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This volume offers an insight into a selection of current issues of embodiment and other related aspects, such as identity, gender, disability, or sexuality, discussed on the basis of examples from contemporary culture and social life. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of boundaries, the book examines fluidity of post-human bodies – from cyber relations to others and to self, enabled by the latest technologies, through fragmented, prostheticised, monstrous or augmented body of popular culture and lifestyles, to the dis/utopian fantasies offered by literary texts – showing how difficult it still is in current culture to let go of the stable boundaries towards the post-gender world Haraway imagines. Contributors are Dawn Woolley, Anna Pilińska, Barbara Braid, Jana Reynolds, Julio Ernesto Guerrero Mondaca, Ana Gabriela Magallanes Rodríguez, Katharina Vester, Wojciech Śmieja and Hanan Muzaffar.
Consuming the Body examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies, paying particular attention to the new forms of interaction produced by social networking sites. Describing the behaviours of an ideal neoliberal subject, Woolley identifies modes of discipline, forms of pleasure, and opportunities for subversion in an exploration of how individuals are addressed and the ways in which they are expected to respond. In doing so, this book explores the imperfect relationship between our own bodies and the idealized images displayed in comtemporary advertising and social media.--Back cover
This volume is the first to draw together theoretical reflection, empirical research, and critical reflection on practice occurring at the juncture of critical approaches in leisure studies and event studies within diverse explorations of deviance. It includes chapters on games and gaming; performing queerness; events around being kinkster; drugs and sex, LGBTQ+ events and activism, and goth subculture. These are combined with poetry, personal reflection and artwork, much of which has been created by contributors. The compendium draws on inquiry undertaken by contributors from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, as well as deviant leisure practitioners/event organisers. It seeks to expand the cultural and academic articulation of deviance into other disciplines and to develop new perspectives on deviant leisure and deviant leisure practice. It speaks to students, researchers, and practitioners working or interested in critical leisure and event studies, queer theory, cultural theory, burlesque/circus studies, media studies, and discourse studies.
The first volume of the expansive Pulitzer Prize-winning series The Story of Civilization. Discover a history of civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China, and Japan from the beginning; with an introduction on the nature and foundations of civilization.
This anthology investigates the interconnections between painting, photography, and the digital in contemporary art practices. It brings together 15 contributors, including internationally acclaimed artists Matt Saunders, Clare Strand, Elias Wessel, and Dan Hays, to write about a diverse range of art-making involving medium cross-over. Topics discussed here include reflections on the painted-on-photograph, reordering photographs into paintings, digital collage, printing digital landscapes onto recycled electronic media, viewer immersion in painted virtual reality (VR) worlds, photography created from paint, and the “truth” of the mediums. Underpinned by significant theoretical concepts, the volume provides unique insights into explorations of the mediums’ interconnectivity, which questions the position of the traditional genres. As such, this book is essential reading for practitioners, theorists, and students researching the nature of painting, photography, and digital art practices today.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. A murderer’s hands are transplanted onto an innocent pianist, an asexual child’s life is threatened by the world of sex and what really happens when pregnancy takes over a woman’s body? Marginalization, eating disorders, altered bodies, breastfeeding, silent films, the truth behind angels and zombies, these topics are all explored in this exciting volume. Where do we draw the line between ‘the body’ and ‘the other’? What does it really mean to meld the body with the biomechanical? Taking evidence from popular culture and well-known theorists worldwide, Bigger Than Bones explores how we are more than just our skeletal blueprint, that the body – and the perceptions of the body – give way to many layers of debate and inquiry. From being displaced by left-handedness to obtaining wings made from the dead, this collection provides a wide variety of material focused on the body’s transformation, as well as the horror and the gifts it brings.
The Complete Story of Civilization by Will Durant represents the most comprehensive attempt in our times to embrace the vast panorama of man’s history and culture. This eleven volume set includes: Volume One: Our Oriental Heritage; Volume Two: The Life of Greece; Volume Three: Caesar and Christ; Volume Four: The Age of Faith; Volume Five: The Renaissance; Volume Six: The Reformation; Volume Seven: The Age of Reason Begins; Volume Eight: The Age of Louis XIV; Volume Nine: The Age of Voltaire; Volume Ten: Rousseau and Revolution; Volume Eleven: The Age of Napoleon
Being Gorgeous explores the ways in which extravagance, flamboyance and dressing up can open up possibilities for women to play around anarchically with familiar stereotypical tropes of femininity. This is protest through play - a pleasurable misbehaviour that reflects a feminism for the twenty first century. Willson discusses how, whether through pastiche, parody, or pure pleasure, artists, artistes and indeed the spectators themselves can operate in excess of the restrictive images which saturate our visual culture. By referring to a wide spectrum of examples, including Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Matthew Barney, Dr Sketchy's, Audacity Chutzpah, Burly Q and Carnesky's Ghost Train, Being Gorgeous demonstrates how contemporary female performers embody, critique and thoroughly relish their own representation by inappropriately re-appropriating femininity.
This book explores the intersections between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists and designers are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Addressing a rich range of wearable artefacts, from mobility aids and prosthetics to clothing and accessories to digital health tracking devices, its themes include care and cure; wellness culture and the commoditization of health; and the complex interactions between (human) bodies and (non-human) objects. With a theoretical framework inspired by the work of materialist thinkers including Sherry Turkle, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and bringing the disciplinary fields of fashion studies, art and design practice, and medical and health humanities into dialogue for the first time, this volume draws attention to the complex agencies entangled in the things we wear, and situates fashion and art in relation to broader cultural and historical contexts of health, illness and disability.