping beneath your feet. Rebecca Yamin wakes it up and dusts it off, revealing the remarkable stories behind once-buried bones, bowls, and privy pits. This second edition is beautifully designed with several new chapters and new color illustrations.

Get: Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, by Mack McCormick. Who doesn’t want to better understand Robert Johnson? I’m curious about this book for that reason, but also because of the questions it raises around storytelling and an author’s responsibility to both the living and the dead. The publisher’s pitch reminds me a little of tales like Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse in which storytellers may be consumed by the same forces they’re exploring in their work. 

Stephen Bassett Gluckman, Graduate Editorial Assistant

Give: Kimberly Kattari’s Psychobilly: Subcultural Survival would be a perfect gift for more than a few people in my circle of friends and family. Kattari’s study is not only a dive into the world of Psychobilly, it’s a fascinating journey into the roots and conditions that shaped this vibrant subculture. It promises to be a thoughtful and intriguing present, one that enlightens as much as it entertains. 

Get: I’m intrigued by Esther Yi’s debut novel Y/N from what I’ve heard about it. With a plot working through the concept of “fanfiction,” Yi’s novel seems to be a unique tragicomic meditation on fandom and the way we center our lives in our globalized and wired world. I hope Yi’s novel proves to be both an absurd yet nuanced reflection on identity, human connection, and their limitations in contemporary culture.

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager

Give: Forklore: Recipes and Tales from an American Bistro, by Ellen Yin.  Celebrate cooking at home with Ellen Yin, winner of the 2023 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur. Great for aspiring chefs and home cooks in your life!

Get: Hoping for this holiday cozy mystery to wind down the year – Blackmail and Bibingka (A Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery) by Mia P. Manansala 

Faith Ryan, Production Assistant
Give: I would give Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020, by Tritia Toyota. I find immigrant stories endlessly fascinating, and this book studies a group of people—young Japanese women—who aren’t commonly showcased in such stories about the United States. Spanning forty years, right up to the modern day, this book offers so much to learn about our society past and present.

Get: I would love to receive Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery by Richard Hollingham. I’ve always been interested in history in general, and I find medical history to be an especially dramatic way to connect with the past. Exploring so many centuries of trial-and-error medical care is both a harrowing and rewarding way to trace just how far we’ve come as a civilization.

Ashley Petrucci, Senior Production Editor

Give: I would give Building a Social Contract, by Michael McCulloch, because I think people I know would be interested in the point of comparison between housing situations in the early twentieth century vs. today.

Get: I need to build up my cooking repertoire, but in a whimsical way, so I’d like to get something like The Redwall Cookbook, since that was a series I enjoyed as a kid.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Bob Angelo’s The NFL Off-Camera. Angelo spent a career humanizing the people behind the NFL jerseys and helmets through his work at NFL Films. In his book, he reveals even more about what those players were like when the cameras were off. 

Get: Colson Whitehead’s The Harlem Shuffle. Whitehead’s understated prose and alluring characters combined deftly with his insight into the antebellum context of Underground Railroad. I’m eager to see him tackle the 1960s.

Alicia Pucci, Scholarly Communications Associate

Give: The Battles of Germantown, by David W. Young. One of the many history buffs in my life would greatly enjoy learning about Philly’s historic Germantown and hearing Young’s powerful take on public history.

Get: Baking Yesteryear, by B. Dylan Hollis, would be a great addition to my kitchen’s bookshelf. I love seeing recipes from antique cookbooks. Plus, who wouldn’t want to try new things like a chocolate potato cake from 1910?

Karen Baker,  Associate Director, Financial Manager
Give: I would give Color Me…Cherry & White: A Temple University Coloring Book to my grandson, because he is starting to color, and what better to color in than a Temple University inspired coloring book.

Get: I would like to receive I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart, because I find him really funny, and he’s a Philly guy, so that makes it even better. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director
Give: Over Thanksgiving, and a week before Henry Kissinger’s death, my nephew and I had a scarily prescient conversation about the U.S. bombing of  Cambodia. When talking about the Khmer Rouge, I described the Press book, A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, by Leth Oun and Joe Samuel Starnes. I’ll follow up on that conversation by giving him the book. 

