Results by title

91 books match the query 'Desire' and 7 start with p

cover of Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men

Pathways of Desire

The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men

Héctor Carrillo

University of Chicago Press, 2017

With Pathways of Desire, Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greater sexual autonomy and sexual freedom in the United States. The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc of these men’s migration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, and their sexual and romantic relationships with American men. These men’s diverse and fascinating stories demonstrate the intertwining of sexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration.

Further, Carrillo shows that sexual globalization must be regarded as a bidirectional, albeit uneven, process of exchange between countries in the global north and the global south. With this approach, Carrillo challenges the view that gay men from countries like Mexico would logically want to migrate to a “more sexually enlightened” country like the United States—a partial and limited understanding, given the dynamic character of sexuality in countries such as Mexico, which are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity. Pathways of Desire also provides a helpful analytical framework for the simultaneous consideration of structural and cultural factors in social scientific studies of sexuality.  Carrillo explains the patterns of cross-cultural interaction that sexual migration generates and—at the most practical level—shows how the intricacies of cross-cultural sexual and romantic relations may affect the sexual health and HIV risk of transnational immigrant populations.
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cover of Peacemakers: Violence and Desire in Native American Myth and Fiction

Peacemakers

Violence and Desire in Native American Myth and Fiction

Scott Richard Lyons

Michigan State University Press, 2027

Employing the mimetic theory of René Girard as its heuristic, Peacemakers offers a unique analysis of Native American myth and fiction. It explores two important founding myths (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe and Acoma Pueblo) and analyzes four modern novels: three from the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s (N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) and the fourth from the twenty-first century (Sherman Alexie’s Flight). While Native American literary criticism typically points to continuities across the traditional-modern divide, Scott Richard Lyons emphasizes a decisive break happening in the progressive era. Following Girard’s theory, Lyons finds that the Indigenous worlds of sacred tradition and secular modernity confront situations of mimetic desire and violence in significantly different ways, given their different cultural resources. Ultimately problems of violence and desire come down to questions of how people can live together peacefully with a sense of meaning and transcendence, questions that are more “religious” than “political.” Thus, the outlook of Peacemakers is more Shakespearian than Marxian.

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cover of Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel

Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel

Chip Rhodes

University of Iowa Press, 2008

The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliché: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire.

Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to “abnormal desire” to, finally, strictly business.

Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel pays close attention to six authors—Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard—who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling.
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cover of Praying Naked

Praying Naked

Katie Condon

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Through language both reverent and reckless, Katie Condon’s debut collection renders the body a hymn. Praying Naked is Eden in the midst of the fall, the meat of the apple sweet as sex. In this collection, God is a hopeless and dangerous flirt, mothers die and are resurrected, and disappointing lovers run like hell for the margins. With effortless swagger and confessional candor, Condon lays bare the thrill of lust and its subsequent shame. In poems brimming with “the desire / to be desired” by men, by God, by lovers’ other women, by oneself, she renders a world in which wildflowers are coated in ash and dark bedrooms flicker with the blue light of longing. The speaker implores like an undressed wound: “is it wrong to feel a hurt kind of beautiful?” Ecstatic and incisive, Praying Naked is a daring sexual and spiritual reckoning by a breathtaking new poet.
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cover of Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance

Presence and Desire

Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 1993

This book critically bridges feminist theory and theatrical practice. Dolan examines how performance can subvert normative constructs of gender and sexuality. The collection evaluates mainstream theater, academic stages, subcultural venues, and performance in daily life. It centers sexuality as a primary analytical framework to explore queer visibility and cultural representation. It bridges contemporary feminist theory, poststructuralism, and theatrical practice and places sexuality at the center of its analytical framework to explore how theatrical representation can subvert normative constructs of gender and desire. Dolan evaluates a vast spectrum of performance spaces—ranging from mainstream professional and academic stages to subcultural venues, pornography, and everyday social interactions—to champion queer visibility and claim recognition for women's bodies. Ultimately, the volume functions as a foundational text in performance studies and LGBTQ+ cultural criticism, demonstrating how deliberate theatrical strategies can provoke American culture to actively dismantle and reimagine its traditional social relations

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cover of Prison Cultures: Performance, Resistance and Desire

Prison Cultures

Performance, Resistance and Desire

Aylwyn Walsh

Intellect Books, 2023

The first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution.

Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of “bad girls” and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics, Prison Cultures examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. Focusing primarily on the UK and using examples from pop cultures, the book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies, Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behavior.
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cover of Promised Lands

Promised Lands

Edited by Derek Rubin

Brandeis University Press, 2010

This vibrant anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American fiction writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume. With the kind of depth and imagination that only fiction allows, they offer striking variations on the multivalent theme of the Promised Land and how it continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews. This anthology provides a rich reading experience and a unique window onto Jewish American life and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A scholarly introduction by Derek Rubin provides literary context, discusses the organization of the volume, and illuminates expected and unexpected connections among the stories. Promised Lands features 23 stories by Elisa Albert, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Janice Eidus, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Lauren Grodstein, Aaron Hamburger, Dara Horn, Rachel Kadish, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Joan Leegant, Yael Goldstein Love, Rivka Lovett, Tova Mirvis, Lev Raphael, Nessa Rapoport, Jonathan Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Joey Rubin, Edward Schwarzschild, Steve Stern, Lara Vapnyar, Adam Wilson, and Jonathan Wilson.
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