From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies


Molly Haskell - 1974
    It is a valuable contribution not just of film criticism but to a society in which the vital role of women is just beginning to emerge."—Christian Science Monitor"Haskell is interested in women—how they are used in movies, how they use movies, and how the parts they play function as projections and verifications of our myths about women's lot and woman's psyche and even, lately, women's lib."—Jane Kramer, Village Voice"In examining the goddesses worshipped by an entire nation, Molly Haskell reveals a good deal about our national character and our most cherished sexual myths. . . . Concerned with the deeply ingrained belief of women's inferiority, she analyzes movies as a social product as well as a social arbiter, and she effectively demonstrates how women are encouraged to impose limitations on themselves by fashioning those selves after flickering shadows in a darkened auditorium—sexual creatures who possess neither ability nor ambition beyond their bodies. . . . Both as an examination of film and as sociology, From Reverence to Rape is excellent."—Harriet Kriegel, The Nation

All Ears: Cultural Criticism, Essays, and Obituaries


Dennis Cooper - 1999
    His novels are fantastic, brooding and violent.As a journalist, he is solid and well-formed. He has an approachable informality, unawed by massive celebrity His straightforward interviews with Leonardo Di Caprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Mould disarm their subjects to find an urgent, everyday humanity. The feature articles on AIDS, youth culture, and contemporary art take their subjects passionately. But the obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William Burroughs are as bracing as a stoic's evaluation of a dead god.All Ears for the first time collects this major 20th-Century novelist's lesser-known work. It will also include several new unpublished piece. All Ears pours necessary critical insight onto the time's leading cultural luminaries.

Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997


Alvin Orloff - 2019
    In Disasterama, Orloff tells their story: the true tale of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly disaster.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence


Adrienne Rich - 1980
    

The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication


E.H. Gombrich - 1999
    Central to these pivotal essays is a consuming interest in the functions of images, and how these functions, in addition to the images themselves, evolve over time. In wide-ranging studies of both so-called 'high' and 'low' art - from fresco painting, altar painting, the International Gothic Style and outdoor sculpture to doodles, pictorial instructions, caricature and political propaganda - Gombrich examines a broad spectrum of key questions.These include the role of supply and demand, competition and display, the 'ecology' of images, the idea of 'feedback' in the interplay of means and ends, and the ways in which developing skills in turn stimulate new demands. Gombrich explores in depth such specific aspects of the uses of images as the hanging of pictures and the use (or misuse) of images as historical evidence.Extensive in its scope and surgically precise in its focus, The Uses of Images signifies yet another landmark corpus of work by the prolific Professor Gombrich, in a subtle but striking tour de force.

Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement


Jennifer Patterson - 2016
    Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement locates them at the center of the anti-violence movement and creates a space for their voices to be heard. Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered. This thirty-seven piece collection disrupts the mainstream conversations about sexual violence and connects them to disability justice, sex worker rights, healing justice, racial justice, gender self-determination, queer & trans liberation and prison industrial complex abolition through reflections, personal narrative, and strategies for resistance and healing. Where systems, institutions, families, communities and partners have failed them, this collection lifts them up, honors a multitude of lived experiences and shares the radical work that is being done outside mainstream anti-violence and the non-profit industrial complex.

Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism


Krysta WilliamsAshling Ligate - 2011
    actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

Keith Haring


Jeffrey Deitch - 2008
    This is the book Haring wanted to make, based on the outline of a monograph that was never completed due to his untimely death in 1989.

Those Who Can, Teach: The Power of Art, Kindness and Compassion in the Classroom


Andria Zafirakou - 2021
    At her inner-city London school where more than eighty languages are spoken, she would sense urgent needs; mending uniforms, calling social services, shielding vulnerable teens from gangs. And she would tailor each class to its pupils, fiercely believing in the power of art to unlock trauma, or give a mute child the confidence to speak. Time and again, she would be proved right.So in 2018, when Andria won the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize, she knew exactly where the money would go: back into arts education for all. Because today, the UK government's cuts and curriculum changes are destroying the arts, while their refusal to tackle the most dangerous threats faced by children – cyber-bullying, gang violence, hunger and deprivation – puts teachers on the safeguarding frontline.Andria's story is a rallying wake-up call that shows what life is really like for schoolchildren today, and a moving insight into the extraordinary people shaping the next generation.

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History


Heather Love - 2007
    It makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward.

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud


Thomas W. Laqueur - 1990
    It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "master plots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.

What Is Art?


Leo Tolstoy - 1898
    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

Gay Life & Culture: A World History


Robert Aldrich - 2006
    This book draws on groundbreaking new material to present a comprehensive survey of all things gay, stretching back to ancient Sumeria and ranging to the present day. Critically acclaimed historian Robert Aldrich and ten leading scholars juxtapose thought-provoking essays with an extensive selection of images, many never before seen. This masterful combination reveals the story behind gay culture from the industrialized world to the remotest corners of tribal New Guinea. Among the contributors are noted names in GLBT studies such as Brett Beemyn (author of Bisexuality in the Lives of Men), Charles Hupperts (expert on classical antiquity at the University of Amsterdam), Helmut Puff (University of Michigan expert on the medieval world), and Florence Temagne (author of A History of Homosexuality in Europe). The book covers such topics as the Old Testament relationship between Jonathan and David, the Age of Confucius, Native American berdaches, Polynesian mahus, Berlin in the '20s, Stonewall and the disco-flavored hedonism that followed, and the advent of AIDS, Act Up, and Angels in America. This book is an important contribution to understanding what makes gay life and culture universal throughout human culture and across time.

Homosexuality & Civilization


Louis Crompton - 2003
    By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth century B.C.E. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World.Louis Crompton traces Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of "sodomites" in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. But Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the Netherlands, Calvin's Geneva, and Georgian England. The root cause was religious superstition, abetted by political ambition and sheer greed. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires, homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters--Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio--often intertwined with Christian motifs. Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great.Anti-homosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. In the samurai tradition of Japan, Crompton makes clear, the celebration of same-sex love rivaled that of ancient Greece.Sweeping in scope, elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, "Homosexuality and Civilization" is a stunning exploration of a rich and terrible past.

The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture


Hal FosterEdward W. Said - 1983
    In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs.