Claiming Place

An edited collection that sets out to dismantle a familiar framing. Scholarship on Hmong women has often treated Hmong culture, and Hmong men, as the explanation for their subordination, a move that positions the community as premodern and renders women's actual strategies invisible. The contributors here argue the opposite case, tracing how Hmong women in the United States and Southeast Asia have negotiated, refused, and reshaped patriarchal arrangements on their own terms. It is the most theoretically demanding book in this catalog and the one that most directly challenges how the Hmong have been written about by outsiders. Read it against the memoirs, where the same lives appear in a different register. For graduate readers, gender studies courses, and anyone who has noticed that the scholarship and the lived experience do not match.