Acts Of Passion

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint. Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture ‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performance Anyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Beginning in the Wyoming Territory in 1866, and spanning 13 tempestuous years in the lives of a spirited young beauty and the charismatic actor who has stolen her heart, this romance draws readers into a spellbinding world of soaring sensuality and rapturous romance. Teaser chapter of James' next book, Acts of Love.

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint. Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture ‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performance Anyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

For forty years Charles Alavoine has sleepwalked through his life. Growing up as a good boy in the grip of a domineering mother, he trains as a doctor, marries, opens a medical practice in a quiet country town, and settles into an existence of impeccable bourgeois conformity. And yet at unguarded moments this model family man is haunted by a sense of emptiness and futility. Then, one night, laden with Christmas presents, he meets Martine. It is time for the sleeper to awake.

In 1914, Luisa writes in a letter to the now Saint, Annibale M. di Francia: “I am finally sending you this handwritten copy of The Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. May it all be for His greater Glory. I have also enclosed a few pages where I describe the effects and the beautiful promises that Jesus makes to everyone who meditates these Hours of the Passion. I believe that if whoever meditates on them is a sinner, he will convert; if he is imperfect, he will become perfect; if he is holy, he will become holier; if he is tempted, he will find victory; if suffering, he will find strength, medicine, and comfort in these Hours; if weak and poor, he will find a spiritual food and a mirror in which to look at himself continually and so become beautiful and similar to Jesus, our model”.

Acts is the sequel to Luke's gospel and tells the story of Jesus's followers during the 30 years after his death. It describes how the 12 apostles, formerly Jesus's disciples, spread the message of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean against a background of persecution. With an introduction by P.D. James

When a man is found in his apartment, appearing to have committed hara kiri with a samurai sword, Boston Homicide Detective Jack Cade suspects more is going on than what it appears. The department’s criminal profiler has left and a new guy is taking his place. At first, Cade is skeptical of Dr. Michael Di Santo. Di Santo seems so absent-minded and too neurotic to be effective. But he is brilliant and hot and Cade finds himself falling hard and fast, both in lust and in love. The attraction is mutual, although Michael's past demons haunt him, keeping him from getting too close. Together, they begin to unravel Michael's emotional knots even as they close in on a killer, another brilliant, wily person whose sights are now set on Michael. Publisher’s note: This title was previously published at Ellora’s Cave. It now contains a previously deleted scene for reprint with Ai Press.