You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are...
Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are...
This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time. The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and "truth" of U.S. women’s unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as "outsider" in some way, whether by gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, race, class, ethnicity, age, ...
Mediating Misogyny is a collection of original academic essays that foregrounds the intersection of gender, technology, and media. Framed and informed by feminist theory, the book offers empirical research and nuanced theoretical analysis about the gender-based harassment women experience both online and offline. The contributors of this volume provide information on the ways feminist activists are using digital tools to combat harassment, raise awareness, and organize for social and political change across the globe. Lastly, the book provides practical resources and tips to help students, educators, institutions, and researchers stop online harassment.
Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics investigates girl superheroes published by DC and Marvel Comics in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, asking who the new-and-improved super-girls are and what potentials they hold for imagining girls as agents of change, in the genre as well as its socio-cultural context. As super-girls have grown increasingly numerous and diverse since the turn of the millennium, they provide an opportunity for reconsidering representations of gender and power in the superhero genre. This book offers the term agentic embodiment as an analytical tool for critiquing the body politics of superhero comics, particularly concerning youth, femininity, whiteness, and violence. Grounded in comics studies and informed by feminist cultural studies, the book contributes a critical and hopeful perspective on the diversification of a genre often written off as irredeemably conservative and patriarchal. Super-Girls of the Future is a key title for students and scholars of comics studies, visual culture, US popular culture, and feminist criticism.
Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.
How superhero narratives in the margins of the mainstream tell innovative, feminist stories. It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Sam Langsdale’s work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, whi...
Comic books and superhero stories mirror essential societal values and beliefs. We can be Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Black Panther or Rocket Raccoon through our everyday choices. We can't fly, fix hyper drives or hear human heartbeats a mile away, but we can think about what Matt Murdock would do in a conflict, how Superman would respond to natural disasters and how Captain America would handle humanitarian crises. This book analyzes the impact of dozens of comics by examining the noble personalities, traits and actions of the main characters. Chapters detail how superheroes, comic books and other pop culture phenomena offer more than pure entertainment, and how we can better model ourselves after our favorite heroes. Through our good deeds, quick thinking and positive choices, we can become more like superheroes than we ever imagined.
From the moment Captain America punched Hitler in the jaw, comic books have always been political, and whether it is Marvel’s chairman Ike Perlmutter making a campaign contribution to Donald Trump in 2016 or Marvel’s character Howard the Duck running for president during America’s bicentennial in 1976, the politics of comics have overlapped with the politics of campaigns and governance. Pop culture opens avenues for people to declare their participation in a collective project and helps them to shape their understandings of civic responsibility, leadership, communal history, and present concerns. Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media opens with...
Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.