Sally Munt

Sharon E. Smith

Andrew K. T. Yip

Race, Sexuality, and Gender in British Buddhism

Cosmopolitan Dharma

Chapters include: 'The Cultural Politics of Shame: An Introduction', 'Shove the Queer: Irish/American Shame in New York's Annual St Patrick Day Parades', 'Shameless in Queer Street' and 'After the Fall: Queer Heterotopias in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy'.

The Cultural Politics of Shame

Queer Attachments

"Lesbians are adept at constructing survival strategies. Our being in this world exacts a cost, and our identities mutate to incorporate and resist that cost. The reality of our world is our relentless demand for presence, an occupation of space which we have colonized for ourselves, in the name of a configuration of desires we call 'lesbian', -- the more reflective we can become about these tactics, the more powerful is our rhetoric of existence". This book is concerned with the ways contemporary lesbians have taken up imaginative and material space. It describes the mechanics of presence, how modern lesbians have produced a discursive space which offers a refutation to the closet. Identities are produced, expressed, and authenticated by and through space. Understanding "real" and metaphorical spatial structures helps us to discover new sites of presence and resistance. Some famous spaces, such as New York, Paris, and Berlin, have been constitutive of modern gay and lesbian identities. Social spaces teach us something about the relations of domination and subordination around us, and we have seen recently in that struggle "to be", a growing politics of location and locatedness. Space is also taken imaginatively. Our narratives, which have become moral and political handbooks, provide role models for building and consolidating identities and communities. By processes of interpretation, drawing from literary and cultural theory, the author displays ways in which lesbian identities are ascribed, resisted and embraced. The structure of the book is provided by the choice of models the author sees as organizing and mobilizing contemporary lesbian desire: the hero, the flaneur, thelesbian outlaw, the butch body and the lesbian nation. The lesbian flaneur and the lesbian hero are emotive figures of movement; both explore possibilities for lesbian identity and subjectivity. Both are adaptations of mainstream representations which have been manipulated for a lesbian political agenda, by contemporary North American writers, whose works the author explores in depth. The imagination, and experience, constitute dialectically the lesbian subject, and literature, the author demonstrates, is a principal forum for the exploration and testing of lesbian subjectivity, operating on an unconscious and emotional level.

Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space

Heroic Desire

Andrew Yip

Cosmopolitan Dharma, through an analysis of the diverse voices of racial, sexual and gender minority Buddhists, explores how cultural politics from the ground up can offer a more inclusive philosophy and lived experience of spirituality for Western Buddhism.

Cherry Smyth

Essays on the butch-femme designations, respecting the power that these categories have in the lesbian community while at the same time avoiding the cliched romanticism often inherent in their representation.

Inside Lesbian Gender

Butch/femme

Questions of space have become central to theorizing identity. Heroic Desire engages spatial paradigms in considering lesbian desire. Arguing against constructions of the self as alienated and fragmentary, Sally Munt posits the model of heroic desire to explain how lesbian space is taken up, materially and imaginatively.

Murder by the Book? is a thorough - and thoroughly enjoyable - look at the blossoming genre of the feminist crime novel in Britain and the United States. Sally Munt asks why the form has proved so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of detective fiction can be truly transgressive; and when exactly it was that the dyke detective appeared as the new super-hero for today. Along the way Munt poses some critical questions about the relations between fiction and activism, politics and representations, the writer and the reader. This will be an enticing book both for addicts of the genre and for teachers and their students.

Feminism and the Crime Novel

Murder by the Book?

Science and technology have had a profound effect on the way humans perceive space and time. In this book, an international team of authors explore themes of depth and surface, of real and conceptual space and of human/machine interaction. The collection is organized around the concept of Technospace--the temporal realm where technology meets human practice. In exploring this intersection the contributors initiate debate on a number of important conceptual questions: Is there a clear distinction between the real spaces of the body or the city, and the conceptual space of virtual reality?How are real and metaphorical spaces of electronic cultures quantified and regulated? Is there an ethics of technospace?Historically, the reception of new technologies has been invested with romantic idealism on the one hand and panic on the other. The authors argue that in order for utopian dreams to be tempered by ethical, humanistic needs, we have an urgent need to reveal, reflect upon and evaluate technospace and our relationship to it.

Technospaces

Andy Medhurst

Sally R Munt, Professor

A major new publication in lesbian and gay studies, this accessible textbook comprises newly-commissioned essays from a rich cross-section of international scholars. The book's twenty-five chapters are organized according to the key debates in the field and are envisaged both as introductory overviews and critical reflections of each field. The chapters published here will raise debates concerning how lesbian and gay studies has contributed to and changed the identity of traditional disciplines, and shaped new areas of study such as the body, performativity and sexual politics. The contributors are experts in their field, and their essays in this essential new textbook comprise incisive and critical accounts that both summarize existing debates and point the way forward to future developments. This is a classroom text which makes ideal seminar material, and contains extensive references for further reading. Directly relevant to, and intersecting with, contemporary debates in sexuality, gender and culture, this book is highly accessible and impressively comprehensive. Sally Munt and Andy Medhurst have been teaching lesbian and gay studies for over a decade. They bring to this volume an extraordinary wealth of knowledge of their subject, and a particular capacity for producing readable and authoritative text.

Sally Munt

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