This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.
Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.
Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography—both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images— Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans. Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.
Lambda Literary Award 2014 Finalist in LGBT Nonfiction Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award 2014 Finalist in Family & Relationships Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015 (IPPY) Silver Medal in Sexuality/Relationships Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2015 Winner in LGBT -- What if you weren't sexually attracted to anyone? A growing number of people are identifying as asexual. They aren’t sexually attracted to anyone, and they consider it a sexual orientation—like gay, straight, or bisexual. Asexuality is the invisible orientation. Most people believe that “everyone” wants sex, that “everyone” understands what it means to be attracted to other people, and that “everyone” wants to date and mate. But that’s where asexual people are left out—they don’t find other people sexually attractive, and if and when they say so, they are very rarely treated as though that’s okay. When an asexual person comes out, alarming reactions regularly follow; loved ones fear that an asexual person is sick, or psychologically warped, or suffering from abuse. Critics confront asexual people with accusations of following a fad, hiding homosexuality, or making excuses for romantic failures. And all of this contributes to a discouraging master narrative: there is no such thing as “asexual.” Being an asexual person is a lie or an illness, and it needs to be fixed. In The Invisible Orientation, Julie Sondra Decker outlines what asexuality is, counters misconceptions, provides resources, and puts asexual people’s experiences in context as they move through a very sexualized world. It includes information for asexual people to help understand their orientation and what it means for their relationships, as well as tips and facts for those who want to understand their asexual friends and loved ones.
This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. Empathic Vision will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics.
Every day we are asked to fulfil others’ requests, and we make regular requests of others too, seeking compliance with our desires, commands and suggestions. This accessible text provides a uniquely in-depth overview of the different social influence techniques people use in order to improve the chances of their requests being fulfilled. It both describes each of the techniques in question and explores the research behind them, considering questions such as: How do we know that they work? Under what conditions are they more or less likely to be effective? How might individuals successfully resist attempts by others to influence them? The book groups social influence techniques according to a common characteristic: for instance, early chapters describe "sequential" techniques, and techniques involving egotistic mechanisms, such as using the name of one’s interlocutor. Later chapters present techniques based on gestures and facial movements, and others based on the use of specific words, re-examining on the way whether "please" really is a magic word. In every case, author Dariusz Dolinski discusses the existing experimental studies exploring their effectiveness, and how that effectiveness is enhanced or reduced under certain conditions. The book draws on historical material as well as the most up-to-date research, and unpicks the methodological and theoretical controversies involved. The ideal introduction for psychology graduates and undergraduates studying social influence and persuasion, Techniques of Social Influence will also appeal to scholars and students in neighbouring disciplines, as well as interested marketing professionals and practitioners in related fields.
Modern Misogyny explores the landscape of popular culture and politics, emphasizing relatively recent moves away from feminist activism to individualism and consumerism where "self-empowerment" represents women's progress. It also explores the retreat to traditional gender roles after September 11, 2001. It interrogates the assumption that feminism is unnecessary, that women have achieved equality, and therefore those women who do insist on being feminists want to get ahead of men. Finally, it takes a fresh look at the positive role that feminism plays in today's "post-feminist" era, and how feminism does and might function in women's lives. Post-feminist discourse encourages young women to believe that they were born into a free society, so if they experience discrimination, it is an individual, isolated problem that may even be their own fault. Modern Misogyny examines that rendering of feminism as irrelevant and as the silencing and marginalizing of feminists.
The first edition was featured as #1 best-seller in Gender on Amazon, and is being used by gender studies & sociology professors on 3 continents. Now with a new foreword by the author, brand new chapters, fixed tpyos, and more gender! 100% of royalties from this edition go directly to hues, a global justice collective. Where do we start, when it comes to learning about something that's everywhere, infused into everything, and is often one of the primary lenses through which we see ourselves and others? When it comes to understanding gender, it's best to begin with deep breath, then with section one of this book by social justice advocate Sam Killermann, who uses clear language, helpful examples, and a bit of humor to help the medicine go down. This book is not overwhelming, it's not overly complicated, and it's not exhausting to read. It is a few hundred pages of gender exploration, social justice how-tos, practical resources, and fun graphics & comics. Sam dissects gender using a comprehensive, non-binary toolkit, with a focus on making this subject accessible and enjoyable. All this to help you understand something that is so commonly misunderstood, but something we all think we get: gender. A Guide to Gender is broken into four sections: Basic Training (which sets the foundation of knowledge for the book, defining concepts of social justice, oppression, privilege, and more); Breaking through the Binary (beginning with a discussion of gender norms, and working toward a more nuanced understanding of gender identity, gender expression, and sex); Feminism & Gender Equity (how feminism can be a solution to the injustices folks of all genders face); and Social Justice Competence (a series of short, practical lessons that will help readers put the learning from the book to work). It's written for people who want to learn for themselves, educators who are hoping to better communicate themes of gender to others, and activists who want to add a gender equity lens to their vision of justice. It's not meant to be the end of one's journey into understanding gender, but a great place to start. Because gender is something we all deserve to understand.
Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
