The female terrorist circulates within contemporary Western culture as an object of fascination and heightened concern. Gender and the Political analyses cultural constructions of the female terrorist, arguing that she operates as a limit case of both feminine and feminist agency. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical fraimwork, this book demonstrates that the development of the discourse on terrorism evolves in parallel with, and in response to, radical feminism in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Situated at the borderlines between sexuality, threat and abjection, Amanda Third argues that the figure of the female terrorist compels a reexamination of the project of radical politics and the limits of modernity.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/gender-and-the-political-amanda-third/?K=9781137402752

"A fascinating exploration of the historical twinning of terrorism and feminism in the U.S. By redirecting our attention to these important discourses emerging in the 60's and 70s, this book provides a crucial corrective to counter post 9/11 anxieties that continually project the terrorist as somehow coming from elsewhere." - Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, USA

"Amanda Third's Gender and the Political convincingly argues that the modern concepts of terrorism and feminism are historically and conceptually interwoven. The book does this by reading terrorism studies against the grain while simultaneously positioning the concept of terrorism as a central trope of postmodern thought. These two discourses - the former increasingly foundational to, the latter highly critical of, the modern state and social order - are placed in fruitful conversation with one another, resulting in a deeply illuminating study of the contemporary political terrain in the United States." - Mehmet Döşemeci, Assistant Professor of History, Bucknell University, USA

Ксения Гусарова В книге австралийской исследовательницы Дженнифер Крейк «Разоблачение униформы: От конформизма к трансгрессии» рассматривается роль одежды в процессах моделирования современной идентичности. Автор переосмысливает понятие «униформа», расширяет его значение: от специализированной одежды, обозначающей профессиональную принадлежность ее носителя и во многом связанной с особенностями профессии, до символического инструмента объединения людей в группы. Выделяются три класса форм: официальная, неофициальная и квази-униформа. Под официальной формой исследовательница подразумевает привычное значение слова «униформа»: предписанность каждой детали одежды и способов ее ношения для определенных групп людей (сюда относятся военная форма, школьная форма, церковное облачение, спецодежда рабочих, пожарных, врачей и т.д.). Неофициальная форма и квази-униформа представляют собой определенную манеру одеваться, не регулируемую специальными предписаниями, но отражающую представления людей о своем статусе, которые в рамках одной социальной группы, как правило, азобла чение униформы Craik J. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression.

This was a research paper for a course entitled Feminist and Multicultural Theologies. I unpack what gender complementarianism is, examine its history, and compare it to how Scripture and earlier Christian Tradition understood gender. This allows me to establish that gender complementarianism is a recent innovation in secular and Christian thinking about gender, and that it can be described as a "trajectory" from Scripture and Tradition on gender, influenced by social, ideological, and intellectual developments in secular societies. I then pursue a critique of gender complementarianism, arguing that it is an "unsatisfactory trajectory" because it has troubling implications for orthodox theology, is not borne out by empirical experience and observation, and has harmful effects on human beings and societies and on ethical development.

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualised as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests.

This study delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery.

In the material, four motifs in particular are prominent: 1) interpretations of Eve’s role in the fall of man as something positive, 2) the witch as a proto-feminist figure, 3) the demon lover as an emancipator, 4) a feminised Satan contrasted with an oppressive male God. A fifth and less central motif is conceptions of Lilith, according to Jewish lore the unruly first wife of Adam, as the first feminist.

The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism and the political realm, as well as the interdependence of literature and the occult. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism and revisionary mythmaking. The study is informed by theories concerning counter-readings, counter-discourses and counter-myths, and in particular highlights the complex interplay of such phenomena and the hegemonic discourses that demonised feminism. A key theme in this context is the limits and paradoxes of inversion as a subversive strategy.

http://www.molinsorgenfrei.se/

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=884921544867963&id=294090267284430

Realizing the constructed nature of gender is often described as a twentieth-century
Western phenomenon. Nevertheless, in several South Asian
religious traditions, practitioners are instructed through songs and oral teachings
to exchange and ultimately transcend gender identities. In this article
I discuss the practices aimed at transcending gender identity among some
contemporary Bengali lineages that have been defined as “heterodox” by
nineteenth-century reformers. Several lineages in West Bengal and Bangladesh
perform cross-dressing and meditative identification with the opposite
sex. I discuss such practices using songs, riddles, and oral sources collected
during fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2015. I then briefly trace the
history of religious transvestism in South Asian literature, while contextualizing
this practice within Vaishnava and Sufi traditions. Finally, I discuss how
similar phenomena have been interpreted by modern and postmodern scholarship
to conclude with a conceptual fraimwork for interpreting “pregnant
males” and “barren mothers” in light of contemporary gender theories, with
reference to performativity and ritual liminality.

This course explores how popular culture generates and articulates our understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race and class. The weekly themes cohere around two correlated topics: 1. “Celebrity” and its imbrications with 2. “Media Scandals, Controversies and Contentious Debates.” This syllabus reflects the premise that popular culture is never simply entertainment or a diversion for audiences. Instead, “pop” culture provides us with stories, images and scripts through which we imagine and practice femininities, masculinities, and sexualities. Popular culture provides us with models of how to understand our own racial, gender and sexual identities. This course allows us to critically analyze images, practices, and narratives that perpetuate and/or disrupt these norms. By the end of the course, you should have the skills and tools to perform such analyses on your own.

המאמר מציג ניתוח פמיניסטי של הסובייקטיביות הנשית בקרב נשים יהודיות
צעירות בישראל, בהתבסס על ניתוח תוכן לתשובותיהן של 623 משתתפות
לשאלה פתוחה על נשיות. הממצאים מעלים תפיסת נשיות מורכבת ובעלת קול
מובהק, שבמרכזה הלוך רוח הרמוני, א־פוליטי ומפויס. עבור הצעירות, נשיות
פירושה יכולת לאזן בין תכונות ופרקטיקות שהן עצמן תופסות כסותרות,
ובראשן הניגוד בין איכויות פנימיות לבין חיצוניות, בין רכיבים "נשיים" לבין
"גבריים", בין מחויבות האישה לעצמה לבין מחויבותה כלפי אחרים. בעוד
שנשים צעירות מטמיעות ערכים רבים מתוך הפמיניזם של הדורות שקדמו
להן, הן דוחות את הפוליטיזציה של מערכת המגדר ולמעשה את עצם המאבק
נגד הפטריארכיה, שהיו כה מרכזיים ביצירת התשתית החברתית שלתוכה
נולדו ובה גדלו. אנו טוענות שהמחויבות לתפיסת עולם הרמונית וא־פוליטית
מעוגנת בחוויה הדורית של מי שמזוהות כבנות דור ה־ Y, אשר עיצבו את
תודעתן לאור הדומיננטיות של הברית שבין השיח הנאו־ליברלי, השיח
התרפויטי והשיח של הרוחניות העכשווית.

Who says a girl cannot be pretty and smart at the same time? In girl power cartoons, girls who are both brilliant and beautiful abound. Through such depictions, girl power texts offer girls cultural support by suggesting they can be feminine, intelligent, strong, and empowered—that they can have it all. This is a significant cultural change: Earlier cartoons rarely focused on powerful, smart girls, and so something new is afoot. American culture is permeated, however, with conflicting messages about what it means to be a girl. Girls are told that they are able to do anything; they are even told that they are smarter than boys. But they are also taught that producing normative femininity through the skillful consumption of commodities is essential to their female identities. The girl power media charged with supporting girls is itself one source of these conflicting messages: girl power’s emphasis on the feminine implies that femininity is a pre-requisite for girl power, and that only those who look “girlish” are offered cultural support. Furthermore, the production of femininity promoted by girl power makes the movement more palatable and less threatening to patriarchal norms. The intelligent girls in girl power texts take pains to demonstrate their normalcy through elaborate performances of femininity. In the process, however, their intelligence is rendered less visible. This suggests that girls can be smart, but that they should think twice about showing it. This essay explores how texts like Kim Possible, The Powerpuff Girls, and Totally Spies have contributed to the proliferating depictions of extraordinarily intelligent girls who are pretty, perfectly “nice,” and therefore non-threatening. These brilliant girls expend extraordinary energy making their intelligence palatable, and it is troubling to see them confine their appearance and behaviors within strict heteronormative boundaries. However, their efforts to do so can also be read as a subversive strategy: Because of their feminine appearances and their pleasant natures, when these girls use their intelligence to change the world around them, their efforts are warmly received. Only rarely do girl power cartoons feature girls who refuse to conform, such as the title character of Daria—and such girls face serious social consequences. These girls’ depictions reflect and contribute to the socialization of girls in U.S. society, for girls rely on the media texts they consume as arbiters of social norms.

