Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke UP, 2021) explores the significance of transnational educational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Based on extensive, long-term ethnographic research, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while ... Show More
Sep 15
Tom Hulme, "Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follow ... Show More
48m 1s
Sep 12
John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)
In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. ... Show More
1h 7m
Sep 2023
Tingting Hu, "Victims, Perpetrators and Professionals: The Representation of Women in Chinese Crime Films" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
How are women represented in Chinese crime films? In what ways do the representation reflect traditional Chinese values and contemporary Chinese social-cultural norms? How did boys’ love culture emerge in China? What is the role of the Chinese state in queer media production and ... Show More
33m 7s
Jul 2023
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. Thes ... Show More
45m 39s
Apr 2024
Cathy Yue Wang, "Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist A ... Show More
36m 47s