An innovative investigation of the five strange worlds that worship women’s chests. After years of biopsies, best-selling author Sarah Thornton made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy. But, after her reconstructive surgery, she was perplexed: What had she lost? And gained? An experienced sleuth, she resolved to venture behind the scenes to uncover the social and cultural significance of breasts. Riotous and galvanizing, Tits Up excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation’s oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers. Thornton draws insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and “free the nipple” activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women’s chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender, and desire. Everywhere she turns, Thornton encounters chauvinist myths about this elemental body part that quietly justify deficits in women’s bodily autonomy and endorse shortfalls in their political status. Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition—to liberate breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice.

The term women's liberation remains charged and divisive decades after it first entered political and cultural discourse around 1970. In Feeling Women's Liberation, Victoria Hesford mines the archive of that highly contested era to reassess how it has been represented and remembered. Hesford refocuses debates about the movement’s history and influence. Rather than interpreting women's liberation in terms of success or failure, she approaches the movement as a range of rhetorical strategies that were used to persuade and enact a new political constituency and, ultimately, to bring a new world into being. Hesford focuses on rhetoric, tracking the production and deployment of particular phrases and figures in both the mainstream press and movement writings, including the work of Kate Millett. She charts the emergence of the feminist-as-lesbian as a persistent "image-memory" of women's liberation, and she demonstrates how the trope has obscured the complexity of the women's movement and its lasting impact on feminism.

THE UNDERGROUND NOVEL YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO READ! "I'll commit suicide soon enough. Maybe before the end of this book, if we're both lucky. In fact, you can even think of what you're reading as the longest suicide note in history." Equal parts sex comedy, misanthropic rant, and hate letter to the world, THE MANIAC MANIFESTO is the radical confession of a self-proclaimed "ordinary man." By turns darkly humorous and outrageously offensive, it chronicles the exploits of its nameless anti-hero who, following an unhappy love affair, voluntarily descends into what he calls "the maggotlife"-a dark night of the soul from the depths of which issues the grim testament of a man determined to tell the absolute truth. Even if it kills him. Nihilistic, misogynistic, and apocalyptic, THE MANIAC MANIFESTO is a text like virtually no other-an admission of everything we've been taught to suppress, conceal, and never speak aloud, not to others, not even to ourselves.

In this passionate report from the front lines, a "New York" magazine writer examines the enormous cultural impact of the newest wave of post-feminism.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

The new edition of Beauty and Misogyny revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys' uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as it was in 2005 when the first edition of the book was published. The United Nations concept of "harmful traditional/cultural practices" provides a useful lens for the author to advance her critique. She makes the case for including Western beauty practices within this definition, examining their role in damaging women's health, creating sexual difference and enforcing female deference. First-wave feminists of the 1970s criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but a later argument took hold that beauty practices were no longer oppressive now that women could "choose" them. In recent years the reality of Western beauty practices has become much more bloody and severe, requiring the breaking of skin and the rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices have not only persisted but become more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing, surgical alteration of the labia and other forms of self-mutilation. The book concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. A new and thoroughly updated edition of this essential work will appeal to all levels of students and teachers of gender studies, cultural studies and feminist psychology, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health.

This book tells the history of the changing gendered landscapes of northern Mozambique from the perspective of women who fought in the armed struggle for national independence, diverting from the often-told narrative of women in nationalist wars that emphasizes a linear plot of liberation. Taking a novel approach in focusing on the body, senses, and landscape, Jonna Katto, through a study of the women ex-combatants’ lived landscapes, shows how their life trajectories unfold as nonlinear spatial histories. This brings into focus the women’s shifting and multilayered negotiations for personal space and belonging. This book explores the life memories of the now aging female ex-combatants in the province of Niassa in northern Mozambique, looking at how the female ex-combatants’ experiences of living in these northern landscapes have shaped their sense of socio-spatial belonging and attachment. It builds on the premise that individual embodied memory cannot be separated from social memory; personal lives are culturally shaped. Thus, the book does not only tell the history of a small and rather unique group of women but also speaks about wider cultural histories of body-landscape relations in northern Mozambique and especially changes in those relations. Enriching our understanding of the gendered history of the liberation struggle in Mozambique and informing broader discussions on gender and nationalism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African history, especially the colonial and postcolonial history of Lusophone Africa, as well as gender/women’s history and peace and conflict studies.

Contains primary source material.

Dr Christian Jessen, the unshockable presenter of the hit television shows, Embarrassing Bodies and Supersize vs. Superskinny, is always being tackled by strangers wanting answers to their most private medical questions. Like all doctors, Dr Christian finds people sidling up to him with their questions at parties, on trains, and even in the street. So why don’t people ask their own doctors these questions in the more formal setting of the medical surgery? And what are the most common questions? Can I Just Ask…? provides the answers in a fun and informative book that includes: • urban health myths busted • advice for common problems we don’t like to talk about • specific sections for male/female health issues, curious facts, sex, diet, medicines, fitness and more • plenty of surprising facts and figures to help trivia-hungry readers better understand the mysterious workings of their bodies. Sometimes humorous, often surprising and always informative, this book will answer all your questions, whether you have a worrying health dilemma or just a curious mind!