Gender is an exciting area of current research in the medical humanities, and by combining the study of medical narratives with theories of gender and sexuality, the essays in Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative illustrate the power of gender stereotypes to shape the way medicine is practiced and perceived. The chapters of Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative investigate gendered perceptions and representations of healers and patients in fiction, memoir, popular literature, poetry, film, television, the history of science, new media, and visual art. The fourteen chapters of Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative are organized into four cohesive sections. These chapters investigate the impact of gender stereotypes on medical narratives from a variety of points of view, considering narratives from diverse languages, time periods, genres, and media. Each section addresses some of the most pressing and provocative issues in theories of gender and the medical humanities: I. Gendering the Medical Gaze and Pathology; II. Monitoring Race through Reproduction; III. Rescripting Trauma and Healing; and IV. Medical Masculinities. Along with these sections, Gender Scripts Medicine and Narrative features a preface by Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Director and Founder, The Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University, a foreword by Marcelline Block, and an introduction by Angela Laflen. This collection takes a truly interdisciplinary look at the topic of gender and medicine, and the impressive group of contributors to the anthology represent a wide range of academic fields of inquiry, including medical humanities, bioethics, English, modern languages, women's studies, film theory, postcolonial theory, art history, the history of science and medicine, new media studies, theories of trauma, among others. This approach of crossing boundaries of genre and discipline makes the volume accessible to scholars who are concerned with narrative, gender, and/or medical ethics. Click for a recent review of this title.

Gender is an exciting area of current research in the medical humanities, and by combining the study of medical narratives with theories of gender and sexuality, the essays in Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative illustrate the power of gender stereotypes to shape the way medicine is practiced and perceived. The chapters of Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative investigate gendered perceptions and representations of healers and patients in fiction, memoir, popular literature, poetry, film, television, the history of science, new media, and visual art. The fourteen chapters of Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative are organized into four cohesive sections. These chapters investigate the impact of gender stereotypes on medical narratives from a variety of points of view, considering narratives from diverse languages, time periods, genres, and media. Each section addresses some of the most pressing and provocative issues in theories of gender and the medical humanities: I. Gendering the Medical Gaze and Pathology; II. Monitoring Race through Reproduction; III. Rescripting Trauma and Healing; and IV. Medical Masculinities. Along with these sections, Gender Scripts Medicine and Narrative features a preface by Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Director and Founder, The Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University, a foreword by Marcelline Block, and an introduction by Angela Laflen. This collection takes a truly interdisciplinary look at the topic of gender and medicine, and the impressive group of contributors to the anthology represent a wide range of academic fields of inquiry, including medical humanities, bioethics, English, modern languages, women’s studies, film theory, postcolonial theory, art history, the history of science and medicine, new media studies, theories of trauma, among others. This approach of crossing boundaries of genre and discipline makes the volume accessible to scholars who are concerned with narrative, gender, and/or medical ethics. Click here for a recent review of this title.

Even a century after its conclusion, the devastation of the Great War still echoes in the work of artists who try to make sense of the political, moral, ideological, and economic changes and challenges it spawned. France, the military major power of the Western Front, carries the legacy of battles on its own soil, and countless French lives lost defending the nation from the Central Powers. It is no surprise that the impact of the First World War can still be seen in French films into the present day. French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation provides the first book-length study of World War I as it is featured in French cinema, from the silent era to contemporary films. Presented in three thematic sections—Recording and Remembering the Great War, Women at the Front, and Interrogating Commemoration—the essays in this volume explore the ways in which French film contributes to the restoration and modification of memories of the war. Films such as La Grande Illusion,King of Hearts, A Very Long Engagement, and Joyeux Noel are among those discussed in the volume’s examination of the various ways in which film mediates personal and collective memories of this critical historical event. This volume will be an invaluable resource, not only to those interested in French Cinema or the cinema of the Great War, but also to those interested in the impacts of war, more generally, on the cultural output of nations torn by the violence, death, and destruction of military conflict.

