Personal Dispatches

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Cathy Crimmins

A cultural history of the customs, fashions, and figures of gay life in the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries-and how they have changed us for the better.How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization presents a broad yet incisive look at how an unusual "immigrant" group, homosexual men, has influenced mainstream American society and has, in many ways, become mainstream itself. From the way camp, irony, and the gay aesthetic have become part of our national sensibility to the undeniable effect the gay cognoscenti have had on media and the arts, Cathy Crimmins examines how gay men have changed the concepts of community, family, sex, and fashion.

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Debra D. Andrist

"Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The Body, Subject & Subjected illuminates some "selfies." This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures - the Iberian Peninsula to pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America - analyzing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. Chapter contributions address the representation of the body itself as subject, in both visual and textual manners, and illuminate attempts at control of the environment, of perception, of behavior and of actions, by artists and authors. Other chapters address the body as subjected to circumstance, representing the body as affected by factors such as illness, injury, treatment and death. These myriad effects on the body are interpreted through the brushes of painters and the pens of authors for social and/or personal control purposes. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures"--

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Momin Rahman

"Drawing on the example set by feminists, this textbook explores the problems of pursuing lesbian and gay political agendas within the present structure of democracy." "Using an interdisciplinary approach, the author connects the analysis of lesbian and gay identities in sociology and cultural studies with the analysis of democracy in political theory. This paves the way for a consideration of the implications of sociological theories of sexuality for democratic theory and practice."--Jacket.

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David G. Calderwood

"A comparative evaluation of early Spanish and Portuguese chronicles, sixteenth and seventeenth century New World conquistadores and colonizers, the Book of Mormon, and Latin American archaeology and art history"--Provided by publisher.