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Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America)
By Kate Shindle. 2014
For nearly a hundred years, young women have competed for the title of Miss America—although what it means to wear…
the crown and be our “ideal” has changed dramatically over time. The Miss America Pageant began as a bathing beauty contest in 1920s Atlantic City, New Jersey, sponsored by businessmen trying to extend the tourist season beyond Labor Day. In the post–World War II years, the pageant evolved into a national coronation of an idealized “girl next door,” as pretty and decorous as she was rarely likely to speak her mind on issues of substance. Since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, the pageant has struggled to find a balance between beauty and brains as it tries to remain relevant to women who aspire to become leaders in the community, not hot babes in swimsuits. In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating and insightful history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America’s “ideal,” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant’s story, with a special focus on Miss America’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the “gown and crown” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America.A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema
By Kendall R. Phillips. 2018
&“An illuminating history . . . it&’s clear that the right story can still terrify us; A Place of Darkness…
is a primer on how the movies learned to do it.&” —NPR Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term &“horror film&” was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty cinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term &“horror film.&” Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old-World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since. &“[A] fascinating read.&” —Sublime HorrorVideo Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means “timespace,” is an effective interpretive lens through which…
to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using ‘slow readings’ attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes—of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love—toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.The Routledge Handbook of Violence in Latin American Literature (Routledge Literature Handbooks)
By Pablo Baisotti. 2022
This Handbook brings together essays from an impressive group of well-established and emerging scholars from all around the world, to…
show the many different types of violence that have plagued Latin America since the pre-Colombian era, and how each has been seen and characterized in literature and other cultural mediums ever since. This ambitious collection analyzes texts from some of the region's most tumultuous time periods, beginning with early violence that was predominately tribal and ideological in nature; to colonial and decolonial violence between colonizers and the native population; through to the political violence we have seen in the postmodern period, marked by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, as well as representations of violence caused by drug trafficking and migration. The volume provides readers with literary examples from across the centuries, showing not only how widespread the violence has been, but crucially how it has shaped the region and evolved over time.Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings
By Megan Rose. 2022
• Presents interviews with ten contemporary practitioners of spirit marriage, exploring how the relationship developed and the opportunities and challenges…
• Discusses the author&’s own spirit marriage, including her awakening as an erotic mystic and her encounters with her Faery beloved • Explains how to cultivate a spirit marriage, sharing precautions and practices to spiritually prepare yourself and navigate the potential challenges of spirit marriage Exploring the phenomenon of the spirit spouse or spirit lover--an entity to which a human is psychically bonded--Megan Rose, Ph.D., examines the practice and purpose of spirit marriage around the world, presenting transcultural evidence of this form of sacred union in anthropological research, religious literature, mythology, folklore, and the oral tradition. She shares her in-depth interviews with ten contemporary practitioners of spirit marriage, including a Faery Seer, a Shakta Tantric, a West African Shrine Keeper, a New Orleans Voodoo Mambo, Haitian Vodou practitioners, and a ceremonial magician. Through these respectful interviews, the spirit-marriage practitioners tell their stories of initiation and of having a spouse who is both otherworldly and able to assist in waking- world activities. They offer intimate insight into this growing global practice and its larger evolutionary purpose. We learn about their experiences of first contact, the decision to marry, how the relationship is upheld by their community, and the impact on their other relationships. We also learn about the risks and challenges as well as one example of divorcing a spirit. Sharing her personal experience, the author discusses in detail her own spirit marriage, including the erotic nature of being &“spirit filled&” and her encounters with her Faery beloved. She explains how to cultivate a spirit marriage, sharing precautions and practices to spiritually prepare yourself, interpret your paranormal encounters, and navigate the potential challenges of spirit marriage. Presenting the first study of the transcultural, shamanistic practice of spirit marriage, this book shows how bonded relationships with spirits are needed now more than ever to assist with spiritual evolution.Salir de la jaula: Vivir y vestir en un mundo nuevo
