This book considers the work of the novelist and critic A.S. Byatt in the context of contemporary debates about art, authorship, creativity, and gender. A.S. Byatt emerges as an author who presents us with fascinating and ambivalent portraits of writers and who uses metaphors of creativity in original ways.

Fay examines the unacknowledged political uses of language in modern culture that engender and effectuate power imbalances among speakers and listeners. She locates six strategies in which women are particularly targeted by politicized rhetoric and shows how they are used in a variety of language-informed social arenas. Using bell hooks' pedagogy of talking back, Eminent Rhetoric argues that women need not only to learn how to recognize victimizing rhetoric, but also to start to challenge it and its rhetors. Women must be shown how the everyday language of politicians, educators, and newscasters is not natural but is marked--designed for manipulative purposes that put women at risk.

This volume considers the complex relationships that exist between Christianity, rape culture, and gender violence. Each chapter explores the various roles that Christian theologies, teachings, and practices have played in shaping contemporary understandings of gender violence and in sanctioning rape-supportive cultural belief systems and practices. Our contributors explore this topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including theology, gender and queer studies, cultural studies, pastoral care, and counseling. Together, the chapters in this volume testify to the considerable influence that Christianity has had, and continues to have, in directing conversations within the Christian tradition around gender violence and rape culture. They therefore invite readers to engage fruitfully in these conversations, fostering transformative dialogues with the Christian community about our shared responsibility to tackle the current global crisis of gender violence.

In the current debate around sexting, this book gives a nuanced account of motives, contexts and possible risks of intimate digital communication. Authors discuss how social media shape new dating opportunities through apps and dating sites, how sexting fits within individual's relational and sexual development. They examine the relationships between sexting, health and sexual risk behaviours and focusing on adolescents, further highlight which role parents can play in relational and sexual education. Chapters cover topics such as abusive sexting behaviours in the context of dating violence and slut shaming, media discourses concerning sexting and the legal framework in several countries that shape the context of sexting. This edited collection will be of great interest to academics and students of communication studies, psychology, health sciences and sociology, as well as policy makers and the general public interested in current debates on how social media are used for intimate communication.

This book acknowledges and highlights the moral excellence embedded in black queer practices of family. Taking the lives, narratives, and creative explorations of black queer people seriously, Thelathia Nikki Young brings readers on a journey of new, queer ethical methods that include confrontation, resistance, and imagination. Young asserts that family and its surrounding norms are both microcosms of and foundations for human relationships. She discusses how black queer people are moral subjects whose ethical reflection, lived experience, and embodied action demonstrate valuable moral agency for those of us thinking about liberating and life-giving ways to enact "family." Young posits that black queer people enact moral agency in ways that ought to be understood qua moral agency. Refusing to recognize the examples from this (and any other) community, Young argues, denies us all the learning and moral growth that come from connecting with diverse human experiences. This book investigates how acknowledging and critically engaging with the moral agency within marginalized subjectivities allow us to consider and bear witness to the moral potential in us all.

First-hand accounts of how parents support their transgender children There is a new generation of parents and families who are identifying, supporting, and raising transgender children. In Trans-Affirmative Parenting, Elizabeth Rahilly presents their fascinating stories, interviewing parents of children who identify across the gender spectrum, as well as the doctors, mental health practitioners, educators, and advocates who support their journeys. Rahilly provides a window into parents' experiences, exploring how they come to terms with new ideas about gender, sexuality, identity, and the body, as well as examining their complex deliberations about nonbinary possibilities and medical interventions. Ultimately, Rahilly compassionately shows how parents can best advocate for transgender awareness and move beyond traditional gendered expectations. She also shows that child-centered, child-driven parenting is as central to this new trans-affirmative paradigm as growing LGBTQ awareness. In an era that is increasingly trans-aware, Trans-Affirmative Parenting offers provocative new insights into transgender children and the parents who raise them.

