Joan Burbick

This ground-breaking book was many years in the making by some of the country's leading women scholars. Until the present century, few people thought of travel as a female pursuit. Men traveled; women stayed at home. But women have always journeyed, for many reasons, as this important book demonstrates." There is almost nothing on women and travel," notes Susan Armitage, editor of the acclaimed The Women's West and a contributor to Women and the Journey. "It has been taken for granted that men are adventurers and explorers, but what this does is wipe out the stories of women travelers. As we looked at how women's senses of their journeys differed from those of men, we felt like explorers ourselves." The eleven essays in Women and the Journey, as well as the original artwork by Jo Hockenhull, approach the theme of women and travel from a variety of perspectives, including literature, history, foreign languages, fine arts, and women's studies. Over several years the contributors worked on this project as a team, sharing research, reading one another's work, uniting in the process of creating a unique book together. Like quilt making, "that most female of activities," note McLeod and Frederick in their prologue, "each of us had some say in how the final product was put together." Women and the Journey is destined to become a women's studies classic. Contributors include Susan Armitage, Joan Burbick, Susanna Finnell, Bonnie Frederick, Diane Gillespie, Jo Hockenhull, Virginia Hyde, Birgitta Ingemanson, Susan McLeod, Sheila Ruzycki O'Brien, Louise Schleiner, Marina Tolmacheva, and Annette White-Parks.

A fictional memoir, Erased is about what happened to Katherine Lin, a wife, young mother, and promising Chinese scientist. Decades after Lin's disappearance in war-torn China, her daughter-in-law sets out on a trek to find out who she was, how she lived, and why her death was a mystery. Through family letters, unusual keepsakes, and discoveries in China, Lin comes alive. But this attempt to rescue Katherine Lin from oblivion uncovers some dangerous secrets long buried under the chaos of war, exile, and family treachery.

A fictional memoir, Erased is about what happened to Katherine Lin, a wife, young mother, and promising Chinese scientist. Decades after Lin's disappearance in war-torn China, her daughter-in-law sets out on a trek to find out who she was, how she lived, and why her death was a mystery. Through family letters, unusual keepsakes, and discoveries in China, Lin comes alive. But this attempt to rescue Katherine Lin from oblivion uncovers some dangerous secrets long buried under the chaos of war, exile, and family treachery.

Based on the 2009 shooting of a Nez Perce man by an Idaho State Police officer, Stripland follows four characters whose lives were upended by this death. Reality bends and perceptions warp as each one travels the same route from the McDonald's at the base of 21st Street up the hill to Dave's Pawn Shop on Thain Road in the city of Lewiston, Idaho. The separate stories of a homeless man, a woman lawyer, a bereft photographer and an internet trickster eventually intersect and overlap as they try to understand, exploit, or seek revenge for the killing.

Based on the 2009 shooting of a Nez Perce man by an Idaho State Police officer, Stripland follows four characters whose lives were upended by this death. Reality bends and perceptions warp as each one travels the same route from the McDonald's at the base of 21st Street up the hill to Dave's Pawn Shop on Thain Road in the city of Lewiston, Idaho. The separate stories of a homeless man, a woman lawyer, a bereft photographer and an internet trickster eventually intersect and overlap as they try to understand, exploit, or seek revenge for the killing.

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of a national culture in America. These 'fictions' of health include annual reports of mental asylums, home-physician manuals, social reform books and novels consumed by the middle class that functioned as cautionary tales of well-being. Read together these writings engage in a counterpoint of voices at once constructing and debating the hegemonic values of the emerging American nation. In studying these narratives of health, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace, Americans designed ways to control the body in the effort to create, impose or embrace social order in a corporeal politics whose influences are felt to this day.

Rodeo has always been considered a supremely masculine sport, a rough and tumble display of macho strength and skill. But author Joan Burbick shows us the other side of rodeo: the world of rodeo queens- part cowgirl and part pageant princess- who wave and smile and keep the dream of the ideal Western woman alive. So who are the women behind the candy-red chaps, Farrah Fawcett curls, and rhinestone tiaras? Burbick traveled the backroads of the rural West for years, trying to find out. She interviewed dozens of queens, including rodeo royalty from the 1930s and 40s, women who grew up breaking wild horses, branding calves, and witnessing the sad decline of the ranching life. Stories from white and Native American rodeo queens in the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of rodeo, reveal the conflicts over gender and race that shaped the rodeo and the Cold War politics of small Western towns. Finally, rodeo queens from the 1970s to the present describe a more fiercely commercial rodeo, driven largely by TV-ratings and sponsorships, glitter and hairspray. Illustrated throughout with wonderful photographs, this rich tapestry of women's voices echoes and challenges our clichés of the rural West. Their combined stories of fulfilled dreams and lost hopes reveal the tenacity of the myth of the American West, a place of muscled men, golden-haired women, relentless beauty and tragic limits.

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of an American national culture. Including annual reports of mental asylums, the home physician manuals, social reform books, and middle-class novels, these ‘fictions’ of health engage in a counterpoint of voices competing to construct the hegemonic values of the emerging republic. Exploring the notion that political values flow from the daily exigencies of survival and enjoyment, the narratives of health presented here address the demands and desires of everyday life and construct a national discourse of control, authority, and subordination. The text first examines the structures of authority found in health narratives, later going on to analyse how specific knowledges about the brain, heart, nerves, and eye provide indices that reveal conflicts basic to American nationalism. Healing the Republic confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace, Americans designed ways to appropriate somatic discourse to create, impose, or embrace social order in a politics of the body whose influences are felt to this day.