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What if normative gender standards were legally enforced? How would our institutions inform and enforce these rules and regulations? What would be the consequences of failing to comply with gender expression standards? It's in the midst of this maelstrom that we join Alex, our genderfluid and nonbinary protagonist who, during the thick of their adolescence, must navigate the choppy waters of lust, love, friendship, schooling, loss, and their city's rigid - and perhaps lethal - gender expectation...

The essays in this volume investigate maternity and the figure of the mother in French literature from France, Switzerland, Quebec and Africa, from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on cultural history, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, as well as more traditional methods, they present maternity as a source of frustration and of joy, mothers as repressed and revered, daughters as wounded and loving, sons as domineering and dependent. Indeed, few things are simple where mothers -...

Over the past decade and a half, Germany has experienced a period of political and cultural turbulence which many have attributed to the combined challenges of unification and globalisation. In response to growing exposure to global markets, politics and migration debates about identity have increasingly been renationalised. At the same time, there has been a notable reappraisal in Germany (and in German Studies) of the regional and global as spaces for the construction of identity. This volum...

Riots and demonstrations, the lifeblood of American social and political protest in the 1960s, are now largely a historical memory. But Mary Fainsod Katzenstein argues that protest has not disappeared--it has simply moved off the streets into the country's core institutions. As a result, conflicts over sexual harassment, affirmative action, and the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and people of color now touch us more than ever in our daily lives, whether we are among those seeking change or...

This collection joins together sixty essays on the philosophy of love and sex. Each was presented at a meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love held between 1977 and 1992 and later revised for this edition. Topics addressed include ethical and political issues (AIDS, abortion, homosexual rights, and pornography), conceptual matters (the nature, essence, or definition of love, friendship, sexual desire, and perversion); the study of classical and historical figures (Plato, Aristo...

Textual Transvestism analyzes the flourishing of imitative versions of Heloise's and Abelard's love correspondence in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Current theoretical approaches on epistolarity, narratology, cultural, feminist and gender studies have been used to focus on the various transformations (rewriting, adapting, veiling, fragmenting) of Heloise's epistles, mainly in the hands of male writers. I employ close textual analysis to investigate how the multiple (re)visions of her epistol...

Evil women, who are they really? What are their motives, and how are they remembered and constructed within our culture? Evil Women: Representations within Literature, Culture and Film seeks to interrogate the nature and construction of evil women in the above fields. Through literature, poetry, history, ballads, film and real-life culture, scholars explore how the evil woman has been constructed and, in some cases, erased; the punishment and treatment of evil women; and the way evil women have...

This comprehensive exploration of curiosity in the fiction and life-writing of Andre Gide (1869-1951) is an important modernist contribution to the field of curiosity in literature and cultural studies more broadly. Curiosity was a credo for Gide. By observing the world and then manifesting in writing these observations, he stimulates the curiosity of readers, conceived as virtual conduits of a curiosity once his own. Using a thematic structure of sexual, scientific and writerly curiosity, this...

This volume explores the variety of ways in which childhood was experienced, lived and remembered in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states. The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time of rapid change, and the history of childhood reflects the impact of new expectations, lived realities and national responsibilities on the youngest members of societies undergoing monumental change because of ideological, wartime and demographic shifts. Drawing on comparis...

Designed for students, academics and the general reader alike, Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging provides theoretical and empirical insights into the linkages between sexualities and forms of desire, and ways of belonging and relating to others in specific contexts and moments in time. Opening with a substantial introduction by one of the editors, this collection of thirteen essays is organised into three parts, each section making important contributions to contemporary debates regarding...

Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony is the first full-length monograph devoted to Ananda Devi, a dynamic contemporary Francophone writer. Recipient of Prix Louis-Guilloux and Prix Television Suisse Romande du Roman, she is described by many as a prototype of a new generation of Mauritian writers. This book analyses Devi's unconventional polyphonic narratives, particularly, her strategies that allow marginalized narrators to disrupt androcentric and dominant structures of narrative con...

Larry Mungin spent his life preparing to succeed in the white world. He looked away from racial inequality and hostility, believing he'd make it if he worked hard and played by the rules. He rose from a Queens housing project to Harvard Law School, and went on to practice law at major corporate firms. But just at the point when he thought he'd make it, when he should have been considered for partnership, he sued his employer for racial discrimination. The firm claimed it went out of its way to h...

Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri became the scene of protests that pitted law enforcement against locals and Black Lives matter activists. The media firestorm has not waned, and, in fact, has grown stronger in light of all the recent violence by and against police officers nationwide. According to Ferguson's former police chief Tom Jackson, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of un...

This book explores the recent trend toward the transformation of religious symbols and practices into culture in Western democracies. Analyses of three legal cases involving religion in the public sphere are used to illuminate this trend: a municipal council chamber; a town hall; and town board meetings. Each case involves a different national context—Canada, France and the United States—and each illustrates something interesting about the shape-shifting nature of religion, specifically its flex...

Women Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic purs...

This is the first systematic examination of the esoteric significance of the bawdy tales and explicit sexual passages present in Rumi's (d. 1273) Mathnawi, a masterpiece of medieval Perso-Islamic mystical literature and theosophic teachings. Using the relevant features of postmodern theories as strategic conceptual tools, and drawing on the recent interpretations of medieval kabbalistic texts, it is a fascinating examination of the link between the dynamics of eroticism and esotericism operativ...