Fifty years of feminist thought have made the idea that women stay at home while men dominate the streets seem outdated; nevertheless, Ceuterick argues that theoretical considerations of gender, space, and power in film theory remain limited by binary models. Looking instead to more fluid models of spatial relations inspired by Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Doreen Massey, this book discovers wilful, affirmative, and imaginative activations of gender on screen. Through close, micro-analysis of historic European Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979) and contemporary world cinema: Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002), Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012), and Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), this book identifies affirmative aesthetics: light, texture, rhythm, movement and sound, all of which that participate in a rewriting of bodies and spaces. Ultimately, Ceuterick argues, affirmative aesthetics can challenge the gender categories and power structures that have been thought to determine our habitation of cars, homes, and city streets. Wilful women drive this book forward, through their movement and stillness, imagination and desire, performance and abjection.

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre.

This book explores the challenges facing women from their mid-forties as they attempt to build/maintain careers in the screen industries. Essays are concerned with the intersection of gender and age on screen and behind the camera and how that can create a ‘double jeopardy’. Existing research in this area has been primarily directed to onscreen representation. Female actors, with notable exceptions, struggle to get screen time and expansive roles as they age. Behind the camera, women 45+ also face challenges and roadblocks; to date, less attention has been directed to this group. The cross-cultural research in this collection offers an analysis of representation, on and off screen, touching on film, television, streaming services and film festivals. It includes an exploration of gendered ageism, age bias and stereotyping. It also highlights the achievements of mature female practitioners who, in their work and working lives, embody a resistance to restrictive cultural discourses about ageing women.

Although film and media studies have widely engaged with the different aspects of social space, domestic space in film has rarely been studied in its multiple dimensions. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical disciplines - and with case studies of directors such as Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis, Todd Haynes, Amos Gitai, Martin Ritt, John Ford, Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine - this book goes beyond the representational approach to the analysis of domestic space in cinema, in order to look at it as a dispositif. Adopting this innovative two-fold approach that couples representation and dispositif, the home is studied as an architecture, as the place that embodies, defines and perpetuates the family history, as the milieu of gender and generational struggle, as well as the first site where manifestations of power unfold. All chapters contribute to explore, unpack the complexities and expand on the richness encapsulated in the notion of domesticity and dwelling in its fascinating relation to moving images.

Examining the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of artificial life.

In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist--who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society--challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender: --why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships; --why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies; --why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves; --why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker; --why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income; --why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions; --why women have not benefited from major social revolutions. Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality--to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power.

An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Today Fanny Burney's venture into authorship would not be questionable. She was, after all, a daughter of a celebrated musician, and the Burney family was know to the circle of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. Yet as Kristina Straub ably shows, the public recognition which followed the publication of her first novel placed Fanny Burney in a situation of disturbing ambiguity. Did she become famous or notorious? Was she a prodigy or a freak? In this study of Burney, Straub not only describes and analyzes the disturbing transition of a writer's self-awareness as a woman and a literary artist from private to public terms, but also reveals in Burney's works a hitherto unacknowledged complexity."

This highly engaging analysis of the contemporary, global social and political landscape of trans antagonisms draws specific attention to ""gender-critical” mobilizations of Simone de Beauvoir's account of becoming a woman in The Second Sex to advance and justify trans exclusionary positions. Through a careful examination and application of Beauvoir's philosophical and political commitments, Becoming a Woman compellingly explores the significance of her notion of becoming as not only affirmative of trans women, but also as an ethical demand to affirm trans possibilities. More than a reply to gender-critical readings of Beauvoir, this book develops an original, Beauvoirian ethics of gender affirmation offering that show why we ought to challenge trans exclusion and anti-trans movements.

The cultural change denominated as “the new normal” goes far beyond the adaptation to habits like physical distancing, limited person-to-person contact, teleworking, and self-isolation established with the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of significant transformations in human behavior spreads today in societies all around the world: physical intimacy decreases while virtual reality expands and alterity declines while artificial intelligence emerges, leading to structural reconfigurations of sex, relationships, gender awareness, and subjectivity. Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World explores this new cultural atmosphere through twelve interdisciplinary essays questioning global governmentality and challenging the biopolitics of the new normal—the administration of self-control societies so politically correct that repressed desire for otherness only finds a simulation of its satisfaction with the forced abnormality, outrageousness, and violence of mainstream porn—, going from ars erotica to alternative pornography, from online dating to gender fluidity, from LGBTQI+ artivism to sex life cultivation, and more.