Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

The religious life of Native Americans is a panorma featuring an immense diversity of beliefs, cermonies, and ways of life. Native Religions of North Ameria reflects this rich tradition as it admirably distills a complex subject in a practical and engaging manner. Through concise expression and careful choice of examples, Hultkrantz identifies the diversity and continuities in American Indian spirituality. He introduces the hunters and farmers, the past and presents, and the physical contexts and the sublime speculations of tribal religions, even the subtle shades of meaning within an Indian community. --

Demonstrates that gender as a metaphor has had an exceptionally vigorous life in the history of biological and medical sciences.

Focusing on fifty girls enrolled in a model public school program for pregnant teens, Luttrell explores how pregnant girls experience society's view of them and also considers how these girls view themselves and the choices they've made. Also includes an 8-page color insert.

Irene Diamond has written a passionate and provocative book that challenges the feminist movement to step beyond its preconceptions. . . . We desperately need this synthesis. -from the Foreword by Starhaw In a wide-ranging critique of Western thought and practice, ecofeminist Irene Diamond raises unsettling questions about the ethic of control that permeates how we think about fertility, sexuality, agriculture, and the environment.

In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place to allow such a transformation to occur? How does it alter our understanding of memory and emotion if these assail us in the form of ghosts rather than as attributes of subjective experience? What does it mean to worship deities who are afflictive and capricious, yet bear an intimate relationship to justice? What is a "human" body if it can be taken over by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be "claimed" in this manner? What is gender if, while possessed, a woman is a woman no longer? Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, Ram concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the domain of the exotic, Ram uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships. In doing so, she uncovers fundamental instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, human agency, and political emancipation. Fertile Disorder interrogates the modern assumptions about gender, agency, and subjectivity that underlie the social improvement projects circulating in Tamil Nadu, assumptions that directly shape people’s lives. The book pays particular attention to projects of family planning, development, reform, and emancipation. Combining ethnography with philosophical argument, Ram fashions alternatives to standard post-modernist and post-structuralist formulations. Grounded in decades of fieldwork, ambitious and wide ranging, her work is conceived as a journey that makes incursions into the unfamiliar, then returns us to the familiar. She argues that magic is not a monopoly of any one culture, historical period, or social formation but inhabits modernity—not only in the places, such as cinema and sound recording, where it is commonly looked for, but in "habit" and in aspects of everyday life that have been largely overlooked and shunned. Fertile Disorder will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in anthropology, religion, gender studies, subaltern studies, and post colonial theory.

Women battling infertility is a familiar though still harrowing story these days. Women using yoga to reduce stress and become more aware of its body and its rhythms is another. So it comes as no surprise that yoga is helping women to cope with the physical and emotional stress of infertility and its treatments.

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.

An intensely personal novel that plays itself out in a closed and intimate circle. It is a study of jealousy, suspicion and love within a family. The most explosive passions are presented with the greatest delicacy and most consummate artistry.