Social Science : Gender Studies

This book casts a critical look at the dominant position that fashion has come to occupy in contemporary society. It addresses various aspects of fashion in postmodern culture including makeup, cosmetic surgery, tattoos, ornament in dress and the blurring of gender boundaries. more...

Price: $75.00

In war films, the portrayal of deep friendships between men is commonplace. Given the sexually anxious nature of the American imagination, such bonds are often interpreted as carrying a homoerotic subtext. In Armed Forces, Robert Eberwein argues that an expanded conception of masculinity and sexuality is necessary in order to understand more fully the intricacy of these intense and emotional human relationships. Drawing on a range of examples from silent films such as What Price Glory and Wings to sound era works like The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Three Kings, and Pearl Harbor, he shows how close readings of war films, particularly in relation to their cultural contexts, demonstrate that depictions of heterosexual love, including those in romantic triangles, actually help to define and clarify the nonsexual nature of male love. The book also explores the problematic aspects of masculinity and sexuality when threatened by wounds, as in The Best Years of Our Lives, and considers the complex and persistent analogy between weapons and the male body, as in Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan. more...

Price: $17.00

Penny Gay lookes at the way five of the comedies have been staged over the last fifty years, asking how gender politics affects production and how gender is represented, both in the text and on stage. more...

Price: $41.95

This book uses one of the most popular accessories of childhood, the Barbie doll, to explain key aspects of cultural meaning. Some readings would see Barbie as reproducing ethnicity and gender in a particularly coarse and damaging way - a cultural icon of racism and sexism. Rogers develops a broader, more challenging picture. She shows how the cultural meaning of Barbie is more ambiguous than the narrow, appearance-dominated model that is attributed to the doll. For a start, Barbie s sexual identity is not clear-cut. Similarly her class situation is ambiguous. But all interpretations agree that, with her enormous range of lifestyle `accessories', Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, standardized and oozing fake sincerity. more...

Price: $51.95

A feminist reading of gender performance and construction of the female role players, onnogata, of the Kabuki theatre, this book is not limited to a 'theatre arts' focus, rather it is a mapping and close analysis of transformative genders through several historical periods in Japan. more...

Price: $80.00