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"Bravo! They've given adults and young girls a much-needed treasure map of heroines and 'she-roes'...It blazes an important path in the forest of children's literature."—Jim Trelease.
Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics investigates girl superheroes published by DC and Marvel Comics in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, asking who the new-and-improved super-girls are and what potentials they hold for imagining girls as agents of change, in the genre as well as its socio-cultural context. As super-girls have grown increasingly numerous and diverse since the turn of the millennium, they provide an opportunity for reconsidering representations of gender and power in the superhero genre. This book offers the term agentic embodiment as an analytical tool for critiquing the body politics of superhero comics, particularly concerning youth, femininity, whiteness, and violence. Grounded in comics studies and informed by feminist cultural studies, the book contributes a critical and hopeful perspective on the diversification of a genre often written off as irredeemably conservative and patriarchal. Super-Girls of the Future is a key title for students and scholars of comics studies, visual culture, US popular culture, and feminist criticism.
Playing off "The Wheels on the Bus," this nursery rhyme book from a founder of Drag Queen Story Hour is a fun, freewheeling celebration of being your most fabulous self. The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish encourages readers to boldly be exactly who they are. Written by a founding member of the nationally recognized Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), this playful picture book offers a quirky twist on a classic nursery rhyme by illustrating all of the ways to "work it". The story plays off "The Wheels on the Bus" as it follows a drag queen who performs her routine in front of an awestruck audience. A fun frenzy of fierceness, this book will appeal to readers of all ages.
Tells the story of Almigal, a girl who receives a cochlear implant and can finally hear all the things she wished she could, including her parents whispering "We love you, Almigal."
"I hear a noise," declared Dot, holding her Alice-doll more firmly and staring all about into the aisles of the chestnut grove. "What kind of noise?" asked Tess, mildly curious. "Where does the sound come from?" demanded Agnes in her abrupt way, but very carefully picking brown chestnuts out of a prickly burr-and with gloves on one may be sure. Catch Agnes Kenway, the "beauty sister," ever doing anything to spoil her hands! "Say! Is this a game? Like 'cum-je-cum'?" grumbled Sammy Pinkney, who did not wear gloves and therefore had already got plenty of "prickers" in his stubbed fingers, although the nutting party had not been in the grove half an hour. "I'll bite. How big is the noise?" "Well," said Dot seriously, and answering Sammy's query first, "it is not a big noise at all. I just manage to hear it. And it's gone now."
Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre's utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre's overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists' radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation-human to machine, human to animal, human to god-are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how? Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre's meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy-often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile-between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in "black and white" conservatism or in a "rainbow" of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power. Ellen Kirkpatrick, based in northern Ireland, is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, she writes about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets and her writings and work can be found at The Break and on Twitter @elk_dash.
(Book). Based on the official Top 20 charts from Billboard in the US and NME/Music Week in the UK, this entertaining book shows at a glance the monthly international status of the hits. The fully updated and revised fourth edition lists the charts since they began in January 1954 all the way through December 2000. Each song is listed with artist name and nationality, current and previous month's chart position, record label, weeks on the chart, and simultaneous position on the "other side of the pond." Special symbols indicate million-sellers, plus artists' first and most recent hits. All stars and songs are indexed separately, making it especially easy to pinpoint any Top 20 hit. Includes 200 photos, plus new pop trivia and star gossip!
Before her father died, he told 16-year-old Helen that Sunset Ranch was to be hers. He'd left New York for Montana because of embezzlement charges and could never find out who had really stolen the money. A few weeks after his death, Helen finds a stranger riding a ridge on the ranch.
