Bryn Mawr Authors

Bodies Unbound

Bodies Unbound
$28.95

by Piper Sledge

Bodies Unbound is a comparative study showing how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care and the ways in which patients respond to these ideologies through decisions about their bodies using three cases: transgender men seeking preventative gynecological care, cisgender men diagnosed with breast cancer, and cisgender women with breast cancer who elect to undergo prophylactic mastectomies. Bodies Unbound is a story about how the relationship between bodies and gender becomes socially intelligible as well as how medical professionals use their position of relative authority over bodies to dictate which combinations of bodies and genders are legitimate or not. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don't match medical and social expectations for gynecological and breast cancer care, Sledge unravels the taken-for-granted alignment of bodies and gender that provide the foundation of medical care in the United States.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781978815780
Publication Date: 
March 12, 2021
Author: 

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
$13.98
$27.95
Sale 50% off 1 item

Judith Butler was the 2011 holder of the Flexner Lectureship.

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, she extends her theory of performativity to show why precarity--destruction of the conditions of livability--is a galvanizing force and theme in today's highly visible protests.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780674967755
Publication Date: 
November 17, 2015
Author: 

Times of Mobility

Times of Mobility
$100.00

Edited by Sibelan Forrester '83


 

In an era of increased mobility and globalisation, a fast growing body of writing originates from authors who live in-between languages and cultures. In response to this challenge, transnational perspective offers a new approach to the growing body of cultural texts with an emphasis on experiences of migration, transculturation, bilingualism and (cultural) translation. The introductory analysis and the fifteen essays in this collection critically interrogate complex relations between transnational and translation studies, bringing to this dialogue a much needed gender perspective. Divided into three parts (From Transnational to Translational; Reading Across Borders and Transnational in Translation), they address a range of issues relevant for this debate, from theoretical problems to practical questions of literary criticism and translation, understood as an act of cultural interpretation. The volume mostly deals with contemporary literary and cultural production, but also with classical texts and modernist literature. Its particular quality is a strong (although not exclusive) focus on Central and East European literatures, and more generally on women writers. Its interdisciplinary, transnational and intercultural perspective makes it relevant across disciplinary boundaries, from literary and translation studies to gender studies, cultural studies and migration studies.
ISBN/SKU: 
9789633863299
Publication Date: 
March 19, 2020

12th Commandment

12th Commandment
$22.64
$27.99
Sale 19% off 1 item

by Daniel Torday - Professor and Co-Chair of Creative Writing

 

Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday.

The Dönme sect--a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots--lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land.

But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil.

When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law--with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781250191816
Publication Date: 
January 17, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Alchemical Harry Potter: Essays on Transfiguration in J.K. Rowling's Novels

Alchemical Harry Potter: Essays on Transfiguration in J.K. Rowling's Novels
$39.95

Edited by Anne Mamary BMC '86

When Harry Potter first boards the Hogwarts Express, he journeys to a world which Rowling says has alchemy as its "internal logic." The Philosopher's Stone, known for its power to transform base metals into gold and to give immortality to its maker, is the subject of the conflict between Harry and Voldemort in the first book of the series. But alchemy is not about money or eternal life, it is much more about the transformations of desire, of power and of people--through love. Harry's equally remarkable and ordinary power to love leads to his desire to find but not use the Philosopher's Stone at the start of the series and his wish to end the destructive power of the Elder Wand at the end. This collection of essays on alchemical symbolism and transformations in Rowling's series demonstrates how Harry's work with magical objects, people, and creatures transfigure desire, power, and identity. As Harry's leaden existence on Privet Drive is transformed in the company of his friends and teachers, the Harry Potter novels have transformed millions of readers, inspiring us to find the gold in our ordinary lives.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781476681344
Publication Date: 
January 5, 2021
Author: 
Publisher: 

