Book picks similar to
Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games by Jennifer Malkowski
video-games
nonfiction
non-fiction
game-studies
Two Among the Righteous Few: A Story of Courage in the Holocaust
Marty Brounstein - 2011
There, people from around the world visit daily to learn about the tragic period of history from 1933 to 1945 known as the Holocaust. The museum serves as an education, research, and historical center in remembrance of the six million Jews across Europe who were murdered at the hands of the Nazi Party machine led by Adolf Hitler. A special section of Yad Vashem is dedicated to those who carried out acts of courage to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. Remembered there is a couple from Dieden of the Netherlands, Frans and Mien Wijnakker. Two Among the Righteous Few: A Story of Courage in the Holocaust is the remarkable tale of how Frans and his wife, Mien, saved the lives of at least two dozen Jews in southern Holland during World War II. They were Catholics who led a simple life in a small town, but they took risks and displayed bravery to help others in dire need, instilling hope during one of the most horrific points of history.
Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences
Leonard Sax - 2005
Back then, most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave are mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends.It's hard to cling to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated. In Why Gender Matters, psychologist and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax leads parents through the mystifying world of gender differences by explaining the biologically different ways in which children think, feel, and act. He addresses a host of issues, including discipline, learning, risk taking, aggression, sex, and drugs, and shows how boys and girls react in predictable ways to different situations. For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher—especially if the teacher is female. Likewise, negative emotions are seated in an ancient structure of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop an early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex, enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often literally cannot say.Dr. Sax offers fresh approaches to disciplining children, as well as gender-specific ways to help girls and boys avoid drugs and early sexual activity. He wants parents to understand and work with hardwired differences in children, but he also encourages them to push beyond gender-based stereotypes. A leading proponent of single-sex education, Dr. Sax points out specific instances where keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Despite the view of many educators and experts on child-rearing that sex differences should be ignored or overcome, parents and teachers would do better to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.
Black Looks: Race and Representation
bell hooks - 1992
In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.
The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain
Gina Rippon - 2019
Gina Rippon finally challenges this damaging myth by showing how the science community has engendered bias and stereotype by rewarding studies that show difference rather than sameness. Drawing on cutting edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which she argues, finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and female components, and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life. Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped by society where scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture.
Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life
Tom Fitzgerald - 2020
In doing so, Drag Race became not only a repository of queer history and culture, but an examination and illustration of queer life in the modern age. It is a snapshot of how LGBTQ folks live, struggle, work and reach out to each other – and how they always have.
Characteristics of Games
George Skaff Elias - 2012
These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games--board games, card games, computer games, and sports--have to teach each other. Today's game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing. "Characteristics of Games"--written by three of the most prominent game designers working today--will serve as an essential reference for game designers and game players curious about the inner workings of games. It includes exercises (which can also serve as the basis for discussions) and examples chosen from a wide variety of games. There are occasional mathematical digressions, but these can be skipped with no loss of continuity. Appendixes offer supplementary material, including a brief survey of the two main branches of mathematical game theory and a descriptive listing of each game referred to in the text.
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World
Alan Downs - 2005
Yet despite the progress of the recent past, gay men still find themselves asking, "Are we really better off?" The inevitable byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, a shame gay men may strive to obscure with a façade of beauty, creativity, or material success. Drawing on contemporary psychological research, the author's own journey to be free of anger and of shame, as well as the stories of many of his friends and clients, The Velvet Rage outlines the three distinct stages to emotional well-being for gay men. Offering profoundly beneficial strategies to stop the insidious cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behavior, The Velvet Rage is an empowering book that will influence the public discourse on gay culture, and positively change the lives of gay men who read it.
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - 2006
By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.
Publics and Counterpublics
Michael Warner - 2002
How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public? According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover. Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Audre Lorde - 1978
The false dichotomies that Lorde debunks persist in our cultural imagination: the separation of the erotuc from the spiritual and political. Now, Kore Press brings this essay into stand-alone focus, reprinting it in a fine, handbound pamphlet illustrated with photographs by Tucson photographer Camille Bonzani. Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, the essay is offset and letterpress printed in an edition of 1000.
Save Yourself
Cameron Esposito - 2020
She would like to tell the whole, freaking queer as hell story. Her story. Not the sidebar to a straight person's rebirth-she doesn't give a makeover or plan a wedding or get a couple back together. This isn't a queer tragedy. She doesn't die at the end of this book, having finally decided to kiss the girl. It's the sexy, honest, bumpy and triumphant dyke's tale her younger, theology major self needed to read. Because there was a long time when she thought she wouldn't make it. Not as a comic, but as a human.SAVE YOURSELF is full of funny and insightful recollections about everything from coming out (at a Catholic college where being gay can get you expelled) to how joining the circus can help you become a better comic (so much nudity) to accepting yourself for who you are--even if you're an awkward tween with an eyepatch (which Cameron was). Packed with heart, humor, and cringe-worthy stories anyone who has gone through puberty can relate to, Cameron's memoir is for that timid, fenced-in kid in all of us--and the fearless standup yearning to break free.
Windows 8.1 For Dummies
Andy Rathbone - 2013
Parts cover: Windows 8.1 Stuff Everybody Thinks You Already Know - an introduction to the dual interfaces, basic mechanics, file storage, and instruction on how to get the free upgrade to Windows 8.1.Working with Programs, Apps and Files - the basics of finding and launching apps, getting help, and printingGetting Things Done on the Internet - instructions for connecting a Windows 8.1 device, using web and social apps, and maintaining privacyCustomizing and Upgrading Windows 8.1 - Windows 8.1 offers big changes to what a user can customize on the OS. This section shows how to manipulate app tiles, give Windows the look you in, set up boot-to-desktop capabilities, connect to a network, and create user accounts.Music, Photos and Movies - Windows 8.1 offers new apps and capabilities for working with onboard and online media, all covered in this chapterHelp! - includes guidance on how to fix common problems, interpret strange messages, move files to a new PC, and use the built-in help systemThe Part of Tens - quick tips for avoiding common annoyances and working with Windows 8.1 on a touch device
For Now
Eileen Myles - 2020
. . is happy to show us the way.”—NPR In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.
Play Matters
Miguel Sicart - 2014
So what, then, is play? In Play Matters, Miguel Sicart argues that to play is to be in the world; playing is a form of understanding what surrounds us and a way of engaging with others. Play goes beyond games; it is a mode of being human.We play games, but we also play with toys, on playgrounds, with technologies and design. Sicart proposes a theory of play that doesn't derive from a particular object or activity but is a portable tool for being—not tied to objects but brought by people to the complex interactions that form their daily lives. It is not separated from reality; it is part of it. It is pleasurable, but not necessarily fun. Play can be dangerous, addictive, and destructive.Along the way, Sicart considers playfulness, the capacity to use play outside the context of play; toys, the materialization of play--instruments but also play pals; playgrounds, play spaces that enable all kinds of play; beauty, the aesthetics of play through action; political play--from Maradona's goal against England in the 1986 World Cup to the hactivist activities of Anonymous; the political, aesthetic, and moral activity of game design; and why play and computers get along so well.
Child, Family, School, Community: Socialization and Support
Roberta M. Berns - 1985
Examining how the school, family, and community influence children's socialization, this text addresses complex issues in a clear, comprehensive fashion. An enjoyable read, it's packed with meaningful, timely examples and effective study tools that ensure you gain a solid understanding of chapter concepts. A sensitive presentation of diversity issues includes matters related to culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and special needs. Updated throughout, this edition features a stronger emphasis on NAEYC and DAP standards as well as new information on diversity in all forms, technology and the impact of media, bullying, and other topics.