Book picks similar to
The Closet and the Cul-De-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California by Clayton Howard
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I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On
Khadijah Queen - 2017
Framed by random celebrity encounters, the shocking ordinariness of rape culture as seen through the female gaze reveals just how deeply sexual violence on macro and micro scales can affect and infect women's lives. The speaker's voice evolves as she ages, yet retains throughout a "clarity of observation" via fast-paced reflective musings that offer as well the joy in moments where enmity between men and women is notably absent. Especially geared toward women who come from working class backgrounds, who might not have the means to escape difficult circumstances and must somehow find a way live through them, Queen's book transports us via hatchbacks and buses and even the KITT car through a life of hard-won confidence and strength. Far from a narrative of fame-chasing or conceit, however, the speaker says "right now I am laughing at myself" and that the age of "40 holds beauty as the accumulation of bliss & survival." Rather than centering the famous men named in the book, I'm So Fine places the lens squarely on what it means for a woman to come into her own power as she decides what she wants for herself "& mostly gets its every fineness."
The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Moisés Kaufman - 2011
Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of the town, the event was deeply personal. In the aftermath, Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with its people. From the transcripts, the playwrights constructed an extraordinary chronicle of life in the town after the murder. Since its premiere, The Laramie Project has become a modern classic and one of the most-performed theater pieces in America. Now, in this expanded edition, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later adds an essential sequel to the original work. Revisiting the town a decade after the tragedy, the troupe finds a community grappling with its legacy and its place in history. The two plays together comprise an epic and deeply moving theatrical cycle that explores the life of an American town over the course a decade.
The Queer Art of Failure
J. Jack Halberstam - 2011
Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.
Campus Sex, Campus Security
Jennifer Doyle - 2015
Sex has its own administrative unit. It is a bureaucratic progression. —from Campus Sex, Campus SecurityThe psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.Campus Sex, Campus Security is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, “less-lethal” weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader
Sue Thornham - 1999
This anthology charts the history of those debates, bringing together the key, classic essays in feminist film theory. Feminist Film Theory maps the impact of major theoretical developments on this growing field-from structuralism and psychoanalysis in the 1970s, to post-colonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism in the 1990s.Covering a wide range of topics, including oppressive images, woman as fetishized object of desire, female spectatorship, and the cinematic pleasures of black women and lesbian women, Feminist Film Theory is an indispensable reference for scholars and students in the field.Contributors include Judith Butler, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Michelle Citron, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa De Lauretis, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Molly Haskell, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Smith, Jackie Stacey, Janet Staiger, Anna Marie Taylor, Valerie Walkerdine, and Linda Williams.
Created for Connection: The "Hold Me Tight" Guide for Christian Couples
Sue Johnson - 2016
But sometimes we need a little help. Enter Dr. Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and "the best couple therapist in the world," according to bestselling relationship expert Dr. John Gottman. In Created For Connection, Dr. Johnson and Kenneth Sanderfer, a leading EFT practitioner in the Christian community, share Johnson's groundbreaking and remarkably successful program for creating stronger, more secure relationships not only between partners, but between us and God. The message of Created For Connection is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, or making grand romantic gestures. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent, and we are on the Heavenly Father, for nurturing, soothing, and protection. The way to enhance or save our relationships with each other and with God is to be open, attuned, responsive, and to reestablish safe emotional connection. Filled with Bible verses, inspiring real-life stories, and guidance, Created For Connection will ensure a lifetime of love.
America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies
Harry M. Benshoff - 2003
Introduces issues of diversity as represented within the American cinema in a lively and accessible manner. Provides a comprehensive overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Is designed specifically for students and includes 101 illustrations, a glossary of key terms, questions for discussion, and lists for futher reading and further viewing. Includes case studies of a number of films, including The Lion King, The Jazz Singer, Smoke Signals, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Celluloid Closet. Each chapter features a concise overview of the topic at hand, a discussion of representative films, figures, and movements, and an in-depth analysis of a single film.
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Sigmund Freud - 1905
=Fragment analysis of a hysteria
Tulsa
Larry Clark - 1971
Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction -- and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared. Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.
The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples
John M. Gottman - 2011
In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called “emotional attunement,” which describes a couple’s ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship.Gottman draws from this longitudinal research and theory to show how emotional attunement can downregulate negative affect, help couples focus on positive traits and memories, and even help prevent domestic violence. He offers a detailed intervention devised to cultivate attunement, thereby helping couples connect, respect, and show affection. Emotional attunement is extended to tackle the subjects of flooding, the story we tell ourselves about our relationship, conflict, personality, changing relationships, and gender. Gottman also explains how to create emotional attunement when it is missing, to lay a foundation that will carry the relationship through difficult times.Gottman encourages couples to cultivate attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy. These qualities, he argues, inspire confidence in couples, and the sense that despite the inevitable struggles, the relationship is enduring and resilient.This book, an essential follow-up to his 1999 The Marriage Clinic, offers therapists, students, and researchers detailed intervention for working with couples, and offers couples a roadmap to a stronger future together.
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
David K. Johnson - 2004
But while the famous question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if more discreetly: "Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?"Historian David K. Johnson here relates the frightening, untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a "Lavender Scare" more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy's Red Scare. Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also shows, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle.The Lavender Scare shatters the myth that homosexuality has only recently become a national political issue, changing the way we think about both the McCarthy era and the origins of the gay rights movement. And perhaps just as importantly, this book is a cautionary tale, reminding us of how acts taken by the government in the name of "national security" during the Cold War resulted in the infringement of the civil liberties of thousands of Americans.
Sex and Disability
Robert McRuer - 2011
The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives—including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography—they consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies.Contributors. Chris Bell, Michael Davidson, Lennard J. Davis, Michel Desjardins, Lezlie Frye, Rachael Groner, Kristen Harmon, Michelle Jarman, Alison Kafer, Riva Lehrer, Nicole Markotić, Robert McRuer, Anna Mollow, Rachel O’Connell, Russell Shuttleworth, David Serlin, Tobin Siebers, Abby L. Wilkerson
The Venus Hottentot: Poems
Elizabeth Alexander - 1990
These poems range from personal memory to cultural history to human personae: John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and "The Venus Hottentot," a nineteenth-century African woman who was made into a carnival sideshow exhibit.In language as vibrant within traditional forms as it is within improvisational lyrics, the poems in The Venus Hottentot demonstrate why Alexander is among our most dazzling and important contemporary poets and cultural critics."Alexander creates intellectual magic in poem after poem."--The New York Times Book Review
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Christopher Bram - 2012
Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America
Paul E. Johnson - 1994
This narrative history brings to life the spiritual and sexual tensions of mid-19th-century America through the sensational story of the cult of Matthias.