Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers

Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers PDF Author: Lesley Graydon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000054845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book analyses twentieth-century writers who traffic in queer, non-normative, and/or fluid gender and sexual identities and subversive practices, revealing how gender and sexually variant women create, revise, redefine, and play with language, desires, roles, the body, and identity. Through the model of the "switch" —someone who shifts between roles, desires, or ways of being in the realms of gender or sexual identity – Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers: Switching Desire and Identity examines the intersecting locations of gender and sexual identity switching that six prolific, experimental authors and their narratives play with: Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. The theory and identities revealed create and give space to—by their playful, exploratory, and destabilizing nature—diverse openings and possibilities for a great expansion and freedom in gender, sexuality, desires, roles, practices, and identity. This is a provocative and innovative intervention in gender and sexuality in modern literature and gives us a new vocabulary and conversation by which to expand women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ and sexuality studies, identity studies, literature, feminist theory, and queer theory.

Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers

Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers PDF Author: Lesley Graydon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000054845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyses twentieth-century writers who traffic in queer, non-normative, and/or fluid gender and sexual identities and subversive practices, revealing how gender and sexually variant women create, revise, redefine, and play with language, desires, roles, the body, and identity. Through the model of the "switch" —someone who shifts between roles, desires, or ways of being in the realms of gender or sexual identity – Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers: Switching Desire and Identity examines the intersecting locations of gender and sexual identity switching that six prolific, experimental authors and their narratives play with: Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. The theory and identities revealed create and give space to—by their playful, exploratory, and destabilizing nature—diverse openings and possibilities for a great expansion and freedom in gender, sexuality, desires, roles, practices, and identity. This is a provocative and innovative intervention in gender and sexuality in modern literature and gives us a new vocabulary and conversation by which to expand women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ and sexuality studies, identity studies, literature, feminist theory, and queer theory.

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction PDF Author: Elaine Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired, and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett’s Not I (1972), and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature, women and gender studies, and sexuality studies.

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science PDF Author: Kirsten Leng
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Introduction : women and sexology : knowledge, possibilities, and problematic legacies -- The emergence of sexology in early twentieth century Germany -- As natural as eating, drinking, and sleeping : redefining the female sex -- Challenging the limits of sex : envisioning new gendered subjectivities and sexualities -- Troubling normal, taking on patriarchy : criticizing male (hetero)sexuality -- The erotics of racial regeneration : eugenics, maternity, and sexual -- New social and moral values will have to prevail : negotiating crisis and opportunity in the First World War -- Fluid gender, rigid sexuality : constrained potential in the post-war period

The End of Gender

The End of Gender PDF Author: Debra Soh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982132523
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Debra Soh [discusses what she sees as] gender myths in this ... examination of the many facets of gender identity"--

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed PDF Author: Kathryn Simpson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472590686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.

Spatialities in Italian American Women’s Literature

Spatialities in Italian American Women’s Literature PDF Author: Eva Pelayo Sañudo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Examining the family saga as an instrument of literary analysis of writing by Italian American women, this book argues that the genre represents a key strategy for Italian American female writers as a form which distinctly allows them to establish cultural, gender and literary traditions. Spaces are inherently marked by the ideology of the societies that create and practice them, and this volume engages with spaces of cultural and gendered identity, particularly those of the ‘mean streets’ in Italian American fiction, which provide a method of critically analyzing the configurations and representations of identity associated with the Italian American community. Key authors examined include Julia Savarese, Marion Benasutti, Tina De Rosa, Helen Barolini, Melania Mazzucco and Laurie Fabiano. This book is suitable for students and scholars in Literature, Italian Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker PDF Author: Margaret Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351585061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women’s writing, punk culture, and punk feminism’s reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women’s studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.

Sexual Fluidity

Sexual Fluidity PDF Author: Lisa M. Diamond
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026247
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

Growing Up Queer

Growing Up Queer PDF Author: Mary Robertson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479876941
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
LGBTQ kids reveal what it’s like to be young and queer today Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as children and adolescents. This groundbreaking and timely consideration of queer identity demonstrates how sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes as opposed to being natural characteristics that one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture where being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, Robertson argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity, but is understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

Representing Abortion

Representing Abortion PDF Author: Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000169596
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Representing Abortion analyses how artists, writers, performers, and activists make abortion visible, audible, and palpable within contexts dominated by anti-abortion imagery centred on the fetus and the erasure of the pregnant person, challenging the polarisation of conversations about abortion. This book illuminates the manifold ways that abortion is depicted and narrated by artists, performers, clinicians, writers, and activists. This representational work offers nuanced and complex understandings of abortion, personally and politically. Analyses of such representations are urgently needed as access to abortion is diminished and anti-abortion representations of the fetus continue to dominate the cultural horizon for thinking about abortion. Expanding the frame of reference for understanding abortion beyond the anti-abortion use of the fetal image, contributors to this collection push beyond narrow abstractions to examine representations of the experience and procedure of abortion within grounded histories, politics, and social contexts. The collection is organized into sections around seeing (and not seeing) abortion; fetal materiality; abortion storytelling and memoir; and representations for new arguments. These themes cover a range of topics including abortion visibility, anti-abortion discourse, pro-choice engagements with the fetus, personal experience and media representations. The analyses of such representations counteract anti-abortion rhetoric, carving out space for new arguments for abortion that are more representative and inclusive and asking audiences to envision new ways to advocate for safe abortion access through reproductive justice frameworks. This is an innovative and challenging collection that will be of key interest for scholars studying reproductive rights and reproductive justice, as well as women and gender studies. Representing Abortion is organized to structure upper year undergraduate and graduate courses on reproductive rights and reproductive justice in a new and engaging way.