Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies.In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay ...

American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture brings together essays from international experts to examine one of the most vital and energized decades in American literature. This volume reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period.The issues that the contributors identify as especially productive include:Immigration and America’s geographical borders, particularly those with Latin Ame...

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies.In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay ...

An explication of the major contributions to feminist theory in the late Twentieth Century, covering Initial Articulations of the 'Woman' Problem (Virginia Woolf; Simone de Beauvoir), Radical Feminism (Kate Millett; Shulamith Firestone; Radicalesbians; Mary Daly), Black Feminism (Audre Lorde; Alice Walker; Patricia Hill Collins), French Feminism (Luce Irigaray; Hélène Cixous; Monique Wittig; Julia Kristeva), Materialist Feminism (Gayle Rubin; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Queer Theory (Adri...

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimatel...

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative t...

Now in a fully updated second edition The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory is an indispensible guide for anyone approaching the field for the first time. Exploring ideas from a diverse range of disciplines through a series of 11 critical essays and a dictionary of key names and terms, this book examines some of the most complex and fundamental theories in modern scholarship including:MarxismTrauma Theory...

There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism...

Anderson reveals the reality of postmodernism in politics, popular culture, religion, literary criticism, art, and philosophy -- making sense of everything from deconstructionism to punk.

A practical guide to the art of theorizing in the social sciencesIn the social sciences today, students are taught theory by reading and analyzing the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other foundational figures of the discipline. What they rarely learn, however, is how to actually theorize. The Art of Social Theory is a practical guide to doing just that.In this one-of-a-kind user's manual for social theorists, Richard Swedberg explains how theor...

In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wo...

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century.Along...