This book examines the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the UK Parliament and efforts to tackle it. The volume's in-depth research unveils a political culture where sexual transgressions thrive. Its intersectional feminist perspective furthermore highlights multiple systems of gendered oppression perpetuating inequality. Britain's experience is viewed against the global #MeToo movement and Hollywood's Weinstein sex scandal. The book identifies ways to redress the status quo and challenges ahead, including a gender power gap, misuse of non-disclosure agreements to silence victims, and misogynistic organisational cultures.

This book explores the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) communities as victims, offenders and staff within the criminal justice system. It draws on both emerging and existing LGBT research and campaigns to identify and explore issues relevant to the criminal justice system, including: agencies of the criminal justice system, victimisation, domestic violence and abuse, transgender experiences, LGBT people as offenders, international perspectives and the personal experiences of LGBT people. Charlotte Knight and Kath Wilson trace the legislative journey toward equal treatment before and after the Wolfenden Report. They consider why, for example, lesbians are over represented on death row in the US, how the prosecution characterises them and what part homophobia might play in offending and in sentencing. They raise important questions about the causes of, and responses to, same-sex domestic violence and abuse and how the system delivers justice to trans people. Sodomy laws and the treatment of LGBT people worldwide are also considered and models of good practice are offered. Their insights will be of interest to practitioners, policy makers and scholars of the criminal justice system, particularly those concerned with the rights of LGBT communities.

This book examines gender attitudes in Reddit's popular video gaming community subreddit, r/gaming. Video gaming has long been understood as a masculinised social space and, while increasing numbers of girls and women now engage in the pastime, boys and men remain the predominant social actors. Furthermore, the gaming community has been widely identified as a prime case study in broader concerns around 'toxic' masculinity and gendered online harassment. However, there is also underexamined evidence of a growing movement in the community coming forward to voice its collective opposition. Utilising an innovative combination of computational and qualitative methods, the research undertaken here exposes this fuller picture, revealing significant contestation and a spectrum of attitudes that mark out this popular gaming community as a battleground for gender (in)equality. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, games studies and computer sciences, will find this book of interest.

Grounded in black feminist scholarship and activism and formally coined in 1989 by black legal scholar Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, intersectionality has garnered significant attention in the field of public policy and other disciplines/fields of study. The potential of intersectionality, however, has not been fully realized in policy, largely due to the challenges of operationalization. Recently some scholars and activists began to advance conceptual clarity and guidance for intersectionality policy applications; yet a pressing need remains for knowledge development and exchange in relation to empirical work that demonstrates how intersectionality improves public policy. This handbook fills this void by highlighting the key challenges, possibilities and critiques of intersectionality-informed approaches in public policy. It brings together international scholars across a variety of policy sectors and disciplines to consider the state of intersectionality in policy research and analysis. Importantly, it offers a global perspective on the added value and "how-to" of intersectionality-informed policy approaches that aim to advance equity and social justice.

This book focuses on the #MeToo movement in China, critically examining how three competing ideologies have worked in co-opting #MeToo activism: China's official communism, Western neoliberalism, and an emerging Chinese cyber feminism. In 2018, China's #MeToo cyber activism initially maintained its momentum despite strict censorship, presenting women's voices against gendered violence and revealing scripts of power in different sectors of society. Eventually though it lost impetus with sloganization and stigmatization under a trio of forces of pressures: corporate corruption, over-politicization by Western media, and continued state censorship. The book documents the social events and gendered norms in higher education, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business, and religious circles that preceded and followed high-profile cases of alleged sexual abuses in mainland China, engaging with sociological scholarship relating to demoralization and power, media studies, and gender studies. Through these entwined theories the author seeks to give both scholars and the general audience in gender studies a window into the ongoing tension in the power spheres of state, market, and gendered hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, China studies, media studies, and cultural studies

To be considered innocent is to be viewed as vulnerable to harm and worthy of protection from harm. An innocent person's pain is recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women's and Girls' Innocence in the Public Imagination interrogates contemporary media culture to illuminate the ways the intersections of anti-blackness and misogyny, i.e., misogynoir, converge to obscure public perceptions of Black women and girls as people with any claim to innocence. When pained images of Black female bodies appear on media devices, the socio-political responses are telling, not only in their lack of urgency, but also in their inability to be read empathetically. By examining viral videos, memes, and recent film and television, Kalima Young makes a striking case for the need to create a new Black feminist media studies framework broad enough to hold the complexity and agency of Black women and girls in a digital age invested in framing them as inherently adulterated and impure.

