A refreshing collection of enchanting fairy tales that reflects the spectrum of human sexuality.

Once upon a time, our ancestors told tales of asexuality, symbolic stories that hint at other identities: a princess who grows a beard to escape marriage, a knight who forsakes his wife's bed to become a werewolf, a goddess with detachable parts, a planet where everyone is asexual. Drawn from many times and places, retold and reimagined for the 21st century, Elizabeth Hopkinson's second book of myths and tales brings asexuality out of the closet and gives it the history it has been denied.

A girl who crafts a husband from marzipan. A man who thinks he's made of glass. A nonbinary sibling who succeeds where their brothers fail. An origin story for the asexual flag. In this third collection, Elizabeth Hopkinson collects, combines and reinvents tales from Spain to China, El Salvador to India, bringing asexual identities to the fore. With original stories about a gender-swapped Cinderella, a poster in love, and a queer platonic relationship, this is her most inventive collection yet.

"Almost everyone knows the familiar fairy tale ending: the prince marries the princess and they live happily ever after. Or do they? Once upon a time, our ancestors were much more honest and open about the spectrum of human sexuality. Among the fairy tales and myths they told were stories of androgynes, neither male nor female; of women and men who resist sex and marriage for other kinds of love; of chaste romances, miraculous childbirth and bodily transformations. These are the asexual fairy tales you will find in this book. These tales come from many places: from Grimms' Fairy Tales to The Thousand and One Nights, from Greek mythology and Arthurian legend to the silent films of the 1920s and from Scandinavia to Japan. Retold, reimagined, and sometimes reinvented as new stories for the 21st century, these stories will change the way you think about fairy tales, and bring asexuality out of the closet."--

As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field. While this edition includes some of the most-cited original chapters, it also features critical updates as well as new, innovative work by both up-and-coming and established scholars and activists from around the world. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human. This cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary book serves as a valuable resource for everyone—from those who are just beginning their critical exploration of asexualities to advanced researchers who seek to deepen their theoretical engagements with the field.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.