The Cruel and Reparative Possibilities of Failure brings together a variety of scholars and research across disciplines, with an emphasis on communication and gender studies, to work toward reimagining the idea of failure. Contributors consider failure as both a space for growth and repair and as a space from which hope can emerge. The collection is divided into five parts, investigating failure as consumption; failure as media; failure as pedagogy; failure as narrative; and final...

Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives presents fifteen chapters that address how the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities are depicted in the media. This collection focuses on how the LGBT community has been silenced or given voice through the media. Through a study of queer media images, this book scrutinizes LGBT media representations and how these representations contribute to a dialogue about civil rights for this marginalized community. While the communication discipl...

Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation is rooted in a discussion about why it is important to address the midlife years in ways that challenge and interrogate the myths that surround this phase of life. Although readers are free to construct their own meaning after reading each narrative, they are encouraged to attend to the ways in which each narrative reveals how the author grapples with their particular issues communicatively. More important, readers are invited to se...

This collection, edited by Daniel S. Strasser, was unearthed from the demand for more inclusive and expansive dialogues on intersectional identities, ethnicity, neuro-diversity, physical ability, religion, sexual orientation, class, and gender performance in academia. The autoethnographic and narrative accounts within Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy offer personal, experiential perspectives on the power of identity to influence ...

With over twenty different casts, multiple spin-off series, and five international locations, The Real Housewives franchise is a television phenomenon. The women on these shows have reinvented the soap opera diva and in doing so, have offered television viewers a new opportunity to embrace a loved, yet waning, genre. As the popularity and prevalence of the docu-drama genre of reality TV continues to increase, the time is ripe for a collection of this sort. The Fantasy of Reali...