This unique study explores the vampire as host and guest, captor and hostage: a perfect lover and force of seductive predation. From Dracula and Carmilla, to True Blood and The Originals, the figure of the vampire embodies taboos and desires about hospitality, rape and consent. The first section welcomes the reader into ominous spaces of home, examining the vampire through concepts of hospitality and power, the metaphor of threshold, and the blurred boundaries between visitation, invasion and confinement. Section two reflects upon the historical development of vampire narratives and the monster as oppressed, alienated Other. Section three discusses cultural anxieties of youth, (im)maturity, childhood agency, abuse and the age of consent. The final section addresses vampire as intimate partner, mapping boundaries between invitation, passion and coercion. With its fresh insight into vampire genre, this book will appeal to academics, students and general public alike.

Over the last two decades, fatness has become the focus of ubiquitous negative rhetoric, in the USA and beyond, presented under the cover of the medicalized ''war against the obesity epidemic''. In Fat on Film, Barbara Plotz provides a critical analysis of the cinematic representation of fatness during this timeframe, specifically in contemporary Hollywood cinema, with an emphasis on the intersection of gender, race and fatness. The analysis is based on around 50 films released since 2000 and includes examples such as Transformers (2007), Precious (2009), Kung Fu Panda (2008), Paul Blart (2009) and Pitch Perfect (2012).Plotz maps the common cinematic tropes of fatness and also shows how commonplace notions of fatness that are part of the current ''obesity epidemic'' discourse are reflected in these tropes. In this original study, Plotz brings critical attention to the politics of fat representation, a topic that has so far received little attention within film and cinema studies.

This book explores how around the world, women's increased presence in the labor force has reorganized the division of labor in households, affecting different regions depending on their cultures, economies, and politics; as well as the nature and size of their welfare states and the gendering of employment opportunities. As one result, the authors find, women are increasingly migrating from the global south to become care workers in the global north. This volume focuses on changing patterns of family and gender relations, migration, and care work in the countries surrounding the Pacific Rim-a global epicenter of transnational care migration. Using a multi-scalar approach that addresses micro, meso, and macro levels, chapters examine three domains: care provisioning, the supply of and demand for care work, and the shaping and framing of care. The analysis reveals that multiple forms of global inequalities are now playing out in the most intimate of spaces.

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization―and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless―a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.

This book employs a variety of perspectives such as Institutional, Social Democratic, Marxist, Gender and Informal, Biblical and Dalit, to critically examine the impact of neo-liberal globalisation on both formal and informal sectors of the labour market and the industrial relations system. The narratives not only interrogate current institutions and paradigms, but also outline future developments.

This book takes the head-scratching out of human sexuality. Personal construct theory provides the foundation for a psychosocial explanation of sexuality that views everyday social interaction as key to the development of sexual identity and desires. The theory developed here accounts for stability and change in sexual identity through an understanding of the importance of experience and the importance of meaning in everyday life. The potential impact of erotica and pornography on sexual desire is discussed, as is the role of social power on sexual behaviour. The variation of sexual expression among individuals-everything from asexuality and sado-masochism to sexual assault-is examined and explained. Formal techniques for changing sexual desires are also presented.

This book takes up the queer girl as a represented and rhetorical figure within film, television and video. In 1987, Canada's Degrassi Junior High featured one of TV's first queer teen storylines. Contained to a single episode, it was promptly forgotten within both the series and popular culture more generally. Cut to 2016 - queer girls are now major characters in films and television series around the globe. No longer represented as subsidiary characters within forgettable storylines, queer girls are a regular feature of contemporary screen media. Analysing the terms of this newfound visibility, Whitney Monaghan provides a critical perspective on this, arguing that a temporal logic underpins many representations of queer girlhood. Examining an archive of screen texts that includes teen television series and teenpics, art-house, queer and independent cinemas as well as new forms of digital video, she expands current discourse on both queer representation and girls' studies by looking at sexuality through themes of temporality. This book, the first full-length study of its kind, draws on concepts of boredom, nostalgia and transience to offer a new perspective on queer representation in contemporary screen media.

