Download or read book Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers written by Lesley C Graydon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses twentieth-century writers who traffic in queer, non-normative, and/or fluid gender and sexual identities and subversive practices, revealing how gender and sexually variant women create, revise, redefine, and play with language, desires, roles, the body, and identity. Through the model of the "switch" —someone who shifts between roles, desires, or ways of being in the realms of gender or sexual identity – Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers: Switching Desire and Identity examines the intersecting locations of gender and sexual identity switching that six prolific, experimental authors and their narratives play with: Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. The theory and identities revealed create and give space to—by their playful, exploratory, and destabilizing nature—diverse openings and possibilities for a great expansion and freedom in gender, sexuality, desires, roles, practices, and identity. This is a provocative and innovative intervention in gender and sexuality in modern literature and gives us a new vocabulary and conversation by which to expand women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ and sexuality studies, identity studies, literature, feminist theory, and queer theory.
Download or read book Women s Suffrage in Word Image Music Stage and Screen written by Christopher Wiley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema. Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support of women’s suffrage. Topics encompassed range from the artistic output of such household names as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth, to the recent feature film Suffragette. It also brings to light under-represented figures and neglected works related to the suffrage movement. A wide variety of material is explored, from poems, diaries and newspapers to posters, dress and artefacts to songs, opera, plays and film. Published in the wake of the centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK, this book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public interested in the broad areas of women’s history and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as across the arts disciplines.
Download or read book Classical Hollywood Cinema Sexuality and the Politics of the Face written by Paul Morrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood – Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor – and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness” is countered by a hermeneutics of “to-be-seen-through-ness.” The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.
Download or read book Kathy Acker written by Margaret Henderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women’s writing, punk culture, and punk feminism’s reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women’s studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.
Download or read book Representing Abortion written by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing Abortion analyses how artists, writers, performers, and activists make abortion visible, audible, and palpable within contexts dominated by anti-abortion imagery centred on the fetus and the erasure of the pregnant person, challenging the polarisation of conversations about abortion. This book illuminates the manifold ways that abortion is depicted and narrated by artists, performers, clinicians, writers, and activists. This representational work offers nuanced and complex understandings of abortion, personally and politically. Analyses of such representations are urgently needed as access to abortion is diminished and anti-abortion representations of the fetus continue to dominate the cultural horizon for thinking about abortion. Expanding the frame of reference for understanding abortion beyond the anti-abortion use of the fetal image, contributors to this collection push beyond narrow abstractions to examine representations of the experience and procedure of abortion within grounded histories, politics, and social contexts. The collection is organized into sections around seeing (and not seeing) abortion; fetal materiality; abortion storytelling and memoir; and representations for new arguments. These themes cover a range of topics including abortion visibility, anti-abortion discourse, pro-choice engagements with the fetus, personal experience and media representations. The analyses of such representations counteract anti-abortion rhetoric, carving out space for new arguments for abortion that are more representative and inclusive and asking audiences to envision new ways to advocate for safe abortion access through reproductive justice frameworks. This is an innovative and challenging collection that will be of key interest for scholars studying reproductive rights and reproductive justice, as well as women and gender studies. Representing Abortion is organized to structure upper year undergraduate and graduate courses on reproductive rights and reproductive justice in a new and engaging way.
Download or read book Freewomen Patriarchal Authority and the Accusation of Prostitution written by Stephanie Lynn Budin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining freewomen in Mesopotamian society, ancient Greek hetaira, Renaissance Italy courtesans, historical and modern Japanese geisha, and the Hindu devadāsī of India, Stephanie Lynn Budin makes a wide-ranging study of independent women who have historically been dismissed as prostitutes. The purpose of this book is to rectify a well-entrenched misunderstanding about a category of women existing throughout world history—women who were not (and are not) under patriarchal authority, here called "Freewomen." Having neither father nor husband, and not being bound to any religious authority monitoring their sexuality, these women are understood to be prostitutes, and the terminology designating them appears as such in dictionaries and common parlance. This book examines five case studies of such women: the Mesopotamian ḫarīmtu, the Greek hetaira, the Italian cortigiana "onesta", the Japanese geisha, and the Indian devadāsī. Thus the book goes from the dawn of written history to the present day, from ancient Europe and the Near East through modern Asia, comparatively examining how each of these cultures had its own version of the Freewoman and what this meant in terms of sexuality, gender, and culture. This work also considers the historiographic infelicities that gave rise and continuance to this misreading of the historic and ethnographic record. This engaging and provocative study will be of great interest to students and scholars working in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s History, Classical Studies, Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies, Asian Studies, World Cultures, and Historiography.
Download or read book Dismantling Rape Culture written by Tracey Nicholls and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses rape culture through the lens of the ‘me too’ era. Drawing feminist theory into conversation with peace studies and improvisation theory, it advocates for peace- building opportunities to transform culture and for the improvisatory resources of ‘culture- jamming’ as a mechanism to dismantle rape culture. The book’s key argument is that cultural attitudes and behaviours can be shifted through the introduction of disrupting narratives, so each chapter ends with a ‘culture- jammed’ re- telling of a traditional fairy tale. Chapter 1 traces an overlap of feminist theory and peace studies, arguing that rape culture is most fruitfully understood through the concept of ‘structural violence.’ Chapter 2 investigates the gender scripts that rape culture produces, considering a female counterpart to the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’: ‘complicit femininity.’ Chapter 3 offers analysis of non- consensual sex and a history of consent education, culminating in an argument that we need to move beyond consent to conceptualise a robust ‘respectful mutuality.’ Chapter 4 ’s history of sexual harassment in the workplace and the rise of #metoo argues that its global manifestations are a powerful peace- building initiative. Chapter 5 situates ‘me too’ within a culture- jamming history, using improvisation theory to show how this movement’s potential can shape cultural reconstruction. This is a provocative and interventionist addition to feminist theory scholarship and is suitable for researchers and students in women’s and gender studies, feminist theory, sociology and peace studies.
Download or read book Sexual Fluidity written by Lisa M. Diamond and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.
Download or read book The End of Gender written by Debra Soh and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Debra Soh [discusses what she sees as] gender myths in this ... examination of the many facets of gender identity"--
Download or read book Women s Rights written by Ann M. Savage and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering from 1900 to the present day, this book highlights how female artists, actors, writers, and activists were involved in the fight for women's rights, with a focus on popular culture that includes film, literature, music, television, the news, and online media. Women's Rights: Reflections in Popular Culture offers a succinct yet thorough resource for anyone interested in the relationship between feminism, women's rights, and media. It is ideally suited for students researching popular culture's role in the modern history of women's rights and representation of women, women's rights, and feminism in popular culture. This insightful book highlights of some of the most important moments of women taking a stand for women throughout popular culture history. Each section focuses on an aspect of popular culture. The television section covers important benchmarks, such as Julia, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Roseanne, Murphy Brown, and Ellen. Coverage of films includes Christopher Strong, Foxy Brown, and Thelma & Louise; the literature section features the work of influential individuals such as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. The book celebrates early musical ground-breakers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith as well as contemporary artists Janelle Monáe and Pussy Riot. The work of key women activists—including Margaret Sanger, Angela Davis, and Winona LaDuke—is recognized, along with the unique ways women have used the power of the web in their continued effort to push for women's equality.
Download or read book Sexual Politics and Feminist Science written by Kirsten Leng and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : women and sexology : knowledge, possibilities, and problematic legacies -- The emergence of sexology in early twentieth century Germany -- As natural as eating, drinking, and sleeping : redefining the female sex -- Challenging the limits of sex : envisioning new gendered subjectivities and sexualities -- Troubling normal, taking on patriarchy : criticizing male (hetero)sexuality -- The erotics of racial regeneration : eugenics, maternity, and sexual -- New social and moral values will have to prevail : negotiating crisis and opportunity in the First World War -- Fluid gender, rigid sexuality : constrained potential in the post-war period
Download or read book Spanish Literature A Very Short Introduction written by Jo Labanyi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title explores the rich literary history of Spain which resonates with contemporary debates on transnationalism and cultural diversity. It introduces readers to the ways in which Spanish literature has been read in and outside Spain explaining misconceptions, outlining insights of scholarship and suggesting new readings.
Download or read book Woolf A Guide for the Perplexed written by Kathryn Simpson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.
Download or read book Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction written by Elaine Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired, and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett’s Not I (1972), and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature, women and gender studies, and sexuality studies.
Download or read book Spatialities in Italian American Women s Literature written by Eva Pelayo Sañudo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the family saga as an instrument of literary analysis of writing by Italian American women, this book argues that the genre represents a key strategy for Italian American female writers as a form which distinctly allows them to establish cultural, gender and literary traditions. Spaces are inherently marked by the ideology of the societies that create and practice them, and this volume engages with spaces of cultural and gendered identity, particularly those of the ‘mean streets’ in Italian American fiction, which provide a method of critically analyzing the configurations and representations of identity associated with the Italian American community. Key authors examined include Julia Savarese, Marion Benasutti, Tina De Rosa, Helen Barolini, Melania Mazzucco and Laurie Fabiano. This book is suitable for students and scholars in Literature, Italian Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
Download or read book Not Gay written by Jane Ward and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first century A straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other’s penises and stick fingers up their fellow members’ anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can—and do—have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity. Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward’s analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.
Download or read book Antigone s Daughters written by Hilary Owen and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antigone's Daughters? provides the first detailed discussion in English of six well-known Portuguese women writers, working across a wide range of genres: Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), Irene Lisboa (1892-1958), Agustina Bessa Lu's, (1923- ), Nat_lia Correia (1923-93), HZlia Correia (1949 -) and L'dia Jorge (1946 - ). Together they cover the span of the 20th century and afford historical insights into the complex gender politics of achieving institutional acceptance and validation in the Portuguese national canon at different points in the 20th century. Although a patrilinear evolutionary model visibly structures national literary history in Portugal to the present day, women writers and critics have not generally sought to replace this with a matrilinear feminist counter-history. The unifying metaphor that the authors adopt here for the purpose of discussing Portuguese women's ambivalent response to female genealogy is the classical figure of Antigone, who paradoxically sacrifices her own genealogical continuity in the name of defending family and kinship, while resisting the patriarchal pragmatics of state-building. Should women writers, faced with the absence of a female tradition, posit a woman-centred place outside the jurisdiction of male genealogy, however strategically essentialist that place may be, or should they primarily eschew fixed sexual identity to act as unnameable saboteurs, undoing the law of patriarchal tradition from within?
