This edited volume is an inquiry into the representation of intimate relationships in a diverse array of media including cinema, arts, literature, picture books, advertising and popular music. It examines artistic portrayal of intimate relationships as a subversion of the boundaries between the representable and the non-representable, the real and the surreal, the visceral and the ideal, the embodied and the abstracted, the configured and transfigured. The essays focus on artistic mediation of intimacy in diverse relationships, including heterosexual, same-sex, familial, sibling' , political, and sadomasochistic. The collection offers new interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives on current trends in the study of popular representations of intimacy; representations that affect and formulate people's most personal inspirations, desires, angsts, dreams and nightmares in an increasingly alienated, industrialized world.

Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases and Practices takes readers on a journey through practico-theoretical experiments in thought, research and practice. Across disciplines, these authors navigate visuality to enhance pedagogical sensibility to how we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on through visual processes.

This book critically analyzes the sex industry in Israel, using feminist concepts and scholarship to elaborate on the power of prostitution to shape a world in which women are objects for fulfilling men's desires. A comprehensive collection of research-based articles that examine prostitution, trafficking in women and pornography from divergent disciplinary angles, it reveals the interconnectedness of these three aspects of the sex trade which objectifies, commercializes and exploits human – and in particular women’s – sexuality. Showing these practices to be embedded in a capitalist and patriarchal oppressive context that is accommodated by state institutions, this volume rejects the argument that it is possible to choose prostitution, and that feminist pornography is possible. With case studies including the conspicuous context of migration that attracts sex traffickers, the liberal discourse introduced by cinema, the media and the arts that serve to legitimate prostitution and pornography, the chauvinist-macho culture that perceives and treats women as sex objects, and the issues of male prostitution and men as clients, Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking in Women: Israel’s Blood Money constitutes a study of Israel as a unique context in which the sex trade can prosper, in spite of geographical, religious and institutional constraints. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies and gender and women’s studies.

Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen examines cinematic depictions of pretending-to-be-gay, assessing performances that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also offer depictions of gay selfhood with more nuanced multidirectional identifications. The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to cultural construction of human sexualities in the face of theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual stability and fluidity in cinematic images of men pretending to be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics and long-term queer visibility in a politically complicated mass culture which is mostly produced in a heteronormative and even hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films and TV series examined as part of the analysis include The Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin’s Cruising and many other straight and gay screens. This is a fascinating and important study relevant to students and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.

Providing an inclusive, yet multi- layered perspective on leisure cultures in dynamic hegemonic, subcultural, and countercultural communities, this volume investigates the disciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of leisure studies in the age of mass migration, nationalism, cultural wars, and conflicted societies in Israel. Israeli society has struggled with complicated geopolitical, intercultural, economic, and security conditions since the establishment of the State of Israel. Consequently, the emergent leisure cultures in Israel are vibrant, diversified, exuberant, and multifaceted, oscillating between Western and Middle Eastern tendencies. The chapters in this edited volume reflect dramatic influences of globalization on Israeli traditions, on one hand, and emergent local practices that reflect a communal quest of originality and authenticity, on the other hand. This book opens up a critical perspective on the tension between contested leisure cultures that are interconnected with spatial and temporal changes and interchanges. Examining leisure as a part of social, interethnic, physical, gendered, and sexual changes, the volume is a key text for scholars and students interested in leisure culture, Israeli society, education, cultural and media studies, and the Middle East.

The essays in this anthology study Israeli television, its different forms of representation, audiences and production processes, past and present, examining Israeli television in both its local, cultural dynamics, and global interfaces. The book looks at Israeli television as a creator, negotiator, guardian and warden of collective Israeli memory, examining instances of Israeli original television exported and circulated to the US and the global markets, as well as instances of American, British, and global TV formats, adapted and translated to the Israeli scene and screen. The trajectory of this volume is to shed light on major themes and issues Israeli television negotiates: history and memory, war and trauma, Zionism and national disillusionment, place and home, ethnicity in its unique local variations of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Israeli–Arabs and Palestinians, gender in its unique Israeli formations, specifically masculinity as shaped by the military and constant violent conflict, femininity in this same context as well as within a complex Jewish oriented society, religion, and secularism. Providing multifaceted portraits of Israeli television and culture in its Middle Eastern political and local context, this book will be a key resource to readers interested in media and television studies, cultural studies, Israel, and the Middle East.