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The human body is a crucial site for the inscription of cultural paradigms: how people are perceived controls the way they are treated. Postmodernist writers have shown sexual roles, racial inequalities and other forms of discrimination to be parts of a process of reductio ad absurdum, consisting of the identification of the individual‘s social functions with their anatomical features as well as with the habitual marking of their bodies. This article examines Angela Carter‘s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman where Carter‘s refusal of established body politics is most clearly dramatised. This novel exposes the dreary consequences of power/weakness relations, together with its contradictory exploitation of Gothic devices, making it an esssential testimony to Carter‘s postmodernist reconfiguration of worldviews and narrative modes.
España (PFE) was founded in 1975 and officially registered in 1981 – and women were finally able to shed state control and domination and enjoy freedom once again. During the electoral campaigns before the general elections in 1977 were due to take place, socialists and communists backed most of women’s demands for equality in all spheres, including the socialisation of domestic work, equal opportunities for paid work, and an end to educational and legislative discrimination. Activists’ campaigns also incorporated certain radical feminist demands around sexuality, most
’ (1984) [‘Investigation about the situation of homosexuals in society’], would put homosexuality on the official political agenda as a legitimate social and civil rights issue in Sweden, paving the way for cohabitation, anti- discrimination, parental and marital rights during the following decades. The two rare lesbian films examined in this chapter, largely forgotten and overlooked in Swedish film history as well as in feminist and queer historiography, anticipate these crucial shifts in the official medical, legal and social understanding of homosexuality in Sweden
his later writings. In his early essay entitled ‘Human Universe’, Olson claims that ‘the only two universes which count, the two phenomenal ones’, are ‘that of himself, as organism, and that of his environment, the earth and planets’ (CPr, 56). Developing this cosmological discrimination via his more schematic essayistic mode in Proprioception, published ten years later, he locates the phenomenally exterior universe within the ‘human universe’, the human body being the site of the same. Experience, or the ‘kosmos inside a human being’, as Olson calls it in The
praise or to bury BUT TO EXAMINE what’s around, that is of USE, not that, we admire’.10 Olson’s desire to maintain discriminations and differences in a commodifying world which elides distinctions, has a specific affinity with Adorno’s methodological effort. Adapting Benjamin’s ideas, Adorno’s critique of non-dialectical thinking was levelled at the manner in which the conceptual or general is mistaken for ‘truth’ rather than merely another mode of thought. While focussing on particularity and recognising that conceptuality cannot be dismissed, Adorno utilises clusters
initially published in Les Temps modernes in November 1945 and was a key point of reference for those who opposed the resurgence of French anti-Semitism immediately after the war. Although Fanon was an avid reader of Les Temps modernes, this was not merely a matter of textual influence. Fanon had served as part of the Free French forces in a war against racism and fascism and had lived through Nazi discrimination against the handful of Jews in Martinique and the larger Jewish population in Algeria (Macey 2000: 83–4, 94–7). These experiences informed much of Peau noire
Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book relocates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre that move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and reimagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event-based trauma, addressing instead the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas.
As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.