Cultural Studies

By Michelle Lee

A riveting glance contained in the model international that exposes the reality approximately shopaholics, sweatshops, and superstar closets.

Fashion—from the $1500 Prada bag to the $30 Kate Spade knock-off offered at the sidewalk—has been remodeled from a commodity reserved for the elite to a strong presence in mass marketplace tradition. As a society, we're passionate about style and magnificence, racking up bank card debt to aid compulsive buying conduct, scouring magazines for the newest traits to shop for, and focusing extra on who’s donning what on the Oscars than on who’s successful. In Fashion Victim, award-winning journalist Michelle Lee blows the lid off the style undefined, and spotlights the fascinating—and frequently disturbing--ways within which it really is morphing our tradition, our economic climate and our values.

Dishing at the lords of the label, together with designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Kenneth Cole, Fashion Victim finds a global that's occasionally ugly, occasionally glitzy, yet consistently fascinating. From endure hides to the Victorian bustle, Lee strains the function of favor in the course of the a long time, taking us from the sunrise of ready-to-wear in 1865 to the fashionable pattern cycles that incite us to clamor after leg heaters, bumster trousers, and Manolo Blahniks. She information the beginning of “Speed Chic”—the hamster wheel of fashion that retains us caught in an never-ending cycle of intake and has develop into the crack-cocaine of style, offering us with a short lived excessive till we spot the following pattern and succeed in for our wallets. She additionally explores the phenomenon of “McFashion,” the uncanny proliferation of shops just like the hole and previous army which are creeping into each city in the United States and stripping us—and the designers they knock off--of individuality and innovation. and he or she finally probes the human expense of fashion’s decadence, together with the distorted perceptions of attractiveness fueled through high-end designers, the hazards of dry cleansing, and the gruesome monetary disparity among those that make the garments and people who purchase them.

An unheard of glance in the back of the runway on the forces and personalities riding this $200 billion greenback undefined, Fashion Victim is a classy, provocative and hugely wonderful contribution to the research of yank renowned culture.

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By Kate Ince

The French functionality artist Orlan has got either popularity and infamy for her performances. A multimedia artist because the Sixties, she embarked at first of the Nineteen Nineties on a venture of physique amendment via cosmetic surgery, the fundamental premise of which was once to remodel herself right into a digitally designed pastiche of the best icons of lady good looks in Western paintings. Orlan's undertaking has sparked excessive debate within the visible arts, between feminists, and between these fascinated with clinical ethics, because it increases complicated questions on sexuality, good looks, subjectivity, gender and know-how. This publication addresses these kind of concerns, and specializes in the interrelations of gown, physique and tradition in Orlan's paintings because the Nineteen Sixties. Surgical performances symbolize the main severe section of Orlan's inventive perform, yet she has made vast and sundry use of dress all through her profession.
utilizing the "body theory" and theories of monstrosity constructed via feminist, gender and picture theorists, and the paintings of philosophers Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze, the writer examines the demanding situations Orlan's functionality paintings poses to its audience. somebody operating within the fields of gender, the visible arts or cultural stories will locate this e-book and the questions it increases provocative and enlightening.

By Ruth Barcan

We alternately think about nudity as a perversion and a kingdom of innocence. Why is our reaction so contradictory and why is nudity taken care of so another way in numerous contexts? Drawing on pop culture, literature, philosophy, faith, and firsthand interviews in an effort to solution those questions, Barcan encounters morticians, nudists, strippers, nurses, tattooists, artists and pornographers. Shining a mild on a subject that has been mostly neglected regardless of its skill to titillate, surprise and entertain, Nudity is an engaging mixture of significant trivia and large philosophical questions about this such a lot unnatural country of nature.

This learn brings jointly paintings on masculinity in movie via demonstrated movie students, teachers, functionality artists, and cultural critics.

The essays research: the position of homosexual males in saving heterosexuality; the emergence of the hot queer cinema; the resurgence of white masculinity; the exploration of masculinity in global battle II movies; and the connection among nationhood and the male physique in Nineties Canadian cinema.

By Karen Chance

By Danielle J. Lindemann

Our lives are jam-packed with small tensions, our closest relationships choked with fight: among lady and guy, artist and client, purist and commercialist, specialist and client—and among the dominant and the submissive. In Dominatrix, Danielle Lindemann attracts on huge fieldwork and interviews with specialist dominatrices in manhattan urban and San Francisco to provide a subtle portrait of those strange pros, their paintings, and their consumers. previous examine on intercourse paintings has concentrated totally on prostitutes and such a lot stories of BDSM take in pro-domme/client relationships with out exploring what makes them specified. Lindemann satisfies our interest approximately those paid encounters, shining a gentle on essentially the most secretive and least understood of private relationships and unthreading a heretofore unexamined patch of our social tapestry. Upending the concept that those erotic employees have interaction in uncomplicated exchanges and revealing the healing and analytic nature in their paintings, Lindemann makes a huge contribution to cultural reviews, anthropology, and queer reviews together with her research of ways gender, energy, sexuality, and hierarchy form all of our social reports.

By Carole Marsh

Well timed, actual, delicate details for kids in regards to the day terrorists attacked the US. contains The Day That was once various: What occurred on September eleven, 2001?

By Richard Dyer

Only Entertainment explores leisure as entertainment, asking how and no matter if an emphasis at the primacy of delight units it except different kinds of art.L Richard Dyer makes a speciality of the genres such a lot linked to leisure, from musicals to motion videos, disco to porn. He examines the character of leisure in video clips reminiscent of The Sound of Music and Speed, and argues that leisure is a part of a 'common sense' that is continually traditionally and culturally constructed.L This re-creation of Only Entertainment incorporates a revised creation and 5 new chapters on themes from serial killer video clips to Elizabeth Taylor. within the ultimate bankruptcy Dyer asks even if leisure as we all know it really is at the wane.

By Barbara Sheen Busby

E-book by way of Sheen, Barbara

By Gerald Murnane

The key paintings of fiction during this assortment, ‘A historical past of Books’, explores the connection among examining and writing in twenty 9 sections, every one of which starts off with the reminiscence of a publication that has left a picture within the writer’s brain. The reminiscence of the books themselves may need pale, however the photographs stay of their readability and import – scenes of discord and insanity, a stern-faced guy, a tender girl on a swing, a pitcher of beer and rays of solar, mountain and wooded area and horizon – photographs which jointly embrace the anxieties and aspirations of a writing lifestyles, and its indebtedness to what has been written and browse. ‘A heritage of Books’ is observed by means of 3 shorter works, ‘As It have been a Letter’, ‘The Boy’s identify used to be David’ and ‘Last Letter to a Niece’, within which a author searches for an awesome international, an excellent sentence, and an excellent reader.