Visual Orgasm

This book aims to encourage and develop understanding of the social category of gender, the concept of visual representation, and the relationship between the two, with contributions stimulating discussion within and between disciplines, research paradigms, and methods. By emphasising ‘real world’ issues, drawn from across the globe, the book aims to contribute towards and inspire broader feminist activism. Inviting readers to approach in an interdisciplinary spirit, the contributions suspend assumptions, and ask us to accept conceptual contradictions and tensions as they may arise, aspiring to (re)centre the concept of representation when considering the social category of gender within our dynamic and changing digital age. This book will be of interest to academics, students, and practitioners from a range of disciplines with an interest in gender studies and in particular the visual representation of gender. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies.

Female Arousal and Orgasm: Anatomy, Physiology, Behaviour and Evolution is the first comprehensive and accessible work on all aspects of human female sexual desire, arousal and orgasm. The book attempts to answer basic questions about the female orgasm and questions contradictory information on the topic. The book starts with a summary of important early research on human sex before providing detailed descriptions of female sexual anatomy, histology and neuromuscular biology. It concludes with a discussion of the high heritability of female orgasmicity and evidence for and against female orgasm providing an evolutionary advantage. The author has attempted to gather as much information on the subject as possible, including medical images, anonymized survey data and previously unreported trends. The groundbreaking book gives a scientific perspective on sexual arousal in women, and helps to uncover information gaps about this fascinating yet complex phenomenon. Readership Biologists, general readers, psychologists

This book identifies each emotion's purpose, trigger and effect. To read the first eighteen chapters, visit www.theoriginofemotions.com.

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century. Along the way, she examines marriage manuals of the 1920s and 1930s, designed to teach heterosexual couples how to achieve simultaneous orgasms; provides a queer reading of behavioral modification practices of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at transforming gay men into heterosexuals; and demonstrates how representations of orgasm have shaped ideas about sexuality and sexual identity. A confident and often counterintuitive engagement with feminist and queer traditions of critical thought, Orgasmology affords fresh perspectives on not just sex, sexual orientation, and histories of sexuality, but also agency, ethics, intimacy, modernity, selfhood, and sociality. As modern subjects, we presume we already know everything there is to know about orgasm. This elegantly argued book suggests that orgasm still has plenty to teach us.

Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman contains comic strips, illustrations, essays, articles, anecdotes and other pieces contributed by top American, English, and international comics creators paying tribute to the master of comic book writing, Alan Moore (creator of Watchmen and From Hell), as he celebrates his 50th year. Over a hundred contributors include Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Gibbons, Denis Kitchen, David Lloyd, Jim Valentino, Sergio Toppi, Bryan Talbot, Steve Parkhouse, Mark Millar, Howard Cruse, James Kochalka, José Villarrubia, Sam Kieth, Dave Sim, Oscar Zarate, DJ Paul Gambaccini, and novelist Darren Shan, to name just a few. The book jacket will feature a new photgraph by Piet Corr and other features will include interviews, biographies, and new and rare photographs.

Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors -- Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup -- Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.

Presenting a revisionary reading of German, Canadian, and American texts such as Fanny Essler, Settlers of the Marsh, and Sister Carrie, Gammel (English, U. of Prince Edward Island) attributes to naturalism, a predominantly male genre, the appropriation of a disruptive female sexuality not so much to "liberate" it from Victorian repression as to contain it within the male boundaries of naturalism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR