Download or read book Fat Sex New Directions in Theory and Activism written by Helen Hester and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While fat sexual bodies are highly visible as vehicles for stigma, there has been a lack of scholarly research addressing this facet of contemporary body politics. Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism seeks to rectify this, bringing debates about fat sex into the academic arena and providing a much-needed critical space for voices from across the spectrum of theory and activism. It examines the intersection of fat, sex and sexuality within a contemporary cultural landscape that is openly hostile towards fat people and their perceived social and aesthetic transgressions. Acknowledging and engaging with some of the innovative work being done by artists, activists, and academics around the issue of fat sex, this collection both challenges preconceptions regarding fatness and sexuality, but also critiques and debates various aspects of the fat activist approach. It draws on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together work from the UK, US, Europe, and Australia to offer a wide-ranging examination of the issues of size, sex, and sexuality. A cutting-edge exploration not only of fat sex, but of identity politics, neoliberalism and contemporary body activism in general, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural studies, geography, porn studies and literary studies working on questions of gender, sexuality and the body.
Download or read book Xenofeminism written by Helen Hester and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution? These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the 'Laboria Cuboniks' collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto 'Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation'. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction. Challenging and iconoclastic, this visionary book is the essential guide to one of the most exciting intellectual trends in contemporary feminism.
Download or read book Beyond Explicit written by Helen Hester and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a novel characterization of the pornographic as a cultural concept. This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words porn and pornographic are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as torture porn and misery porn, Hesters argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particulartransgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticitycan be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.
Download or read book Adorno written by Stefan Müller-Doohm and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
Download or read book Talk Dirty to Me written by Sallie Tisdale and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talk Dirty to Me is a frank, funny, and provocative journey through gender and desire. It ranges from romance and pornography, prostitution and morality, to fantasies and orgasm. Sallie Tisdale guides us through her research of peep shows, sex shops, and even the pornography collection of the British Library. Along with descriptions of her personal experiences, she presents a brilliant, fascinating, and wholly original portrait of contemporary sex and sexual identity. "I wrote Talk Dirty To Me almost twenty years ago. I was in my thirties, and I still found sex bewildering - to be precise, I found my own anxieties and shyness about sex bewildering." - Sallie Tisdale Sallie Tisdale challenges commonly held assumptions about almost everything related to sexuality. Talk Dirty to Me investigates the role of sex in human life: from discussing how gender is now something partly born, partly borrowed, and partly built; to exploring how children are sexualised in fashion, music, and advertising while condemnation of paedophilia reaches fever pitch. "I don't worry much about sex anymore. It just is, there - sometimes forward, sometimes over in a corner. There's mine, and there's yours, and I don't worry too much about yours. Sex is just being human." - Sallie Tisdale Talk Dirty to Me encompasses a wide range of references: American and Japanese pornography, James Joyce's infamous love letters, interviews with prostitutes proud of their skills and earning power, cultural writing from Roland Barthes to Susie Bright, Freud, Adam and Eve, to the findings of sex researchers such as Masters and Johnson. Sallie Tisdale invites her readers to have an open conversation about sex while challenging traditional feminist attitudes towards sexual politics. A personal philosophy of human sexuality - now expanded and revised. Talk Dirty to Me is a frank, funny, and provocative journey through gender and desire. It ranges from romance and pornography, prostitution and morality, to fantasies and orgasm. Sallie Tisdale guides us through her research of peep shows, sex shops, and even the pornography collection of the British Library. Along with descriptions of her personal experiences, she presents a brilliant, fascinating, and wholly original portrait of contemporary sex and sexual identity. Sallie Tisdale challenges commonly held assumptions about almost everything related to sexuality. Talk Dirty to Me investigates the role of sex in human life: from discussing how gender is now something partly born, partly borrowed, and partly built; to exploring how children are sexualised in fashion, music, and advertising while condemnation of paedophilia reaches fever pitch. Talk Dirty to Me encompasses a wide range of references: American and Japanese pornography, James Joyce's infamous love letters, interviews with prostitutes proud of their skills and earning power, cultural writing from Roland Barthes to Susie Bright, Freud, Adam and Eve to the findings of sex researchers such as Masters and Johnson. Sallie Tisdale invites her readers to have an open conversation about sex while challenging traditional feminist attitudes towards sexual politics.
Download or read book Badass Feminist Politics written by Sarah Jane Blithe and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Badass Feminist Politics explores gender, difference, feminist methods, stigma, social movements, mediated communication, intersectional feminist theory and pedagogy. It is a testament to resilience, resistance, and forward thinking about what these themes mean for new feminist agendas.
Download or read book Thickening Fat written by May Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat—the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an “add difference and stir” approach. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the centre and start of inquiry.
Download or read book Pleasure Activism written by adrienne maree brown and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!
Download or read book Fat Sex written by Helen Hester and published by Lund Humphries Publishers. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How to Use the Yoni Egg for Sensual Healing written by Grace Diaz and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a first-class guide into one of the most empowering practices for women: the yoni egg practice. This book covers step by step how to use the yoni egg, an egg-shaped crystal for the vagina, for optimal pelvic floor health and sexual wellness. The yoni egg practice is a booming trend that has resurfaced from thousands of years ago from the east. This book seeks to answer the questions of tens of thousands of women worldwide who use yoni eggs. Topics such as how to use it, healing trauma, orgasm, feminine cultivation, menstrual bleeding, pregnancy, incontinence, menopause, miscarriage, and more are all discussed in this book. This book is for all women of all ages who may be a beginner or advanced at using the yoni egg. This book focuses on safely helping you make progress with their yoni egg in a manner that will stimulate you into orgasmic womb wisdom.
Download or read book Sexing the Body written by Anne Fausto-Sterling and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms -- sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed -- and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
Download or read book Defiant Daughters 21 Women on Art Activism Animals and The Sexual Politics of Meat written by Carol J. Adams and published by Lantern Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused a immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted. But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women's lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven't read the original work, you're sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.
Download or read book Fearing the Black Body written by Sabrina Strings and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.
Download or read book The Weight of Images written by Katariina Kyrölä and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Weight of Images explores the ways in which media images can train their viewers’ bodies. Proposing a shift away from an understanding of spectatorship as being constituted by acts of the mind, this book favours a theorization of relations between bodies and images as visceral, affective engagements that shape our body image - with close attention to one particularly charged bodily characteristic in contemporary western culture: fat. The first mapping of the ways in which fat, gendered bodies are represented across a variety of media forms and genres, from reality television to Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms to documentaries, from print magazine and news media to online pornography, The Weight of Images contends that media images of fat bodies are never only about fat; rather, they are about our relation to corporeal vulnerability overall. A ground-breaking volume, engaging with a rich variety of media and cultural texts, whilst examining the possibilities of critical auto-ethnography to unravel how body images take shape affectively between bodies and images, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, media, cultural and gender studies, with interests in embodiment and affect.
Download or read book Cynical Theories written by Helen Pluckrose and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Times, Sunday Times, and Financial Times Book-of-the-Year Selection! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.
Download or read book Feminist Theory written by bell hooks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory "unsettling" or "provocative." Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.
Download or read book Feminist Disability Studies written by Kim Q. Hall and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume are contributions to feminist disability studies. The essays constitute an interdisciplinary dialogue regarding the meaning of feminist disability studies and the implications of its insights regarding identity, the body, and experience.
