Being Gorgeous explores the ways in which extravagance, flamboyance and dressing up can open up possibilities for women to play around anarchically with familiar stereotypical tropes of femininity. This is protest through play - a pleasurable misbehaviour that reflects a feminism for the twenty first century. Willson discusses how, whether through pastiche, parody, or pure pleasure, artists, artistes and indeed the spectators themselves can operate in excess of the restrictive images which...

This edited book brings together new perspectives on fashion, the body, and politics. The intention of this collection is to explore the cultural intersection between bodies, fashion, and transgression, often in the most unlikely of locations. Bodies are political players in culture and the authors gathered here ask a range of pressing questions. What role do fashioned bodies play in resistance, in meeting governmental boundaries or institutional power? Arguably, fashion is an aspect of mo...

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay on the male gaze, ushering in a new era in understanding the politics and theory of looking at the female body. Since then, feminist thinking has expanded upon and revised Mulvey's theory and much of the Western world has seen a resurgence in feminist activism as well as the rise of neoliberalism and shifts in digital culture and (self-)representation. For the first time, this book addresses what it means to look at the fashioned female body...

If the burlesque stripper, with her bawdy spirit and unruly insubordination, has emerged for many as a new 'empowering' model for the sexually aware woman, then she also strikes horror in the heart of second wave feminism. Embodied by high profile artistes such as Dita von Teese and Catherine D'Lish, the explosive revival of striptease, burlesque and overt female sexual performance has proved no less alluring to a new generation of women artists familiar with the provocative work of 70's p...

A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first centuryA straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where ...

A “vital” (New York Times Book Review), groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformityToday’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the p...

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night...

An engaging account of today’s contemporary art world that features original articles by leading international art historians, critics, curators, and artists, introducing varied perspectives on the most important debates and discussions happening around the world.Features a collection of all-new essays, organized around fourteen specific themes, chosen to reflect the latest debates in contemporary art since 1989Each topic is prefaced by an introduction on current di...

Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture, 2nd edition is a comprehensive gender studies textbook with an international focus and relevance across a broad range of academic disciplines. Covering an array of topics, theories and approaches to gender studies, it introduces students to the study of gender through geographically diverse case studies on different historical and contemporary figures. The volume covers the established canon of gender studies, including questions of represen...

What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? How are speech communities identified? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in societies around the world and in this book readers will find an overview of the main concepts and critical arguments surrounding how language and communication styles distinguish and identify groups. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinio...

Using bisexuality as a frame, Go the Way Your Blood Beats questions the division of sexuality into straight and gay, in a timely exploration of the complex histories and psychologies of human desire.A challenge to the idea that sexuality can either ever be fully known or neatly categorised, it is a meditation on desire’s unknowability. Interwoven with anonymous addresses to past loves - the sex of whom remain obscure - the book demonstrates the universalism of desire, whil...

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance ...