You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book uses one of the most popular accessories of childhood, the Barbie doll, to explain key aspects of cultural meaning. Some readings would see Barbie as reproducing ethnicity and gender in a particularly coarse and damaging way - a cultural icon of racism and sexism. Rogers develops a broader, more challenging picture. She shows how the cultural meaning of Barbie is more ambiguous than the narrow, appearance-dominated model that is attributed to the doll. For a start, Barbie′s sexual identity is not clear-cut. Similarly her class situation is ambiguous. But all interpretations agree that, with her enormous range of lifestyle `accessories′, Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, standardized and oozing fake sincerity.
Focusing on British and American novels, Rogers takes a sociological look at the business of literature, the book industry, and the experiences of novelists and readers. Viewing the novel as a vehicle of cultural meaning, the author shows how the literary canon overlooks substantial similarities among novels in favor of restrictive codes based on social as well as literary considerations. She emphasizes the kinship between the social sciences and humanities in her analysis, by reinvigorating affection for the novel and also establishing its rich cultural significance.
Srebnick uses the famous, unsolved murder of a Manhattan woman in 1841 as a window into urban culture in the mid-nineteenth-century.
In this volume, first published in 1983, Professor Rogers examines the usefulness of a phenomenological approach to sociology. Her broad purpose is to demonstrate the theoretical and methodological advantages phenomenological sociology holds. Thus she offers a selective, introductory exposition of phenomenology, highlighting its relevance for social scientists and undercutting the notion of phenomenology as a non-scientific, subjective, or esoteric method of study.
"This combination text and reader provides an introduction to contemporary feminist theory oriented toward undergraduates as well as master;s-level students. Its organization around substantive topics and issues rather than conventional categories of feminist thinking effectively conveys the breadth and depth of feminist theorizing, demonstrating the intersections and eclecticism that have become its hallmark. It offers a strong, multicultural dimension, integrating diversity (race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation) within the discussion of substantive topics. As a supplement or as a main text, it will prove highly useful in courses in feminist theory and women;s studies, as well as in gender studies, sociology of women, and contemporary social/sociological theory."--Pub desc.
Motherhood is a highly personal array of experiences with a uniquely public dimension, preoccupying policymakers, advice givers, health care providers, religious leaders, child care workers, educators, and total strangers who feel entitled to judge mothers they see with their children in the neighborhood or on the TV news. Chase (U. of Tulsa) and Rogers (U. of West Florida) approach motherhood and mothering as feminist sociologists, focusing on questions such as how ideas about motherhood are shaped by social and historical conditions, how ideas about motherhood change over time and across social contexts, who has the power to make their definitions of motherhood stick, and what diverse groups of mothers themselves think. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
This book examines the historical and philosophical links between commodity culture and cultural fetishism.
Carefully and thoroughly researched, and told in Geary's gleeful tongue-in-cheek style with all the lurid details, Mary Rogers was a compelling and beautiful woman employed in a cigar store in New York City. She suddenly disappeared and her body was recovered in the Hudson off the Jersey side. The press had a field day with all the possible shocking possibilities. But the case was never solved. Geary recreates a fascinating picture of the nascent still somewhat anarchical soon-to-be metropolis of New York.
She was born Virginia Katherine McMath, but the world would come to know her—and love her—as Ginger Rogers: Broadway star, Academy Award-winning actress, and the ultimate on-screen dancing partner of the inimitable Fred Astaire. In Ginger: My Story, the legendary entertainer shares the triumphs of a remarkable career that began when she won a Texas dancing contest at age fourteen; the joys and heartbreaks of her five marriages; her relationships with some of Hollywood's major leading men, including Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and damaged daredevil billionaire Howard Hughes; and the strength of her religious convictions that got her through thick and thin. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs from the author's personal collection, Ginger is an enthralling, behind-the-scenes tour of Hollywood life during the Golden Age of movies by one of its most enduring stars.
Prostitute, apostle, evangelist—the conversion of Mary Magdalene from sinner to saint is one of the Christian tradition’s most compelling stories, and one of the most controversial. The identity of the woman—or, more likely, women—represented by this iconic figure has been the subject of dispute since the Church’s earliest days. Much less appreciated is the critical role the Magdalene played in remaking modern Christianity. In a vivid recreation of the Catholic and Protestant cultures that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Magdalene in the Reformation reveals that the Magdalene inspired a devoted following among those eager to find new ways to relate to God an...