Beyond Bombshells
Beyond Bombshells

Author: Jeffrey A. Brown

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2015-09-09

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1496803205

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Beyond Bombshells analyzes the cultural importance of strong women in a variety of current media forms. Action heroines are now more popular in movies, comic books, television, and literature than they have ever been. Their spectacular presence represents shifting ideas about female agency, power, and sexuality. Beyond Bombshells explores how action heroines reveal and reconfigure perceptions about how and why women are capable of physically dominating roles in modern fiction, indicating the various strategies used to contain and/or exploit female violence. Focusing on a range of successful and controversial recent heroines in the mass media, including Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games books and movies, Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels and films, and Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies and comic books, Jeffrey A. Brown argues that the role of action heroine reveals evolving beliefs about femininity. While women in action roles are still heavily sexualized and objectified, they also challenge preconceived myths about normal or culturally appropriate gender behavior. The ascribed sexuality of modern heroines remains Brown's consistent theme, particularly how objectification intersects with issues of racial stereotyping, romantic fantasies, images of violent adolescent and preadolescent girls, and neoliberal feminist revolutionary parables. Individual chapters study the gendered dynamics of torture in action films, the role of women in partnerships with male colleagues, young women as well as revolutionary leaders in dystopic societies, adolescent sexuality and romance in action narratives, the historical import of nonwhite heroines, and how modern African American, Asian, and Latina heroines both challenge and are restricted by longstanding racial stereotypes.

Beyond Pritikin
Beyond Pritikin

Author: Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., CNS

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2009-12-30

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307571955

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The proven natural way to a healthier, slimmer life! Americans have never been more health- and diet-conscious, yet the percentage of overweight Americans is greater than ever before. Could the fat-free diet often promoted for weight loss and health actually be causing sugar cravings, weight gain, fatigue, and other serious problems? Based on a revolutionary dietary model using healthful essential fats and lower carbohydrate intake, Beyond Pritikin is a complete lifestyle regimen for health, weight loss, and longevity. In this updated program, informed by the latest scientific research, Ann Louise Gittleman, former director of nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center, tells you how to lower cholesterol, revitalize your immune system, control weight, and slow the aging process—the major health concerns of our time. Beyond Pritikin includes: • The compete guide to the essential fats: how they work, and what foods and dietary supplements contain them • How carbohydrates, when not balanced in the diet by sufficient protein and fat, stimulate insulin production—which promotes the storage of body fat • Fat-burning nutrients—natural substances that boost the body’s ability to burn fat • The original two-week “fat flush” to help detoxify your body and jump-start weight loss • A 21-day eating program for natural weight loss—including balanced meal plans and delicious recipes to satisfy every taste • Advice on how to purchase, store, and prepare foods on the Beyond Pritikin Diet Plan • Plus vital information on the benefits of foods once considered “bad,” the dangers of some “heart-healthy” foods, and much more!

Supervillains
Supervillains

Author: Nao Tomabechi

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2025-01-14

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1978839391

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Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today’s most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, author Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes.

Supersex
Supersex

Author: Anna Peppard

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1477321608

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2021 Comic Studies Society Prize for Edited Collection From Superman and Batman to the X-Men and Young Avengers, Supersex interrogates the relationship between heroism and sexuality, shedding new light on our fantasies of both. From Superman, created in 1938, to the transmedia DC and Marvel universes of today, superheroes have always been sexy. And their sexiness has always been controversial, inspiring censorship and moral panic. Yet though it has inspired jokes and innuendos, accusations of moral depravity, and sporadic academic discourse, the topic of superhero sexuality is like superhero sexuality itself—seemingly obvious yet conspicuously absent. Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero is the first scholarly book specifically devoted to unpacking the superhero genre’s complicated relationship with sexuality. Exploring sexual themes and imagery within mainstream comic books, television shows, and films as well as independent and explicitly pornographic productions catering to various orientations and kinks, Supersex offers a fresh—and lascivious—perspective on the superhero genre’s historical and contemporary popularity. Across fourteen essays touching on Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and many others, Anna F. Peppard and her contributors present superhero sexuality as both dangerously exciting and excitingly dangerous, encapsulating the superhero genre’s worst impulses and its most productively rebellious ones. Supersex argues that sex is at the heart of our fascination with superheroes, even—and sometimes especially—when the capes and tights stay on.

