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During the interwar years in France, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of homosexuality and queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era. Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including René C...
Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church today often frame queer genders and sexualities as perverse deviations from ‘tradition’. While historians often assume the Church has always condemned homosexuality, this book reassesses the supposed incompatibility of Russian Orthodoxy and queerness. Focusing on a range of primary sources from canonical texts to unpublished archival materials, it shows that the Russian Orthodox Church consistently permitted and celebrated non-normative genders and sexualities, including the veneration of transmasculinity in hagiography, the liturgical consecration of same-sex unions, and the Church’s broad lack of interest in policing homosexuality. Paradoxically, Queerness in the Early Modern Russian Orthodox Church highlights how patriarchy breeds queerness.
Carnage in the classroom, misogynists in high office, sociopaths in uniform, masculinity is a killer. From styles of dress to the stunted capacity for expressing a diversity of emotions, becoming a man involves killing off and repudiating anything that in our society is held as feminine. When a person is unable to show compassion and tenderness, or when exposed for their frailties, feels angry and humiliated, they have problems. Problems that none of us are immune to. Masculinity, Cremin provocatively declares, is a generic disorder of a sick society that afflicts even the best of us. Neither a condition of being human nor even of male, it is a disorder, as she illustrates, of a capitalist s...
What is gender? What should gender look like in the 21st century? This book brings together philosophy with insights from feminist and transgender theory to argue for gender pluralism: that there should be more than two genders, and that each gender term should have multiple meanings. Developing an explicitly political version of conceptual engineering, What Gender Should Be contains novel and powerful arguments both against existing theories of gender such as family resemblance accounts and against gender abolition, underlining how each is insufficient for thinking about and doing justice to contemporary transgender identities and politics. Instead, Matthew J. Cull argues that we should be pluralists about gender, putting forward and advocating for a position that is more apt for contemporary transgender and feminist activism. The 21st century requires a new way of thinking about gender. What Gender Should Be sets out to provide it.
Creativity and Sociology: Doing Social Research with and on Artistic Sources explores the relationship between artistic and sociological narratives, considering the ways in which artistic narratives in their different forms can be both subjects of sociological observation and tools for the sociological analysis of reality. Thematically divided into sections that focus on “doing sociology on art” ’ and “doing sociology with art”, it observes the major forms of art – including literature, music, theatre, painting, photography, cinematography, and interactive arts such as videogames – examining each as objects and instruments of sociological analysis: as narratives that can offer new perspectives on the world. Bringing together under a single epistemological framework area of research that frequently remains separate, or beyond sociological framing, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, and social science methodology with interests in media and artistic narratives.
An auto-ethnography of cross-dressing, framed by Marxism and psychoanalytic theory
Given the limitless freedom of animation, why would anyone use it to make a sitcom about a struggling family-owned burger place? And why would audiences embrace this greasy fantasy, not just by tuning in but by permanently decorating their legs and arms with images from the show and writing detailed backstories for its minor characters? This book-length critical study of Bob's Burgers examines the moments in which the animated sitcom exposes the chasms between generations, explores gender and sexual identity, and allows fans to imagine a better world. Essays cover how the show can be read as a series of critiques of Steven Spielberg's early blockbusters, a rejection of Freudian psychology, or an examination of the artificiality of gendered behaviors through the cross-casting of characters like Tina and Linda. By tracing the ways that the popular reception of Bob's Burgers reflects changing cultural attitudes, the essays provoke broader questions about the responsibility of popular entertainment to help audiences conceive of fantasies closer to home: fantasies of loving and accepting parents, of creative, self-assured children, and of menus filled with artisanal puns.
A powerful work of utopian critical theory which looks at how the destructive nature of capitalism will eventually be used against itself
Unveils the radical feminine force to dismantle the oppressive structures of gender, class, and colonialism
Putting Deleuze and Guattari's concepts to wide-ranging use, leading trans theorists and activists develop innovative ways of thinking about trans identities, and the processes involved in liberating desires from the gendered ego. The first volume of its kind covers a broad mix of subjects including transecology, corporalities of betweenness, black transversality, toxic masculinity, and transvestism. Led by the overarching concept of schizonalaysis and responding to the need to move beyond the hetero-patriarchy currently dominating both progressive and regressive discourse, Ciara Cremin outlines the potential for radical departure from the status quo concerning gender identity, sex, bodies, and politics. Arguing that trans people are at the forefront of debates on gendered dichotomies as a result of becoming something other than their assigned gender, Cremin and her contributors theorise the possibility of a society which does not rely on gendered forms of oppression for its existence. Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies is an essential, ground-breaking resource for theorists, activists and students interested in trans theory today.