Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Popular Fantasy

This book explores the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, directors, producers and fans use the opportunities offered by popular fantasy to exceed or challenge norms of gender and sexuality, focusing on a range of media, including television episodes and series, films, video games and multi-player online role-play games, novels and short stories, comics, manga and graphic novels, and board games. Engaging directly with an enormously successful popular genre which is often overlooked by literary and cultural criticism, contributors pay close attention to the ways in which the producers of fantasy texts, whether visual, game, cinematic, graphic or literary texts, are able to play with gender and sexuality, to challenge and disrupt received notions and to allow and encourage their audiences to imagine ways of being outside of the constitutive constraints of socialized gender and sexual identity. With rich case studies from the US, Australia, UK, Japan and Europe, all concentrating not on the critique of fantasy texts which duplicate or reinforce existing prejudices about gender and sexuality, but on examining the exploration of or attempt to make possible non-normative gendered and sexual identities, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, with interests in popular culture, fantasy, media studies and gender and sexualities.

This book explores the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, directors, producers and fans use the opportunities offered by popular fantasy to exceed or challenge norms of gender and sexuality, focusing on a range of media, including television episodes and series, films, video games and multi-player online role-play games, novels and short stories, comics, manga and graphic novels, and board games. Engaging directly with an enormously successful popular genre which is often overlooked by literary and cultural criticism, contributors pay close attention to the ways in which the producers of fantasy texts, whether visual, game, cinematic, graphic or literary texts, are able to play with gender and sexuality, to challenge and disrupt received notions and to allow and encourage their audiences to imagine ways of being outside of the constitutive constraints of socialized gender and sexual identity. With rich case studies from the US, Australia, UK, Japan and Europe, all concentrating not on the critique of fantasy texts which duplicate or reinforce existing prejudices about gender and sexuality, but on examining the exploration of or attempt to make possible non-normative gendered and sexual identities, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, with interests in popular culture, fantasy, media studies and gender and sexualities.

"Gender identity and sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction" is the Call for Papers 2016 of Academia Lunare, the non-fiction arm of Luna Press Publishing. The papers explore this theme asking the important question: do we have a problem?

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."

This groundbreaking collection provides students with a timely and accessible overview of current trends within contemporary popular fiction.

In globalizing Asia, sexual mores and gender roles are in constant flux. How have economic shifts and social changes altered and reconfigured the cultural meanings of gender and sexuality in the region? How have the changing political economy and social milieu influenced and shaped the inner workings and micro-politics of family structure, gender relationships, intimate romance, transactional sex, and sexual behaviors? This volume offers up-to-date, grounded, critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across a diverse array of Asian societies: China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters disentangle the ways in which gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Whether highlighting intimate relationships between elite businessmen and their mistresses in China; nightclub performances by Thai men in Bangkok; single women’s views of romance, motherhood, and marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo; or male same-sex relationships in Pakistan—each chapter centers around the stories of the gendered subjects themselves and how they are shaped by outside forces. Taken together they provide a provocative entrée into the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia. By foregrounding cross-cultural ethnographic research, this volume sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, and women’s and LGBTQ studies.

Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.