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Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bo...
The linking of age and ill-health is part of a cultural narrative of decline as age is often defined as the absence of good health. Research has shown that we are aged by culture, but we are also culturally made ill when we age. The cultural ambiguity of aging can thus deconstruct negative images of old age as physical decrepitude. This volume investigates the topic of health within the matrix of time and experience by addressing issues such as how our understanding of health influences our notion of agency within a subversive deconstruction of normative age concepts, and what role the notion of health plays in such an interaction.
This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls “embodied shame,” J. Brooks Bouson describes older women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.
Care is fundamental to human survival, yet it is often overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and thought of as ‘women’s work’. Care of the old is particularly low in status and is too readily occluded. This volume asks why and how cultures of care for older people are negatively configured. It examines some of the powerful responses to relationships of intergenerational care in recent creative works by women. It thereby contributes to the contemporary imperative to transform care by investigating some of the ways in which care might be redefined and reconceptualized. Taking as its focus the representation or narrativization of care in theory, literature, visual culture, and performance,...
What happens when the 'modern woman' ages? Modernist Poetics of Ageing answers this question by being the first book-length study of three late modernist women's writers. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, who are often thought of as the quintessentially youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s. Taking a literary, ageing studies and cultural criticism approach, this monograph focuses on lived experience, as well as thematic representations of ageing in their work, to examine how each author grew older in the years 1940-1982. By surveying literary texts, visual art, photography, life writing an...
This book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art intersect. Structured according to the origin myths of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity, this volume gives space to narratives of alter-modernity that resonate with Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for a new kind of story which exposes the violence and exploitation driven by a sustained belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and cultural superiority. In this context, the posthuman myths of multispecies flourishing given in this collection, which are situated across a range of historical times and locations, and media and modalities, are to be thought of as kernels of possible futures that can only be realized through collective endeavour.
This volume explores the idea of age in American literature over the course of the nineteenth century and examines how writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James used literature as a space to imagine alternative ideas about aging and to challenge conventional definitions of adulthood.
Disability and the Posthuman analyses cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of embodied technologies. Working across texts from contemporary writing and film, it argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism when read as generating sustainable yet radical critical spaces.
As baby boomers gray, cinematic depictions of aging and the aged are on the rise. In the horror genre, fears of growing old take on fantastic proportions. Elderly characters are portrayed as either eccentric harbingers of doom--the crone who stops at nothing to restore her youth, the ancient ancestor who haunts the living--or as frail victims. This collection of new essays explores how various filmic portrayals of aging, as an inescapable horror destined to overtake us all, reflect our complex attitudes toward growing old, along with its social, psychological and economic consequences.
The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century offers new perspectives on contemporary literary adaptation as a dynamically global field. Featuring contributions from an international team of established and emerging scholars, this volume considers literary adaptation to be a complex global network of influences, appropriations, and audiences across a diversity of media. It offers site-specific case studies that situate literary adaptation within global market forces while challenging the homogenizing effects of globalization on local literatures and adaptation practices. The collection also provides a multi-disciplinary and transnational discussion around a wide array of topics in literary adaptation in a global context, such as soft power, decolonization, global justice, the posthuman, eco criticism, and forms of activism. This Companion provides scholars, researchers, and students with a survey of key methodologies, current debates, and ideologies emerging from a new and exciting phase in literary adaptation.