"A warm and wry epistle, the endless and near-perfect email you wish your mother, your mentor and your therapist would sit down and type out together." —Laura Kolbe, Wall Street Journal In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"—a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a “real” doctor. Accessed by thousands of readers around the world, Koven’s “Letter to a Young Female Physician” has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine. Koven tells candid and illuminating stories about her pregnancy during a grueling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her child and aging parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother, and daughter converged, and sometimes collided; the sexism, pay inequity, and harassment that women in medicine encounter; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she traces the arc of her life, Koven finds inspiration in literature and faces the near-universal challenges of burnout, body image, and balancing work with marriage and parenthood. Shining with warmth, clarity, and wisdom, Letter to a Young Female Physician reveals a woman forging her authentic identity in a modern landscape that is as overwhelming and confusing as it is exhilarating in its possibilities. Koven offers an indelible account, by turns humorous and profound, from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher, and writer who sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.

A look at African American women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror: “A compelling contribution to the scholarship on speculative cinema and television.” —Journal of American Culture When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women onscreen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.

Redrawing the Historical Past examines how multiethnic graphic novels portray and revise U.S. history. This is the first collection to focus exclusively on the interplay of history and memory in multiethnic graphic novels. Such interplay enables a new understanding of the past. The twelve essays explore Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica, Scott McCloud’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, Art Spiegelman’s post-Maus work, and G. Neri and Randy DuBurke’s Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, among many others. The collection represents an original body of criticism about recently published works that have received scant scholarly attention. The chapters confront issues of history and memory in contemporary multiethnic graphic novels, employing diverse methodologies and approaches while adhering to three main guidelines. First, using a global lens, contributors reconsider the concept of history and how it is manifest in their chosen texts. Second, contributors consider the ways in which graphic novels, as a distinct genre, can formally renovate or intervene in notions of the historical past. Third, contributors take seriously the possibilities and limitations of these historical revisions with regard to envisioning new, different, or even more positive versions of both the present and future. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that graphic novelists use the open and flexible space of the graphic narrative page—in which readers can move not only forward but also backward, upward, downward, and in several other directions—to present history as an open realm of struggle that is continually being revised. Contributors: Frederick Luis Aldama, Julie Buckner Armstrong, Katharine Capshaw, Monica Chiu, Jennifer Glaser, Taylor Hagood, Caroline Kyungah Hong, Angela Lafien, Catherine H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Jorge Santos.

Versatile, trendy, and resilient, the global cosmetic surgery industry shows no signs of decline, especially with its promises, not just of aesthetic improvement, but of absolute transformation. Introducing the concept of "surface imagination," Rachel Hurst discusses the fantasy that a change to the exterior will enhance the interior, or that the outside is more significant because it fashions the inside. Drawing on psychoanalysis, feminist theory, popular culture, the history of medicine, and interviews with women who have undergone cosmetic procedures, Hurst explores the tensions between the two primary surfaces of cosmetic surgery: the photograph and the skin. The photograph, an idealized surface for envisioning the effects of cosmetic surgery, allows for speculation and retouching, predictably and without pain. The skin, on the other hand, is a recalcitrant surface that records the passage of time and heals unpredictably. Ultimately, Hurst argues, the fantasy of surface imagination corroborates the belief that one's body is mutable and controllable, and that control over one's body permits control over one's social, emotional, and mental suffering. Acknowledging the varied experiences and opinions of the patients interviewed, but also critiquing the promises made by the industry, Surface Imaginations develops an innovative approach to thinking about cosmetic surgical transformations through the seduction of surfaces.

"The Cinderella Complex" offers women a real opportunity to achieve the emotional independence that means so much more than a new job or a new love. It can help you no matter what your age or your goals. You cannot read it without changing the way you think - and maybe the way you live.

Beginning in 1800, Looking at Men explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau idéal. This ideal of the virile body derived from the athletic perfection found in the classical male nude. The study of human anatomy and dissection in both art and medicine underpinned a modern gladiatorial ideal, its representations setting the parameters not just of 'normal' virile masculinity but also its abject 'other'. Through the shared violence of human dissection and martial arts, male artists and medics secured their professional privilege and authority on the bodies of 'roughs'. First and foremost visual, this process has literary parallels in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. While embodying signs of dominant power and signalling differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, the virile masculine ideal contained its shadow, the threat of loss, of a Darwinian 'degeneration' that required vigilant intervention to ensure the health of nations. Anthea Callen's lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by Géricault, Courbet, Dalou and Bazille through to Eakins, Thornycroft, Leighton and Tonks, and includes images that draw on photography and the popular visual cultures of boxing, wrestling and bodybuilding. Callen reassesses ideas of the modern male body and virile manhood in this exploration of the heteronormative, the homosocial and the homoerotic in art, anatomy and nascent anthropology.

An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010