In a culture such as ours that obsessively denies death and fosters a generalised social fantasm of technomedical-driven immortali- ty, the idea of a positive valorisation of death can seem flatly counterintuitive, ...

Author: Peter A. Jackson

Publisher: NIAS Press

ISBN: 9788776943080

Category: Religion

Page: 325

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In central Thailand, a flamboyantly turbaned gay medium for the Hindu god of the underworld posts Facebook selfies of himself hugging and kissing a young man. In Myanmar’s largest city Yangon, a one-time member of a gay NGO dons an elaborate wedding dress to be ritually married to a possessing female spirit; he believes she will offer more support for his gay lifestyle than the path of LGBTQ activism. The only son of a Chinese trading family in Bangkok finds acceptance for his homosexuality and crossdressing when he becomes the medium for a revered female Chinese deity. And in northern Thailand, female mediums smoke, drink, flaunt butch masculine poses and flirt with female followers when they are ritually possessed by male warrior deities. Across the Buddhist societies of mainland Southeast Asia, local queer cultures are at the center of a recent proliferation of professional spirit mediumship. Drawing on detailed ethnographies and extensive comparative research, Deities and Divas captures this variety and ferment. The first book to trace commonalities between queer and religious cultures in Southeast Asia and the West, it reveals how modern gay, trans and spirit medium communities all emerge from a shared formative matrix of capitalism and new media. With insights and analysis that transcend the modern opposition of religion vs secularity, it provides fascinating new perspectives in transnational cultural, religious and queer studies.

DEATH. OF. A. DIVA. by. KELLY. REY. CHAPTER. ONE. Some people are as subtle as spoiled milk and about as pleasant. Dorcas Beeber was one of those people. One and a quarter, if you counted her killer Bossi-Poo, Chandler.

Author: Kelly Rey

Publisher: Gemma Halliday Publishing

ISBN: 9781940371412

Category: Fiction

Page: 228

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From USA Today bestselling author Kelly Rey comes a laugh-out-loud mystery that is so funny it should be a crime… Jamie Winter loathes her job as a secretary in the sleaziest law firm in New Jersey. Trouble is, someone else loathes the whole firm—enough to kill one of the partners, the two-timing, eleven-fingered king of lowbrow television commercial spots, Dougie Digits. Now, Jamie is being strong-armed into investigating by Dougie’s frosty widow, Hilary. The suspect list is long, including the firm’s bookish paralegal, embezzling bookkeeper, ambitious associate, and resentful senior partners. Add to that list a mélange of oddball clients with grudges of their own, and Jamie has her work cut out for her. With assists from her studly landlord and husband-hungry sister, Jamie uncovers enough dirt on her coworkers to launch a tabloid in her hunt to find the killer...before he or she strikes again! Jamie Winters Mysteries: Motion for Murder – book #1 Mistletoe & Misdemeanors– holiday short story Death of a Diva – book #2 Motion for Misfits (short story in the "Killer Beach Reads" collection) The Sassy Suspect – book #3 Verdicts & Vixens – book #4 A Playboy in Peril – book #5 "Move over Stephanie Plum—there's a new girl in town! Jamie Winters is smart, sassy, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Mix one fun mystery, some fantastic romantic chemistry, and witty quips throughout for a sure-fire winner! Who knew a lawyer's office could be so funny?" ~ Gemma Halliday, New York Times bestselling author

With the freedom of a grand diva she rewrites her part , killing Balthazar and then herself with grand brio . ... explanation is that Kyd created her as an icon , a star , and there is no better exit for a diva than a a showy death .

