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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies
From rethinking feminist archives, to inserting postpornography in
academia, to approaching sex toys from a transpositive perspective,
to dismantling the foundations of techno-capitalism, the areas of
inquiry in this book are lenses through which to explore the
relationships between genders, bodies and technologies. All the
various chapters work to reimagine the body as a hybrid, malleable
and subversive source of potentiality. These essays offer readers
road maps for unimagined and uncharted social scapes: the
relationship between bodies-technologies-genders means working
within a space of monstrosity. Through this embodied discomfort the
book questions existing techno-social norms, and imagines
tranfeminist futures. Contributors are: Carlotta Cossutta,
Valentina Greco, Arianna Mainardi, Stefania Voli, Lucia Egana
Rojas, Ludovico Virtu, Angela Balzano, Obiezione Respinta, Elisa
Virgili, Rachele Borghi, and Diego Marchante "Genderhacker".
This is one of the first book-length English translations of Nazik
Al-Mala'ika's Arabic poetry. One of the most influential Iraqi
poets of the twentieth century, Nazik Al-Mala'ika pioneered the
modern Arabic verse movement when she broke away from the
formalistic classical modes of Arabic poetry that had prevailed for
more than fifteen centuries. Along with 'Abdulwahhab Al-Bayyati and
Badre Shakir Al-Sayyab, she paved the way for the birth of a new
modernist poetic movement in the Arab world. Until now, very little
of Al-Mala'ika's poetry has been translated into English. Listen to
the Mourners contains forty of her most significant poems selected
from six published volumes, including Life Tragedy and a Song for
Man, The Woman in Love with the Night, Sparks and Ashes, The Wave's
Nadir, The Moon Tree, and The Sea Alters Its Colours. These poems
show the beginning of her development from the late romantic
orientation in Arabic poetry toward a more psychological approach.
Her poetic form shows a significant liberation from the traditional
two-hemistich line in traditional Arabic poetry, which adheres to
the traditional Arabic measures of prosody and rhyme. 'Abdulwahid
Lu'lu'a's introduction functions as a critical analysis of the
liberated verse movement of the era and situates the poet among her
Arab and Western counterparts. This accessible, beautifully
rendered, and long overdue translation fills a gap in modern Arabic
poetry in translation and will interest students and scholars of
Iraqi literature, Middle East studies, women's studies, and
comparative literature.
How do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual
outlaw? In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values
of 1970s movements for women's and gay liberation-including
consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the
closet-were translated into a range of American popular culture
forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought
social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly
explode definitions of so-called "normal" gender and sexuality. In
doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent
new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to,
non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women,
queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new
environments-from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco
to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York
City apartment to an all-female version of Earth-and finding new
ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by
articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be
imagined in the mind's eye and interpreted by diverse publics.
Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and
sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly
generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic
strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science
fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the
serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer
and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart
Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin's Tales of
the City (1976-1983), Lizzy Borden's Born in Flames (1983), and
Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1989-1991), Fawaz shows how
artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the
experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass
audiences in the modern United States. Against the ideal of
ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity and attachments to rigidly
defined identities, Queer Forms argues for the value of
shapeshifting as the imaginative transformation of genders and
sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual
divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and
be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility,
but to be better understood in all our dimensions.
A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the
canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view
of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a
process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different
variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person
prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each
other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited
patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not
just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical
theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by
overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist
Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers
ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic
philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas
and feminist experimental writings of the last century.
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