By Fabián Medina Flores, Victoria Maria Guazzone Azzano. 2022
Salir de la jaula es una invitación a repensar el estilo propio, cómo nos vestiremos y cuidaremos en el nuevo…
mundo después de la pandemia. La pandemia transformó la manera de percibirnos, vestirnos, cuidarnos y presentarnos ante los demás. Cambió la noción de estilo y las formas de pensar el cuerpo, llegaron códigos de consumo y surgieron nuevos influencers. En este libro, Fabián Medina Flores retrata el cambio de época que atravesó la moda, lo que dejamos atrás y lo que se viene. Con una mirada empática y el humor que lo caracteriza, ofrece consejos para que sinceremos el ropero y nos convirtamos en verdaderos estilistas, ideas para el cuidado de la piel y la salud y tips para las reuniones Zoom y las fiestas presenciales. El asesor de moda de las celebridades argentinas adelanta las tendencias que llegarán con la nueva normalidad: un lujo distinto, el auge de las novias y hasta la moda para las mascotas.Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife
By Dr Eben Alexander III. 2014
Internationally acclaimed neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander always considered himself a man of science. His unwavering belief in evidence-based medicine fuelled…
a career in the top medical institutions of the world. But all this was set to change. One morning in 2008 he fell into a coma after suffering a rare form of bacterial meningitis. Scans of his brain revealed massive damage. Death was deemed the most likely outcome. As his family prepared themselves for the worst, something miraculous happened. Dr Alexander's brain went from near total inactivity to awakening. He made a full recovery but he was never the same. He woke certain of the infinite reach of the soul, he was certain of a life beyond death. In this astonishing book, Dr Alexander shares his experience, pieced together from the notes he made as soon as he was able to write again. Unlike other accounts of near-death experiences, he is able to explain in depth why his brain was incapable of fabricating the journey he experienced. His story is one of profound beauty and inspiration.The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
By Neil Gaiman. 2016
The View from the Cheap Seats draws together myriad non-fiction writing by international phenomenon and Sunday Times bestselling author Neil…
Gaiman. From Make Good Art, the speech that went viral, to pieces on artists and legends including Terry Pratchett and Lou Reed, the collection offers a glimpse into the head and heart of one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.'Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation'Welcome to the conversation. Neil Gaiman fled the land of journalism to find truths through storytelling and sanctuary in not needing to get all the facts right. Of course, the real world continued to make up its own stories around him, and he has responded over the years with a wealth of ideas and introductions, dreams and speeches. Here 'we can meet the writer full on' (Stephen Fry) as he opens our minds to the people he admires and the things he believes might just mean something - and makes room for us to join the conversation too.(P)2016 HarperCollins DigitalChildren, Youth, and International Television (Routledge Advances in Television Studies)
By Debbie Olson, Adrian Schober. 2022
This volume explores how television has been a significant conduit for the public consumption of changing ideas about children, childhood,…
and national identity, via a critical examination of programs that prominently feature children and youth in international television. The chapters connect relevant cultural attitudes within their respective countries to an analysis of children and/or childhood in international children’s programming. The collection addresses how international children’s programming in global and local context informs changing ideas about children and childhood, including notions of individual and citizen identity formation. Offering new insights into childhood and television studies, this book will be of great interest to graduate students, scholars, and professionals in television studies, childhood studies, media studies, cultural studies, popular culture studies, and American studies.In Football and Accelerated Culture, Steve Redhead offers a new and challenging theorisation of global football culture, exploring the relationship…
between sport and culture in a rapidly shifting world. Incorporating cutting-edge concepts, from accelerated culture and claustropolitanism to non-postmodernity, he reflects on the demise of working class football cultures and the rapid media globalisation of ‘the people’s game’. Drawing on international empirical research and a unique and ground-breaking study of football hooligan memoirs, the book delves into a wide array of disciplines, examining fascinating topics such as the relationship between music and football; hooligans and ultras; the rise of social media and anti-modern football movements; and ultra-realist criminology. Football and Accelerated Culture offers a new way of thinking about sporting cultures that expands the boundaries of physical cultural studies. As such, it is important reading for anybody with an interest in the culture of sport and leisure, social theory, communication studies, criminology or socio-legal studies.In this path-breaking book Anna Arrowsmith analyses gendered dating behaviour and shows how men’s behaviour is both defined and illustrated…
