The annual Country Girls pageant is coming up, and this one is going to be bigger than every one before it. But that’s not exactly a good thing—at least not as far as Justin is concerned. It used to be a small little town tradition where the men in town got to hang out with eager, beautiful women for a week. But now it’s a joke. They don’t even pick local contestants anymore. After a night of heavy drinking, Justin’s friend comes up with an idea to expose the ridiculousness of the annual contest: by dressing Justin up as a little country hoe and making him compete with the other pageant girls.

After World War II, Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i sought to carve a positive niche of public citizenship in the community. In 1953 members of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and their wives created a beauty contest, the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) Queen Pageant, which quickly became an annual spectacle for the growing urban population of Honolulu. Crowning the Nice Girl analyzes the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research; interviews with CBF queens, contestants, and organizers; and participant observation in the Fiftieth Annual Festival as a volunteer, Christine Yano paints a complex portrait of not only a beauty pageant, but also a community. The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest.Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990s, adding corresponding "herstories"—extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality.

'Femininity in Flight' considers flight attendants as cultural icons, looking at how attendants redeployed the 'glamourization' used to sell air travel to campaign for professional respect, higher wages, and women's rights.

David Amey has been forced to wear female clothes and renamed Amy while working for Ms Ryder, a world-famous author. He can't escape due to the COVID lockdown and the attention of Ms Ryder's other two employees, Ellen and Jenny. They do not like a rival in the household and push him further into femininity.His situation becomes more extreme in book 2, when Ms Ryder's agent, Louise Lipman comes to stay and see out the lockdown. She is so enamoured with 'Amy' that she goes further by making him into a sissy maid and dressing him in increasingly sissy and revealing clothes.Things take an unexpected turn when he receives a call from a lawyer. An aunt he hadn't known existed is searching for him with a proposal he will find impossible to refuse.This novel contains scenes of a sexual nature including forced feminisation, sissy to sissy sex, submission, female domination, forced sissyfication, mild BDSM and humiliation. Suitable for adults over the age of 18 or the age of maturity in your region only.

How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for “Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained “typewriter girls” and “typewriter boys.” Still later was the “Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of “predictive text.” Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an “object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

What do mompreneurs, angry working-class men, and migrant domestic workers all have in common? They are all gendered subjects responding to the economic, political, and cultural realities of neoliberalism’s global gender order. In this ambitious book, Radhakrishnan and Solari map the varied gendered pathways of a global hegemonic regime. Focusing on the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia, they argue that the interconnected histories of imperialism, socialism, and postcolonialism have converged in a new way since the fall of the Soviet Union, transforming the post-war international order that preceded it. Today, the ideal of the empowered woman – a striving, entrepreneurial subject who overcomes adversity and has many “choices” – symbolizes modernity for diverse countries competing for status in the global hierarchy. This ideal bridges the painful gap between aspiration and lived reality, but also spurs widespread discontent. Blending social theory, rich empirical evidence, and a multi-sited understanding of neoliberalism, this book invites all of us to question taken-for-granted knowledge about gender and capitalism, and to look to grassroots international movements of the past to chart the path to a fairer future.

Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB "Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers"RUSA/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source"" ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates."