Cristina Santos

Jonathan A. Allan

Adriana Spahr

Delving into everything from medieval drama to Bollywood films to the Twilight franchise, Virgin Envy examines the elusive state of virginity.

The Cultural (in)significance of the Hymen

Virgin Envy

Can they navigate their past traumas and learn to trust each other, to turn this relationship into something real and lasting? Elaina Losing her first love at eighteen, the pain and heartbreak prevent Elaina from letting any man get too close. A decade later, fate throws her a curveball in a chance encounter with Hollywood star, Adam. Despite the intense pull between them, Elaina tries to keep her distance, determined not to let anyone shatter her heart again. Adam Battling his own demons, Hollywood star, Adam, is reluctant to let anyone get too close. When his publicist suggests a fake girlfriend to silence rumors about his personal life, Elaina readily volunteers. As the couple navigates their fake romance, they realize it is more real than they thought. In Lost Love Found, readers will be swept away by the poignant story of two wounded souls who find love and healing in each other's arms.

Lost Love Found

A starlet in the making. A Marine afraid to lose her. And a past they must fight to untangle. Hollywood-wannabe Maeve Howard didn't believe in love at first sight - until tall, buff and handsome Owen James walked in the door and set off wedding bells in her heart. But before Maeve's feelings can be revealed, Owen gets stationed miles away on deployment... Separated by oceans, their friendship starts to blossom over video calls, a mutual love of The Office, and burning, buried desire. But when passion finally ignites, it crashes and burns, leaving two bruised hearts in its wake. Seven years later, Owen walks back into Maeve's life - and so does fate. With their future suddenly tangled beyond repair, old wounds reignite a fiery mix of longing and hurt. For Maeve, trust is a thing of the past, but for Owen it's a prize he's intent on winning back. After all this time, can sparks still fly? Amidst the glitz of Hollywood and the echoes of a shared past, Sparks Still Fly is a tale of second chances and the courage to heal. This is book two in the Love in LA series but can be read as a standalone.

Sparks Still Fly

The narrative style of both Clarice Lispector and Carmen Boullosa is characterized by a postmodern tendency toward an increased reader participation. This is accomplished by a process of liberalizing a pre-established socio-cultural repertoire with respect to female identity. The female protagonists, created by Lispector and Boullosa and examined in this book, struggle to find their true voices and their real life experiences. The resulting literary style of both these authors parallels this struggle, subverting traditional narrative structure and utilizing a dialogue that is particularly suited to describe this feminine process of conscientization.

Clarice Lispector and Carmen Boullosa

Bending the Rules in the Quest for an Authentic Female Identity

This is an interdisciplinary examination of depictions of girlhoods through a comparative study of foundational fairy tales revised and reimagined in popular narrative, film, and television adaptations. The success of franchises such as The Hunger Games, Twilight and Divergence have re-presented the young heroine as an empowered female, and often a warrior hero in her own right. Through a selection of popular culture touchstones this empowerment is questioned as a manipulation of feminist ideals of equality and a continuation of the traditional vision of female awakening centering on issues of personal choice, agency, physical violence, purity, and beauty. By investigating re-occurring storytelling frameworks and archetypes, Untaming Girlhoods examines different portrayals of girlhoods in the 20th- and 21st-century Anglo-American cultural imaginary that configure modern girlhoods, beyond the fairy-tale princess or the damsel in distress, into refigurations that venture away from the well-trodden path for a new breakaway path to authentic selfhood. This will be a useful and enlightening text for students and researchers in Girlhood Studies, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture and Media Studies.

Storytelling Female Adolescence

Untaming Girlhoods

Laura K. Davis

A collection of interdisciplinary essays examining how far and to what extent humanity and monstrosity have become intertwined.

Humanity's Recreation of Monsters and Monstrosity

The Monster Imagined

This book traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of sociocultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive power. It examines the female maturation cycle and the archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of development in literature, art, film, and television with a particular focus on Latin American work.

Witches, Vampires, and Virgins

Unbecoming Female Monsters

Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it's just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don't do, or don't want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today's world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.

The Cultural Insignificance of the Hymen

This innovative study embarks, from a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, on redefining the «supernatural» as elements that fail to be framed as «natural» by their socio-cultural environment. The «supernatural» elements depicted in this study encompass such monstrous representations as witches, vampires, angels, virgins, apparitions, and other universally recognized reflections of human existence - though not all «supernatural» representations are seen as «monstrous, » but as physical and psychological embodiments of common human experience. Contributors to this project represent a wide scope of literary genres and eras, as well as differing theoretical approaches, united by the common goal of defining the «irreality of reality.»

Cristina Santos

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