Pleasure in the News
Pleasure in the News

Author: Kim Gallon

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2020-05-25

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0252052102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Critics often chastised the twentieth-century black press for focusing on sex and scandal rather than African American achievements. In Pleasure in the News, Kim Gallon takes an opposing stance—arguing that African American newspapers fostered black sexual expression, agency, and identity. Gallon discusses how journalists and editors created black sexual publics that offered everyday African Americans opportunities to discuss sexual topics that exposed class and gender tensions. While black churches and black schools often encouraged sexual restraint, the black press printed stories that complicated notions about respectability. Sensational coverage also expanded African American women’s sexual consciousness and demonstrated the tenuous position of female impersonators, black gay men, and black lesbians in early twentieth African American urban communities. Informative and empowering, Pleasure in the News redefines the significance of the black press in African American history and advancement while shedding light on the important cultural and social role that sexuality played in the power of the black press.

This Is Pleasure
This Is Pleasure

Author: Mary Gaitskill

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1524749141

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

Author: Paul Bloom

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2010-06-14

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 039307711X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Engaging, evocative…[Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling." —NPR Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

Pleasure Activism
Pleasure Activism

Author: adrienne maree brown

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1849353271

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

The News
The News

Author: Alain de Botton

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2014-02-06

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0241967384

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - an accessible and eye-opening exploration of our relationship with 'the news' 'His gift is to prompt us to think about how we live and how we might change things' The Times 'De Botton analyses modern society with great charm, learning and humour. His remedies come as a welcome relief' Daily Mail 'Like all classic de Botton, there are plenty of insightful observations here, peppered with some psychology, a dash of philosophy, a big dollop of commonsense' Scotsman 'The news' occupies a range of manic and peculiar positions in our lives. We invest it with an authority and importance which used to be the preserve of religion - but what does it do for us? Mixing current affairs with philosophical reflections, de Botton offers a brilliant illustrated guide to the precautions we should take before venturing anywhere near the news and the 'noise' it generates. Witty and global in reach, The News will ensure you'll never look at reports of a celebrity story or political scandal in quite the same way again.

Gender, Pleasure, and Violence
Gender, Pleasure, and Violence

Author: Agnieszka Kościańska

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0253053102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

The Pursuit of Pleasure
The Pursuit of Pleasure

Author: Arsen Dallan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 3838269500

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This important book unveils how the pleasure principle has taken humanity hostage to the powers of branding and consumerism, steering our most basic desires. Radically re-evaluating the notion of pleasure and arguing for a deep societal change, it shows the way to a new humanist culture.

The Chinese Pleasure Book
The Chinese Pleasure Book

Author: Michael Nylan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1942130163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and to the health of the body politic. Unlike Western theories of pleasure, early Chinese writings contrast pleasure not with pain but with insecurity, assuming that it is right and proper to seek and take pleasure, as well as experience short-term delight. Equally important is the belief that certain long-term relational pleasures are more easily sustained, as well as potentially more satisfying and less damaging. The pleasures that become deeper and more ingrained as the person invests time and effort to their cultivation include friendship and music, sharing with others, developing integrity and greater clarity, reading and classical learning, and going home. Each of these activities is explored through the early sources (mainly fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD), with new translations of both well-known and seldom-cited texts.

Bodies and Pleasures
Bodies and Pleasures

Author: Ladelle McWhorter

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1999-07-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780253213259

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual identity into her readings of Foucault's most recent writings on sexuality and power, McWhorter argues compellingly that Foucault's texts should be read less for the arguments they advance and more for their transformative effect. By exploring bodies and pleasures—gardening, line dancing, or doing philosophy, for example—McWhorter shows that it isn't necessary to conform with socially recognized sexual identities. Bodies and Pleasures takes the reader beyond unexplored norms and imposed identities as it points the way toward a personal politics, ethics, and style that challenges our sexual selves.

News of Great Joy
News of Great Joy

Author: Hugh Hillyard-Parker

Publisher: Canterbury Press

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1786224089

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Each year, the Christmas double issue of the Church Times offers a feast of seasonal reading. News of Great Joy draws together the best Christmas writing by outstanding authors and poets over twenty years to create an ideal Christmas gift and a wealth of material for all who preach or lead worship at Christmas. Its many highlights include: • the eminent biblical scholar John Barton on how to understand the Old Testament prophecies of the nativity; • Barbara Brown Taylor on the prologue of John’s Gospel which is always read on Christmas Day; • Margaret Barker on the legends that have become part of the Christmas story; • an unpublished short story by Evelyn Underhill; • a piece on the origins of the Nine Lessons and Carols; • poetry and reflections on the season’s lectionary readings, and more besides.