Recommendations based on "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power"

"A totally engaging read [and] a fascinating look at the diversity and range of female comics... by an author who herself obviously has a sense of humor." —Joanna E. Rapf, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either "pretty" or "funny." Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars—and often they've been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis Diller to Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett. Pretty/Funny focuses on Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, the groundbreaking women comics who flout the pretty-versus-funny dynamic by targeting glamour, postfeminist girliness, the Hollywood A-list, and feminine whiteness with their wit and biting satire. Linda Mizejewski demonstrates that while these comics don't all identify as feminists or take politically correct positions, their work on gender, sexuality, and race has a political impact. The first major study of women and humor in twenty years, Pretty/Funny makes a convincing case that women's comedy has become a prime site for feminism to speak, talk back, and be contested in the twenty-first century.

What happens when your gender doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of male or female? Even mundane interactions like filling out a form or using a public bathroom can be a struggle when these designations prove inadequate. In this groundbreaking book, thirty authors highlight how our experiences are shaped by a deeply entrenched gender binary. The powerful first-person narratives of this collection show us a world where gender exists along a spectrum, a web, a multidimensional space. Nuanced storytellers break away from mainstream portrayals of gender diversity, cutting across lines of age, race, ethnicity, ability, class, religion, family, and relationships. From Suzi, who wonders whether she’ll ever “feel” like a woman after living fifty years as a man, to Aubri, who grew up in a cash-strapped fundamentalist household, to Sand, who must reconcile the dual roles of trans advocate and therapist, the writers’ conceptions of gender are inextricably intertwined with broader systemic issues. Labeled gender outlaws, gender rebels, genderqueer, or simply human, the voices in Nonbinary illustrate what life could be if we allowed the rigid categories of “man” and “woman” to loosen and bend. They speak to everyone who has questioned gender or has paused to wonder, What does it mean to be a man or a woman—and why do we care so much?

Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppélia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism. Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.

In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt? Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.

Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded—that things will eventually get better—Ruti demystifies the false hope that often causes us to tolerate an unbearable present. Theoretically rigorous and lucidly written, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is a trenchant critique of contemporary gender relations. Refuting the idea that we live in a postfeminist world where gender inequalities have been transcended, Ruti describes how neoliberal heteropatriarchy has transformed itself in subtle and stealthy, and therefore all the more insidious, ways. Mobilizing Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Jacques Lacan’s account of desire, and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, she analyzes the rationalization of intimacy, the persistence of gender stereotypes, and the pornification of heterosexual culture. Ruti shines a spotlight on the depression, anxiety, frustration, and disenchantment that frequently lie beneath our society’s sugarcoated mythologies of self-fulfillment, romantic satisfaction, and professional success, speaking to all who are concerned about the emotional costs of the pressure-cooker ethos of our age.

There are several issues in English teaching on which applied linguists take very different positions: e.g. linguistic imperialism, the validity of critical discourse analysis, the pedagogic relevance of corpus descriptions of language, the theoretical bases of second language acquisition research, the nature of applied linguistics itself. This book presents exchanges between scholars arguing different positions, and directs attention to the key points at issue.

The game-changing book about sex, consent, and the distortion of desire, a battle cry from a generation no longer prepared to stay silent. When activist and internationally renowned philanthropist, Chanel Contos asked her followers to share their stories of sexual assault, her post went viral. Almost 7,000 people provided testimonies of surviving sexual violence by people they knew, but virtually none of these incidents had been reported to authorities. The testimonies proved that sexual assault is widespread and Chanel was on a quest to understand why. In an era of growing inequality, Contos argues that when it comes to sex, we are all still working with an outdated social contract that privileges cisgender men's pleasure at the expense of humanity. In Consent Laid Bare, Chanel challenges the rampant inequality that reinforces violent behavior and questions whether consent is possible in a world where female sexuality has been hijacked. She offers girls and women the tools and encouragement to seek sex that is truly enjoyable which involves: Redefining consent Challenging gender norms Language's influence on rape discourse Understanding fawning responses  Equipping teens to combat toxic masculinity Chanel's message of fostering empathy is especially urgent in the face of rising rates of toxic messages about masculinity and manhood that are targeting our young men. 

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) had an enormous influence on social and cultural thought in the second half of the 20th century, leaving a mark on fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, critical theory, education, literary criticism, art history, and media studies. From his childhood in a rural French village, to his fieldwork in Algeria, to his ascension to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Bourdieu's life followed a trajectory both complex and contradictory. In this original and eloquent study, Deborah Reed-Danahay offers fresh insights on Bourdieu's work by drawing on the perspectives of ethnography and autobiography. Using Bourdieu's own reflections upon his life and career and considering the totality of his research and writing, this book locates Bourdieu within his French milieu and within the current state of discussion of Europe and its colonial legacy. Locating Bourdieu revisits major themes and concepts such as structure and practice, taste and distinction, habitus, social field, symbolic capital, and symbolic violence, adding new perspectives and discovering implications of Bourdieu's work for understanding emotion, social space, and personal narrative. The result is a work of impressive scholarship and intellectual creativity that will appeal to scholars, students, and non-specialists alike.New Anthropologies of Europe—Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Michael Herzfeld, editors