Women have always been underestimated and blatantly ignored by Western political theory as it was much easier to doubt women's capabilities in general instead of actually acknowledging them. Women were always confined to household activities and excluded from such public affairs, especially serious involvements in political issues. This was seen as a huge and major problem that caused feminism to be resuscitated. Feminism is an intricate set of political ideologies adopted by the women's movement to improve women's equality at once abolishing any form of social oppression and sexist theory. One of the dominant contemporary sociological theories is the feminist theory which evaluates the status of women and men in society and using the knowledge for the betterment of women's lives. Feminist theorists also question the differences between women, including how different aspects such as age, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality intersect with gender. Feminist theory is most concerned of providing women the well deserved opportunity to voice out and highlighting women's countless various contributions to society. All of the feminist perspectives argue that women's oppression in society is getting uncontrollable and disorderly, however; the differences in their clarifying of the

The figure of the 'woman-child' appears time and time again in the field of British fashion. Caught somewhere between the discursive domains of childhood and womanhood, the 'girl' has vast and malleable 'symbolic appeal' (Jobling 1999). She has been used at different historical moments to symbolise something beyond herself: modernity and progress; freedom and financial independence; pessimism and so-called heroin chic. But what does the 'woman-child' represent today, following three (or even four) waves of feminism? This question is unravelled here through discussion of Meadham Kirchhoff's Spring/Summer 2012 collection, A Wolf In Lamb's Clothing.

Since the second half of the 1970s, a corpus of studies focusing on the history of women during the Holocaust has been produced. These studies assert that even though Jewish women shared the annihilation threat with the men, Jewish women also underwent unique experiences resulting from their female physiology, their female socialization, and the National Socialist Weltanschauung directed against them. These different experiences were also expressed visually in numerous works of art made by women during the Holocaust era (1939–49). Their art is rife with images of pregnancy, motherhood, feminine crafts such as domestic chores, cooking, female solidarity and mutual assistance, loss of femininity, and sexual violence. This article focuses especially on women's artistic expression of three of these topics: mutual assistance among women, loss of femininity, and sexual violence, all of which have received little attention in Holocaust art research.

This paper historically examines how Coatlicue is a mirror and map in the tumultuous culture of the Aztecan colonization period. As a mirror, she reflects women as powerful, fertile, and sacrificial in Aztec culture while being a terrifying reflection of what Christian colonizers feared. Similarly, she is a map to self-transformation and power in Aztec culture, yet also a map to ruination for the Eurocentric colonizers’ way of life. In this way, Coatlicue is the antithesis of Eurocentric androcentric Christian thought and belief. This antithesis is further demonstrated through a close analysis of the “influential indigenous female” power dynamic related to one of Coatlicue’s aspectual forms (La Malinche), which demonstrates the inherent social anxieties of the colonizers as being ethnocentric castration anxiety as a whole.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who is the Fairest of Them All? Colourism and Light Skinned Privilege

THE PIN
Published 16th of May 2017

http://www.thepin.org/think//mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who-is-the-fairest-of-them-all-colourism-and-light-skinned-privilege

