Ghostly Matters
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Avery Gordon’s influential work has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.
Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting.
George Lipsitz
Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.
Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting.
George Lipsitz
Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.
Charles Lemert
One of the most courageous works of the last decade, Ghostly Matters is nothing less than an eloquent demonstration that modern knowledge practices are not only embedded in social forms of domination, but that such practices work to conceal, rather than to disclose, the relationship between knowledge and power.
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
