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A thorough - and thoroughly enjoyable - look at the genre of the feminist crime novel in Britain and the United States. A pioneering work in the field and an indispensable guide for readers and scholars of the genre.
Why is shame so central to our identity and to our culture? What is its role in stigmatizing subcultures such as the Irish, the queer or the underclass? Can shame be understood as a productive force? In this lucid and passionately argued book, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces - from eighteenth-century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across cultures and historical periods, and that patterns of shame are disturbingly long-lived. But she also reveals shame as an affective emotion, engendering attachments between bodies and between subjects - queer attachments. Above all, she celebrates the extraordinary human ability to turn shame into joy: the party after the fall. Queer Attachments is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame.
Questions of space have become central to theorizing identity. Heroic Desire engages spatial paradigms in considering lesbian desire. Arguing against constructions of the self as alienated and fragmentary, Sally Munt posits the model of heroic desire to explain how lesbian space is taken up, materially and imaginatively.
Within Western Buddhism, practitioners are often assumed to be white and middle-class. Based in ground-breaking empirical research, Cosmopolitan Dharma: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in British Buddhism explores the stories of Buddhists from minority communities, through a rich analysis of their lived experiences. Smith, Munt and Yip explore their various contestations of dominant white and heteronormative cultures in Western Buddhism. Using cosmopolitanism as the theoretical lens, Cosmopolitan Dharma argues convincingly that the Buddhist ethos of human interconnectivity needs to be further developed to truly embrace the ‘Other’ of different kinds (not least Western Buddhism’s own internal ‘Others’). Cosmopolitan Dharma, through Buddhists’ own narratives, explores how cultural politics from the ground up can offer a more inclusive philosophy and lived experience of spirituality.
This work challenges the field of British cultural studies to return to the question of social class as a primary focus of study. The chapters examine contemporary working-class life and its depiction in the media through a number of case studies on topics such as popular cinema, football, romance magazines and club culture. The essays pose methodologies for understanding working-class responses to dominant culture, and explore the contradictions and limitations of the traditional Marxist model. The book's contributors conclude that it is time for cultural theorists to revisit issues of working-class cultural formations and to renew the original radical intentions of the discipline by reintegrating class analysis into social templates of race, sexuality and gender.
A major new publication in lesbian and gay studies, this accessible textbook comprises newly-commissioned essays from a rich cross-section of international scholars. The book's twenty-five chapters are organized according to the key debates in the field and are envisaged both as introductory overviews and critical reflections of each field. The chapters published here will raise debates concerning how lesbian and gay studies has contributed to and changed the identity of traditional disciplines, and shaped new areas of study such as the body, performativity and sexual politics. The contributors are experts in their field, and their essays in this essential new textbook comprise incisive and ...
Drawn from extensive, new and rich empirical research across the UK, Canada and USA, Queer Spiritual Spaces investigates the contemporary socio-cultural practices of belief, by those who have historically been, and continue to be, excluded or derided by mainstream religions and alternative spiritualities. As the first monograph to be directly informed by 'queer' subjectivities whilst dealing with divergent spiritualities on an international scale, this book explores the recently emerging innovative spaces and integrative practices of queer spiritualities. Its breadth of coverage and keen critical engagement mean it will serve as a theoretically fertile, comprehensive entry point for any scholar wishing to explore the queer spiritual spaces of the twenty-first century.
An anthology of 22 essays in three sections. The first section presents responses by writers to the questions of audience: For whom do you write, and who is reading you? The second section addresses 19th and early 20th century works that, although reflecting a lesbian sensibility, were masked to resemble a section explores more overtly lesbian texts. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The 1990s has seen the growing consolidation of lesbian and gay studies as a key area of cultural theory, particularly in relation to ideas about the construction of subjectivity and identity. Lesbian theory specifically intersects with feminism and sexuality/identity politics to critique both gender and (hetero) sexuality, while developments in lesbian criticism suggest a move towards a new textual practice. This volume explores whether there can be a specific lesbian aesthetic, juxtaposed against reading as a 'woman' or as a 'heterosexual'. Contributors both explore the uses of recent theories such as post-structuralism and offer a lesbian critique of such methodologies. Close readings of contemporary lesbian fiction and popular culture focus on works such as Zami, Oranges Are Hot the Only Fruit, The Wanderground and Desert of the Heart, as well as on lesbian pornography. Together the essays point to lesbian culture's ability to create new meanings for itself and to foreground the intertextuality of lesbian identities. This important book, which includes a reassessment of lesbian literary criticism by Bonnie Zimmerman, contributes to a new and growing field of critical theory.
Essays on the butch-femme designations, respecting the power that these categories have in the lesbian community while at the same time avoiding the cliched romanticism often inherent in their representation.