Author: Pamela Allen Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780192638083

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 224

View: 932

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The Diva's Gift traces the far-reaching impact of the first female stars on the playwrights and players of the all-male stage. When Shakespeare entered the scene, women had been acting in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling in Italy and beyond and performing in all genres, including tragedy. The ambitious actress reinvented the innamorata, making her more charismatic and autonomous, thrilling audiences with her skills. Despite fervent attacks, some actresses became the first international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers in France and Spain. After Elizabeth and her court caught wind of their success in Paris, Italian troupes with actresses crossed the Channel to perform. The Italians' repeat visits and growing fame posed a radical challenge to English professionals just as they were building their first paying theaters. Some writers treated the actress as a whorish threat to their stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new model full of promise. Lyly, Marlowe, and Kyd endowed innamorata parts with hot-blooded, racialized passions, but made them self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster and others followed, ringing changes on the new type in comedy, tragedy, and romance. Like the comici they recycled actress-linked theatergrams and star scenes, such as cross-dressing, the mad scene, and the sung lament. In this way, the diva's prodigious virtuosity and stardom altered the horizons of playmaking even on the womanless stage. Capitalizing on the talents of boy players, the best playwrights created bold new roles endowed with her alien glamour, such as Lyly's Sapho and Pandora, Marlowe's Dido, Kyd's Bel-Imperia, Webster's Vittoria, and Shakespeare's Beatrice, Viola, Portia, Juliet, and Ophelia. Cleopatra is not alone in her superb theatricality and dazzling strangeness. As this book demonstrates, the diva's gifts mark them all.

... as a clientele who pay her to come to their homes and prepare a week's worth of food at a time. She also caters parties and banquets, and on occasion, Diva meetings. Bitty would starve to death if not for Sharita.

Author: Virginia Brown

Publisher: BelleBooks

ISBN: 9781611941968

Category: Fiction

Page: 283

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The bestselling DIXIE DIVAS mystery series continues! Trinket and her pals are, once again, caught in the middle of a murder scene... "Professor Sturgis is dead." "Hah!" replied my cousin/best friend/partner in mayhem. "I'm not that lucky." "It's true," I said as I pointed to her son's dorm room closet. "Look for yourself. But I warn you--it's not a pretty sight." My warning did not deter Bitty Hollandale from peering into the closet where the dead professor was propped against a shoe rack. She immediately recoiled. "Good lord! I thought you were joking . . . it . . . how horrible!" I didn't say "I told you so" although I could have. I was still too rattled myself to take a verbal swing at Bitty. What I'd thought was an untidy pile of clothing tumbling out of the closet turned out to be a professor with whom Bitty had just quarreled that very morning. This was not a good thing. Virginia Brown is the author of The Dixie Divas Mysteries, The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries, and a mystery/drama, Dark River Road. As a long-time resident of Mississippi, award-winning author Virginia Brown has lived in several different areas of the state, and finds the history, romance, and intrigue of the Deep South irresistible. Although having spent her childhood as a "military brat" living all over the US, and overseas, this author of nearly fifty novels is now happily settled in and drawing her favorite fictional characters from the wonderful, whimsical Southerners she has known and loved.

For Alba, the “song of marriage” heard on the wind is actually a song of death. Divas do not end up coupled happily ever after. But death is not the point of the diva film. Fantasy and longing are the ...

Author: Ronald Gregg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780190878016

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 816

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The term "queer cinema" is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception, and the past twenty-five years have seen the idea of "queer cinema" expand further as a descriptor for a global arts practice. As the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema treats these three currents as art and critical practice, bringing the canon of queer cinema together with a new generation of makers and scholars. The Handbook's contributors include scholars who research the worldwide canon of queer cinema, those who are uniquely positioned to address three decades of its particular importance, and those best positioned to ponder the forms it is taking or may take in our new century, namely digital media that moves in new circuits. In eight sections, they explore the many forms that queer cinema takes across time, discussing narrative, experimental, documentary, and genre filmmaking, including pornography. Likewise, although the study of cinema and media is not restricted to a single method, chapters showcase the unique combination of textual analysis, industrial and production history, interpretation, ethnography, and archival research that this field enables. For example, chapters analyze the ways in which queer cinema both is and is not self-evidently an object for study by examining films that reinforce negative understandings of queerness alongside those that liberate the subject; and by naming the films that are newly queered, while noting that many queerly-made texts await discovery. Finally, chapters necessarily assert that queer cinema is not an Anglophone phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the medium of film.

'Modern times' are more dangerous for males: of 40 operas that conclude with a male death, 22 were written after 1900. ... reverberate through Wayne Koestenbaum's book of that title.34 This is his scrapbook created for his divas, diva, ...

Author: Michael Trimble

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

ISBN: 9781527575356

Category: Science

Page: 641

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An aspect of dying in opera, rarely observed or commented on, is Sudden Unexpected Death. There are many deaths in this melodramatic genre: most follow expected causes like murder, suicide, or old age. This book explores those deaths which occur without obvious natural causes. These are often central to the overall drama of the opera, representing denouements forming the epiphany of the story and the apotheosis for the audience. The book identifies 50 operas where such events occur, exploring the role of the dramatis personae, the circumstances of their dying, and specific themes that emerge. These include a preponderance of females, especially in the 19th century, who die mainly at the end of the operas, often in the context of tragedy. It charts the growing awareness in the medical sciences of the unconscious forces driving human behaviour, including liminal mental states and trances, which influenced these operas and continue to affect human behaviour to the present day. In addition, the changing philosophies that are intertwined with operatic narratives, in particular stemming from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are important in the book’s exegesis, as is the special role of Wagner’s compositions. This leads to the exploration of recurrent concepts such as the Liebestod, the ewig Weibliche and redemption itself.

Thoughts on the Death of a Diva Asmahan's untimely death is as important a piece in her puzzling image as Marilyn Monroe's suicide . The general public could only speculate that her political involvement with Palace personalities and ...

Author: Nikki R. Keddie

Publisher:

ISBN: UOM:39015048857836

Category: Iran

Page: 316

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Questioning the life-death boundary Jana Králová, Tony Walter ... By comparing the fetishisation of the dead diva with the composer cult, I explain why performers who continue to be admired posthumously still do not achieve the same ...

Author: Jana Králová

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781315467238

Category: Social Science

Page: 106

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Social death occurs when the social existence of a person or group ceases. With an individual, it can occur before or after physical death. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have applied the concept to very diverse issues – including genocide, slavery, dementia, hospitalisation, and bereavement. Social death relates to social exclusion, social capital, social networks, social roles and social identity, but its theorising is not united – scholars in one field are often unaware of its use in other fields. This is the first book to bring a range of perspectives together in a pioneering effort to bring to the field conceptual clarity rooted in empirical data. Preceded by an original theoretical discussion of the concept of social death, contributions from the UK, Romania, Sweden, and Israel analyse the fourth age, end of life policies, dying alone at home, suicide, photographs on gravestones, bereavement, and the agency of dead musicians. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

Harvey's performances of the deathly diva are resistant to moral or sexual censure, couched, as they are, ... The lyrics, visuals and music in all four of these videos combine to generate a palpable sense of dissolution or death.

Author: Abigail Gardner

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781317080749

Category: Music

Page: 204

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PJ Harvey’s performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing ’trouble’. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise ’disruption’ and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. Abigail Gardner mixes feminist theory and critical models from film and video scholarship as a rich means of interrogating Harvey’s work and redefining her disruptive strategies. The book presents a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it to cultural memory, precipitated by Gardner’s claim that Harvey’s performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity. Harvey’s masquerades emerge from her conversations and renegotiations with both national and transatlantic musical, visual and lyrical heritages. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey’s music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain’s premier singer-songwriters. It extends the discussion on music video to consider how to make sense of the rapidly developing digital environment in which it now sits. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should attract readers from a range of subject areas including popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby and Detective Sergeant Ben Jones investigate a string of deaths that imitate the horror films of two actress sisters, all while Midsomer Langley's film festival gets underway.

Author: Caroline Graham

Publisher:

ISBN: OCLC:1348252207

Category: Actresses

Page: 0

View: 219

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Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby and Detective Sergeant Ben Jones investigate a string of deaths that imitate the horror films of two actress sisters, all while Midsomer Langley's film festival gets underway.