Fur has been sparking controversies ever since sumptuary laws marked it as a luxury item and as a sign of medieval class privilege. Drawing on wide-ranging historical and contemporary sources, Julia V. Emberley explains how a material good has become both a symbol of wealth and sexuality, and a symptom of class, gender, and imperial antagonisms.

Emberley documents the 1980s confrontations between animal rights activists and native peoples that pitted Lynx, the organization responsible for the high-profile anti-fur ads in Great Britain, against Inuit and Dene societies' claims for a livelihood based on the selling and trading, consumption and production of animal fur.

The fetishization of fur, Emberley shows, extends from early modern paintings and etchings to late nineteenth-century literary and psychoanalytical narratives of sexual fantasy, such as von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs. Contemporary advertising and fashion photography, as well as films such as Paris is Burning reveal the ongoing fetishistic practices of the fashion world. From colonial fur trading to twentieth-century globalization of the fur industry, Emberley analyzes the cultural, political, material, and libidinal values ascribed to fur.

"A fascinating account of the powerful roles fur has played in various cultures and of the historical and political forces at work in the play of its meanings." Jonathan Culler, Cornell University"In this well-written treatise, Emberley . . . views fur through widely disparate lenses. . . . Emberley is able to make us understand all the viewpoints she presents. . . . A valuable book on a little-explored subject." Library Journal"This is a strong and intelligent work on a controversial topic. Emberley's book is much more intellectually sophisticated than anything else I've seen on this subject." Valerie Steele, Editor, Fashion Theory"Julia Emberley's book is a complex, wide-ranging, and fascinating feminist critique of the history and meaning of fur and fashion. Particularly unique is her integration of indigenous voices into the debates." Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on ArtFur has been sparking controversies ever since sumptuary laws marked it as a luxury item and as a sign of medieval class privilege. Drawing on wide-ranging historical and contemporary sources, Julia V. Emberley explains how a material good has become both a symbol of wealth and sexuality, and a symptom of class, gender, and imperial antagonisms."

Through the study of Indigenous literary and artistic practices from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, Julia V. Emberley examines the ways Indigenous storytelling discloses and repairs the traumatic impact of social violence in settler colonial nations. She focuses on Indigenous storytelling in a range of cultural practices, including novels, plays, performances, media reports, Internet museum exhibits, and graphic novels. In response to historical trauma such as that experienced at Indian residential schools, as well as present-day violence against Indigenous bodies and land, Indigenous storytellers make use of Indigenous spirituality and the sacred to inform an ethics of hospitality. They provide uncanny configurations of political and social kinships between people, between the past and the present, and between the animate and inanimate. This book introduces readers to cultural practices and theoretical texts concerned with bringing Indigenous epistemologies to the discussion of trauma and colonial violence.