Get: I want to make time to read a book I already have: The Nix, by Nathan Hill. I bought it after the great New York Times and NPR reviews, and then many more, but have been daunted by its size ever since.  This will be the year I tackle it! 

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager and Interim Sales Manager
Give: A friend of mine is a history buff so I’m getting him a copy of Real Philly History, Real Fast. I had a chance this year to see author Jim Murphy present his book and he was amazing. I sold out of copies. I’d hoped to see him lead a tour but it rained the day we planned. But hey, that’s a resolution for 2024!
Get: While I am not a history buff, I read about two “history” books in the New York Times that intrigued me. Aaron and I were both fascinated by Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing and Bookselling in the 20th Century, so if anyone wants to spend the $200.00 to send us a copy, I’d share it with him when I’m done. The other title was the more affordable novel, The Sleeping Soldier, by Aster Glenn Gray, about a union soldier who “wakes up” and befriends a college student in the 1960s.

Designing a comprehensive resource for community-engagement professionals

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Tryon, coauthor (with Haley Madden and Cory Sprinkel) of Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships, writes about the challenges and rewards of integrating community engagement into higher education.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, it’s overwhelming to try to process the impact of events of the last four years. A global pandemic disproportionately affected minoritized communities in a climate of vitriolic hatred and intolerance encouraged by the former president. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests created overdue heightened awareness of systemic racism. In a short time span, so much of the country’s dialogue shifted that it is mind-boggling to catalog the ramifications, good and bad. The learning curve was steep, especially for community engagement (CE) under lockdown, but universities pivoted more quickly in response to the COVID-19 closure than thought possible for such behemoth institutions. It was gratifying, in our campus Zoom world in the late summer and fall of 2020, to see conversations about equity take center stage. Some academics seemed to have been living a cloistered existence, unaware that inequity and systemic racism persist in the neoliberal construct of academia. Now folks were gamely attempting to wake up and contribute to rectifying some inequities. The gates of the ivory tower seemed to crack open and we heard a new willingness to listen and try new things.

These issues were not new in the context of academic CE. For many, many years we had been hearing from off-campus partners that our institutions didn’t do enough to prepare students in CE coursework (some of it required to graduate) before unleashing them on the unsuspecting populace. And that even with the best intentions, students sometimes interacted with community members in ways that caused harm. At our university a large community-based study, overseen by Professor Randy Stoecker in 2006, categorized those issues using a grounded-theory method. These findings were so extensive that our team published a book with Temple in 2009 called The Unheard Voices. This work led us to plead with administrators to institute policies to improve CE. These calls had largely gone unheeded, and 10 years after the Voices study, a community follow-up showed that not much had changed except that partners were becoming choosier about agreeing to projects and they still needed us to shoulder the burden of student training. (One told us, “Tell your students to stop bringing their white nonsense!”) Higher ed has a moral responsibility to behave better both inside the campus boundaries and especially beyond if universities continue to send students into the community under their auspices.

While the issues chronicled in Voices included everything from students not showing up at their sites to the vagaries of the academic calendar, over the next decade packed rooms for every workshop or conference presentation our team led with words like “cultural humility” in the title pointed to the overarching problem. Once all the available extra chairs were dragged in, people sat on floors or windowsills or hovered in doorways. Instructors kept saying, “I’m not equipped to teach these topics. I need the tools to do a better job of not only ensuring my students do no harm, but also ensuring the CE project is more than a break-even exercise for my community partners.”

During those years we were lucky to have some very skilled student interns who had extensive training in intergroup/intercultural dialogue as well as lived experience and wisdom. They knew how to meet students at their level as they worked toward more equitable partnerships and helped us develop workshop curriculum. This led to the creation of a CE Preparation staff role in 2019, filled by Cory Sprinkel, also a skilled dialogue facilitator, and we embarked on formalizing our student trainings for wider dissemination.

Our new handbook, Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships, is designed to be a comprehensive resource for use by community-engaged professionals to prepare students for more equitable relationships with community members as they conduct course projects or research. It is structured into three broad sections that loosely mirror a companion set of open-access online modules that instructors can assign: an introductory overview and literature review; essential concepts, including student motivations, identity, privilege, power and oppression, and cultural humility; and additional contexts and considerations that drill down even deeper. We used a developmental approach so instructors can go from simpler to more complex understandings. Every chapter starts with discussion and theory and then moves to specific strategies and classroom activities. The book ends with appendices of activities and resources we have collected over the years.

