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2 books match the query 'Does'

cover of Does the Earth Care?: Indifference, Providence, and Provisional Ecology

Does the Earth Care?

Indifference, Providence, and Provisional Ecology

Mick Smith

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Rethinking our relationship with Earth in a time of environmental emergency

The world is changing. Progress no longer has a future but any earlier sense of Earth as “providential” seems of merely historical interest. The apparent absence of Earthly solicitude is a symptom and consequence of these successive Western modes of engagement with the Earth, now exemplified in global capitalism. Within these constructs, Earth can only appear as constitutively indifferent to the fate of all its inhabitants. The “provisional ecology” outlined in Does the Earth Care?—drawing on a variety of literary and philosophical sources from Richard Jefferies and Robert Macfarlane to Martin Heidegger and Gaia theory—fundamentally challenges that assumption, while offering an Earthly alternative to either cold realism or alienated despair in the face of impending ecological disaster.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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cover of What Gender Is, What Gender Does

What Gender Is, What Gender Does

Judith Roof

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

What Gender Is, What Gender Does provides a forceful new paradigm for considering genders. With depth and insight, Judith Roof argues that genders are much more than binary. And they are constantly morphing: they are conscious and unconscious, simultaneously conventional and idiosyncratic. At any moment, more than one gender dynamic is at work in any individual.

Roof’s interpretation of genders isn’t content with either biological duality or endlessly open performativity, and what results is a nuanced and surprising representation of gender—an account that captures the complexities of lived experience as well as lived ideology. For Roof, genders are interacting sets of operations that link individual desires to multiple, shifting manifestations of sociocultural positioning and self-presentation. Thus, “to gender” is to signal, mask, suggest, mislead, and simplify the uncontainable chaos of desires characteristic of subjects but roundly contained by society.

Drawing illustrative material from contemporary popular culture productions, including My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Spider-Man, Shrek, Shallow Hal, Sex and the City, Bridesmaids, Bond films, and “bromance” movies, What Gender Is, What Gender Does demonstrates how the persistent conflation of gender and sexual difference is, on the one hand, a simple taxonomic urge and, on the other, a cover that offers the security of identity in place of the frustrations and fears of the real asymmetries of personal power dynamics.


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