Homoplot


Book Description

Homoplot analyses the lesbian, gay and bisexual coming-out story in fiction and autobiography from the late 1960s to the present day. These stories are recognised as an invaluable record of lesbian, gay or bisexual life. However, this book illuminates their equally vital role as active tools in the arduous project of creating gay, lesbian and bisexual identities - constructing the identities they seem to describe. Homoplot shows how a popular twist of the plot, or a single common character trait, can be a powerful intervention into sexual politics. Approaching these texts with the tools of queer criticism, the book celebrates their success, but also illuminates their chief problem: how the need to create concrete sexual identities has often narrowed the range of queer experiences represented. Despite the ongoing popularity of coming-out stories, this is the first book-length study of the genre. Homoplot surveys hundreds of examples - including in-depth readings of authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Dorothy Allison, Rita Mae Brown, Oscar Moore, Paul Monette and Aaron Fricke - and provides an incisive account of the genre's defining features. The book is essential reading for anyone considering queer literature, or lesbian, gay and bisexual identity in the twentieth century and beyond. Researchers and students considering life history and autobiography will also benefit from its analysis of feminist and queer politics.




Adaptation in Young Adult Novels


Book Description

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels argues that adapting classic and canonical literature and historical places engages young adult readers with their cultural past and encourages them to see how that past can be rewritten. The textual afterlives of classic texts raise questions for new readers: What can be changed? What benefits from change? How can you, too, be agents of change? The contributors to this volume draw on a wide range of contemporary novels – from Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Megan Shepherd's Madman's Daughter trilogy to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones – adapted from mythology, fairy tales, historical places, and the literary classics of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Unpacking the new perspectives and critiques of gender, sexuality, and the cultural values of adolescents inherent to each adaptation, the essays in this volume make the case that literary adaptations are just as valuable as original works and demonstrate how the texts studied empower young readers to become more culturally, historically, and socially aware through the lens of literary diversity.




Bibliographic Index


Book Description




Functional Nanomaterials


Book Description

Functional Nanomaterials Presents the most recent advances in the production and applications of various functional nanomaterials As new synthetic methods, characterization technologies, and nanomaterials (NMs) with novel physical and chemical properties are developed, researchers and scientists across disciplines need to keep pace with advancements in the dynamic field. Functional Nanomaterials: Synthesis, Properties, and Applications provides comprehensive coverage of fundamental concepts, synthetic methods, characterization technologies, device fabrication, performance evaluation, and both current and emerging applications. Contributions from leading scientists in academia and industry present research developments of novel functional nanomaterials including metal nanoparticles, two-dimensional nanomaterials, perovskite-based nanomaterials, and polymer-based nanomaterials and nanocomposites. Topics include metal-based nanomaterials for electrochemical water splitting, cerium-based nanostructure materials for electrocatalysis, applications of rare earth luminescent nanomaterials, metal complex nanosheets, and methods for synthesizing polymer nanocomposites. Provides readers with timely and accurate information on the development of functional nanomaterials in nanoscience and nanotechnology Presents a critical perspective of the design strategy, synthesis, and characterization of advanced functional nanomaterials Focuses on recent research developments in emerging areas with emphasis on fundamental concepts and applications Explores functional nanomaterials for applications in areas such as electrocatalysis, bioengineering, optoelectronics, and electrochemistry Covers a diverse range of nanomaterials, including carbonaceous nanomaterials, metal-based nanomaterials, transition metal dichalcogenides-based nanomaterials, semiconducting molecules, and magnetic nanoparticles Functional Nanomaterials is an invaluable resource for chemists, materials scientists, electronics engineers, bioengineers, and others in the scientific community working with nanomaterials in the fields of energy, electronics, and biomedicine.




Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization


Book Description

This book presents a new approach to the understanding of non-normative sexuality and gender transgressive modes in South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It reconceives sexual representation from the point of view of the theoretical, political and empirical trajectories of decolonization, provincialization and neoliberalism to look at the role of historical contingency, postcolonial sexual politics and gender and sexual diversity. The volume brings together anthropological, historical, material and political analyses around South Asian sexual politics by exploring a range of themes, including culture, class, ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, migration, borders, diaspora, modernity and cosmopolitanism across various local, regional and global contexts. By using southern/non-Western and subaltern theorizations of gender and sexuality, the book discusses South Asian sexualities through issues such as the sexual politics of indeterminacy; sexual subculture, iconography and political decision-making; religious identity; queer South Asian diaspora; decolonizing the postcolonial body; sexual politics, gender and feminist debates; discrimination, and socio-political violence; the political economy of empowerment; and critical appropriation of the 377 Indian Penal Code. It also builds forms of dialogues to bridge the gap between academic and development practitioners. With diverse case studies and a fresh theoretical framework, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology and social anthropology, political studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and global south studies.




Contemporary British Queer Performance


Book Description

This book examines queer performance in Britain since the early 1990s, arguing for the significance of emerging collaborative modes of practice. Using queer theory and the history of early lesbian and gay theatre to examine claims to representation among other things, it interrogates the relationships through which recent works have been presented.




Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction


Book Description

Exploring the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture, these essays use the trope of haunting and spectrality as a critical tool with which to consider neo-Victorian works, as well as our ongoing fascination with the Victorians, combining original readings of well-known novels with engaging analyses of lesser-known works.




That Other Dashwood Girl


Book Description

Sometimes, you must be totally lost to finally find yourself. Maggie Dashwood thought her whole life was laid out for her. Her well-to-do father had a plan that she and her two older sisters would follow to ensure the family’s success. When tragedy strikes, everything she knows about the world changes, and her life is turned upside down. Now, she, her mother and her two sisters must leave behind everything they’ve ever known while relying on the charity of others to begin again. Stranded in a new place with relative strangers, the Dashwoods try to stay a family while they work through their grief and find out if life can go on. Will the family survive in-tact? Will Maggie discover her true self? This modern-day retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is full of heart, tears, and ultimately, triumph.




Queerness in Heavy Metal Music


Book Description

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that serve only to underpin the popular imagining of heavy metal as violent, homophobic and inherently masculine. This book queers heavy metal studies, bringing discussions of gender and sexuality in heavy metal out of that poorly theorized dichotomy. In this interdisciplinary work, the author connects new and existing scholarship with a strong ethnographic study of heavy metal’s self-identified queer performers and fans in their own words, thus giving them a voice and offering an original and ground-breaking addition to scholarship on popular music, rock, and queer studies.




Imagining LatinX Intimacies


Book Description

Imagining Latinx Intimacies addresses the ways that artists and writers resist the social forces of colonialism, displacement, and oppression through crafting incisive and inspiring responses to the problems that queer Latinx peoples encounter in both daily lives and representation such as art, film, poetry, popular culture, and stories. Instead of keeping quiet, queer Latinx artists and writers have spoken up as a way of challenging stereotypes, prejudice, and violence occurring in communities ranging from Puerto Rico to sites within the mainland United States as well as transnational flows of migration. Such migrations are explored in several ways including the movement of queer people from Chile to the United States. To address these matters, artistic thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Rane Arroyo have challenged such socio-political problems by imagining intimate social and intellectual spaces that resist the status quo like homophobic norms, laws, and policies that hurt families and communities. Building on the intellectual thought of researchers such as Jorge Duany, Adriana de Souza e Silva, and José Esteban Muñoz, this book explains how the imagined spaces of Latinx LGBTQ peoples are blueprints for addressing our tumultuous present and creating a better future.