Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives presents fifteen chapters that address how the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities are depicted in the media. This collection focuses on how the LGBT community has been silenced or given voice through the media. Through a study of queer media images, this book scrutinizes LGBT media representations and how these representations contribute to a dialogue about civil rights for this marginalized community. While the communication discipl...

Social Networking and Impression Management: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age, edited by Carolyn Cunningham, offers critical inquiry into how identity is constructed, deconstructed, performed, and perceived on social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, and LinkedIn. The presentation of identity is key to success or failure in the Information Age, especially because SNSs are becoming the dominant form of communication among Internet users. The architecture of SNSs provide opportu...

Locating Queerness in the Media: A New Look examines how media images of the LGBTQ community create a universal consciousness about the existence of queer people, ranging from tragic and villainous to upbeat and courageous. In this book, contributors explore how our media world invites a tension that marginalizes the LGBTQ community. It examines what a queer sensibility means and how the queer community is creating new ways to study itself. Throughout the book, contributors explore specifi...

Critical Articulations of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation engages scholarly essays, poems, and creative writings that examine the meanings of race, gender, and sexual orientation as interlocking systems of oppression. Each chapter in this volume critically, yet creatively, interrogates the notion of identity as socially constructed, yet interconnected and shaped by cultural associations, expanding on the idea that we as individuals live in an identity matrix—our self-concept, experien...

Teaching the Texas Story is a dynamic and inclusive curriculum guide developed by The Texas Center at Schreiner University. Designed for K–12 educators, it presents a rich, multicultural narrative of Texas history through the lens of E Pluribus Texas—“Out of many, one Texas.” This statewide cultural literacy project aims to: tell the full story of Texas through a diverse and inclusive perspective; Foster civic engagement and a shared identity among Texans; Support educators with a...

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag’s 1964 cornerstone essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from telev...

From a decidedly inauspicious start as a low-rated television series in the 1960s that was cancelled after three seasons, Star Trek has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry of spin-off series, feature films and merchandise. Fuelling the ever-expanding franchise are some of the most rabid and loyal fans in the universe, known affectionately as 'Trekkies'. Perhaps no other community so typifies fandom as the devoted aficionados of the Star Trek television series, motion...

The spinal cord is a vital part of the central nervous system; even a small injury can lead to severe disability. In the US, there are approximately 230,000 people living with traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI), with over 10,000 more becoming disabled each year. Learning to live with SCI can be a challenge to any individual, caregiver or family. To improve their ability to cope, everyone involved must understand how the body responds to a spinal cord injury, and educate themselves about tr...

Recent decades have seen remarkable changes in the cultural visibility, legal status, and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, from positive representations of queerness in television series like The L-Word and Will & Grace, to films about queer intersectionality like Moonlight, to openly-gay and lesbian elected officials and leaders in the business community, to the end of anti-sodomy laws and marriage discrimination. With these advances have come assimi...

Covering 825,000 acres in the Coastal Plain and Brush Country of South Texas, King Ranch, established in 1853, looms large in Texas and American history. Since its founding by the energetic and visionary Richard King, it has indelibly captured for generations the essence of the American West. As Tom Lea asserted in his epic 1953 history, the spirit of the place “is alive in the land itself, in the far quietness of growing grass and grazing herds.”In King Ranch: A Legacy in Art

This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history.This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother coun...

The concept of free will has long been accepted in society as the controlling force behind human behavior, and it is regarded as a fundamental truth within the Christian faith and other religious dogmas. But what if free will is a myth? When biophysicist Bruce Lehnert started to question the notion along with the legitimacy of his prior faith-based religious teachings, he discovered the scientific reality he sought.In The Irresponsible Human, Lehnert turns the assumption of free wi...