Explores impact of 3 women filmmakers on French films

The Subject and Other Subjects theorizes the differences among ethical, aesthetic, and political conceptions of identity. When a person is called beautiful, why does it strike us as an objectification? Is a person whom we consider to be an exemplary person still a person, and not an example? Can one person conceive what it means to have the perspective of a community? This study treats these thorny issues in the context of recent debates in cultural studies, feminism, literary criticism, narrative theory, and moral philosophy concerning the nature and directions of multiculturalism, post-modernity, and sexual politics. Tobin Siebers raises a series of questions that "cross the wires" among ethical, aesthetic, and political definitions of the self, at once exposing our basic assumptions about these definitions and beginning the work of reconceiving them. The Subject and Other Subjects will broaden our ideas about the strange interplay between subjects and objects (and other subjects!) that characterizes modern identity, and so provoke lively debate among anthropologists, art historians, literary theorists, philosophers, and others concerned with how the question of the subject becomes entangled with ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Siebers argues, the subject is in fact a tangled network of subjectivities, a matrix of identities inconceivable outside of symbols and stories. Tobin Siebers is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, and author of Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism; Morals and Stories; The Ethics of Criticism; The Romantic Fantastic; and The Mirror of Medusa.

Theorizes an alternative form of masculinity in global literature that is less egocentric and more sustainable, both in terms of gendered and environmental power dynamics. Contemporary novelists and filmmakers like Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese-British), Emma Donoghue (Irish-Canadian), Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lankan-Canadian), Bong Joon-ho (South Korean) and J.M. Coetzee (South African-Australian) are emblematic of a transnational phenomenon that Robinson Murphy calls “castration desire.” That is, these artists present privileged characters who nonetheless pursue their own diminishment. In promulgating through their characters a less egocentric mode of thinking and acting, these artists offer a blueprint for engendering a more other-oriented global relationality. Murphy proposes that, in addition to being an ethical prerogative, castration desire's “less is more” model of relationality would make life livable where veritable suicide is our species' otherwise potential fate. “Castration desire” thus offers an antidote to rapacious extractivism, with the ambition of instilling a sustainable model for thinking and acting on an imminently eco-apocalyptic earth. In providing a fresh optic through which to read a diversity of text-types, Castration Desire helps define where literary criticism is now and where it is headed. Castration Desire additionally extends and develops a zeitgeist currently unfolding in critical theory. It brings Leo Bersani's concept “psychic utopia” together with Judith Butler's “radical egalitarianism,” but transports their shared critique of phallic individualization into the environmental humanities. In doing so, this book builds a new framework for how gender studies intersects with environmental studies.

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.

Lifelong learning is a key feature of society today, and is apparently embraced by a wide range of educators and trainers, as well as by governments and employers. In this wide-ranging book, Sue Jackson shows that universities have been slow to embrace a lifelong learning agenda, and argues that the lifelong learning experiences of women – and especially of working-class students – are seldom welcomed in the academy. In its unique considerations of the experiences of women students and academics, this book expounds an innovative and critical analysis of women in higher education. It will give a clear indication of alternative strategies for learners, teachers and policy makers. This book will be of key interest to anyone working in the fields of lifelong learning or continuing education who is interested in making learning accessible and meaningful for disadvantaged groups. It will also appeal to students of education, women's studies, gender studies and sociology; and to those interested in issues of gender, social class, feminist theory and feminist research.