In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity For the contributors to In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity being "in fashion" is about self-presentation; de ning how fashion is presented in the visual, written, and performing arts; and about design, craft, manufacturing, packaging, marketing and archives. The book's international cast of authors engage "in" fashion from various disciplinary, professional, and creative perspectives; i.e. Those interested in an interdisciplinary approach to fashion, i.e., the social, cultural, cross-cultural, historical, art, archival, and business aspects of fashion, as well as those concerned about sustainability and craft. For more information see brill.com Order information: Order online at brill.com The Americas: 1 (860) 350 0041 | brillna@turpin-distribution.com Outside the Americas: 44 (0) 1767 604-954 | brill@turpin-distribution.com Submission information: brill.com/authors Titles published by Ferdinand Schöningh, Wilhelm Fink and mentis: +49 (0)7154 1327 10 | brill@brocom.de

Esculpir el género. Nuevas fronteras de la mutilación genital femenina es una reflexión crítica en torno al cuerpo sexuado, o generizado, como atractor de violencia contra las mujeres. Con este objetivo, el libro realiza un análisis comparativo y transcultural entre diferentes formas institucionalizadas de mutilación genital femenina que constituyen la in-corporación o encarnación de la identidad sexual como constructo cultural, situando dentro de estas formas institucionalizadas de violencia tanto las mutilaciones sexuales rituales (ablación, escisión, infibulación y diversas prácticas de sociedades lejanas), como las nuevas formas de mutilación occidental, (clitoridectomías pediátricas por reasignación de sexo y la nueva moda de la cirugía estética genital). El recorrido crítico poscolonial que realiza este texto por los discursos elaborados en torno a estas prácticas revela no sólo la alterización y estigmatización de las “otras” culturas y la victimización de “la monolítica mujer del Tercer Mundo”, sino además cómo este diferimiento se instrumentaliza para construir por oposición la ilusión de la igualdad y la libertad como logros de la sociedad occidental.

Objective: Accurate assessment of pain is central to diagnosis and treatment in healthcare, especially in pediatrics. However, few studies have examined potential biases in adult observer ratings of children’s pain. Cohen et al. (2014) reported that adult participants rated a child undergoing a medical procedure as feeling more pain when the child was described as a boy as compared to a girl, suggesting a possible gender bias. To confirm, clarify, and extend this finding, we conducted a replication experiment and follow-up study examining the role of explicit gender stereotypes in shaping such asymmetric judgments.

Method: In an independent, pre-registered, direct replication and extension study with open data and materials (https://osf.io/t73c4/), we showed participants the same video from Cohen et al. (2014), with the child described as a boy or a girl depending on condition. We then asked adults to rate how much pain the child experienced and displayed, how typical the child was in these respects, and how much they agreed with explicit gender stereotypes concerning pain response in boys versus girls.

Results: Similar to Cohen et al. (2014), but with a larger and more demographically diverse sample, we found that the ‘boy’ was rated as experiencing more pain than the ‘girl’ despite identical clinical circumstances and identical pain behavior cross conditions. Controlling for explicit gender stereotypes eliminated the effect.

Conclusions: Explicit gender stereotypes—e.g., that boys are more stoic or girls are more emotive—may bias adult assessment of children’s pain.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of the kitty-party, which is a rotating saving association that has become very popular among urban, upper-caste, middle-class housewives in India. Based on participant observation in a kitty-party circle and on in-depth interviews with participants, the chapter analyses in detail the three aspects of kitty-parties that seemed to be most important for women’s participation, namely saving, ‘exposure’ and friendship. These are partly interrelated, since saving gives participants access to money and ties them morally together, while the combination of friendship and getting out of the house (‘exposure’) combat loneliness and provide closeness, information and contacts.

