Illuminates how one folktale serves as a living record of the evolving cultures and relationships of China and Korea

The Butterfly Lovers Story, sometimes called the Chinese Romeo and Juliet, has been enduringly popular in China and Korea. In Transforming Gender and Emotion, Sookja Cho demonstrates why the Butterfly Lovers Story is more than just a popular love story. By unveiling the complexity of themes and messages concealed beneath the tale’s modern classification as a tragic love story, this book reveals the tale as a rich academic subject for students of human emotions and relationships, comparative geography and culture, and narrative adaptation. By examining folk beliefs and ideas that abound in the narrative—including rebirth and a second life, the association of human souls and butterflies, and women’s spiritual power—this book presents the Butterfly Lovers Story as an example of local religious narrative. The book’s cross-cultural comparisons, best manifested in its discussion of a shamanic ritual narrative version from the Cheju Island of Korea, frame the story as a catalyst for inclusive, expansive discussion of premodern Korean and Chinese literatures and cultures. This scrutiny of the historical and cultural background behind the formation and popularization of the Cheju Island version sheds light on important issues in the Butterfly Lovers Story that are not frequently discussed—either in past examinations of this particular narrative or in the overall literary studies of China and Korea. This new, open approach presents an innovative framework for understanding premodern literary and cultural space in East Asia.

Angela Katz-McNair has never felt quite right as a girl, but it’s a shock to everyone when she cuts her hair short, buys some men’s clothes, and announces she’d like to be called by a new name, Grady. Grady is happy about his decision to finally be true to himself, despite the practical complications, like which gym locker room to use. And though he didn’t expect his family and friends to be happy about his decision, he also didn’t expect kids at school to be downright nasty about it. But as the victim of some cruel jokes, Grady also finds unexpected allies in this thought-provoking novel that explores struggles any reader can relate to.

Sexed Sentiments provides a gender perspective on the recent turn to affect in criticism. It presents new work by scholars from different disciplines working on gender and emotion, a field par excellence where an interdisciplinary focus is fruitful. This collection presents essays from disciplines like history, literary studies, psychology, sociology and queer studies, focusing on subjects varying from masculinity in the cult of sensibility to the role of empathy in forging feminist solidarities. The volume illuminates how new theoretical approaches to both gender and emotion may be productively applied to a variety of fields.

Transgender, gender variant and intersex people are in every sector of all societies, yet little is known about their relationship to place. Using a trans, feminist and queer geographical framework, this book invites readers to consider the complex relationship between transgender people, spaces and places. This book addresses questions such as, how is place and space transformed by gender variant bodies, and vice versa? Where do some gender variant people feel in and / or out of place? What happens to space when binary gender is unravelled and subverted? Exploring the diverse politics of gender variant embodied experiences through interviews and community action, this book demonstrates that gendered bodies are constructed through different social, cultural and economic networks. Firsthand stories and international examples reveal how transgender people employ practices and strategies to both create and contest different places, such as: bodies; homes; bathrooms; activist spaces; workplaces; urban night spaces; nations and transnational borders. Arguing that bodies, gender, sex and space are inextricably linked, this book brings together contemporary scholarly debates, original empirical material and popular culture to consider bodies and spaces that revolve around, and resist, binary gender. It will be a valuable resource in Geography, Gender and Sexuality studies.

Combining transgender studies with the ’neomodernist’ architectures of the internationally renowned firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and with modernist writers (Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf) whose work anticipates that of transgender studies, this book challenges the implicit ’spatial models’ of popular narratives of transgender - interiority, ownership, sovereignty, structure, stability, and domesticity - to advance a novel theorization of transgender as a matter of exteriority, groundlessness, ornamentation, and movement. With case studies spanning the US and UK, Transgender Architectonics examines the ways in which modernist architecture can contribute to our understanding of how it is that humans are able to transform, shedding light on the manner in which architecture, space, and the spatial metaphors of gender can play significant - if often unrealized - potential roles in body and gender transformation. By remedying both the absence of actual architecture in queer theory's discussions of space and also architectural theory's marginal treatment of transgender, this volume constitutes a serious intervention in the field of ’queer space’. It draws on modernist literature in order to reckon with and rebuild the architectural ideas that already implicitly structure common understandings of the queer and transgender self. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in queer theory, the body and transformation, gender and sexuality, modernist writing and architectural theory.

This tightly focused collection of essays by a distinguished group of scholars analyses the degree to which expressions of emotion in ancient literature and art become an 'artistic' rather than a 'social' construct. To what degree do literary genres, philosophy and visual arts produce expectations for the arousal of certain emotions? Are the emotions of women, for example, represented differently in different genres? How and why do literary genres and visual arts concentrate on specific emotions and stylise them accordingly, and how do particular emotions relate to gender within literary texts? The book will be of interest to all students and scholars of classical literature and gender studies.