How superhero narratives in the margins of the mainstream tell innovative, feminist stories.

It's no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Sam Langsdale's work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts.

Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working toward a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile.

The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides deep insight into a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. The third decade of the twenty-first century is being marked by a polycrisis caused by various world crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change leading to economic, geopolitical, environmental, health and security crises.

Featuring 42 chapters, the collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism and technology. It illuminates the many faces of the current permacrisis as well as the multifarious crises of the past and their representation in literatures across ages and cultures-from the Viking wars, Black Death in mediaeval Europe, technology in ancient China and the crisis of power in Elizabethan England to imperial biopower in nineteenth-century India, the genocides in the twentieth century, upsurge of domestic violence during the Covid lockdown in Spain and the development of AI.

The Companion connects diverse cultures, disciplines and academic traditions to show how and why literature, media and art can voice all types of crises across times. It will be a key resource for students and researchers in a broad range of areas including literature, film studies, narrative studies, cultural studies, international politics and ecocriticism.

Chapters: Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Today drag has an unprecedented mass cultural appeal. Reaching far beyond traditional queer venues and audiences into the mainstream, it has evolved into a booming industry worth millions of dollars.

Drag is art, politics, lifestyle and entertainment all in one. Yet, studies examining its market value as a product, brand or consumption practice remain scarce. This interdisciplinary collection fills that void, exploring the intersection of drag and markets.

Written by an international group of scholars exploring cases from Europe, Asia and the US, this will be a key resource for anyone curious about drag's social, political and economic impact.

The exploration of masculinity in celebrity culture sheds light on the complex interplay between gender norms, media influence, and the construction of modern masculinity. Timothee Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan whose unique approach to fashion, style, and self-presentation challenges traditional notions of masculinity, provide fruitful subject matter for deep analysis.

In Fashionable Queerness: Straight Appropriation of Queer Fashion, author Angelos Bollas weaves together gender theory, sexuality studies, and celebrity research to create fresh pathways of understanding. Through this nuanced exploration, Bollas focuses on the intricate connections between gender dynamics, sexuality, and celebrity culture. From the red carpet to glossy fashion magazines, Timothee Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan, rising stars known for their acting prowess, have become icons for their distinctive fashion choices and their blurring of gender boundaries. By analyzing how Chalamet, Mescal, and Keoghan navigate the norms of celebrity culture, Bollas provides insights into how masculinity is both reinforced and transformed in the public eye. Bollas unravels the complexities of how gender and sexual identity and representation intersect with the construction of celebrity personas.

Examining representations of masculinity in celebrity culture and uncovering broader societal implications related to gender norms, this is valuable reading for scholars of Gender Studies, Media and Communication, Fashion and Style, Cultural Capital Theory, and Queer Studies

A history of American Western genre comics and how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture.

Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond. Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press; through fin de siecle anxieties with the closing of the frontier, and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar, and high Cold War years; to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western's continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling.

In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest, and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the "simplistic" conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms, and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.

How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.

Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in "productivist" ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices-revolts that in turn are treated as revolting.

Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.

Victorians and Modern Greece examines the representation of nineteenth-century Greece in British magazines, fiction, poetry, and travel writing, revealing the popular reception of the modern nation in the Victorian period. Reflecting upon the tensions-ancient and modern, oriental and European, primitive and developed-emerging from Victorian texts on Modern Greece, the 12 essays in this volume analyse these texts and their role in reconceptualising the national identity and culture of Britain and Greece through their encounter with each other.

Featuring writers such as Mary Shelley, Christopher Wordsworth, William Thackeray, Theodore Bent, Isabella Fyvie Mayo, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee, as well as anonymous authors publishing in popular periodicals, and a broad range of topics from travel and fashion to political crises and the pervasive appeal of ruins, this book tells the story of Modern Greece from British perspectives, at a time when Greece was struggling to achieve self-definition among conflicting geopolitical interests. Victorians and Modern Greece also opens up Victorian studies to minor or marginal voices and narratives which addressed worldly concerns and Britain's global affiliations.

With its comparative perspective, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of both Victorian literature and culture and of the culture and history of Modern Greece.

"Emerging Trends in Smart Societies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives" is an intellectual mosaic stemming from the inaugural HMSS 23 conference. This anthology intricately weaves together insights from luminaries spanning humanities and management, reshaping the very essence of smart societies. It captures the fusion of diverse disciplines, offering novel solutions vital for sustainable, digitally evolved futures.

Contained within these pages is a roadmap for societal progress, fostering collaborative exchanges and visionary discussions pioneered by HMSS 23. Set on an innovative virtual platform, this collection transcends borders, embracing inclusivity and fostering the exchange of transformative ideas.

Dive into this compendium to grasp the essence of interdisciplinary dialogue shaping the landscapes of future societies. Immerse in the transformative potential of collective wisdom propelling us towards a future where diverse perspectives blend harmoniously to craft resilient, innovative, and interconnected smart societies.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book presents emerging themes and future directions in the interdisciplinary field of critical data studies, loosely themed around the notion of shifting response-abilities in a datafied world.

In each chapter an interdisciplinary group of scholars discuss a specific theme, ranging from questions around data power and the configuring of data subjects to the intersection of technology and the environment.

The book is an invaluable dialogue between disciplines that introduces readers to cutting edge arguments within the field. It will be a key resource for scholars and students who require a guide to this rapidly evolving area of research.

This text outlines the relative merits of qualitative interviewing to new and emerging scholars in an accessible way. This is achieved not by providing an exhaustive 'how-to' guide but in introducing researchers to the interview technique and using examples of 'best practice' from across the social sciences.
To ensure the book is both accessible and inclusive, efforts have been made to include case studies from a diverse range of authors, including those from different ethnic and social backgrounds, from outside Western Europe/North America, and from non-academic sources. This book will therefore introduce the reader to the key themes surrounding interview design, implementation, analysis and presentation, using examples and case studies from research across the social sciences.
Crucially, the book will not provide exhaustive guidance on how to conduct the techniques. Instead, each chapter includes a range of interview design activities for readers to try which might help them engage with the chapter topics, as well as a 'Summary' box which comprises a short annotated reading list of key texts relating to each of the chapter topics and a checklist of things to consider relating to the chapter topics.

How can we have meaningful public conversations in the algorithmic age?

This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of arguing all sides of a case, the book offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in democratic societies.

This is a timely and urgent book for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in the digital era.