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The powerful Beyoncé, formidable Rihanna, and the incalculable Nikki Minaj. Their images lead one to wonder: are they a new incarnation of black feminism and black women’s agency, or are they only pure fantasy in which, instead of having agency, they are in fact the products of the forces of patriarchy and commercialism? More broadly, one can ask whether black women in general are only being led to believe that they have power but are really being drawn back into more complicated systems of exploitation and oppression. Or, are black women subverting patriarchy by challenging notions of their subordinate and exploitable sexuality? In other words, ‘who is playing who’? Black Women, Agen...
This book investigates contemporary naming practices on marriage in Britain, drawing on survey data and detailed interview material in which women offer their own accounts of the reasons for which they have changed or retained their names. Exploring the ways in which names are used to create and understand family, to cement commitments and make it clear to the self and to others that subject is in ’true love’, Changing Names and Gendering Identity considers the manner in which names are used to make sense of the self and narrate life changes and choices in a coherent fashion. A critique of the gender-blindness of sociological theories of individualisation, this volume offers evidence of ...
The second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes within the expansive knowledge project known as Women’s and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume’s chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices. In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions of the field. The ongoing aim of Rethinking Women’...
Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women’s voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission—illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives. The twelve orig...
This book critically situates the figure of the black female vampire in several fields of study including literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. Black female vampires continue to appear as important literary devices and revealing indicators of cultural attitudes and trends about African American women’s bodies. This book examines five novels written by four African American women writers to investigate what it means to represent African American womanhood through the lens of vampirism, interrogate how these representations connect to or stem from historical representations of African American women, and explore how representations of black female vampires in African American women’s literature simultaneously negate, reinforce, or dismantle stereotypes of African American women.
Taking recent German debates of diversity terminology as a case example for scrutinizing enactments of genealogy that assume a linear image of progressive generation, this book engages with performative effects of genealogical stories in academic texts that negotiate conceptual belonging. While supporters of the developing Diversity Studies in Germany cherish diversity’s potential for multi-category investigations, Gender and Women’s Studies critics reject the term for its neoliberal, managerial rationale, allegedly holding profit above social justice. Genealogies and Conceptual Belonging intervenes in this oppositional debate by turning one’s attention to narrations of the origins of ...
"From the outset, women experienced infection and death at the hands of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet when the health crisis of AIDS first emerged in the United States in the early 1980s, scientists, doctors, and public health officials overlooked women in the response to a disease first associated with men. As the acknowledgment that women could contract HIV and die from AIDS grew, women became vulnerable to hostile government policies which threatened their health and rights. But they did not passively accept mistreatment; rather, they mobilized to frame the fight against the disease. Emma Day moves the historical understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS on women beyond their exclusion from the initial medical response and the role they played as the supporters of gay men. Focusing on the activism of women who protested the co-occurring state neglect of their health care needs and state intervention into their lives, In Her Hands opens a timely new avenue to explore the relationship between the state and women's status in modern America"--
This book contributes to our collective understanding of the significance of representations of women and gender in magazines in both their print and online forms. The essays are authored by scholars, writers and cultural producers in fields such as art, film and visual studies, literature, critical race studies, communications, broadcast and print journalism, history, and women and gender studies. Taken as a whole, the volume offers historical breadth and perspectives that are transnational and cross-racial on women in magazines and digital media in a variety of ways. It examines how women are represented, how women have created and produced magazines and how women make meaning of themselves and their world using magazines as key sources of information.
The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.
This volume explores how men in precarious positions in different countries and social contexts understand and experience their masculinities, focusing on men who are viewed as being marginal in a range of fields in society including the family, work, the media, and school. It provides a range of stakeholders including students, academics, researchers, and policy makers with an informed understanding of what it means to experience marginalization.