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The group of respected writers who have contributed to this volume hold two beliefs in common: a passionate opposition to censorship and a vehement conviction that, until pornography is eradicated, women's status in society can never equal men's.
This book is not a diatribe against eroticism or a moral crusade to stamp out sex. Rather, it is an attack on the international industry in pornography which, in abusing and degrading women desensitizes people to the routine discrimination and violence that its opponents claim it engenders. Including contributions by Andrea Dworkin, Corinne Sweet, and Michael Moorcock, these challenging, uncompromising, and passionate essays examine such topics as the ineffectiveness of the Obscene Publications Act, the need for legislation against pornography without censorship to enable victims of pornography-related harm to seek redress and an equivalent to the Race Relations Act to permit the prosecution of cases of incitement to sexual hatred and violence, the different types of pornographic material, and the possible links between pornography and rape, child abuse, and discrimination.
This book attempts to identify two central areas for the study of aging and the epistemological differences and continuities between them: constructions of aging (modern) and deconstructions of aging (postmodern).
Calling for a broader, new approach to social mobility research, Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility moves beyond pure statistics to use qualitative techniques-such as life stories and family case studies-to examine more closely the dynamics of mobility and address more fundamental sociological questions.
Assesses the contributions of one of the leading figures of post-1968 British political theater
Addresses fundamental questions about the social and political purposes of performance through an investigation of post-war alternative and community theatre. A detailed analysis of oppositional theatre as radical cultural practice.
British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.
Originally published in 1983. Song has always been a natural way to record everyday experiences – an expression of celebration, commiseration, complaint and protest. This innovative book is a study of popular and working-class song combining several approaches to the subject. It is a history of working-class song in Britain which concentrates not simply on the songs and the singers but attempts to locate such song in its cultural context and apply principles of literary criticism to this essentially oral medium. It triggered controversy: some critics castigated its Marxist approach, others enthused that ‘such unabashed partisanship amply reveals the outstanding characteristic of Watson's...
The communication potential of contemporary mass media is immense. It can communicate with us about the entire world and it can stimulate and inspire us with entertainment. The realisation of this potential has been frustrated by interrelated networks of people who have controlled major media over the last century. Those interests see media as a means to control and manipulate people rather than as a means to inform and inspire people. The approach in this book moves beyond the abstractions and systems approaches often used in criticisms of media to an analysis focused on the concrete groups that dominate media. These groups do constitute a system, but one that must be understood in its terms of all of its historical features -- economic, political, and social.
This 26-volume set is a wide-ranging, time- and subject-spanning examination of the phenomenon of political protest. What drives people to take to the streets, and how do their governments respond? These questions and many more are analysed in areas as varied as sixteenth-century German peasant uprisings, revolutionary Russians at the Paris Commune, women protesting nuclear weapons at Greenham Common, and the role Christianity played in protests across the ages. An impressive reference resource, this set also looks at the policing of protests and official responses to them.