Howard's unparalleled history of "queer" life in the South shows how homosexuality flourished in the conservative institutions of small-town life, interspersing the life stories of both the ordinary and the famous. 22 halftones. 4 maps.
As in his highly acclaimed Growing Up Gay in the South, James Sears masterfully blends a symphony of Southern voices to chronicle the era from the baby boom to the dawn of gay rights and the Stonewall riot. Sears weaves a rich historical tapestry through the use of personal reminiscences, private letters, subpoenaed testimony and previously
The darkly humorous stories in I'm A Registered Nurse Not A Whore take dead aim at how easily our desire to be good is perverted or undermined by a desperate need for love and recognition. Despite a world of fading optimism and advancing catastrophe, plans are formulated, deals drawn, bargains struck, and hope prevails. Beautifully flawed, well-meaning yet easily sidelined, the characters in these eight stories catapult off the rails of ordinary life before raising themselves up - if only for a moment - in oddly heroic ways. These stories will make you laugh, reflect, and yearn to carry on.
In this unique book, David Fillingim explores country music as a mode of theological expression. Following the lead of James Cone's classic, "The Spirituals and the Blues, Fillingim looks to country music for themes of theological liberation by and for the redneck community. The introduction sets forth the book's methodology and relates it to recent scholarship on country music. Chapter 1 contrasts country music with Southern gospel music--the sacred music of the redneck community--as responses to the question of theodicy, which a number of thinkers recognize as the central question of marginalized groups. The next chapter "The Gospel according to Hank," outlines the career of Hank Williams and follows that trajectory through the work of other artists whose work illustrates how the tradition negotiates Hank's legacy. "The Apocalypse according to Garth" considers the seismic shifts occuring during country music's popularity boom in the 1980s. Another chapter is dedicated to the women of country music, whose honky-tonky feminism parallels and intertwines with mainstream country music, which was dominated by men for most of its history. Written to entertain as well as educate and advance, "Redneck Liberation will appeal to anyone who is interested in country music, Southern religion, American popular religiosity, or liberation theology.
I believe in causal connection. I am convinced that I was a S.O.B. in my previous life and had hurt lots of women. This life is to repay some of the debts. Thus the reason of the book. It is to help to free the hundreds of millions of women who are still under the control of men. For millennia, women have been men's prisoners and slaves. Slavery of women is still going on in many countries. The book traces the slavery to its very beginning and identifies the one-tool men have been using to imprison them. It was a recent event measured in evolutionary scale. Knowing the when and the how will enable the ultimate liberation of all women. Though a stronger sex, there is one universal womanly "weakness". It is an innate sense of insecurity. This "weakness", however, was a must for the survival of our species during the past millions of dark years. Women today have no more need to feel insecure. But it is still there, playing harmful psychological game to women. To know this insecurity is to allow women to deal with it effectively. The book also points out the many potential traps and downfalls to women. The most damaging trap for women is religion. All religions treat women as second-class citizens. The other is to have children. They are career killers. Getting married is also a bad idea. 50% of the marriages in North America end up in divorce and most are initiated by women. Statistics don't lie. W.O.M.A.N. is an acronym for world of man ain't nice. Our world is a mess--wholesale environmental deterioration, wars, over-population and poverty are rampant. They are mostly man-made, by the male gender, that is. Our only hope is woman. The misery won't end as long as men are allowed to run our world. Women are our saviors. But women can't save the world without a tool. The tool is moral selfishness, which is the other central message of the book. Thank you.
Everywhere you look in 1970s American cinema, you find white working-class men. They bring a violent conclusion to Easy Rider, murdering the film's representatives of countercultural alienation and disaffection. They lurk in the Georgia woods of Deliverance, attacking outsiders in a manner that evokes the South's recent history of racial violence and upheaval. They haunt the singles nightclubs of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, threatening the film's newly liberated heroine with patriarchal violence. They strut through the disco clubs of Saturday Night Fever, dancing to music whose roots in post-Stonewall homosexuality invite ambiguity that the men ignore. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men argues that the persistent appearance of working-class characters in these and other films of the 1970s reveals the powerful role class played in the key social and political developments of the decade, such as the decline of the New Left and counterculture, the re-emergence of the South as the Sunbelt, and the rise of the women's and gay liberation movements. Examining the "youth cult" film, the neo-Western "southern," and the "new nightlife" film, Nystrom shows how these cinematic renderings of white working-class masculinity actually tell us more about the crises facing the middle class during the 1970s than about working-class experience itself. Hard Hats thus demonstrates how these representations of the working class serve as fantasies about a class Other-fantasies that offer imaginary resolutions to middle-class anxieties provoked by the decade's upheavals. Drawing on examples of iconic films from the era-Saturday Night Fever, Cruising, Five Easy Pieces, and Walking Tall, among others-Nystrom presents an incisive, evocative study of class and American cinema during one of the nation's most tumultuous decades.