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This book is a deep dive into the largely unexplored space of BBW “bashes”—multi-day gatherings of fat women and their admirers. Using a range of feminist theories of embodiment and affect, the project is guided by autoethnography and in-depth interviews with twelve participants. Participant experiences are first analyzed with a key focus on experiences that cause grief and disenfranchisement; subsequently, the book looks at experiences that may be radical or revelatory. The book does not seek to either villainize or valorize BBW spaces but instead sheds a bright light on the experience of this cultural subspace and all it may offer to analyses of fat life.

This volume examines the role of culture in developing social, cultural and political discourses of HIV/AIDS from a contemporary viewpoint. In doing so, the memory of HIV/AIDS is a powerful tool to examine representations of the past and connect them with future debates. This reassessment of HIV/AIDS explores the most appropriate way to come to terms with a past that involved a negative, stigmatised and marginalised representation. Therefore, remembering plays a key role in generating collective memory, which allows for the exchange of mnemonic content between individual minds, creates discourses on memory and commemoration, and disseminates versions of the past that may affect the representation of HIV/AIDS in the future. Indeed, rewriting about the past also means assessing our responsibility towards the present and the potential of transmission to future generations, especially in times of pandemics.

The Campus Queen in Literature and Culture: Prom Queen Profiles explores the nuanced relationship between femininity and power and provides a scholarly framework for understanding the evolution of the prom queen's archetypal ubiquity. Semantically, the titles are nearly synonymous—prom queen, homecoming queen, winterfest princess—as all denote the longstanding tradition in the United States of conferring royal status upon teenage popularity. Yet whatever we call it, high school royalty remains one of the most paradoxical realities of youth culture, for as fervently as it gets dismissed and discredited, it is just as frequently revered and respected. A physical manifestation of the student body's collective hegemonic efforts, the campus queen occupies a significant space in literature and culture, excavating truths both timeless and telling. A signature survey of the genre, this study traces the historical underpinnings and cultural implications of the campus queen, examining the longevity of the archetype and ultimately reimagining the narrative for future generations.

This book explores the status of women representation in management in Indian industries. Recognizing that women managers are facing barriers in achieving top level of management positions in industries, it adopts unique methodology of involving men and women managers as respondents to understand the key issues of gender diversity, glass ceiling, glass walls, glass cliffs, and gender inequality in the Indian corporate scenario. The book, via its six chapters, explores these key issues through the lens of feminist theories under four dimensions – personal, work, organisational and social – and contains an extensive literature review to understand the root causes of these issues. Secondly, it discusses a pilot study conducted to understand the perspectives about career growth of women managers. Outcome of this pilot study works towards conceptualising factors under four dimensions, mentioned above, influencing women participation in management, and to develop survey tools for further quantitative study. Thirdly, for the empirical analysis, the book employs exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify factors under each of these four dimensions; and structure of the relationship between factors and women representation in management is confirmed by the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). This book is beneficial for several stakeholders as it is a multidimensional study. It is useful for the undergraduate and post graduate students and research scholars of management, social sciences (such as economics, gender studies, psychology, political sciences, sociology etc), law, medicine, and engineering. Apart from this, it is also useful for corporate executives, decision makers of corporate governance, women elected representatives, administrators, development practitioners, teachers, legal experts, international agencies like UN who are working on women empowerment, and all those agencies working towards meeting SDG5 goal.

Caribbean countries have had to navigate multiple crises, which have tested their collective resolve through time. In this regard, the region's landscape has been shaped by an interplay of vulnerability and resilience which has brought to the fore possibilities and contradictions. It is within this context that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic must be considered. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and the Caribbean, Volume 2: Society, Education and Human Behaviour provides a comprehensive, multi- and interdisciplinary assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, using the Caribbean as the site of enquiry. The edited collection mobilises critical perspectives brought to bear on research produced within and beyond the boundaries and boundedness of conventional academic disciplinary divides, in response to the multi-dimensional crises of our time. This volume is divided into four (4) parts consisting of twenty-three (23) chapters and weaves together fourbroad thematic strands: COVID-19 and Caribbean Society; COVID-19 Religion and Rights; Psycho-social Impacts of COVID-19; and Education, Innovation, and Technology. Authors working within and across the human, social, physical and life sciences consider the myriad effects of the health crisis in the region, interrogating these experiences from the granular to macro level, utilising inter and multidisciplinary lenses. Collectively, the chapters which constitute Volume II expose the fault lines in Caribbean societies, which are deeply rooted in the region's history and delineate the precise ways in which the pandemic has transformed lives and livelihoods in the region. The culmination of this collection offers a reimagining of our Caribbean contemporary futures in the hope of finding home-grown solutions, avenues and possibilities.

This volume brings to the fore the interface of religion, women's sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Zimbabwe. It emphasizes that empowering African women is a pivotal pillar for attaining sustainable development. Contributors discuss the need for implementing structural changes as a prerequisite for social progress and development to occur in Southern Africa. They interrogate the extent to which religious beliefs and practices either promote or impede women's SRHR. The contributors also proffer several ways in which addressing the themes of health for all and equality for all women and girls can make a meaningful contribution towards the fulfillment of the goals set for Agenda 2030.

This volume brings to the fore the interface of religion, women's sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Zimbabwe. It emphasizes that empowering African women is a pivotal pillar for attaining sustainable development. Contributors discuss the need for implementing structural changes as a prerequisite for social progress and development to occur in Southern Africa. They interrogate the extent to which religious beliefs and practices either promote or impede women's SRHR. The contributors also proffer several ways in which addressing the themes of health for all and equality for all women and girls can make a meaningful contribution towards the fulfillment of the goals set for Agenda 2030.

This book is about Madeleine Slade (1892-1982) and Catherine Mary Heilemann (1901-1982), two English associates of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948), known in India as Mira Behn and Sarala Behn. The odysseys of these women present a counternarrative to the forces of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and globalized development. The book examines their extraordinary journey to India to work with Gandhi and their roles in India's independence movement, their spiritual strivings, their independent work in the Himalayas, and most importantly, their contribution to the evolution of Gandhian philosophy of socio-economic reconstruction and environmental conservation in the present Indian state of Uttarakhand. The author shows that these women developed ideas and practices that drew from an extensive intellectual terrain that cannot be limited to Gandhi's work. She delineates directions in which Gandhian thought and experiments in rural development work and visions of a new society evolved through the lives, activism, and written contributions of these two women. Their thought and practice generated a new cultural consciousness on sustainability that had a key influence in environmental debates in India and beyond and were responsible for two of the most important environmental movements of India and the world: the Chipko Movement or the movement against commercial green felling of trees by hugging them, and the protest against the Tehri high dam on the Bhagirathi River. To this day, their teachings and philosophies constitute a useful and significant contribution to the search for and implementation of global ideas of ecological conservation and human development.

This book, bringing together a multi-voiced dialogue between academic scholars and professionals from diverse fields, shares a comprehensive and heterogeneous look at the interdisciplinarity of Galician Studies while examining a chronologically broad range of subjects from the 1800s to the present. This volume carves out a distinct approach to gender studies investigating issues of culture, language, displacement, counterculture artists, and community projects as related to questions of politics, gender and class. Women, conceived as both individual and political bodies, are studied, among other things, as an example of what it means to struggle from the margins emphasizing the importance of looking at the opposition between the center and the peripheries when studying the relationship between space and culture.

This book presents a compilation of chapters relating to the socio-cultural experiences of Malaysian Indian women. It includes a historical background covering Indian women's migration to Malaya, and explores the lived realities of contemporary Indian women who are members of this minority ethnic group in the country. The authors cover a wide range of issues such as gender inequality, poverty, the involvement of women in performing arts, work, inter‐personal relationships, and well-being and happiness, drawing on substantial empirical data through a gendered lens. This book addresses the gap in the intersectional gender studies literature on minority groups of women in Malaysia, while simultaneously highlighting the multiple forms of subordination minority women - particularly Indian women - experience in society, including those that arise from gender‐ethnic intersectionality. In examining the case of Indian women in Malaysia, it also speaks to and enriches existing literature on the lives of minority groups of women in the Global South more broadly This anthology is beneficial to researchers and students in the social sciences, particularly in disciplines related to gender studies and minority studies. In addition, it is also useful for policy makers and social activists working with minority women in the Global South.

Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the'anorexic logic'that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic—the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine—is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare,'anorexic'style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

This book provides a comparative and contemporary account of social stratification in the Central European states of Czechia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (the Visegrad Four – V4 group), and also by contrast with Austria. It looks at the shared history of these countries as part of the erstwhile Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the V4 states experienced, for decades, the regressive authoritarian Soviet rule, Austria escaped this fate. The question is how some common historical roots, impact of the communist regime, and transition paths have shaped the specific social structures of V4 countries which differ despite belonging to a relatively homogeneous region. The book examines the changes and developments through analyses of large comparative surveys and other data collected after 1990, most notably using the European Union's survey “Statistics on Income and Living Conditions” (EU-SILC) that has been fielded since 2005. The book starts with an outline of the long-term developmentsin key social structure dimensions which occurred during the post-communist transition. The analytical chapters then discuss topics previously not much examined in social stratification perspective: subjective well-being, couples'status, cultural activities and differences among retirees. This book is intended for social scientists working on stratification research, and, specifically, V4 societies and politics.

Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, Craig Martin outlines a theory of discourse, ideology, and domination that can be used by scholars and students to understand these central elements in the study of culture. The book shows how discourses are used to construct social institutions-often classist, sexist, or racist-and that those social institutions always entail a distribution of resources and capital in ways that capacitate some subject positions over others. Such asymmetrical power relations are often obscured by ideologies that offer demonstrably false accounts of why those asymmetries exist or persist. The author provides a method of reading in order to bring matters into relief, and the last chapter provides a case study that applies his theory and method to racist ideologies in the United States, which systematically function to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with poor African Americans, thereby contributing to reinforcing the latter's place at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that has always existed in the US.