In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies offers an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. Examining the non-normative body in a cultural studies context, this book reconsiders the concept of the transgressive body , establishing its status as a culturally mutable term, arguing that popular cultural representations create the transgressive or freak body and then proceed to either contain its threat or (s)exploit it. Through studies of extreme bodybuilding, obesity, disability and transsexed bodies, it examines the implications of such transgressive bodies for gender politics and sexuality. Transgressive Bodies engages with contemporary cultural debates, always relating these to concrete studies of media and cultural representations. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sports studies and cultural theory.

In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies offers an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. Examining the non-normative body in a cultural studies context, this book reconsiders the concept of the transgressive body , establishing its status as a culturally mutable term, arguing that popular cultural representations create the transgressive or freak body and then proceed to either contain its threat or (s)exploit it. Through studies of extreme bodybuilding, obesity, disability and transsexed bodies, it examines the implications of such transgressive bodies for gender politics and sexuality. Transgressive Bodies engages with contemporary cultural debates, always relating these to concrete studies of media and cultural representations. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sports studies and cultural theory.

Examines crucial moments of transition in Spanish culture and society during both dictatorship and democracy.

In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. She analyzes the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture to show how many individuals contest traditional roles by maneuvering within and/or trying to change their society’s binary gender systems. She skillfully argues and demonstrates that these transgressions better represent Caribbean culture than the “official” representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes. Unique in its breadth and its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial relations, transgender people, and women’s sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. Additionally, King explores the paradoxical nature of sexuality across the region: discussing sexuality in public is often considered taboo, yet the tourism economy trades on portraying Caribbean residents as hypersexualized. Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures attempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.

What do we want? What do we believe to be wrong with the world? How can we best change it? How should we live? Given the world as it is, how can we best achieve our dreams and desires? Utopian Bodies is, quite simply, a new approach to thinking about theory. Using the dominant themes of green and feminist politics, this fascinating and original text creates a new notion of utopian thought and life - "transgressive utopianism". This new concept is not a blueprint for an ideal polity; instead it demonstrates an approach to the world that is both idealistic and pragmatic, focussing on bodies of thought in relation to bodies of people: communities. Also spanning philosophy, political theory and deconstruction, this book is especially relevant today as the millennium marks a time of resurgence in utopian studies

While the growing attention to trans rights and the development of trans-specific interest groups suggest that the time is right for a trans rights movement akin to prior civil rights movements, The Politics of Right Sex explores the limitations of rights-based mobilization and litigation for advancing the interests of trans communities. Synthesizing critical theory, transgender studies, and extant law and society research, Courtenay W. Daum argues that trans individuals, particularly those situated at the intersection of gender, race, class, and immigration status, are regulated by myriad forces of governmentality that work to maintain the sex and gender binaries and associated power hierarchies. Because many informal practices and norms are located beyond the reach of civil rights laws, a trans politics of rights may produce some modest legal and legislative reforms but will not eliminate the disciplinary forces that work to subject trans individuals. It will also privilege those who are able to conform with dominant gender norms at the expense of the interests of those individuals who are gender nonconforming, gender queer, trans people of color, and others unable or unwilling to embrace a transnormative presentation of self and/or lifestyle. In order to disrupt the dominant discourse and hierarchical power arrangements in pursuit of collective liberation for all as opposed to rights for some, The Politics of Right Sex advocates for a more confrontational approach that directly engages and challenges the hegemonic power structures that govern and discipline trans individuals.

South Asian diasporas can be considered transcultural legacies of colonialism, while constituting transcultural forms of postcolonial reality in today’s globalised world. The main focus of investigation here is South Asian women’s fiction, where diverse forms of identity negotiation undertaken by the protagonists in a number of contemporary novels (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) are read as transgressions. The themes of early gendered experiences of South Asian indentured labour migration, female genealogies and transmissions of cultural heritages down female lines, as well as negotiations of patriarchal violence, are read using a framework culled from postcolonial and feminist criticism. The literary representations of South Asian diasporic female experience in these texts are forms of commentary and critique by contemporary South Asian diasporic women writers. Hence these novels can be viewed as feminist strategies of textual creativity with distinct political aims of presenting transformative narratives addressing the tensions of diaspora and patriarchy. This book is intended to contribute to the current spectrum of academic work being done in diaspora studies, in that it brings together the concepts of diaspora, transculturality, contemporary women’s writing and transnational feminist critical approaches to bear on South Asian women’s diasporic literature. Contrary to the celebratory notion of the concept in much theory, transculturality, as represented in these texts, is fraught with ambivalence.