It's about style, it's about grace . . . it's about how to handle the human race.You may have heard of the metrosexual, the modern urban male for whom appearance and lifestyle are paramount. Now meet the petrosexual-the canine with the chic leather collar, the Corbu dog bed, and the right moves to control his human owner. For ordinary dogs who haven't yet achieved this extraordinary status, Petrosexual is the ultimate guide to becoming a furry fashionista.Sterling Sugar Magnolia, the sassy pup who narrates the book, offers highly opinionated views on everything from personal hygiene to commitment issues, from holiday garb ("Seasonal frou-frou will never be in fashion.") to human food ("Too divine. Too easy to overindulge."). Collars vs. harnesses? "Harnesses can make one look quite pudgy, if one is not careful." Where to sleep? "Do not, under any circumstances, allow your human to think it is okay for you to sleep on the floor." Filled with dire warnings about "fashion faux paws," hilarious "do and don't" photographs, and hundreds of tips for mutts who are panting for a fashion and lifestyle makeover, this exceptionally clever and colorful advice book is the perfect gift for the dog-and dog owner-who aspires to absolute fabulousness.

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another—from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever comes next—transformed culture and society? What are the implications of uneven access to energy in the past, present, and future? Which concepts and theories clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms. Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new. Keywords in this volume include: Aboriginal, Accumulation, Addiction, Affect, America, Animal, Anthropocene, Architecture, Arctic, Automobile, Boom, Canada, Catastrophe, Change, Charcoal, China, Coal, Community, Corporation, Crisis, Dams, Demand, Detritus, Disaster, Ecology, Electricity, Embodiment, Ethics, Evolution, Exhaust, Fallout, Fiction, Fracking, Future, Gender, Green, Grids, Guilt, Identity, Image, Infrastructure, Innervation, Kerosene, Lebenskraft, Limits, Media, Metabolism, Middle East, Nature, Necessity, Networks, Nigeria, Nuclear, Petroviolence, Photography, Pipelines, Plastics, Renewable, Resilience, Risk, Roads, Rubber, Rural, Russia, Servers, Shame, Solar, Spill, Spiritual, Statistics, Surveillance, Sustainability, Tallow, Texas, Textiles, Utopia, Venezuela, Whaling, Wood, Work For a full list of keywords in and contributors to this volume, please go to: http://ow.ly/4mZZxV

Kimberly A. Williams wants the annual Calgary Stampede to change its ways. An intrepid feminist scholar with a wry sense of humour, Williams deftly weaves theory, history, pop culture and politics to challenge readers to make sense of how gender and race matter at Canada’s oldest and largest western heritage festival. Stampede examines the settler colonial roots of the Calgary Stampede and uses its centennial celebration in 2012 to explore how the event continues to influence life on the streets and in the bars and boardrooms of Canada’s fourth-largest city. Using a variety of cultural materials—photography, print advertisements, news coverage, poetry and social media—Williams asks who gets to be part of the “we” in the Stampede’s slogan “We’re Greatest Together,” and who doesn’t.

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

Rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness

How social media has become a critical tool for advancing the interests of the Canadian oil industry Petroturfing presents an incisive look into how Canada’s pro-oil movement has leveraged social media to rebrand the extractive economy as a positive force. Adapting its title from the concept of astroturfing, which refers to the practice of disguising political and corporate media campaigns as grassroots movements, the book exposes the consequences of this mutually informed relationship between social media and environmental politics. Since the early 2010s, an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups, organizations, and campaigns has harnessed social media strategies originally developed by independent environmental organizations in order to undermine resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Situating these actions within the broader oil culture wars that have developed as an outgrowth of contemporary right-wing media, Petroturfing details how this coalition of groups is working to reform the public view of oil extraction as something socially, economically, and ecologically beneficial. By uncovering these concerted efforts to influence the “energy consciousness,” Jordan B. Kinder reveals the deep divide between Canada’s environmentally progressive reputation and the economic interests of its layers of government and private companies operating within its borders. Drawing attention to the structures underlying online political expression, Petroturfing highlights the limitations of social media networks in the work of promoting environmental justice and contributing to a more equitable future.