This book provides an international, multi-disciplinary empirical account of pole classes and how they fit into wider discourses about bodies and gender, and age and fitness. In particular, the book explores how women initiate agency and espouse liberation and empowerment through something as seemingly problematic as pole classes.

Pole dancing is revolutionizing the way in which women relate to sex and their bodies. It has empowered many women through physical fitness and sensual movement. And yet the psychology behind this empowerment has not really been well defined or well understood by many people. This book is the first of its kind to capture and explore these issues. It has the potential to encourage people to examine their prejudices about pole dancing and female sexuality, and to cast the art of pole dancing in an entirely new light.

Introduces an exercise program combining yoga, dance, and erotic movements designed to tone muscles, increase flexibility, and promote weight loss.

This edited collection focuses on gender and contemporary horror in film, examining how and if representations of gender in horror have changed.

This book explores the meanings and practices of vintage lives. It focuses on the non-mainstream subculture of vintage clothes and lifestyle, specifically that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and asks how those engaged in the culture place themselves within the gendered and classed contexts of these eras. As a result, it also identifies the tensions involved in these identities connected to a past that offered little gain for women and narrow gender roles for both women and men. Modern Vintage Homes & Leisure Lives is based on original empirical international data about a group of people who wear vintage clothing all of the time and whose homes are styled entirely, or almost entirely, vintage. It aims to understand the meanings of vintage for them through their daily practices and accrued knowledge. Through interviews and direct observations of vintage events it also explores questions about the acquisition, display and curation of vintage clothes, homes and objects, about glamour and wardrobes, about the history of second-hand markets, and emotional durability and ideas about ghosts, hauntings and spectral remains. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of gender and women’s studies, fashion and design, fashion history, cultural studies, the body and embodiment.

This book examines childbirth and parenting in horror texts. By analysing new texts, and re-analysing commonly used texts with new feminist methodology, this study provides a unique contribution to the fields of gender and horror studies.

Horror has found a resurgence on television in the post-millennial years. This book will investigate the changing and challenging roles that gender has undergone in TV horror, examining a range of shows, including Hannibal, American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Penny Dreadful, Supernatural, The Exorcist, iZombie, and Bates Motel.