It all comes down to communication and this is one book that has no problem with telling it how it is.

    But none of this has prepared us for Loren Cameron's amazing portraits of transsexuals. Beautifully reproduced and complemented with notes and short essays, these portraits of women who are now men may startle, but they will also make you marvel at the genuine complexities of life, sex, and desire. Body Alchemy might have been a curiosity, like Diane Arbus's photographs of those outside the physical and cultural mainstream, but Cameron's art is so empathetic, so precise, that we are left in awe and with a new understanding of the realities of being human.

    Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics.The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to the more recent Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens trilogy; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception.Other contributors include Vera Dika, Thomas Doherty, Lucy Fischer, Christopher Sharrett, Vivian Sobchack, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre.The Dread of Difference demonstrates that horror is hardly a uniformly masculine discourse. As these essays persuasively show, not only are horror movies about patriarchy and its fear of the feminine, but they also offer feminist critique and pleasure.

    Transgender Warriors is an eye-opening jaunt through the history of gender expression and a powerful testament to the rebellious spirit.

    Although self-educated, he became one of the first Black American novelists and took a leading part in raising Black soldiers for the Union army and in educating Freedmen in Louisiana during the Civil War. His enduring claim to fame, however, is the crucial role he played in the transformation of spiritualism, a medium's passive reception of messages from the spirits of the dead, into occultism, the active search for personal spiritual realization and inner vision.From his experiences in his solitary travels in England, France, Egypt and the Turkish Empire in the 1850s and 1860s, he brought back to America a system of occult beliefs and practices (the magic mirror, hashish use and sexual magic) that worked a revolution. The systems of magic he taught left their traces on many subsequent occultists, including Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, and are still practiced today by several occult organizations in Europe and American that carry on his work. This is the fist scholarly work on Randolph and includes the full text of his two most important manuscript works on sexual magic.

    Reel To Real collects hooks' classic essays on films such as Paris Is Burning or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, as well as newer work on Pulp Fiction, Crooklyn and Waiting To Exhale. hooks also examines the world of independent cinema. Conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's Kids, to show that cinema can function subversively as well as maintain the status quo.

    Here, scholar-activist Joy James provides such a voice. Taking the convergence of race, gender, and class as fundamentals trajectories.

    She argues that despite the marginal role women played in monastic life, they occupied a very conspicuous place in Buddhist hagiographic literature. In narratives used for the edification of Buddhist monks, women's bodies in decay (diseased, dying, and after death) served as a central object for meditation, inspiring spiritual growth through sexual abstention and repulsion in the immediate world.Taking up a set of universal concerns connected with the representation of women, Wilson displays the pervasiveness of androcentrism in Buddhist literature and practice. She also makes persuasive use of recent historical work on the religious lives of women in medieval Christianity, finding common ground in the role of miraculous afflictions.This lively and readable study brings provocative new tools and insights to the study of women in religious life.

    We should, he argues, recognize the limits of purely technical approach to healing, as well as the importance of a qualitative approach to medical treatment.Written by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, this brilliant meditation on health, illness, and the art of healing will be of interest to general readers as well as students of philosophy and social thought.

    Dismissing essentialist accounts of a universal female identity, the contributors examine how ideas about sexual difference are shaped by specific socio-historical circumstances. How, for example, do issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality impact on the experience of women? How are such categories defined in widely disparate cultures and time periods? Refreshingly open to non-western, as well as western, perspectives, Feminism and History addresses subjects from the experience of women in Colonial Asia to the ideology of sexual difference in Nazi Germany. Timely, provocative, and influential, these essays raise intriguing questions about the future direction of women's history.

    Although it existed only from 1877 to 1890, the gallery displayed the works and advanced the careers of many progressive artists, particularly those whose work was ignored by the traditional tastes of the usual exhibition venues. The Lindsays' innovative approach to art, audiences, and exhibition display made the gallery an influential force not only in Victorian art and society but also in the evolution of modern-day museum practice.This first in-depth study of the Grosvenor Gallery consists of essays by noted scholars in nineteenth-century art and culture who explore critical aspects of the gallery such as the significance of its social ambience, the diverse content of its winter and summer exhibitions, and its status in the context of other exhibition sites. The authors also consider artists and groups who exhibited at the gallery, including Edward Burne-Jones and the second generation Pre-Raphaelites, James McNeill Whistler, George Frederic Watts, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and other women artists, the Newlyn School, British Rustic Naturalists, and the Glasgow Boys. Copublished with the Yale Center for British Art

    Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women."An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A definitive source for all future discussion of homoeroticism and the Bible."—Mary Rose D'Angelo, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review"[Brooten's] convincing analysis . . . not only profoundly reshapes our understanding of the past, but it should also shape the way in which that past, particularly the early Christian texts with their immense normative weight, will be used for the future."—Anne L. Clark, Journal of Lesbian Studies"Love Between Women gives contemporary debates on sexuality a carefully delineated past. It boldly insists upon a different future, one informed by history but not tyrannized by it."—Susan Ackerman, Lambda Book Report"Fascinating, provocative and lucid. . . . Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to women's and gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and classics."—Elizabeth A. Castelli, Women's Review of BooksWinner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Studies Book, 1997

    Jean Cocteau, as camp a figure as Paris has ever produced, said in Vanity Fair in 1922, 'I am a lie that tells the truth.' This paradox is the basis of Philip Core's personal definitions of camp, seen from the inside. His savagely witty depicts of more than two centuries of camp find it embodied in personalities and places, objects and artefacts. He has written a Who's Who and a What's What of camp, a deceptively descriptive and factual lexicon, allowing the reader to build up a kaleidoscopic picture of camp through the ages. It is complemented with 150 rare and stunning photographs and a vivacious foreword by England's foremost authority on surrealism, eccentric behaviour and hats - jazz singer George Melly.

    This volume illustrates how women in Islamic societies have become more actively involved not only in learning their rights under the sharia (Islamic law) but in rereading this law to improve their status and gain increased equality and freedom. Surveying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Arab societies in general, the essays in feminism and Islam focus on such subjects as crimes of honor and the construction of gender in Arab societies; law and the desire for social control; women ad entrepreneurship; family legislation; and the political strategies of feminists in the Islam world.

    Since the word homosexual was coined in 1869, many scientists in a variety of fields have sought to understand same-sex intimacy. Drawing on recent insights in biology and genetics, psychiatrist Francis Mondimore set out to explore the complex landscape of sexual orientation.The result is A Natural History of Homosexuality, a generous work that synthesizes research in biology, history, psychology, and politics to explain how homosexuality has been understood and defined from ancient times until the present. Mondimore narrates tales of love and courage as well as discrimination and bigotry in settings as diverse as ancient Greece and Victorian England, early America and fin de siecle Vienna. He also tells fascinating stories about societies which accepted, incorporated, or institutionalized homosexuality into mainstream culture, stories illustrating that same-sex eroticism was often accepted as a normal aspect of human sexuality. In twentieth-century America, researchers first recognized that homosexuality might not be "pathological" when Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker conducted the first studies of sexuality not biased by preconceived notions of "normal" sexual behavior.After exploring sexual development in the human fetus, Mondimore reviews current biological research into the nature of sexual orientation and examines recent scientific findings on the role of heredity and hormones, as well as Simon LeVay's 1991 brain studies. He then turns to a very important focus: on people and their individual experiences. He explores "what happens between childhood and adulthood in an individual that makes him or her come to identify himself or herself as having a sexual orientation." He also explains our current understanding of bisexuality and the transgender phenomena of transsexualism and transvestism.Finally, Mondimore analyzes the circumstances of such prominent scandals as the anti-homosexual trials of Oscar Wilde and Philip von Eulenberg, and recounts the Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. This far-reaching discussion includes a description of the ex-gay ministries and reparative therapy as well as the Stonewall riots and AIDS, ending with the emergence of gay pride and community."The preponderance of the scientific evidence is converging on a view which homosexual people have had of themselves for as long as any had the courage to record it," writes Mondimore. "Homosexuality is a natural, abiding, normal sexuality for some people. It is not a disease state, not simply a behavior, and not subject to change.""Thoughtful and readable. Dr. Mondimore tells us an enormous amount about homosexuality in a lively manner. This book belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to be informed about this important subject."—Richard A. Isay, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College, and author of Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance

    Through close attention to the variety of objects which children constantly produce (drawings, cuttings-out, 'writings' and collages), Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions; actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing.This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy, thought and action. It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities and dispositions essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentring of language in educational theory and practice.