White Girl In Yoga Pants

Melissa Scott has done a lot of yoga. Along the way, she's learned lessons about acceptance, overcoming, and inner strength. In White Girl in Yoga Pants, she meditates on those lessons and applies them to both the everyday and extraordinary experiences that make up the tapestry of life. With humor, vulnerability, and grace, she shares inspiring stories about using yoga to heal from an eating disorder and sexual assault. She discusses her frustrations and hopes for these divisive political times. She talks about the unique struggles women and yogis face in the social media age. And above all, she offers gratitude for the divine strength that keeps us all moving forward. Rooted in lessons from both on the mat and out in the world, this collection of essays is a love letter to the human spirit from one white girl in yoga pants.

A high school senior navigates messy boys and messier relationships in this unflichingly honest and much-needed look into the overlap of Asian American identity and teen sexuality. "A fresh tale about a teen’s struggles to define herself." –Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review June Chu is the “just good enough” girl. Good enough to line the shelves with a slew of third-place trophies and steal secret kisses from her AP Bio partner, Rhys. But not good enough to meet literally any of her Taiwanese mother’s unrelenting expectations or to get Rhys to commit to anything beyond a well-timed joke. While June’s mother insists she follow in her (perfect) sister’s footsteps and get a (full-ride) violin scholarship to Northwestern (to study pre-med), June doesn’t see the point in trying too hard if she’s destined to fall short anyway. Instead, she focuses her efforts on making her relationship with Rhys “official.” But after her methodically planned, tipsily executed scheme explodes on the level of a nuclear disaster, she flings herself into a new relationship with a guy who’s not allergic to the word girlfriend. But as the line between sex and love blurs, and pressure to map out her entire future threatens to burst, June will have to decide on whose terms she’s going to live her life—even if it means fraying her relationship with her mother beyond repair. A modern Judy Blume meets Jenny Han, Boys I Know is a raw and realistic look into the lives of teen girls. June Chu is an authentic if imperfect protagonist, and her journey of self discovery is as uncomfortable as it is cathartic. A Summer/ Fall 2022 Indies Introduce Selection!

Engaging with the growing popular and academic interest in the "spiritual but not religious," Andrea R. Jain explores the connections between the practices of global spirituality and aspects of neoliberal capitalism in Peace Love Yoga. "Personal growth," "self-care," and "transformation" are all tropes in the narrative of the spiritual identity Jain is concerned with. This "spirituality" is usually depicted as firmly countercultural: the term "alternative" (alternative health, alternative medicine, alternative spiritualities) is omnipresent. To the contrary, Jain argues, spiritual commodities, entrepreneurs, and consumers are quite mainstream and sometimes even conservative and nationalistic. Ranging from the transnational to the economic to the activist, Jain refuses the single narrative focus of most works on the SBNR; human phenomena that can be analyzed through a single lens or narrative are few and far between, and existing research in this area too often yields a suspiciously tidy story. The heart of the book includes sophisticated analyses of: two politically divergent but equally entrepreneurial and global-capitalist yoga gurus; "athleisure apparel" corporations, such as lululemon, that successfully market consumer goods as a purchased commitment to social justice; and therapeutically-focused applications of spirituality that concentrate on healing the broken person rather than undermining the system that broke that person in the first place. Many spiritual commodities, corporations, and entrepreneurs, Jain suggests, do actually acknowledge the problems of neoliberal capitalism and in fact subvert them; but they subvert them through mere gestures. From provocative taglines printed across t-shirts or packaging to calls for "conscious capitalism," commodification serves as a strategy through which subversion itself is colonized.

A stunning, fearless, and darkly comic debut essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions. In this "expansive" (Electric Literature) and "stellar" (Kirkus Reviews) collection, Tajja Isen braids cultural criticism with personal narrative to examine a common, exasperating pattern in our daily lives: how industries—like entertainment, media, the law, and publishing—have become very good at speaking the language of equity but don't always follow through. Through nine "often hilarious, always thought-provoking" (ELLE) essays, Isen explores that discord with razor-sharp humour. Troubling though this contradiction may be, she oberves, it can also be unexpectedly funny. "An inspiring, determined work" (Saeed Jones), Some of My Best Friends is a brilliantly incisive examination of the gaps between what we say and what we do; what we value and what we demand.

"This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha's own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents--especially mothers--who raise them.” —Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre Beautifully written and deeply personal, this book follows the struggles and triumphs of one single, immigrant mother of color to raise an American feminist son. From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, the author offers an empowering, imperfect feminism, brimming with honest insight and actionable advice. Informed by Jha's work as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, other parents and boys--and through powerful stories from her own life--How to Raise a Feminist Son shows us all how to be better feminists and better teachers of the next generation of men in this electrifying tour de force. Includes chapter takeaways, and an annotated bibliography of reading and watching recommendations for adults and children. "A beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family." —Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

In this hysterical follow-up to the New York Times bestseller White Girl Problems, Babe Walker travels the globe as she tries to figure out the answer to the question foremost on everyone's mind—including hers: Who is Babe Walker? If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands who devoured Babe Walker’s New York Times bestselling novel White Girl Problems or one of the million people who read her blog or follow her on Twitter daily, then you’ve obviously been waiting with bated breath for her hilarious follow-up novel, Psychos. Fresh from a four-month stint in rehab for her “alleged” shopping addiction, Babe Walker returns home to Bel Air ten pounds lighter (thanks to a stomach virus), having made amends (she told a counselor with bad skin she was smart) and confronted her past (after meeting her birth mother for the first time—a fashion model turned farmer lesbian). Although delighted to be home and determined to maintain her hard-won inner peace, Babe now faces a host of outside forces seemingly intent on derailing her path to positive change. Not only is she being trailed by an anonymous stalker, but she’s also reunited with the love of her life, a relationship that she cannot seem to stop self-sabotaging. Babe’s newfound spirituality, coupled with her faith in the universe and its messages, leads her all over the world: shoulder dancing in Paris, tripping out in Amsterdam, and hooking up in the Mediterranean, only to land her back in New York City, forced to choose between a man who is perfect in every way (except for one small detail) and a man who could be The One if only he didn’t drive Babe to utter insanity. Unapologetic and uproarious, Psychos is the send-up of the season—already as timeless as vintage Dior.

This volume, edited by Kim Golombisky, applies an intersectional lens to advertising, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, class, and nationality. Intersectional feminist perspectives on advertising are rare in the advertising industry, even as it faces pressure to reform. This anthology focuses on advertising messaging to follow up the professional practices covered in Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising, edited by Kim Golombisky and Peggy Kreshel. In this new collection, contributors write from a variety of perspectives, including Black, African, lesbian, transnational, poststructuralist, material, commodity, and environmental feminisms. The authors also discuss the reproductive justice framework, feminist disability studies, feminist ethnography, feminist discourse analysis, and feminist visual rhetoric. Together, these scholars introduce big ideas for feminist advertising studies. The first section, titled “Historicize This!,” includes work dealing with historicized analyses of advertising, ranging from more than a century of stereotypes about black women to early twentieth-century white women purchasing automobiles, all contextualized with women’s complex relations with technologies from cars to Twitter. The second section, “Advertising Body Politics,” groups work on topics related to body politics in advertising, including lesbians, disabled women, aging women, and Chinese “promotion girls.” The third section, “Media Reps,” revisits advertising representation in novel ways from operational definitions of race and advertising news about gay men to advertising twenty-first-century masculinities in Ghana and the United States. The last section, “Reproduction and Postfeminist Empowerment,” ends the book with a selection of case studies on the advertising industry’s cooptation and commodification of feminism, particularly in regressive postfeminist ideologies about women’s reproductive health and mothering.

Raymond King's main focus in life has always been women. When Ray returns home to deal with the death of his father, his focus had to shift. From basketball college life to full-blown adulting: house finances, guiding his teenage siblings through their senior year in high school and keeping his drug-addicted mother off the streets. With calls from creditors increasing and Ray's inheritance slowly dwindling, Ray's focus has to change yet again - to getting his money up - and fast. Ray recruits the women in his life: his on-again/off-again girlfriend, his steady side chick, and his slew of randoms - to help him keep his father's legacy alive. Juggling the demands of his many women were never a problem for Ray until he meets for Ashley Jay, a curvy, older woman who refuses to fall victim to the lies of multi-daters and sexually-motivated men. Ashley Jay resistance to Ray's charm only intrigues him to go harder to get her. Lusting for her got Ray talking himself into a love he isn't prepared to keep.