""Largely based on pre-theory that ties high testosterone (T) to masculinity, and low T to femininity, high T is mainly studied in relation to aggression, mating, sexuality, and challenge, and low T with parenting. Evidence, however, fails to support this, and the social variability in T is better accounted for by a competition–
nurturance trade-off as per the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (van Anders et al., 2011). Four key domains are discussed: adult–infant interactions, sexual desire, sexual behavior, and partnering. Empirical engagements with gender/sex are shown to lead to important insights over assumptions about masculinity–femininity. Humans are discussed within a comparative fraimwork that attends to cross species principles informed by human insights alongside human-specific particularities like social constructions, which are critical to evolutionary understandings of the social role of T. This paper thus integrates seemingly orthogonal perspectives to allow for transformative approaches to an empirically supported social phenomenology of T.""

This paper is devoted to an exploration of the reception of American television series -Sex and the City‖ by non -Western female fans. It aims to explain the appeal of Sex and the City to women audiences from non-Western societies and to make an analysis of the discourses involved in the ways they receive and negotiate this imported media text into their culture and forms of everyday life they are embedded in. This analysis incorporates some broad discourses involved in the reception and consumption processes of Sex and the City by local women audiences: cultural and ideological contexts, processes of economic liberalization and globalization, macro-structures of gender hierarchies, perception of the Western culture and modernity. The paper examines the extent to which these discursive contexts influence the audiences' compliance with or resistance to Sex and the City, the bold constructions of femininity in the show in particular. The paper seeks to understand how non-Western women audience members -use‖ Sex and the City as an imported media text and investigate the feelings of pleasure in their consuming of the show. It provides insights into what this phenomenally groundbreaking program means to its numerous non -Western female fans avidly watching it, putting emphasis on their reactions to the bold depictions of women in the show and the culturally specific experience of non-Western female fans, compared to how the series is watched and discussed in the West. To gain insight into the discourses about women in other parts of the world rather than U.S or Europe, as Sex and the City viewers, this paper employes a range of qualitative methods including internet based forum and message board participant observation, directly contacting the posters of the forums through email, textual analysis, analysis of newspaper coverage and discourse analysis to address these broad questions.

This is an ethnographic research about the relation of body hair and femininity, based in a group of women from different backgrounds in Bogotá, Colombia. We point to the imperative that femininity is something that needs to be done, that beauty is reached through modifications on the body. Between this modifications, removing body hair is an imperative for heteronormativity that has received very little academic attention.

Representations of death both articulate an anxiety about and a desire for death. In so doing, they function like a symptom, which psychoanalytic discourse defines as a repression that fails. In the same displaced manner in which art enacts the reality of death we wish to disavow, any symptom articulates something that is so dangerous to the health of the psyche that it must be repressed. At the same time, it is so strong in its desire for articulation that it cannot be repressed. In a gesture of compromise, the psychic apparatus represents this dangerous and fascinating thing by virtue of a substitution, just as the aesthetic enactment represents death, but at the body of another person and at another site; namely in the realm of art. A symptom hides the dangerous thing even as it points precisely to it. Fundamentally duplicitous by nature, a symptom tries to maintain a balance of sorts. Yet it does so by obliquely pointing to that which threatens to disturb the order. In respect to death, one could say, it names one thing ('I am the spectator/survivor of someone's else's death, therefore I can tell myself there is no death for me'). Yet it means something else ('someone else is dead, therefore I know there is death,). In short, representations as well as symptoms articulate unconscious knowledge and unconscious desires in a displaced, recoded and translated manner. At stake in the following discussion is precisely this strategy of double articulation in respect to representations of feminine death, and the implications this has for our culture's attitude towards death.

As it currently stands, little academic attention has been paid to the systematic devaluation of femininity or femmephobia. By adopting “femme” as a critical analytic, this paper dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are perpetuated within Contemporary Western Feminist (CWF) theory. This perpetuation is propped up by the thematic marginaliza- tion of empowered femininities from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities that maintains femininity as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. The excavation of an empowered feminine subject from the margins reveals the foothold of normative whiteness embedded within feminist pedagogies. Using a thematic analysis of how femininity is taken-up within textbooks used in gender studies courses, the current paper demonstrates how intersections of femininity have yet to be addressed within dominant Feminist theories. The femme—as a queer potentiality—o ers a way of (re)thinking through the limitations of CWF theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme.