Between Persecution and Participation

Between Persecution and Participation
$19.95

by Penny Milbouer BMC '67

This is the story of a crushingly ordinary man who had the misfortune to live in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The son of a baptized Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Willy Wiemokli (1908-1983) was declared a half-Jew by the laws of the Third Reich, and because of this, he and his father were briefly interned in Buchenwald. Although his father was eventually executed in Auschwitz in 1943, Willy went on to become an accountant for J. A. Topf & Söhne, the manufacturer of the ovens used in the death of his father as well as thousands of others in concentration camps. Persecuted by the Nazis, he also participated, minimally, in the Nazi-led genocide. This paradox and Willy's liminal status gives his fascinating biography historical significance, adding a new dimension to our understanding of what the Nazi race policies meant to ordinary Germans. In this brief telling of an otherwise average man's life, Schüle and Sowade reveal the pervasive and long-term effect of the race laws. Based solely on archival records, Willy's story gives insight into the muddled and impossible choices of vulnerable individuals living under the Third Reich and the blurred boundaries between victim, bystander, and accomplice.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780815636168
Publication Date: 
October 29, 2018
Author: 

Aeneas

Aeneas
$34.95

by Lee Pearcy, Research Associate, Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies

The central character of Vergil's Aeneid seems to elude readers. To some, he is unlikable; to others, he seems unreal, a figure on which to hang a plot. Aeneas discovers a tragic figure whose defining virtue depends on a past that has been stripped from him, and whose destiny blocks him from the knowledge of the future that gives meaning to his life. His choices, silences, tears, and anger reflect an existential struggle that, in the end, he loses. Aeneas is a hero of the Trojan War, a time as distant from Vergil as Vergil is from us, but he is also a literary character created in response to political chaos and civil strife as the Roman Republic gave way to the Augustan empire. Lee T. Pearcy's book creates an Aeneas for our time: an age of liquid modernity, when identities seem fungible and precarious, amid a moment of political conflict and collapsing institutions. This volume gives readers new translations and close readings of important passages, and it restores Aeneas to the center of Rome's most important poem.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780472054909
Publication Date: 
July 19, 2021
Author: 

Amelia Finds Her Voice

Amelia Finds Her Voice
$12.99
Amelia was a happy girl but she became sad and withdrawn when her parents separated. She felt that no one listened to her. Little by little, she learned to express her needs and things improved. By the end of the book, her parents are still divorcing but they all work together: they know that they are still a family even though they live in different houses. Amelia went back to her old self and things were much better.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780578766638
Publication Date: 
October 29, 2020
Author: 
Publisher: 

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi
$24.00

Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and renowned memoirist, is one of the most widely read writers of post-World War II Italy. His works are characterized by the lean, dispassionate eloquence with which he approaches his experience of incarceration in Auschwitz. His memoirs--as well as his poetry and fiction and his many interviews--are often taught in several fields, including Jewish studies and Holocaust studies, comparative literature, and Italian language and literature, and can enrich the study of history, psychology, and philosophy.

The first part of this volume provides instructors with an overview of the available editions, anthologies, and translations of Levi's work and identifies other useful classroom aids, such as films, music, and online resources. In the second part, contributors describe different approaches to teaching Levi's work. Some, in presenting Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and The Drowned and the Saved, look at the place of style in Holocaust testimony and the reliability of memory in autobiography. Others focus on questions of translation, complicated by the untranslatable in the language and experiences of the concentration camps, or on how Levi incorporates his background as a chemist into his writing, most clearly in The Periodic Table.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781603291484
Publication Date: 
November 1, 2014

Aqua's Aquarium

Aqua's Aquarium
$22.95

by C.C. McKee

Assistant Professor of History of Art and Director of the Center for Visual Culture


"I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world," the ubiquitous refrain that dominated the airwaves in summer 1997. Aqua's single from their debut album Aquarium spread like wildfire, topping charts across the globe. With their erotically charged lyrics and dance beats, Aqua moved beyond their Danish Eurodance beginnings and achieved global renown in the late 1990s. In the US, however, they are an infamous "one hit wonder," remembered for their highly publicized lawsuit with Mattel. Although Aqua's fame waned at the turn of the millennium, the 25th anniversary of their debut precipitated a resurgence in their popularity.

This book unwraps a bubblegum dance classic to offer the first in-depth examination of what lies beneath Aqua's sticky-sweet veneer. It traces the history of Aquarium alongside interpretations of the album's singles informed by queer theory and covers by contemporary musicians commissioned for the book. Peeling back the layers of Aquarium reveals a confection rife with unexpected contradictions and possibilities; videos permeated by seemingly innocuous articulates of heteronormativity are held in tension with suggestions of queerness, fetishism, and adolescent lust when heard through the ironic lens of camp.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781501384189
Publication Date: 
August 8, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: