Explicit Utopias

Explicit Utopias PDF Author: Amalia Ziv
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143845709X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Provides an incisive account of women’s porn and queer porn of the 1980s and 1990s. Explicit Utopias explores a problem that has long haunted feminist, lesbian, and queer critics: the obstacles to imagining women’s desire and sexual agency. Pornography is one arena in which women have actively sought to imaginatively overcome this problem, yet pornography has also been an object of passionate feminist contention. Revisiting the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, Amalia Ziv offers a comprehensive and thoughtful reassessment of the arguments and concerns of both camps, tying these early debates to the contemporary surge of concern over the pornification of culture. She also sets out to rectify the lack of critical attention to marginal sexual representations by examining the feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic literature on several key issues, including fantasy, the phallus, identification, and gender performativity.

Explicit Utopias

Explicit Utopias PDF Author: Amalia Ziv
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143845709X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides an incisive account of women’s porn and queer porn of the 1980s and 1990s. Explicit Utopias explores a problem that has long haunted feminist, lesbian, and queer critics: the obstacles to imagining women’s desire and sexual agency. Pornography is one arena in which women have actively sought to imaginatively overcome this problem, yet pornography has also been an object of passionate feminist contention. Revisiting the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, Amalia Ziv offers a comprehensive and thoughtful reassessment of the arguments and concerns of both camps, tying these early debates to the contemporary surge of concern over the pornification of culture. She also sets out to rectify the lack of critical attention to marginal sexual representations by examining the feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic literature on several key issues, including fantasy, the phallus, identification, and gender performativity.

The Gender of Latinidad

The Gender of Latinidad PDF Author: Angharad N. Valdivia
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111957496X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Presents innovative scholarship on Latina/o visibility in contemporary mainstream media Latina/os have seen increased visibility in the media in the past several years, especially in feature-length films, network television programs, and various digital platforms. The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity explores Latina/o visibility—analyzing presence, production, and interpretation throughout various media. An important contribution to the emerging field of Latina/o Media Studies, this unique volume brings together political economy and cultural studies to consider the limitations of cultural politics and explore current issues relevant to Latina/o cultural inclusion. Author Angharad N. Valdivia addresses the concept of hybridity and applies it to contemporary Latinidad, in which hybrid Latina/os lead hybrid lives and consume hybrid media. The text explores strategies for gendered visibility in a range of popular culture media, using the concept of hybridity to connect Latina/o Studies to Feminist Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Throughout the text, the author discusses the inclusion Latina/o scholars and audiences seek and considers if such inclusion is even achievable. Offering intersectional exploration of Latinidad in mainstream media, this volume: Explores the trope of the spitfire in the context of popular media Brings Disney Studies into Latina/o Studies Discusses the dynamic inclusion of Latinidad in awards ceremonies Assesses the implicit utopias of Latina/o representation Presents the only major academic treatment of Charo Presenting an original perspective on Latina/os in media, The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity is an ideal text for students and scholars in areas including Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and general Media and Feminist Media Studies.

Apocalyptic Narratives

Apocalyptic Narratives PDF Author: Hauke Riesch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Linking literature from the sociological study of the apocalyptic with the sociology and philosophy of science, Apocalyptic Narratives explores how the apocalyptic narrative frames and provides meaning to contemporary, secular and scientific crises focussing on nuclear war, general environmental crisis and climate change in both English- and German-speaking cultural contexts. In particular, the book will use social identity and representation theories, the sociologies of risk and Lakatos’ philosophy of science to trace how our cultural background and apocalyptic tradition shape our wider interpretation, communication and response to contemporary global crisis. The set of environmental and other challenges that the world is facing is often framed in terms of apocalyptic or existential crisis. Yet apocalyptic fears about the near future are nothing new. This book looks at the narrative connections between our current sense of crisis and the apocalyptic. The book will be of interest to readers interested in environmental crisis and communication, the sociology and philosophy of science, and existential risk, but also to readers interested in the apocalyptic and its contemporary relevance.

Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative

Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative PDF Author: Libby Falk Jones
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870496363
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies

Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies PDF Author: John Storey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351782436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies, John Storey looks at the concept of utopianism from a cultural studies perspective and argues that radical utopianism can awaken the political promise of cultural studies. Between the Preface and the Postscript, there are seven chapters that explore different aspects of radical utopianism. The book begins with a definition of what radical utopianism means, with its productive combination of defamiliarization and desire. From there, it considers Thomas More’s invention of the concept of utopia with its double articulation of what is and what could be, Herbert Marcuse’s utopian rereading of Sigmund Freud’s concept of repression, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the Paris Commune, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. In the final chapter, Storey examines two versions of utopian capitalism: retro and post. Although the main focus here is on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign and Paul Mason’s recent bestseller Postcapitalism, the chaper begins with a brief discussion of Karl Marx on capitalism. Each chapter, in a different way, argues that radical utopianism defamiliarizes the manufactured naturalness of the here and now, making it conceivable to believe that another world is possible. This book provides an ideal introduction to utopianism for students of cultural studies as well as students within a number of related disciplines such as sociology, literature, history, politics, and media studies.

The Nowhere Bible

The Nowhere Bible PDF Author: Frauke Uhlenbruch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110414171
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia – “good place” yet “no place” – as a method and a concept in biblical studies. A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it – finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text. This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing – not obscuring – pre-suppositions brought to the text.

Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History

Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History PDF Author: Marina Leslie
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts—Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World—as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form among many available for reading historically but as a privileged form or methodological paradigm. Rather than approach utopia by mapping out a fixed set of formal features, or by tracing the development of the genre, Leslie elaborates a history of utopia as critical practice. Moreover, by taking every reading of utopia to be as historically symptomatic as the literary production it assesses, her book integrates readings of these three English Renaissance utopias with an analysis of the history and politics of reading utopia. Throughout, Leslie considers utopia as a fictional enactment of historical process and method. In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.

Green Utopias

Green Utopias PDF Author: Lisa Garforth
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745684750
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever. This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being.

Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923

Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923 PDF Author: Harry Liebersohn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620796
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Fate and Utopia in German Sociology provides a lucid introduction to a major sociological tradition in Western thought. It is an intellectual history of five scholars—Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Georg Lukács—who created modern German sociology over the course of fifty years, from 1870 to 1923. Liebersohn portrays his subjects as thinkers who were deeply immersed in the politics and poetry of their time, and whose sociology benefited in unexpected ways from sources as diverse as medieval mysticism and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. He maps out their shared sociological discourse, shaped in response to the fragmentation they perceived in public life, in education and the arts, and in Protestant religious life. German sociology has generally been interpreted as having a tragic perspective on modern society (as implied by the pervasive idiom of "fate"); Liebersohn argues that this sense of fate was matched by an underlying utopian hope for an end to fragmentation, rooted for all of his subjects in the Lutheran idea of community.The book's five biographical chapters are structured to discuss ideas of community, society, and personality in the work of the individual discussed, while there is a general movement among the chapters from community to society to socialism. Many specific texts are discussed, and the overall orientation is one of intellectual history rather than sociological analysis.

Utopics

Utopics PDF Author: L. Marin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349073296
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description