Gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in modern Chinese history; comparative labor history; Chicana history; nationalism and sexuality in the Third World; oral history
"Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited," in Modern China, 29.2, April 2003:153-75.
"Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards," in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, editors Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
"Iron Girls Revisited: Gender and the Politics of Work in the Cultural Revolution," in Barbara Gutwisle and Gail Henderson, eds., Re-Drawing the Boundaries of Work, Households, and Gender, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's, with Gail Hershatter, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.