We could only write from the perspective of a predominantly white institution in a medium-sized city, and our BIPOC faculty/staff colleagues, while very supportive, were too committed to join us as coauthors. So, we solicited short vignettes from small private and large urban campuses, community colleges, HBCUs, and minority-serving institutions. We received contributions from a diverse group of 22 colleagues about a plethora of related issues, including valuable contributions from students. It was a real pleasure to work with all of these contributors and my co-authors and I are excited to see this handbook reach CE professionals that have been looking for resources to help them prepare students for equitable partnership building.

University Press Week Blog Tour: #SPEAKUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is What Does It Mean to #SPEAKUP at your Press? 

Today’s entries shine a spotlight on new or backlist projects that exemplify the ways the SpeakUP theme intersects with a Press’ mission, practices, acquisitions/marketing/production strategies, etc.

Click on links to Presses to read their entries.
(Note: Some Press have not provided links or descriptions of content as of time of publication)

Yale University Press

University of Notre Dame Press
Greg Bourke, author of Gay, Catholic, and American, writes about choosing to publish his book with University of Notre Dame Press.

Columbia University Press
In this interview, Howard University’s Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Columbia University’s Dr. Frank Guridy #SpeakUP about The Black Lives in the Diaspora series and its mission to uplift voices of Black scholars and authors who have often been marginalized by providing a platform for their research and perspectives.

Leuven University Press
Guest post by a press Acquisitions Editor.

University of Nebraska Press
Guest post, by UNP Director.

University of Chicago Press
Interview with Laura Mamor, author of Sexualing Cancer, a book that SpeaksUP about the intersections of politics, gender, and public health

McGill-Queen’s University Press
#SpeakUP Reading list

University of Amsterdam Press

Purdue University Press
Purdue University Press has a long history of publishig in Jewish, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies.

Harvard Education Press
Executive director Jess Fiorillo writes about HEP’s mission and our books that that “speak up” against problems in education

Bristol University Press
Alison Shaw on BUPs history and mission.

Duke University Press
Curated reading lists with free content.

University Press of Kentucky
Frank X Walker, the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate, is an artist, writer, and educator who has published eleven collections of poetry. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, Walker speaks to the importance of books by the University Press of Kentucky.

Johns Hopkins University Press

The University of the West Indies Press
Empowering our authors as Dara Wilkenson Bobb is with her marketing strategy for Gods of Bruising.

Cornell University Press

SUNY Press
#SpeakUP Reading List

University of Manitoba Press
Highlighting ways our recent titles have spoken up.

NYU Press
Author Jeffrey S. Gurock explains how sports hero Marty Glickman spoke out against anti-semitism.

The problem with prostitution problem solving

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, coauthors of The Compassionate Court?, provide their observations about studying prostitution diversion programs. (Part 2 of 2)

For many years we have been studying court-affiliated prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) at various stages of their inception and implementation. As Corey’ previous blog suggests, we find ourselves caught between the critical reflection of our academic training and deep empathy for all of the stakeholders. What is often missing from policy debates is an accurate portrayal of workday conditions of under-resourced agencies that struggle to provide the assistance or the efforts to survive in a city that lacks much of a social safety net. By the same token, a lot of joy, humor, and love is also missing from these debates. Criminal legal system actors and women arrested for street-based sex work are a savvy, thoughtful bunch and they often help each other with advice and material resources.

One of the main reasons we wanted to write The Compassionate Court? was to provide the broader public with a picture of the complicated reality that we see when we spend time in courtrooms, probation offices, people’s homes, and treatment programs. A book provides an opportunity to share the three-dimensional understanding that we have championed, and one goal of our book is to provide what Nancy Fraser referred to as “everyday world policy analysis,” a walk through policy as it would happen on the ground in real time. It also allowed us to provide fuller stories for some of our study participants. In addition to formal observations and interviews, our conversations and embeddedness in a variety of locations creates a familiarity that often feels truncated by the traditional article format built from decontextualized fragments. Each chapter in The Compassionate Court? contains an expanded vignette drawing on multiple interviews and interactions with a different participant, which we hope provides our readers with some of the familiarity that we have developed with the interviews. We imagine that, as Project Dawn Court participant “Amy” suggested, knowing a person’s story will open readers’ minds.

