What if normative gender standards were legally enforced? How would our institutions inform and enforce these rules and regulations? What would be the consequences of failing to comply with gender expression standards? It’s in the midst of this maelstrom that we join Alex, our genderfluid and nonbinary protagonist who, during the thick of their adolescence, must navigate the choppy waters of lust, love, friendship, schooling, loss, and their city’s rigid – and perhaps lethal – gender expectations. In this world, Alex must constantly exchange their true self for safety and compliance, a relentless transaction from which they feel they never will escape. Can they navigate this slippery slope, alongside their patchwork community of friends and allies? Or is arrest and social persecution inevitable? This novel is an honest and raw examination of queer lives. Gender Optics will illustrate, interrogate, and challenge the harmful products of binary hegemonic systems that all too often push gender variant folks to the fringes of society. While Gender Optics can be read purely for pleasure, it can also be used as supplemental reading for courses in critical theory, gender theory, gender and sexuality studies, LGBTQ studies, intersectionality, and arts-based research.

Examines modernist writers’ efforts to map the social implications of an evolving science of vision and visual culture. Western accounts of human vision before the nineteenth century tended to separate the bodily eye from the rational mind. This model gave way in the mid–nineteenth century to one in which the thinking subject, perceiving body, perceptual object, and material world could not be so easily separated. Christina Walter explores how this new physiology of vision provoked writers to reconceive the relations among image, text, sight, and subjectivity. Walter focuses in particular on the ways in which modernist writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot adapted modern optics and visual culture to develop an alternative to the self or person as a model of the human subject. Critics have long seen modernists as being concerned with an “impersonal” form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of its author’s personality. Walter argues that scholars have misunderstood aesthetic impersonality as an evacuation of the person when it is instead an interrogation of what exactly goes into a personality. She shows that modernist impersonality embraced the embodied and incoherent notion of the human subject that resulted from contemporary physiological science and traces the legacy of that impersonality in current affect theory. Optical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology.

The fifth edition of this popular textbook considers diversity in the mass media in three main settings: Audiences, Content, and Production. The book brings together 55 readings – the majority newly commissioned for this edition – by scholars representing a variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Together, these readings provide a multifaceted and intersectional look at how race, gender, and class relate to the creation and use of media texts, as well as the media texts themselves. Designed to be flexible for use in the classroom, the book begins with a detailed introduction to key concepts and presents a contextualizing introduction to each of the three main sections. Each reading contains multiple 'It’s Your Turn' activities to foster student engagement and which can serve as the basis for assignments. The book also offers a list of resources – books, articles, films, and websites – that are of value to students and instructors. This volume is an essential introduction to interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and class across both digital and legacy media.

Premodern History and Art through the Prism of Gender in East-Central Europe is a representative collection of current Czech research in premodern history and art history, using gender as a tool of analysis. The common denominators of the texts collected in this volume are the art history of the premodern period, gender perspectives, and, to a certain degree, the Czech milieu. The book is divided into four parts, based on area of interest, time frame, and research perspective. The first part sheds light on the state of research in the field of women's history—along with the implementation of the concept of gender—and highlights a certain paradigmatic conservatism of Czech art historiography. The second gathers contributions that analyze visual sources of Czech origin. The third includes texts that analyze gender issues on the level of literary representation. The final part presents two case studies that involve analysis of the premodern West European source base. Rywiková and Malaníková present this volume as an innovative way to introduce this specific segment of Central European art history to a broader audience in global academia.

Examines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of surveillance When Donald Trump promised to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, both supporters and opponents visualized a snaking barrier of concrete cleaving through nearly two thousand miles of arid desert. Though only 4 percent of the US population lives in proximity to the border, imagining what the wall would look like came easily to most Americans, in part because of how images of the border are reproduced and circulated for national audiences. Border Optics considers the US-Mexico border as one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the US. As a place of continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense, the border is rendered as a layered visual space of policing—one that is seen from watchtowers, camera-mounted vehicles, helicopters, surveillance balloons, radar systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and live streaming websites. It is also a space that is visualized across various forms and genres of media, from maps to geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television, which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Border Optics elaborates on the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and media. Camilla Fojas describes how the perception of the viewing public is controlled through a booming security-industrial complex made up of entertainment media, local and federal police, prisons and detention centers, the aerospace industry, and all manner of security technology industries. The first study to examine visual codes of surveillance within an analysis of the history and culture of the border region, Border Optics is an innovative and groundbreaking examination of security cultures, race, gender, and colonialism.

The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Transgender Studies is a comprehensive yet concise overview of important issues, themes, and research on transgender people and populations. Coupling both their scholarly expertise with their lived experiences, the contributors tackle a full gamut of topics, including medical care, education, coming out, bathroom and military politics and possibilities, and the creation of families. The volume opens with an introduction from the editor who outlines her own journey and experience searching for information on “transgender studies” in the early 2010’s. Since then, the field has risen in prominence and is one of the fastest growing areas of research in gender studies. Scholars and students alike will find this to be an accessible and essential primer on the societal forces that impact and shape the lives of transgender people.

In particular, optical imagery and paradigms afforded poets a new approach to the roles of the languishing male and his powerful beloved."--Jacket.