by societal norms that require a particular masculine performance, including those desired by potential female performers. Using the case-study of pick-up artistry which is compared to interviews with other men who date women, this book analyses how the men deal with conflicting ideas borne out of living in an age when both hegemonic (harder, historic) and inclusive (softer, modern) masculinities co-exist. It asks whether men acknowledge their own insecurities or whether they focus on perceived external triggers, such as female culpability as a means of ignoring their own concerns, or, whether men respond to insecurities by focusing on an active process of overcoming them. Through exploring male experiences of female beauty, emotions, fertility, strength, female violence and sexual assault, Arrowsmith’s findings encourage a new path of enquiry in gender studies which explores and includes men's words as central to interpreting their behaviour and how it is understood. This book has political worth as it differentiates and delineates between emotive and often misogynistic demands for an entire rethink of the gender order by some men's rights activists and a genuine need to incorporate male insecurities and psychological experiences in how we understand gender to be structured and performed, as a means to increase equality.Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series)
By Barbara Geilhorn, Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. 2017
The natural and man-made cataclysmic events of the 11 March 2011 disaster, or 3.11, have dramatically altered the status quo…
of contemporary Japanese society. While much has been written about the social, political, economic, and technical aspects of the disaster, this volume represents one of the first in-depth explorations of the cultural responses to the devastating tsunami, and in particular the ongoing nuclear disaster of Fukushima. This book explores a wide range of cultural responses to the Fukushima nuclear calamity by analyzing examples from literature, poetry, manga, theatre, art photography, documentary and fiction film, and popular music. Individual chapters examine the changing positionality of post-3.11 northeastern Japan and the fear-driven conflation of time and space in near-but-far urban centers; explore the political subversion and nostalgia surrounding the Fukushima disaster; expose the ambiguous effects of highly gendered representations of fear of nuclear threat; analyze the musical and poetic responses to disaster; and explore the political potentialities of theatrical performances. By scrutinizing various media narratives and taking into account national and local perspectives, the book sheds light on cultural texts of power, politics, and space. Providing an insight into the post-disaster Zeitgeist as expressed through a variety of media genres, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Japanese Culture, Popular Culture, and Literature Studies.Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television (The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture)
By Michael Mario Albrecht. 2015
Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity and quantity of ’quality’ television programs, many of which featuring complicated…
versions of masculinity that are informed not only by the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies, but also by several decades of backlash and debate about the effects of women’s equality on men, masculinity, and the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon studies of contemporary television programs, including popular series viewed internationally such as Mad Men, The League, Hung, Breaking Bad, Louie, and Girls, this book explores the ways in which popular cultural texts address widely circulating discourses of the ostensible ’crisis of masculinity’ in contemporary culture. A rich study of masculinity and its representation in contemporary television, Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, popular culture, television studies and cultural sociology with interests in gender, masculinities, and sexuality.Law and Enjoyment: Power, Pleasure and Psychoanalysis
By Daniel Hourigan. 2015
This book advocates, and develops, a critical account of the relationship between law and the largely neglected issue of ‘enjoyment’.…
Taking popular culture seriously – as a lived and meaningful basis for a wider understanding of law, beyond the strictures of legal institutions and professional practices – it takes up a range of case studies from film and literature in order to consider how law is iterated through enjoyment, and how enjoyment embodies law. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this book addresses issues such as the forced choice to enjoy the law, the biopolitics of tyranny, the enjoyment of law’s contingency, the trauma of the law’s symbolic codification of pleasure, and the futuristic vision of law’s transgression. In so doing, it forges an important case for acknowledging and analyzing the complex relationship between power and pleasure in law – one that will be of considerable interest to legal theorists, as well as those with interests in the intersection of psychoanalytic and cultural theory.Spirituality in Education in a Global, Pluralised World (Routledge Research in Education)
By Marian De Souza. 2016
A particular problem associated with international research in the field of spirituality and education is the reluctance of scholars to…
agree on what spirituality means, with numerous descriptions increasing ambiguity and reducing the impact of research in the discipline. This book argues that it is important to understand spirituality as a unifying concept that has the potential to be meaningful in its application to the lives of children and young people in areas of learning and wellbeing. Chapters show why and how spiritual learning should be addressed across the curriculum, with implications for the design of learning programs and environments.Recommender Systems in Fashion and Retail: Proceedings of the Third Workshop at the Recommender Systems Conference (2021) (Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering #830)
By Nima Dokoohaki, Shatha Jaradat, Humberto Jesús Corona Pampín, Reza Shirvany. 2022
This book includes the proceedings of the third workshop on recommender systems in fashion and retail (2021), and it aims…
to present a state-of-the-art view of the advancements within the field of recommendation systems with focused application to e-commerce, retail, and fashion by presenting readers with chapters covering contributions from academic as well as industrial researchers active within this emerging new field. Recommender systems are often used to solve different complex problems in this scenario, such as product recommendations, size and fit recommendations, and social media-influenced recommendations (outfits worn by influencers).This volume explores how and why we deny, or manipulate, or convert, or enhance reality. Finding it important to come…
to terms with reality, with what is there before us, and, with reality however defined, to live responsibly, this collection takes a truly multidisciplinary approach to examining the idea that history, the truth, facts, and the events of the present time can be refashioned as prismatic, theatrical, something we can play with for agendas either noble or ignoble. An international team of contributors considers the issue of how and why, in dealing what is there before us, we play with reality by employing theatre, fiction, words, conspiracy theories, alternate realities, scenarios, and art itself. Chapters delve into issues of fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life, reality TV, and positive ways of refashioning and enhancing your own reality. Drawing on examples from film studies to sociology, from the social sciences to medicine, this volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre.Hot Feminist
By Polly Vernon. 2015
Polly Vernon, Grazia columnist, Times feature writer, the artist formerly known as The Observer's Cocktail Girl provides us with a…
new perspective on feminism. THE HOT FEMINIST is an 8 chapter trip through feminism, fashion, the righteous pursuit of a sexy vibe, and what it means to be a woman when you're on the receiving end of modern media's hilariously/ bizarrely/ insanely contradictory / restrictive / reductive / sometimes just straightforward revolting notions of ladyhood.From achieving a state of empowered, enlightened hotness to a contemplation of the media's perspective on, manipulation of, and increasingly bizarre relationship with women THE HOT FEMINIST is a refreshing and empowering book for you, the thinking woman.Exploring her own life long, on-going pursuit of hotness with lessons from 'Zen and the Art of Approaching Topshop' to 'When Is It OK To Slag Off Other Women?', THE HOT FEMINIST will teach you how to seek empowerment through the way you look. This isn't about what women can't do, this is a new-age bible in what you can do, what you can think, what you can wear and what you can wax.(P)2015 Hodder & StoughtonTrust Me, I'm Dr Ozzy
By Ozzy Osbourne. 2011
By rights, Ozzy Osbourne should not be alive. He spent forty years on a hell-raising, bat-biting, ant-snorting*, drink and drug-fuelled…
bender. He broke his neck going two miles an hour on a quad bike and died twice in a chemically induced coma. And yet - at 62 years old - he is healthier and happier than ever. He is a walking medical miracle. So who better to offer the public medical advice and support? In May 2010 the Sunday Times invited 'Dr' Ozzy to be their new Agony Uncle. Since then he has answered questions ranging from dog depression to snoring to third nipples... and has also tackled more serious questions with his trademark humour and hard-won wisdom. The column has become such a phenomenon that Dr Ozzy has now decided to gather together all his advice into one handy guide. Ozzy's motto is that if he can survive and enjoy a happy and healthy life - then *anyone* can. And enjoy a very good laugh along the way. * Yes. You read that right. Ant-snorting.Verbrechen als „Bild der Zeit“: Kriminalitätsdiskurse der Weimarer Republik in Literatur, Film und Publizistik (Kriminalität in Literatur und Medien #1)
By Christof Hamann, Susanne Düwell. 2021
Während der Zeit der Weimarer Republik entsteht ein breites Spektrum an Verbrechensdarstellungen und Reflexionen über Kriminalität, das erst zum Teil…
bzw. in Einzelstudien erforscht ist. Zudem stehen vor allem ausgewählte kanonische kriminalliterarische Texte und Filme im Zentrum des Interesses. Ziel des geplanten Bandes ist es, gerade die Vielfalt und Bandbreite an Darstellungsformen und diskursiven Verhandlungen von Kriminalität zwischen 1918 und 1933 zu diskutieren und dabei literatur-, medien-, diskurs- und wissensgeschichtliche Perspektiven miteinander zu verbinden.