We are looking for suitable book reviewers to review recently published books that will be listed in the "Looking for Book Reviewers" section below. Book reviewers will receive review copies of recently published books, provided to us by various university presses and academic publishing houses. If you would like to review a recently published book in sexuality studies, gender studies, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, or queer studies, not listed on our list, please let us know and we will try to obtain a review copy from the publisher. For any information regarding book reviews please contact the editor Dr Alexander Lambevski at alex@sextures.net.
In the "Currently under Review" section, we alert you to some recently published books being currently reviewed by members of the Sextures' editorial board or external scholars.
Currently under Review
Cressida J. Heyes and Meredith Jones (editors) (2009) Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer, Surrey: Ashgate, 259 pages.
From the back cover:
Practices of cosmetic surgery have grown exponentially in recent years, in both over-developed and developing worlds. What comprises cosmetic surgery has also changed, with a plethora of new procedures and an extraordinary rise of non-surgical operations. Feminists have always had something to say about cosmetic surgery, which remains vastly more popular among women, and reflects and perpetuates cultural desires for normative feminine bodies as well as often creating new norms. However, as the practices of cosmetic surgery have multiplied and diversified, so have feminist approaches to understanding them.
Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer brings together, for the first time, leading feminist scholars to analyse cosmetic surgery, revealing the complexity of feminist engagements with this phenomenon. Offering a diversity of theoretical, methodological and political approaches, this volume presents not only the latest, cutting-edge research in this field, but also the reflections of some key feminist thinkers, including Susan Bordo, Kathy Davis, Vivian Sobchack and Kathryn Pauly Morgan, on classic contributions of their own.
Challenging and unique, this book will appeal to researchers across the social sciences and humanities.
This is an important and timely collection of essays, presenting recent and complex investigations in Cosmetic Surgery Studies, whilst also revisiting landmark feminist interventions in a manner that gives key authors the opportunity to update their thinking in light of these more recent debates.
Ruth Holliday, University of Leeds, UK
Cover image: Pink Consultation Chair with Vanity Lights, Upper East Side. 2008, Copyright Cara Phillips, www.cara-phillips.com
Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (editors) (2009) Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 189 pages.
From the back cover:
"This is a brilliant and well-timed collection of state-of-the-arts essays. It conclusively proves that queerness has to do not only with identity politics and performative stances, but also with material and collective experiments with radical otherness and un-programmed intensity."
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University and Honorary Professor at Birkbeck College London
This exciting collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. Moving away from the established path known as queer theory, it suggests an alternative to Butler's matter/representation binary. It thus dares to ask how to think sexuality and sex outside the discursive and linguistic context that has come to dominate contemporary research in social sciences and humanities.
Deleuze and Queer Theory is a provocative and often militant collection that explores a diverse range of themes including: the revisiting of the term 'queer'; a rethinking of the sex-gender distinction as being implied in queer theory; an exploration of queer temporalities; the non/re-reading of the homosexual body/desire and the becoming-queer of the Deleuze/Guattari philosophy. It will be essential reading for anyone interested not just in Deleuze's and Guattari's philosophy, but also in the fields of sexuality, gender and feminist theory.
Contributors: Claire Colebrook, Verena A. Conley, Jonathan Kemp, Patricia MacCormack, Anna Hickey-Moody, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Dorothea Olkowski, Luciana Parisi, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Margrit Shildrick and Mikko Tuhkanen.
Chrysanthi Nigianni is a PhD candidate at the University of East London. She has taught at the University of East London and at Anglia Ruskin University.
Merl Storr is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. She is the author of Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties (2003).
Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh.
Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke (editors) (2009) The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Surrey: Ashgate, 539 pages.
From the back cover:
"This collection ambitiously convokes established and emerging scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines to critically address, in new and original ways, the field of queer theory. Divided into major categories of queer concern: identity, discourse, normativity, and relationality, the essays chart genealogies, track changes, and pose questions about the travels of this elusive term, the work it does, and the challenges it faces."
Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Noreen Giffney is the series editor of Queer Interventions at Ashgate Publishing. Her current research focuses on the intersections between queer theory and psychoanalysis. She is a lecturer in women's studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick and is also undertaking clinical training in the object relations tradition of psychoanalysis at Trinity College Dublin.
Michael O'Rourke is the series editor of Queer Interventions at Ashgate Publishing. His research concentrates on the intersections between queer theory and Continental philosophy, especially Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Ranciere, Foucault, Irigaray, Caputo and Nancy.
Image courtesy of Lisa Fingleton, Copyright Flying Lesson (2006), Video Still.
Michael Lister and Emily Pia (editors) (2008) Citizenship in Contemporary Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 218 pages.
From the back cover:
Inthe era of globalisation, European integration, mass migration, and changing patterns of political participation and welfare state provision, the precise shape and structure of citizenship in Europe seems to be altering. This book explores these developments through the analysis of a range of perspectives, uniting a theoretical orientation with an empirical approach. The central theme of the book is that the way in which we assess the impact of these changes on citizenship depends upon how we view citizenship theoretically.
The text is divided into two sections. First, the book identifies three main theoretical approaches to citizenship: classical positions (liberal, communitarian, republican); multiculturalist and feminist theories of citizenship; and the further challenge raised by post-national or cosmopolitan theories of citizenship.
The second section focuses on four key social, economic and political developments - migration, political participation, the welfare state and European integration - all of which raise fundamental questions about the status and meaning of citizenship in contemporary Europe.
Michael Lister is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations, Politics and Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Emily Pia is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
COUNSELLING IDEOLOGIES: QUEER CHALLENGES TO HETERONORMATIVITY, edited by Lyndsey Moon, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010, 238 pages.
From the back cover:
Counselling Ideologies draws our attention to the dilemmas inherent within the therapeutic ideologies commonly subscribed to by psychotherapists and counsellors working with those who challenge heteronormative models and approaches. Identifying the modernist, heteronormative understandings of the world implicit in the more popular models, this book employs queer theory to challenge these ideologies, drawing on disciplines both within and outside of counselling and psychology, as well as sociology, cultural studies and various ethnographic accounts. It highlights the dilemmas faced by those who may wish to practise as 'queer therapists,' addressing not only therapeutic dilemmas, but also issues such as: identity, race, coming-out experiences, 'internalised homophobia,' 'empathy,' 'ethical issues,' bisexuality and pathologisation.
Comprising contributions from both academic experts and practitioners from the UK, USA and Australia, this book represents a new approach to counselling and psychotherapy that will appeal not only to sociologists and those working in the field of mental health, but also to scholars of race and ethnicity, gender, queer studies and queer theory.
Cover photo Claudio Pestana.
A NEW CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN SPACE FOR SEXUALITIES IN THE HUMANITIES, ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
