Professing Selves

Professing Selves PDF Author: Afsaneh Najmabadi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377292
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Professing Selves

Professing Selves PDF Author: Afsaneh Najmabadi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377292
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Professing Selves

Professing Selves PDF Author: Afsaneh Najmabadi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822355574
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards

Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards PDF Author: Afsaneh Najmabadi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520242637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"This book is groundbreaking, at once highly original, courageous, and moving. It is sure to have a tremendous impact in Iranian studies, modern Middle East history, and the history of gender and sexuality."—Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman "This is an extraordinary book. It rereads the story of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality in ways that no other scholars have done."—Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History

Missing Out

Missing Out PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429949538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
From the leading psychoanalyst Adam Phillips comes Missing Out, a transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short. But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires. In this elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives—and may be essential to the one fully lived.

The Ironic Spectator

The Ironic Spectator PDF Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745664334
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Shakespeare and Faulkner

Shakespeare and Faulkner PDF Author: Karl F. Zender
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Faulkner explores the moral and ethical dilemmas that characters face inside themselves and in their interactions with others in the works of these two famed authors. Karl F. Zender’s characterological study offers insightful, critically rigorous, and at times quite personal analyses of the complicated figures who inhabit several major Shakespeare plays and Faulkner novels. The two parts of this book—the first of which focuses on the English playwright, the second on the Mississippi novelist—share a common methodology in that they originate in Zender’s history as a teacher of and writer on the two authors, who until now he generally approached separately. He emphasizes the evolving insights gleaned from reading these authors over several decades, situating their texts in relation to shifting trends in criticism and highlighting the contemporary relevance of their works. The final chapter, an extended discussion of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, attempts something unusual in Zender’s critical practice: It relies less on the close textual analysis that characterizes his previous work and instead explores the intersections between events depicted in the novel and his own life, both as a child and as an adult. Shakespeare and Faulkner speaks to the power of literature as a form of pleasure and of solace. With this work of engaged and thoughtful scholarly criticism, Zender reveals the centrality of storytelling to human beings’ efforts to make sense both of their journey through life and of the circumstances in which they live.

The Selves

The Selves PDF Author: Sonja Ahlers
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
ISBN: 9781770460102
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A HAUNTING, BEAUTIFUL STUDY OF ART, POP, FEMININITY, AND FEMINISM Before blogs, there were zines. Before zines, there were scrapbooks. Sometimes overlooked in the quest to produce high culture, these most direct and intimate means of communication and recording memory are the tools favored by Sonja Ahlers in the making of her art. A self-taught artist and writer, Ahlers wears her pop-culture obsessions on her sleeve, professing her love for such visual icons as Princess Di, Holly Hobbie, and Stevie Nicks. Focusing on found objects such as stickers, greeting cards, andmagazine photos collected in collage framework, complete with song lyrics hand-lettered in cursive script and heartbreaking, melancholic watercolors, Ahlers explores and exposes the social construction of roles, feminine and otherwise. Beginning with incipient childhood self-awareness and traversing high school status jockeying to adult social climbing, the cultural imagery that supports and informs personal identity is given uneasy new meanings and importance in Ahlers's visual remixes.

Islamicate Sexualities

Islamicate Sexualities PDF Author: Kathryn Babayan
Publisher: Harvard CMES
ISBN: 9780674032040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This anthology explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality.

The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce

The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce PDF Author: John Milton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Divorce
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description


Jesus in Our Wombs

Jesus in Our Wombs PDF Author: Rebecca J. Lester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520938205
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants--young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written, finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an "authentic" femininity--one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of "the Call"--and their choices in answering it--as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds, friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves, Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's "technology of embodiment" on multiple levels--from the phenomenological to the political.