The world of James Bond is complex and ever growing. The British secret agent started off life as a semi-fictional, part-biographical character in Ian Fleming's 1953 novel, Casino Royale. Since then, 007 has captured the minds and hearts of a worldwide audience, and the franchise is now available over multiple media platforms, including movie, comic strips, games, graphic novels and fashion statements. This edited collection examines the role that gender has played across the platforms that the James Bond franchise now occupies. Each chapter investigates gender-approaches through a variety of case studies, including Bond, his boss M, and Miss Moneypenny, the songs and title sequences, the villains, computer games, 'Lad's Mags', and the fashions of the era. Looking beyond the Bond Girl, expert editor Steven Gerrard brings together a cast of contributors that investigate not only femininity, but also masculinity when it comes to the world's best-known agent - a man with a license to kill. In a rapidly changing world where gender boundaries are being eroded, this edited collection investigates the changing and challenging roles that gender has undergone in the franchise. By using a series of case studies, and employing theoretical modes linked to close analysis, each chapter clearly demonstrates how and why the world of James Bond is important in reflecting the changing gender roles within modern society.

The poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry.

This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in 581 AD, also known as the Six Dynasties. Bret Hinsch offers rich descriptions of the most important aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, and religious roles. He traces women's lived experiences as well as the emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese primary sources and scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the early medieval era, this groundbreaking book will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.

This book maps father failure and redemption through three decades of Hollywood family films, revealing how libertarian notions that align agency with autonomy lead to new conflicts for the contemporary father. The films find resolution to these conflicts through a re-gendering of parenting as relationship. In their creation of a 'pure' fatherhood that is valorised as authentic for its lack of parental responsibilities, the films serve to challenge the perception that fathering enacted outside the nuclear family structure is fragile. McNulty Norton finds in the films a new essentialism that secures the pure relationship to the biological father, reinforcing his position in the face of changing family forms.

This book presents South Asian women's voices which have been marginalised in the theory and practice of international relations in the region. It highlights critical issues of importance for women which are often neglected in traditional International Relations (IR). Embracing Feminist epistemology, the book re imagines the theory and practice of IR in South Asia, placing women's experiences and their diverse voices at the centre. Refusing the temptation to typecast women, the book showcases the varied voices of South Asian women in international relations with contributions from an eclectic set of authors from different nationalities. In doing so, the book expands the ontological and epistemological limits of IR by including caste, conflict, protest perspectives. While some of these are uniquely South Asian, like caste, all of them show how the field of IR in general can become enriched by being more inclusive. This book will be of interest to researchers as it provides a fresh conceptual re-conceptualization of the field of IR from gender as well as global south perspective. The book will also help graduate students seeking to understand the intersection of gender and IR.

Contemporary debates on "mansplaining" foreground the authority enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privilege of the dominant. What mansplaining denies systematically is the right of women to speak and be heard as much as men. This book excavates numerous instances of the authority of female speech from Indian goddess traditions and relates them to the contemporary gender debates, especially to the issues of mansplaining and womansplaining. These traditions present a paradigm of female speech that compels its male audience to reframe the configurations of "masculinity." This tradition of authoritative female speech forms a continuum, even though there are many points of disjuncture as well as conjuncture between the Vedic, Upanishadic, puranic, and tantric figurations of the Goddess as an authoritative speaker. The book underlines the Goddess's role as the spiritual mentor of her devotee, exemplified in the Devi Gitas, and re-situates the female gurus in Hinduism within the traditions that find in Devi's speech ultimate spiritual authority. Moreover, it explores whether the figure of Devi as Womansplainer can encourage a more dialogic structure of gender relations in today's world where female voices are still often undervalued.