Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction
Author: Michael Pitts
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793636613

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man traces efforts within American feminist utopias to imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and its attending masculinities constitute an overlooked site for mining new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias gained popularity —the early 1970s to the mid-2010s—these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist conceptions of masculinity and female experience. These texts vary in their focus but share an interest in replacing patriarchal masculinities with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of alternative masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist writers present new conceptions of manhood pivotal to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American masculinity.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction
Author: Lisa Yaszek
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2023-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000826287

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is the first large-scale reference work of its kind, critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in science fiction (SF) especially—but not exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world. This global volume builds upon the traditions of interdisciplinary inquiry by connecting established topics in gender studies and science fiction studies with emergent ideas from researchers in different media. Taken together, they challenge conventional generic boundaries; provide new ways of approaching familiar texts; recover lost artists and introduce new ones; connect the revival of old, hate-based politics with the increasing visibility of imagined futures for all; and show how SF stories about new kinds of gender relations inspire new models of artistic, technoscientific, and political practice. Their chapters are grouped into five conversations—about the history of gender and genre, theoretical frameworks, subjectivities, medias and transmedialities, and transtemporalities—that are central to discussions of gender and SF in the current moment. A range of both emerging and established names in media, literature, and cultural studies engage with a huge diversity of topics including eco-criticism, animal studies, cyborg and posthumanist theory, masculinity, critical race studies, Indigenous futurisms, Black girlhood, and gaming. This is an essential resource for students and scholars studying gender, sexuality, and/or science fiction.

Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin

Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin
Author: Berit Åström
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2023
Genre: Families in literature
ISBN: 1666910465

This edited collection examines the central role that webs of kinship and families play in the fiction of N.K. Jemisin, arguing that they ca function as centers of resistance, means of oppression, or both. In doing so, Jemisin's work challenges readers to re-imagine the intimate relations of their present.

Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture

Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture
Author: Sara Martín
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031221443

This edited volume rethinks Masculinity Studies by breaking away from the notion of the perpetual crisis of masculinity. It argues that not enough has been done to distinguish patriarchy from masculinity and proposes to detox masculinity by offering a collection of positive representations of men in fictional and non-fictional texts. The editors show how ideas of hegemonic and toxic masculinity have been too fixed on the exploration of dominance and subservience, and too little on the men (and the male characters in fiction) who behave following other ethical, personal and socially accepted patterns. Bringing together research from different periods and genres, this collection provides broad, multidisciplinary insights into alternative representations of masculinity.

Out of This World

Out of This World
Author: Priscilla Dionne Layne
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810147599

Examining Afro-German artists’ use of Afrofuturist tropes to critique German racial history The term Afrofuturism was first coined in the 1990s to describe African diasporic artists’ use of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to reimagine the diaspora’s pasts and to counter not only Eurocentric prejudices but also pessimistic narratives. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism focuses on contemporary Black German Afrofuturist literature and performance that critiques Eurocentrism and, specifically, German racism and colonial history. This young generation has, Priscilla Layne argues, engaged with Afrofuturism to disrupt linear time and imagine alternative worlds, to introduce non-Western technologies into the German cultural milieu, and to consider the possibilities of posthumanism. Their experiments in futurist and speculative narratives offer new tools for breaking with the binary thinking about race, culture, and gender identity that have been enforced by repressive ideological and state apparatuses, such as educational, cultural, and police institutions. Rather than providing escapism or purely imaginary alternatives, however, they have created a space—outer and artistic—in which their lives matter.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2023-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476647461

Slow to rise in the literary world, Octavia Estelle Butler cultivated musings on earth's future, reaching massive critical acclaim in the process. This companion will complement book club discussions and classroom lessons for the closest possible readings of Butler's science fiction and her texts on racism and pollution. A maven of speculative fiction so prescient that it hovers between tocsin and prophecy, Butler survives through her print stories, essays, novels and musings on individualism and compromise. This book guides the reader on a variety of Butler pieces, from her most obscure titles to her historical entries and pieces that speculate upon science, metaphysics, linguistics, psychology, writing and religion. The text serves as a guide through the depths of Octavia Butler's works and reinforces the reasons for which her name so often appears on reading lists for higher learning.

Masculinity and Popular Television

Masculinity and Popular Television
Author: Rebecca Feasey
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-10-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0748631798

This book is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the key debates concerning the representation of masculinities in a wide range of popular television genres. The volume looks at the depiction of public masculinity in the soap opera, homosexuality in the situation comedy, the portrayal of fatherhood in prime-time animation, emerging manhood in the supernatural teen text, alternative gender roles in science fiction, male authority in the police series, masculine anxieties in the hospital drama, violence and aggression in sports coverage, ordinariness and emotional connectedness in the reality game show, and domesticity in lifestyle television. Masculinity and Popular Television examines the ways in which masculinities are being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary British and American programming, and considers the ways in which such images can be understood in relation to the 'common sense' model of the hegemonic male that is said to dominate the cultural landscape.

Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World

Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World
Author: À. Carabí
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2014-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137462566

Focusing on global examples of gender equality, this collection explores non-dominant models of masculinity that represent gender equity in pro-feminist ways. Essays explore new alternative models of masculinity by a wide variety of contemporary authors and texts, ranging from Paul Auster to Jonathan Franzen.

Seduction

Seduction
Author: Rachel O'Neill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509521593

Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation – and frequent sensationalism – for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O’Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of ‘pickup artists’ as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry’s overarching logics and internal workings.

The Will to Change

The Will to Change
Author: bell hooks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2004-01-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0743480333

From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, a timelessly necessary treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all, with a new introduction by poet Ross Gay. Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. Everyone needs to love and be loved—including men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways in which patriarchal culture keeps them from understanding themselves. In The Will to Change, bell hooks provides a compassionate guide for men of all ages and identities to understand how to be in touch with their feelings, and how to express versus repress the emotions that are a fundamental part of who we are. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. The Will to Change “creates space for men to acknowledge their traumas and heal—not only for their sake, but for the sake of everyone in their lives” (BuzzFeed).