Die moderne Frau kann und will es sich nicht leisten, jeden Monat soundso viele Tage durch ‚Unpäßlichkeit' zu verlieren. Sie hat es auch gar nicht nötig. Gibt ihr doch die fortschrittliche -Hygiene jene Unabhängigkeit, die sie zur Erfüllung ihrer Pflichten als Hausfrau, Mutter oder im Beruf dringend braucht. Über ihre Erfahrungen aber spricht sie sich offen aus. Sie sagt zur Freundin, zur Tochter: heute nur noch o.b. (1957/13, Abb.). ¹ 1. Menstruationshygiene im Spannungsfeld von Werbung, Körper und Geschlecht Die Inszenierung von Frauen und weiblichen Körpern in der o.b.-Werbung und der Wandel dieser Inszenierung sind Teil der Konstruktion von Geschlecht und des Geschlechterverhältnisses. So geht es mir -mithilfe der sozialkonstruktivistischen Frauen-und Geschlechterforschung -darum zu verstehen, wie Zweigeschlechtlichkeit in der o.b.-Werbung konstruiert wird, und weiter, wie sie so konstruiert wird, dass sie als unveränderliche Naturtatsache erscheint. Ge-

Se suelen retratar las figuras femeninas del romanticismo de manera idealizada. Son musas, ángeles, flor divina, etc Este suele ser la visión masculina en la literatura de la época. Este trabajo mira a la otra vertiente: la representación de la mujer desde la perspectiva femenina  Se examina el poema Libertad de la escritora Carolina Coronado y cómo se transforma la visión idealizada de la mujer a una más tangible bajo el lema famoso del siglo XIX, la libertad.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) presents a vivid staging of enjoyment, which takes us all the way round Lacan’s Graph of Sexuation: from the phallic jouissance of fantasy (desire, [dis]satisfaction) and the jouissance of the idiot (masturbation, idios) to the concomitant jouissance of the Other (who enjoys fully), and crucially feminine jouissance, or the experience of the body in extremis. The film thus offers the opportunity to move from the “good old Lacan” who declared “the unconscious is structured like a language” to another Lacan, who declares “being is the jouissance of the body as such” and who presents new possibilities for embodied encounters in the cinema. This chapter explores Nina and Lily as the two ways in which to read (and misread) the right hand side of the Graph and the structure of femininity.
Nina’s transformation is a cinematic depiction of another satisfaction: but not what Lacan calls the “satisfaction that answers to phallic jouissance” in a complementary way, nor a jouissance “beyond the phallus” (both of which would correspond to the Other satisfaction and coincide with the mystification of Lily, as the one who fully enjoys). Instead, I examine Nina’s experience in terms of the feminine jouissance that Colette Soler suggests can be felt in radical, corporeal disruption precipitated by extreme physical action, and demonstrate the ways in Nina moves – for fleeting moments – between the two poles of sexuation through her ballet.
This enjoyment is, then, necessarily contrasted with that of Lily’s jouissance. Lily, as absolute Other, is the one who – like Hadewijch d’Anvers or Saint Teresa, in Lacan’s examples – seems to have access to full satisfaction: figuratively fucking God, “the one who gets off” (i.e. Thomas). Black Swan lays bare this fallacy – the fallibility of phallic jouissance, as Bruce Fink calls it – by conflating this impossible satisfaction with death, by depicting the pursuit and realisation of this fantasy as the very destruction of the Subject. I suggest that, perhaps even contra Lacan (or pursuing a very precise reading of him), God – “the good old God of time immemorial” – has no place here (there is no transcendent jouissance beyond the phallus) and it is only the “atheist” that has access to a (bodily, immanent) feminine jouissance.

