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The Age of Fitness
We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jürgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity’s emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged,...
New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature
The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.
Inventing the Modern American Family
Family is the foundation of society, and debates on family norms have always touched the very heart of America. This volume investigates the negotiations and transformations of family values and gender norms in the twentieth century as they relate to the overarching processes of social change of that period. By combining long-term approaches with innovative analysis, Inventing the "Modern American Family" transcends not only the classical dichotomies between women's studies and masculinity studies, but also contribute substantially to the history of gender and culture in the United States.
Gender and Power in the Third Reich
This book examines the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. The Gestapo were able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines, especially 'crimes' pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life. One of the key factors in the enforcement of Nazi policies was the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected 'criminality'. This book examines women denouncers in Nazi Germany through close examination of the Gestapo files. The author seeks to answer questions about how women in particular used denunciation and why so many ordinary women denounced 'deviants and dissenters' to the Gestapo.
Visualizing Orientalness
In the early twentieth century Hollywood was fascinated by the Far East. Chinese immigrants, however, were excluded since 1882 and racism pervaded U.S. society. When motion pictures became the most popular form of entertainment, immigration and race were heavily debated topics. 'Visualizing Orientalness' is the first book that analyses the significance of motion pictures within these discourses. Taking up approaches from the fields of visual culture studies and visual history, Björn A. Schmidt undertakes a visual discourse analysis of films from the 1910s to 1930s. The author shows how the visuality of films and the historical discourses and practices that surrounded them portrayed Chinese immigration and contributed to notions of Chinese Americans as a foreign and other race.
Dangerous Music? – ‘Explicit’ Lyrics in the United States of America
This book discusses the history of music warning labels, specifically the Parental Advisory Label (PAL), and the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). It aims to answer these questions: How could the PMRC trigger a debate on music lyrics as a negative influence on children that led to the introduction of the PAL in the long run? What did the implementation of the PAL warning mean for musicians and how had the perception of music changed so that the advisory label was deemed necessary? The central thesis is that through the discourse on explicit lyrics, certain music was marked as an actual threat to children and society and consequently started to be perceived as such. By the way in which th...
World of Sport
World of Sport examines the development of modern sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in the light of transnational approaches to history. Critically probing existing studies and offering new insights, this volume demonstrates that while sport was a national and international phenomenon, it was invariably constructed transnationally. Taking in topics ranging from the dissemination of football codes to transpacific surfing cultures, and the touring lives of baseball and hockey players to the contact zones of international competition, it emphasises the importance of transnational perspectives in the way people around the globe experience sport. Like other forms of popular cultu...
Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art, and Film
Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film: Song of Death in Paradise explores the combination of two motifs, death and gardens, to show how the two subjects are intertwined and used in various media and cultural contexts. Using cultural, literary, film, and art history theories, the contributors analyze various death and garden sceneries in literary works by Arthur Machen, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, as well as in superhero comics, films, and cultural and art contexts such as Ian Hamilton Finley's “Little Sparta,” the poetic verses from the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Australian wilderness.
Non-humans in Social Science
The book explores the issue of non-humans and their role and position within contemporary social sciences. Inspired by current trends of bridging the dichotomy of nature and culture, the authors use the “non-human“ as a prism that offers a different perspective of the world, society, culture, and last but not least, being(s). To start paying attention to non-humans has the potential to hybridize social sciences and in turn enrich them as well as to offer social scientists novel perspectives and tools to approach social phenomena. Such an attitude might in turn lead to a reassessment of understanding of the relationship between the world and being, and of the categories of being and subje...
Visions of the Future in Germany and America
Predictions about the world have the power to grip whole societies, and shape the actions of many groups whether working in politics, ecology or religion. At the end of epochs and eras humans tend to reflect on the shape of things to come. Most recently, fears about the 'millennium bug' had thousands rushing to stock up on candles and food in the weeks before New Year's Eve. Concerns about the future have been expressed differently throughout history. This book explores the historical context surrounding various debates, decisions and beliefs about the future in recent centuries. Religious, political, literary and ecological visions of the future in America and Germany are addressed comparat...
