Gender and Sexual Identity: Presentations of the 31st Annual SW/Texas Regional Meeting of the Popular Culture Association

Gender and sexuality are complex discursive forces that are in action and enacted on a daily basis in people lives through the United States. How we navigate these complex forces takes shape in a variety of ways, often unknowingly and with our complicit consent. Popular cultural studies is one vehicle by which scholars, theorists and others assess both the extent and impact that these discursive forces have on us and the degree to which we interpret, adapt, internalize and accept or reject our participation and engagement. Thus this volume possesses a number of interesting essays which look to a variety of popular cultural phenomenon that illustrate the complexity of our position in the world in relationship across the wide spectrum of genders and sexualities. The essays included in this collection examine the construction of masculinity through celebrity status; transsexuality in literature and the pyschotherapeutic modalities of transsexual counseling; polyamourous sexualities; discourses of fertility/infertility; gender identity and feminine warrior spirit in various literatures; as well as critical gender analyses of a variety of films. It is the editor’s hope and the hope of the contributors to this volume, that the reader finds within these pages some intellectually exciting and theoretically challenging ideas that push the boundaries of what and how we know gender and sexuality is and can be in our society today.