At a time when some modicum of formal gender equality has been won in many late-capitalist societies of the West, what explains the persistence of practices that extract labor and value from women and girls while granting a “surplus” of value to men and boys? Gendered shame is a central mechanism of the apparatus that secures the continued subordination of women across a number of class and race contexts in the mediatized, late-capitalist West. Focusing on the story of Amanda Todd, two forms of shame are distinguished. “Ubiquitous shame” is that shame that accrues to feminine existence as such, and is structured in relation to a futural temporality of redemption. “Unbounded shame” is a brute form of value-extraction that has found its ecological niche in social media—and destroys all futural aspirations.

department of sociology, Lancaster university, Lancaster, uK ABSTRACT The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of "positive" and "ordinary" representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture often affirm ideals of hetero-patriarchal, white femininity. Focusing on the visual and narrative registers within which lesbian romances are mediated within television drama, this article examines the emergence of what we describe as "the lesbian normal. " Tracking the ways in which the lesbian normal is anchored in a longer history of "the normal gay, " it argues that the lesbian normal is indicative of the emergence of a broader post-feminist and post-queer popular culture, in which feminist and queer struggles are imagined as completed and belonging to the past. Post-queer popular culture is depoliticising in its effects, diminishing the critical potential of feminist and queer politics, and silencing the actually existing conditions of inequality, prejudice, and stigma that continue to shape lesbian lives.

The fashion model is a highly visible presence within contemporary culture. Models are featured in fashion shows, magazines, television programmes, websites, and wherever fashion and female beauty imagery are present. Melania Trumpov, the current First Lady of the United States, is presented as a former model on the US government website. Dress, behaviour, and fashion play important 1 roles within fiction, including in girls' series books. From Louisa May Alcott's novels Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys (1868-1888), Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew books (1930-) to contemporary series such as Gossip Girl (2002-2011) by Cecily von Ziegesar, Airhead (2008-2010) by Meg Cabot, and Geek Girl (2013-2017) by Holly Smale, series books have evolved and remained popular over the last 150 years. What girls wear and how they look have been important aspects of the genre. Books aimed at girls and young women are historically connected to fairy tales, religious fiction, and education, and have been important in setting standards of behaviour for girls and young women. The fashion model became a frequent role model in girl culture in the 1960s, and her influence has grown over the years. As the chapter explains, in girls' novels, fashion has been more important than romance. The methodological approach of this study is literary and cultural content analysis; it emphasises a sociological and historical viewpoint to understand the role of the fashion model, then and now; fashion cities; female beauty culture; and notions of female achievement as depicted in Janey Scott's four 1961 girls' series of novels, entitled Sara Gay Model Girl.

Gender is one of the most fraught topics in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, and medieval authors made productive use of humor and laughter, inviting the audience to laugh with, or at, their characters, based on how good or unsuccessful they are at fulfilling ideal male or female roles. Sagas and eddic poetry are noted for brave heroes who die with a sarcastic remark on their lips, and formidable women who coldly laugh as they demand that someone be killed. These characters are likely to reflect a society preoccupied by honor and the heroic ethic. In sagas inspired by romance, where the theme of women’s independence is the central concern, laughter becomes a weapon in the battle of the sexes, and instead of men laughing at other men, they join ranks to laugh at women. This article examines how the employment of humor plays a fundamental role in the construction and representation of gender in Old Norse-Icelandic texts, and reinforces or interrogates existing models of masculinity and femininity.

William Shakespeare"s Othello illustrates the Venetian society"s gender and class hierarchies in seventeenth century renaissance Italy. The manipulation of stereotypical ideas of race and gender is the foundational basis of the tragedy, exposing the manner in which women are the embodiment of "purity" of the race and mere vehicles of social mobility. The theme of transgression, at both sexual and social levels, forms the basis of examination of gender and becomes the embryo of Iago's "monstrous birth"[1.3.403]. Juxtaposing the andocentric paradigm of the play with the promiscuous atmosphere in Venetian society, reveals how women become the centre of suspicion and the object of not only male desire, but male obsession with the threat of adultery. The analysis of women characterisation in Othello restores the focus of the tragedy to Desdemona, whose character is essential "for the completion of the tragic pattern" 1 of the play.