Social Identity

Today’s youth struggle with difficult questions of sexual identity. How can a youth worker offer wise care and counsel on such a controversial and confusing subject? Mark Yarhouse, director of the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity, writes to equip youth ministers so they can faithfully navigate the topic of sexual identity in a way that is honest, compassionate, and accessible.

A message for hopeless romantics, romantic idealists, and developing men and women who seek the passionate depths of their natural masculine and feminine qualities.

Say good-bye to the crippling stress and anxiety that come with dating in the 2020s with the dating advice all single people need.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

Inviting you to challenge accepted beauty standards and the concept of “the perfect body,” Essie takes everything they have learned on their journey to self-acceptance and body satisfaction to help guide you towards loving your queer body. From gender, sexuality, and reclaiming your body, through to food, politics, social media, and fatphobia, this radical book starts a conversation about body image and mental health that queer people are so often left out of.

For five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that movement at every stage. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant mother, explores the history and theology of what he terms the "Brown Church."

Et si nos peurs, nos peines, nos hontes et nos contradictions étaient aussi sacrées que nos joies ? Si elles étaient une porte d'entrée vers une connexion à nos profondeurs, aux autres et au monde ? Dans le secret des cercles de parole comme dans sa vie de femme, Camille a fait l'expérience de cet état émotionnel si inconfortable et dont la société ne sait que faire : la vulnérabilité. Dans cet ouvrage, elle en décrypte les particularités et lui donne le visage d'une déesse, pour mieux nous inviter à pénétrer dans son temple.

Radical Belonging is not a simple self-love treatise. Focusing only on self-love ignores the important fact that we have negative experiences because our culture has targeted certain bodies and people for abuse or alienation. For marginalized people, a focus on self-love can be a spoonful of sugar that makes the oppression go down. This groundbreaking book goes further, helping us to manage the challenges that stem from oppression and moving beyond self-love and into belonging.

In this important and inspiring book, Obioma Ugoala tells his own story as he examines the problems with how race, sex and masculinity are portrayed and experienced by Black men–and how to change that.

You were born with massive reservoirs of strength, confidence, and creativity. But oppressive structures that keep you “in your place” - that is, silent, weak, and complacent - have cut you off you from your natural gifts and pitted women against one another. Following the timeless wisdom of the heroine's journey, Becoming Heroines invites you to recover your inner power and unleash it as a force for change in the world.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called Black to what is assumed to be White. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a "Black" father from the segregated South and a "White" mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of "Black blood" makes a person Black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations....

Sticky is a beat-around-the-head foster kid with nowhere to call home but the street and an outer shell so tough that no one will take him in. He started out life so far behind the pack that the finish line seems nearly unreachable. He's a white boy living and playing in a world where he doesn't seem to belong. But Sticky can ball. And basketball might just be his ticket out, if he can only realize that he doesn't have to be the person everyone else expects him to be.

The denial of the European peoples' right to their own heritage, history, and even their physical homelands has become part of the cultural fundament of the modern West. In Generation Identity, activist Markus Willinger presents his take on the ideology of the budding identitarian movement in 41 brief and direct chapters. Willinger presents a crystal-clear image of what has gone wrong and indicates the direction in which we should look for our solutions.

Transgender men comprise a large, growing proportion of the trans population, yet they remain largely invisible. In this powerful, timely, and eye-opening account, award-winning sociologist Arlene Stein draws from dozens of interviews with transgender people and their friends and families, as well as with activists and medical and psychological experts. Unbound documents the varied ways younger trans men see themselves and how they are changing our understanding of what it means to be male and female in America.

The ‘culture wars' have generated ferocious argument, but little clarity. This book takes the long view, explaining the real origins of ‘race' in Western thought, and tracing its path from those beginnings in the Enlightenment all the way to our own fractious world. In doing so, leading thinker Kenan Malik upends many assumptions underpinning today's heated debates around race, culture, whiteness and privilege.

Based on the African American Women's Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of African American women feel pressure to compromise their true selves as they navigate America's racial and gender bigotry. Black women "shift" by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance....

Grayson Sender has been holding onto a secret for what seems like forever: "He" is a girl on the inside, stuck in the wrong gender's body. The weight of this secret is crushing, but sharing it would mean facing ridicule, scorn, rejection, or worse. Despite the risks, Grayson's true self itches to break free. Will new strength from an unexpected friendship and a caring teacher's wisdom be enough to help Grayson step into the spotlight she was born to inhabit?

Afua Hirsch is British. Her parents are British. She was raised, educated and socialised in Britain. Her partner, her daughter, her sister and the vast majority of her friends are British. So why is her identity and sense of belonging a subject of debate? The reason is simply because of the colour of her skin. Blending history, memoir and individual experiences, Afua Hirsch reveals the identity crisis at the heart of Britain today. Far from affecting only minority people, Britain is a nation in denial about its past and its present.

In American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell compares today’s secular politics of identity - skin tone, gender, and sexuality - to the religious awakenings of America’s past. The book asks where the clerisy of identity politics came from, how identity politics claimed a death grip on liberalism, and how can it be defeated.

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy now examines the relationship between the war's realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.