Many of our readers will be empathetic toward the women who participate in Project Dawn Court and the Specialized Prostitution Diversion Program. We imagine that readers may be less empathetic toward professional stakeholders, especially given the critiques that we have shared (often quoting these very same professional stakeholders!). We hope that our extended vignettes and weaving of perspectives will allow our readers to recognize the binds faced by these professionals, most of whom are women—just like the overwhelming majority of people arrested for sex work. That they act from a place of urgency and love does not negate problematic saviorism that some grapple with. But to view them only through such a critical lens obscures the larger capitalistic patriarchal narrative that too often serves up the street-level service providers for critique. We should also be asking who benefits from the entrenched inequality and privileging of criminal legal spaces as the last-stop safety net. It is no wonder that PDP participants’ say the primary positive aspect of PDPs is that they are treated like human beings. This low bar for a positive rating shows how people arrested for sex work, especially those who use drugs, are treated. We ask the question, does this need be the case? What would happen if all systems treated people like human beings? We doubt that PDPs would be as welcome in the criminal legal system landscape by participants or by professional stakeholders and welcome readers to let us know what you think.

Visiting Project Dawn Court

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, coauthor of The Compassionate Court?, with Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, provides observations from her research on prostitution diversion programs. (Part one of two entries).

In December 2021 I visited Project Dawn Court (PDC). It was the first time I had seen anyone in person since the start of the COVID pandemic. Fresh in my mind were the interviews I had been conducting with program participants and other stakeholders, many of whom were no longer engaged with Dawn Court, and who hold wildly divergent assessments of whether PDC is good or bad, and in what ways. I was struck by how good it felt for me to be in this space, and the warmth that is there. There was a genuine feeling of camaraderie among many of the women in the program and care emanating from the program staff. As someone who sat on the benches with program participants monthly for three years, and in subsequent visits, this was familiar, and I was eager (COVID-caution to the winds) to share hugs. There was also a sense of sadness and nostalgia that something is ending. This court meeting was also a farewell party for the retiring judge and a longtime therapist who is leaving for new career options. The program is small, with participants who have been in Project Dawn for years. The “spigot” has literally been turned off by self-proclaimed progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, who will not bring charges for prostitution against those who sell sex, and who is the target of dismay and anger. Although there may have been folks in the room who think this is good, none shared this publicly. Program graduates and participants and the professional stakeholders were vehemently opposed and broke into diatribes in conversation and in their prepared farewell messages in open court. Most saw this as abandonment: The concerns of women who need help will once again go unheeded. They viewed Larry Krasner and his progressive vision as part of a larger, ongoing “discourse of disposal” (Lowman, 2000).

This narrative of abandonment shows both how important Prostitution Diversion Programs (PDPs) are, and how they are also doomed to failure. This group of program participants and most program stakeholders—nearly all women—have created a space where (some of them) find a semblance of common ground. Even those who most decried the program, and women who were removed from the program, made meaningful personal connections. They found mutual hope, concrete assistance, and in some cases friendship. But few of the women were left better off. There are still insufficient resources for assistance that would help people who would prefer not to sell sex on the streets of Philadelphia or Baltimore to leave this option behind. There are also insufficient resources to help most of those who have stopped selling sex, either by choice or by mandate, to thrive. I was upset with myself for being nostalgic, and upset by how easily I could be lulled by the familiarity, warmth, and kindness of individual women to blunt and suspend my own critical stance. What does this say about the mutual eagerness to make connections among people whom I imagine do not usually connect—across class, race, and stigma? Is that the real purpose of this court? To make everyone here feel just a little bit better about an overall lack of empathy and isolation? And where is the line between a prurient curiosity and a desire for connection, especially in this space where sex and suffering are the main topics of conversation? What are the systems that place these women, myself included, into this space of longing and desire? How are visions of mothering and other forms of women’s work implicated in this peculiar blend of maternalistic rescue that focuses on nurturing while tasked with a mission of preparation for the world? This role largely involves making sure that those in our charge are ready—ostensibly for their own safety but also for the “good” of a larger society—to conform to normative conceptions of how, where, and with whom, women can present and use their bodies and their sexuality. Is one of the reasons that we cannot imagine large large-scale change somehow built on this fear of abandoning and being abandoned?

