Have you ever had an idea for a book, a movie, or a TV show? Chances are that you’ve had many. Today’s students, who are coming of age in a world that is increasingly mediated by smartphones, pads, pods, apps, and the Internet, are even more likely to think of their lives and experiences in terms of stories. Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind explores how our innate abilities as storytellers can be used in the K-12 classroom to stimulate new approaches to learning. Relying on data collected du...

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...

A roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminismWhy are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies?In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. ...

An in-depth look at America's changing gay neighborhoodsGay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why the...

Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema examines the way that contemporary film reflects today’s changing gender roles. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the central issues in feminist film criticism with analyses of over twenty popular contemporary films across a range of genres, such as chick flicks, teen pics, hommecoms, horror, action adventure, indie flicks, and women lawyer films. Contributors explore issues of femininity as well...

Imagining Transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism. Embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender-variant people, the category quickly gained momentum in public health, social service, scholarly, and legislative contexts. Working as a safer-sex activist in Manhattan during the late 1990s, David Valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male-to-fe...

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understanding...

From Gleeto gay marriage, from lesbian senators to out gay Marines, we have undoubtedlyexperienced a seismic shift in attitudes about gays in American politics andculture. Our reigning national story isthat a new era of rainbow acceptance is at hand. But dig a bit deeper, and thisseemingly brave new gay world is disappointing. For all of the undeniable changes,the plea for tolerance has sabotaged the full integration of gays into Americanlif...

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place

Television entertainment rules supreme, one of the world’s most important disseminators of information, ideas, and amusement. More than a parade of little figures in a box, it is deeply embedded in everyday life, in how we think, what we think and care about, and who we think and care about it with.But is television entertainment art? Why do so many love it and so many hate or fear it? Does it offer a window to the world, or images of a fake world? How is it political and how does ...

Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay AnthropologistsWinner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities SectionWinner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable MentionFrom Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker's Clubs, Out in the Country off...

Explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selvesSince the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the politics of sexual identity in America have drastically transformed. It’s almost old news that recent generations of Americans have grown up in a culture more accepting of out lesbians and gay men, seen the proliferation of LGBTQ media representation, and witnessed the attainment of a range of legal rights for same-sex couples. But the changes wrough...