The Routledge Companion to Sally Rooney
The Routledge Companion to Sally Rooney offers an in-depth examination of one of the most influential contemporary Irish authors, Sally Rooney, offering valuable insights into her writing and its socio-cultural significance.
This comprehensive collection brings together contributions from international scholars who explore Rooney’s novels through a range of interdisciplinary lenses, including literary studies, gender theory, political analysis, and cultural criticism. The book provides critical insights into Rooney’s exploration of millennial identity, class dynamics, relationships, and the evolving role of technology in shaping human connections. By situating Rooney’s work within both the global context and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, the collection presents a nuanced understanding of her literary impact.
The Routledge Companion to Sally Rooney is essential reading for academics and students studying contemporary Irish literature.
The volume not only highlights the significance of Rooney’s work in contemporary literature but also expands on its sociopolitical relevance, making it an indispensable resource for understanding her cultural impact.
HIV/AIDS in Memory, Culture and Society
This volume examines the role of culture in developing social, cultural and political discourses of HIV/AIDS from a contemporary viewpoint. In doing so, the memory of HIV/AIDS is a powerful tool to examine representations of the past and connect them with future debates. This reassessment of HIV/AIDS explores the most appropriate way to come to terms with a past that involved a negative, stigmatised and marginalised representation. Therefore, remembering plays a key role in generating collective memory, which allows for the exchange of mnemonic content between individual minds, creates discourses on memory and commemoration, and disseminates versions of the past that may affect the representation of HIV/AIDS in the future. Indeed, rewriting about the past also means assessing our responsibility towards the present and the potential of transmission to future generations, especially in times of pandemics.
Fashionable Queerness: Straight Appropriation of Queer Fashion
The exploration of masculinity in celebrity culture sheds light on the complex interplay between gender norms, media influence, and the construction of modern masculinity. Timothée 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 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, Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan 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.
Sexualised Governmentalities: Critical Perspectives on Homosexism
This book critically examines the concept of sexualised governmentalities, a framework for understanding the evolving discourse and power dynamics surrounding discrimination on the basis of sexual practices. Central to this exploration is the shift from traditional heteronormative perspectives to a more complex hetero/homonormative context, where the structure and organisation of sexual relationships gain prominence over the gender or sexual orientation of the participants. A key focus of the book is the concept of homosexism within the realm of gay masculinity studies. The author discusses homosexism as a form of discrimination experienced by gay men from other gay men, highlighting the influence of heteronormative patriarchal society on these interactions. It calls for a broader recognition and acceptance of diverse sexual expressions and challenges the reader to re-evaluate the societal norms around masculinity and sexual behaviour. Sexualised Governmentalities is an important contribution to the discourse on sexual identity and practice, offering insights for a more inclusive and empathetic understanding of sexual diversity.
Contemporary Irish Masculinities: Male Homosociality in Sally Rooney's Novels
By examining portrayals of male homosociality in Sally Rooney's novels, the book documents how male relationships are formed, challenged, and often disavowed and the profound negative effects this can have for the wellbeing of men. The book also highlights the importance of the sociocultural context within which male relationships are formed and supports that the potential for healthy and meaningful relationships between men depends on how they are brought up to view themselves as men and their role in the society they live in. That is, despite the many examples whereby space for authentic and meaningful male homosociality is limited and well concealed, the book also offers a more optimistic potential for men's relationships by illustrating the significance of broader understandings of masculinity, unfettered by homophobia and misogyny, in allowing for male homosociality with the potential of emancipating men from heteropatriarchal norms which dictate their behaviour toward themselves and others.