Lili St. Cyr was, in the words of legendary reporter Mike Wallace, the  highest paid stripteaser in America." Wallace was so fascinated by Lili that out of all the presidents and celebrities he interviewed over a long career, towards the end of his life, she was the one he remained fixated on. Her beauty had that kind of effect.Lili St. Cyr, the one time queen of burlesque, led an incredible life  six marriages, romances with Orson Wells, Yul Brenner, Vic Damone, a number of suicide attempts, all alongside great fame and money. Yet despite her fierce will she lost it all; becoming a recluse in her final decades, she eked out a living selling old photos of herself living with magazines taped over her windows.Goddess of Love Incarnate will be the definitive biography of this legendary figure, done with the cooperation of Lili's only surviving relative. But the book does more than fascinate readers with stories of a byone era. St. Cyr was ahead of her time in facing the perils and prejudices of working women, and the book offers a portrait of a strong artistic figure who went against the traditional roles and mores expected of women at that time St. Cyr was the first stripper to work in the swanky nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard. She was the first stripper to work Las Vegas. She was at the top of her game for over thirty years. And though she would feel conflicted by it, as do many women who feel the push/pull of careers  especially controversial, button-pushing careers  Lili would dismiss what she did as having no importance. But she wouldn't give it up  not for millionaires and most certainly not for love.Based on years of research, Goddess of Love Incarnate contains information and memorabilia that was almost lost forever. As an award winning documentary filmmaker and expert writer, Zemeckis brings St. Cyr back to life the way no other writer can, restoring Lili to her rightful place in American history.

Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

Lois Weber (1879-1939) was one of early Hollywood's most successful screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached from street corners, Weber began working in the American film industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the positions of screenwriter and director. She wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, and drug abuse. She gained international fame in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson. Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal studio's biggest box-office hit the following year and played to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class filmmaker. Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood's institutionalized sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and the changing business in which she worked.

Applied Theatre: Facilitation is the first publication that directly explores the facilitator's role within a range of socially engaged theatre and community theatre settings. The book offers a new theoretical framework for understanding critical facilitation in contemporary dilemmatic spaces and features a range of writings and provocations by international practitioners and experienced facilitators working in the field. Part One offers an introduction to the concept, role and practice of facilitation and its applications in different contexts and cultural locations. It offers a conceptual framework through which to understand the idea of critical facilitation: a political practice that that involves a critical (and self-critical) approach to pedagogies, practices (doing and performing), and resilience in dilemmatic spaces. Part Two illuminates the diversity in the field of facilitation in applied theatre through offering multiple voices, case studies, theoretical positions and contexts. These are drawn from Australia, Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel/Palestine, Rwanda, the United Kingdom and North America, and they apply a range of aesthetic forms: performance, process drama, forum, clowning and playmaking. Each chapter presents the challenge of facilitation in a range of cultural contexts with communities whose complex histories and experiences have led them to be disenfranchised socially, culturally and/or economically.

Finalist, 2020 Latino Book Awards, Best Academic Themed Book The surprising effects of American TV on global viewers As a dominant cultural export, American television is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language for many people throughout the world. Yet, American television is flawed, and, it represents race, class, and gender in ways that many find unfair and unrealistic. What happens, then, when people who grew up on American television decide to come to the United States? What do they expect to find, and what do they actually find? In America, As Seen on TV, Clara E. Rodriguez surveys international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US to examine the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. She finds that many were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse, and that it is not the easy-breezy, happy endings culture portrayed in the media, but a work culture. The author also surveys US-millennials about their consumption of US TV and finds that both groups share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US as they have experienced them. However, the groups differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views on sex, smoking and drinking. America, As Seen on TV explores the surprising effects of TV on global viewers and the realities they and US millennials actually experience in the US.