Pleasure and Pain in Us Public Culture

Pleasure and Pain in Us Public Culture PDF Author: Christopher J. Gilbert
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780817322120
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Unraveling the intricate dance of pleasure and pain in contemporary American culture Mainstream news and social media often highlight presentations of pain that invite a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, whether the result of war, disasters, crime, accidents, or other catastrophes. This collection of essays explores pleasurable pains and painful pleasures, showing how they pervade contemporary western public culture. Deploying methodologies drawn from psychoanalysis, rhetoric and communication, political theory, and visual culture, Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture offers insightful criticisms and theories about how pleasure and pain function in public discourse, media, and everyday communication practices. The contributors provide a sample of fascinating range of news reportage, television, film and cinema, stage drama, comic performances, street art, and other forms of popular culture. The media cited and analyzed include Spike Lee's films, Afrofuturism, autoethnography, and the #MeToo movement. The collection takes up engrossing topics such as the cathartic allure of pain, ethical dilemmas surrounding public displays of suffering, and the transformative power of narratives that confront trauma. The essays also draw connections between theory and real-world outcomes, explore the implications of enjoying traumatic comedy, and link the natural world to otherwise mundane instances of interspecies violence. Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination hearings and what they suggest about witnessing trauma is also discussed. Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture will change how a reader sees the world. It imparts a startling vision of western culture permeated by pain and pleasure"--

Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture

Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture PDF Author: Christopher J. Gilbert
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361707
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Unraveling the intricate dance of pleasure and pain in contemporary American culture

Hurts So Good

Hurts So Good PDF Author: Leigh Cowart
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 9781541798038
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An exploration of why people all over the world love to engage in pain on purpose--from dominatrices, religious ascetics, and ultramarathoners to ballerinas, icy ocean bathers, and sideshow performers Masochism is sexy, human, reviled, worshipped, and can be delightfully bizarre. Deliberate and consensual pain has been with us for millennia, encompassing everyone from Black Plague flagellants to ballerinas dancing on broken bones to competitive eaters choking down hot peppers while they cry. Masochism is a part of us. It lives inside workaholics, tattoo enthusiasts, and all manner of garden variety pain-seekers. At its core, masochism is about feeling bad, then better--a phenomenon that is long overdue for a heartfelt and hilarious investigation. And Leigh Cowart would know: they are not just a researcher and science writer--they're an inveterate, high-sensation seeking masochist. And they have a few questions: Why do people engage in masochism? What are the benefits and the costs? And what does masochism have to say about the human experience? By participating in many of these activities themselves, and through conversations with psychologists, fellow scientists, and people who seek pain for pleasure, Cowart unveils how our minds and bodies find meaning and relief in pain--a quirk in our programming that drives discipline and innovation even as it threatens to swallow us whole.

Dopamine Nation

Dopamine Nation PDF Author: Dr. Anna Lembke
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524746746
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER “Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick, as heard on Fresh Air This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination PDF Author: Henry Jenkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479891258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Pleasures and Pains

Pleasures and Pains PDF Author: Milligan
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813934686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Use front of jacket for front paperback cover Back paperback cover camera-ready copy on sheet 1 Paperback title page and copyright page included to substitute for cloth edition pages. Please call Mark Saunders at 434-924-6064 if questions arise

Beyond Pleasure and Pain

Beyond Pleasure and Pain PDF Author: E. Tory Higgins
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199765820
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book Description
Rather, they work together.

Youth in Revolt

Youth in Revolt PDF Author: Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317248570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Recently, American youth have demonstrated en masse about a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. Youth in Revolt chronicles the escalating backlash against dissent and peaceful protest while exposing a lack of governmental concern for society's most vulnerable populations. Henry Giroux carefully documents a wide range of phenomena, from pervasive violent imagery in our popular culture to educational racism, censorship, and the growing economic inequality we face. He challenges the reader to consider the hope for democratic renewal embodied by Occupy Wall Street and other emerging movements. Encouraging a capacity for critical thought, compassion, and informed judgment, Giroux's analysis allows us to rethink the very nature of what democracy means and what it might look like in the United States and beyond.

Hop on Pop

Hop on Pop PDF Author: Henry Jenkins III
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383500
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 761

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Book Description
Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Latina/o Sexualities

Latina/o Sexualities PDF Author: Marysol Asencio
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548225
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Latina/os are currently the largest minority population in the United States. They are also one of the fastest growing. Yet, we have very limited research and understanding of their sexualities. Instead, stereotypical images flourish even though scholars have challenged the validity and narrowness of these images and the lack of attention to the larger social context. Gathering the latest empirical work in the social and behavioral sciences, this reader offers us a critical lens through which to understand these images and the social context framing Latina/os and their sexualities. Situated at the juncture of Latina/o studies and sexualities studies, Latina/o Sexualities provides a single resource that addresses the current state of knowledge from a multidisciplinary perspective. Contributors synthesize and critique the literature and carve a separate space where issues of Latina/o sexualities can be explored given the limitations of prevalent research models. This work compels the current wave in sexuality studies to be more inclusive of ethnic minorities and sets an agenda that policy makers and researchers will find invaluable.