Gender and the Superhero Narrative
Gender and the Superhero Narrative

Author: Michael Goodrum

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1496818814

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Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Janine Coleman, Gabriel Gianola, Mel Gibson, Michael Goodrum, Tim Hanley, Vanessa Hemovich, Christina Knopf, Christopher McGunnigle, Samira Nadkarni, Ryan North, Lisa Perdigao, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Philip Smith, and Maite Ucaregui The explosive popularity of San Diego’s Comic-Con, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Luke Cage all signal the tidal change in superhero narratives and mainstreaming of what were once considered niche interests. Yet just as these areas have become more openly inclusive to an audience beyond heterosexual white men, there has also been an intense backlash, most famously in 2015’s Gamergate controversy, when the tension between feminist bloggers, misogynistic gamers, and internet journalists came to a head. The place for gender in superhero narratives now represents a sort of battleground, with important changes in the industry at stake. These seismic shifts—both in the creation of superhero media and in their critical and reader reception—need reassessment not only of the role of women in comics, but also of how American society conceives of masculinity. Gender and the Superhero Narrative launches ten essays that explore the point where social justice meets the Justice League. Ranging from comics such as Ms. Marvel, Batwoman: Elegy, and Bitch Planet to video games, Netflix, and cosplay, this volume builds a platform for important voices in comics research, engaging with controversy and community to provide deeper insight and thus inspire change.

Disruptive Women of Literature
Disruptive Women of Literature

Author: Eleanore Gardner

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-07-08

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1666951455

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Disruptive Women of Literature: Rooting for the Antiheroine critically examines the representation of the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels and traces her emergence from the deviant women of Greek mythology and Shakespeare to the twenty-first century. It explores how the antiheroine shifts dependent on genre, time period, and format, demonstrating that she is capable of both challenging and reaffirming problematic ideologies surrounding women, power, violence, sexuality, and motherhood. Eleanore Gardner argues that the antiheroine is almost always defined by her experience of a patriarchal trauma and must therefore navigate her identity differently and more complexly than her antihero counterpart. The author examines a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine’s fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.

Hot Pants and Spandex Suits
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits

Author: Esther De Dauw

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-01-15

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1978806035

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Taking a critical look at the gender presentation of DC and Marvel superheroes like Superman, Captain America, Batwoman, Luke Cage, and Storm, Hot Pants and Spandex Suits is a thought-provoking consideration of what superhero comics teach us about identity, embodiment, and sexuality.

Comics and Pop Culture
Comics and Pop Culture

Author: Barry Keith Grant

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1477319417

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It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedial adaptations are part of an evolution that can be traced to the turn of the last century, when comic strips such as “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Felix the Cat” were animated for the silver screen. Representing diverse academic fields, including technoculture, film studies, theater, feminist studies, popular culture, and queer studies, Comics and Pop Culture presents more than a dozen perspectives on this rich history and the effects of such adaptations. Examining current debates and the questions raised by comics adaptations, including those around authorship, style, and textual fidelity, the contributors consider the topic from an array of approaches that take into account representations of sexuality, gender, and race as well as concepts of world-building and cultural appropriation in comics from Modesty Blaise to Black Panther. The result is a fascinating re-imagination of the texts that continue to push the boundaries of panel, frame, and popular culture.

Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman

Author: Regina Luttrell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1786735814

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Wonder Woman was created in the early 1940s as a paragon of female empowerment and beauty and her near eighty-year history has included seismic socio-cultural changes. In this book, Joan Ormrod analyses key moments in the superheroine's career and views them through the prism of the female body. This book explores how Wonder Woman's body has changed over the years as her mission has shifted from being an ambassador for peace and love to the greatest warrior in the DC transmedia universe, as she's reflected increasing technological sophistication, globalisation and women's changing roles and ambitions. Wonder Woman's physical form, Ormrod argues, is both an articulation of female potential and attempts to constrain it. Her body has always been an amalgamation of the feminine ideal in popular culture and wider socio-cultural debate, from Betty Grable to the 1960s 'mod' girl, to the Iron Maiden of the 1980s.

Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford

Author: Virginia Luzón-Aguado

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1350152439

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Harrison Ford is known for such iconic roles as Han Solo, Indiana Jones and Rick Deckard - but his career of 50 years (and counting) encompasses a plethora of other thought-provoking roles. His off-screen persona has been no less intriguing. Covering a wide timespan, this book assesses Harrison Ford as 'star' from the difficult Hollywood studio years where he began, his blockbusters of the 1980s, through to the impact of ageist culture on his artistry of recent years. The author argues that Ford has generally been seen as a potent, irresistible combination of tradition and modernity. He is an actor who both reflects and utilises changing ideas about American masculinity in the context of Hollywood film production: particular male types are revealed as much in his trademark trustworthy hero act as in his more fallible, less conservative and therefore commercially riskier characters. Luzon Aguado explores these particular star identities and every fluctuation in between. She gives due attention to his much-neglected acting abilities while examining the crucial interplay between star persona and the constraints and conventions of genre. Going beyond standard accounts of Ford's production and pinpointing overlooked aspects of his work, and the creation of the star through cultural artefacts like magazine interviews and advertising campaigns, this book reveals the depth and dimensions of the enduring American screen legend that is Harrison Ford.