Encountering Bharati Mukherjee

This week in North Philly Notes, Ruth Maxey, editor of The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee, discusses her personal connection to the late South Asian American writer.

The only time I encountered Bharati Mukherjee, the first major American writer to produce fiction about the lives of South Asian immigrants in the U.S., she was recalling the difficulties of publishing Darkness (1985), her first collection of short stories. In “America Unbound,” a lecture she gave to an audience of British scholars in Manchester in 2004, she remembered North American publishers and readers who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were not ready for the stories she had to tell. Listening to the lecture as a new graduate student of South Asian American and British Asian literature, my main reaction was excitement. Seeing writers I was researching in person was a big moment: Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie in London; Meena Alexander in New York; and Mukherjee in Manchester. It made the study of contemporary literature that much more thrilling: beholding the author as a living, breathing person and watching, in real time, as their career unfolded and their writing evolved.

Little did I know back then that my own professional path would cross so decisively with Mukherjee’s short fiction. It wasn’t until 2017, when I was writing Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, that I began to discover all the lesser-known and even unpublished work she had produced. Despite the breakthrough success of her prize-winning second collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which includes her most anthologized story “The Management of Grief,” critics and scholars had focused heavily on two novels: Jasmine (1989) and The Holder of the World (1993), which were fascinating to some and problematic to others. I felt that this overemphasis on one or two texts was doing a disservice to Mukherjee’s writing overall. Then I read, in an interview published a few years before her death in 2017, that Mukherjee had tried to publish her later short stories as a collection, only to be met with a lack of interest from her agent. It was as though, no matter how celebrated she was by then, history was repeating itself years after the challenge of publishing Darkness.

Eager and curious to know more about the late stories, I remembered that Mukherjee had begun her career producing short fiction for her M.F.A. thesis, The Shattered Mirror, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1960s. And there were a number of stories that had been published throughout her life but never anthologized. They had received no critical attention whatsoever. My search also uncovered some tales published late in life that I hadn’t known about. Meanwhile, the University of Iowa had just digitized The Shattered Mirror. In March 2019, I contacted Mukherjee’s husband, the respected Canadian writer Clark Blaise, who later sent me her unpublished late stories. All in all, in addition to the 23 stories included in Darkness and The Middleman, I had now found 12 stories, produced between 1963 and 2012, that were either unpublished or unanthologized and thus remained, for the most part, unavailable to readers.

It became really important to me to do justice to as much of Mukherjee’s work as possible. I wrote new articles that engaged with her 1966 doctoral thesis, also from the University of Iowa, and her little-known essays on everything from teaching R.K. Narayan to her relationship with her own hair. But most of all, I was determined to bring out The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee, a project of literary retrieval and recuperation, different from anything I had done before. I wanted to ensure that future readers and critics could know the full extent of her short fiction and finally have access to it. That wasn’t the only reason, though. I discovered in the course of my research that, perhaps predictably, the “Collected Stories” genre is still a white man’s club and it became even more urgent to confront that cultural and literary injustice in my own small way.

Publishing this book was far from easy: the path was strewn with both joys and obstacles. As one small example: Blaise had to track down the late unpublished stories on his wife’s password-protected, structurally damaged computer, while dealing with his own health issues. Once I had found Temple University Press as the right home for this book, there was the significant problem of securing permission to republish many of the 35 stories: new territory for me and not a quick fix. There were great moments, too: when we could proceed with republication of specific stories, thanks to both Blaise and the publisher Godine; when my invited collaborators, the leading literary scholar Nalini Iyer and acclaimed novelist Lysley Tenorio, agreed to write the Foreword and Afterword respectively; when renowned British artists The Singh Twins generously allowed me to use their wonderful tableau Manhattan Mall (1997) for the book’s cover art. I’m hugely proud of this special book, unlike any other I have worked on and now out in the world for new readers to discover the remarkable contributions Mukherjee made to American fiction.