The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies is a fan culture volume that deconstructs how and why Showgirls , a 1995 drama with a female lead bent on becoming a famous performer in Las Vegas, became a much-contested cult film despite being a critical failure when it released.The collection orchestrates a conversation between scholarly essay work and archival...

On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with ...

**2024 Best Book of the Year Award by the GLBTQ Division of the National Communication AssociationFinalist for Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ+ Anthology**For a generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming sexually active meant confronting the dangers of catching and transmitting HIV. In the 21st century, however, the development of viral suppression treatments and preventative pills such as PrEP and nPEP has massively reduced the risk of acqu...

How and why branded bottles of water have insinuated themselves into our daily lives, and what the implications are for safe urban water supplies.How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the u...

Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically a...

In this ground-breaking new work, Dan Goodley makes the case for a novel, distinct, intellectual, and political project – dis/ability studies – an orientation that might encourage us to think again about the phenomena of disability and ability.Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary areas, including sociology, psychology, education, policy and cultural studies, this much needed text takes the most topical and important issues in critical disability theory, and pushes them into new ...

This study guide contains fundamental sociological definitions and principles which are specifically designed to aid students. Topics covered include: social structure & culture, formal organizations, socialization & deviance, basic concepts of demography, population changes, social inequality & stratification, social classes, race, gender & inequality, economy, politics & education, family, religion & more!

This book examines recent changes in media education and in young people’s lives, and provides an accessible set of principles on which the media curriculum should be based, with a clear rationale for pedagogic practice.David Buckingham is one of the leading international experts in the field - he has more than twenty years' experience in media education as a teacher and researcher.This book takes account of recent changes both in the media and in y...

Life for emerging adults is vastly different today than it was for their counterparts even a generation ago. Young people are waiting longer to marry, to have children, and to choose a career direction. As a result, they enjoy more freedom, opportunities, and personal growth than ever before. But the transition to adulthood is also more complex, disjointed, and confusing. In Lost in Transition, Christian Smith and his collaborators draw on 230 in-depth interviews with a broad cros...

Do we have a literacy crisis?Fierce debates in the media over how to teach children to read and write have reached new heights in recent years. The intensity of the debates is not surprising as literacy education matters to everyone, but there is collateral damage. Public confidence in literacy teachers has been undermined and many believe we have a literacy crisis in our schools.The Literacy Wars explains the reasons for the often bitter disagreements between the ...

Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams. Bipolar Expeditions seeks to understand mania's appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression....

In her third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism, Julia Serano chronicles her own personal evolution and the many shifts in transgender activism that have occurred since the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a personal history of where transgender activism has recently been, and a passionate & insightful analysis of where it should head in the future. This collection compiles forty-eight of her previously unpublished and difficult to find trans-themed ...