Examining the compelling and often poignant connection between women and the material culture of death, this collection focuses on the objects women make, the images they keep, the practices they use or are responsible for, and the places they inhabit and construct through ritual and custom. Women?s material practices, ranging from wearing mourning jewelry to dressing the dead, stitching memorial samplers to constructing skull boxes, collecting funeral programs to collecting and studying diseased hearts, making and collecting taxidermies, and making sculptures honoring the death, are explored in this collection as well as women?s affective responses and sentimental labor that mark their expected and unexpected participation in the social practices surrounding death and the dead. The largely invisible work involved in commemorating and constructing narratives and memorials about the dead-from family members and friends to national figures-calls attention to the role women as memory keepers for families, local communities, and the nation. Women have tended to work collaboratively, making, collecting, and sharing objects that conveyed sentiments about the deceased, whether human or animal, as well as the identity of mourners. Death is about loss, and many of the mourning practices that women have traditionally and are currently engaged in are about dealing with private grief and public loss as well as working to mitigate the more general anxiety that death engenders about the impermanence of life.

Death, Gender and Ethnicity examines the ways in which gender and ethnicity shape the experiences of dying and bereavement, taking as its focus the diversity of ways through which the universal event of death is encountered. It brings together accounts of how these experiences are actually managed with analyses of a range of representations of dying and grieving in order to provide a more theoretical approach to the relationship between death, gender and ethnicity. Though death and dying have been an increasingly important focus for academics and clinicians over the last thirty years, much of this work provides little insight into the impact of gender and ethnicity on the experience. The result is often a universalising representation which fails to take account of the personally unique and culturally specific experiences associated with a death. Drawing on a range of detailed case studies, Death, Gender and Ethnicity develops a more sensitive theoretical approach which will be invaluable reading for students and practitioners in health studies, sociology, social work and medical anthropology.

Scholars of popular Hindu religion in India have always been fascinated by oral texts and rituals, but surprisingly only few attempts have as yet been made to analyse the relationship between rituals and texts systematically. This book contributes to the filling of this gap. Focusing on the dynamics of a local (non-Brahmanical) ritual, its modular organisation and inner logic, the interaction between narrative text and ritual, and the significance of the local versus translocal nature of the text in the ritual context, the study provides a broad range of issues for comparison. It demonstrates that examining texts in their context helps to understand better the complexity of religious traditions and the way in which ritual and text are programmatically employed. The author offers a vivid description of a hitherto unnoticed ritual system, along with the first translation of a text called the Icakkiyamman-Katai (IK). Composed in the Tamil language, the IK represents a substantially longer and embellished form of a core versio which probably goes as far back as the seventh century C.E. Unlike the classical source, this text has been incorporated into a living tradition, and is being constantly refashioned. A range of text versions have been encapsulated in the form of a conspectus, which will shed light on the text's variability or fixity and will add to our knowledge of bardic creativity. Includes a film by the author on DVD.

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."

When Cassie Martin slips through the top-secret time-bridge to find herself in 1348 Avignon, France, she has high hopes that she can make this trip a quick and magical one, and most of all, keep it secret from her lover Aaron Reegan. She wants to get onto Avignon’s famous bridge, see it and get back within minutes. Then, Cassie comes through the time-bridge the first person to see her is a cruel monk who calls her Hecate and “Death’s Maiden.” Top-secret time travel facility? Creepy (yet mysterious) fellow reporter Syd Meyer who has lied and betrayed Cassie? No-nonsense ex-Delta force Army Captain who loves BDSM play, has a riding crop – and will use it, if only he can also follow Cassie back in time and find her. What could possibly go wrong?

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines: * this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot * specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics * a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials * a bibliography of secondary sources Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.

HIV Affected and Vulnerable Youth: Prevention Issues and Approaches provides suggestions for support of vulnerable youth who must face chronic disease or death, poverty, drug abuse, and racism, as well as the tribulations that accompany adolescence. Social workers, case managers, psychologists, and nurses who work with HIV-affected and vulnerable youth and their families will find unique recommendations on how to assist these individuals in resisting risky behaviors. This unique collection of research studies expands on the current knowledge while informing us of how much more there is to be learned. This informative book will enlighten you about the children and mothers who are most likely to be affected by the HIV disease, the poor people of color living in substandard housing who are subjected to discrimination and social isolation. The multiple losses experienced by these women and children because of infection, crime, and substance abuse are included in this valuable book but most importantly you will discover how you can alleviate some of the stresses caused by these losses. Through HIV Affected and Vulnerable Youth, you will discover multiple ways to successfully help the adolescents in your practice deal with the challenges inherent to HIV, economic hardships, and substance abuse.Comprehensive and intelligent, this important book will help you address the needs of HIV-affected children or families with humanity, sensitivity, and ethnically sensitive interventions. With HIV Affected and Vulnerable Youth, you will find unique interventions to help the youth and family in your community by: discovering how facing the mortality of an HIV-infected family member has profound psychological effects on a child or adolescent and how you can help ease this crisis for your clients understanding why many youth who must cope with the eminent death of a family member deal with this crisis by engaging in risky behaviors which may result in HIV infection for themselves realizing that the lack of education about HIV, how it is transmitted, and how to prevent transmission may be part of the problem for high-risk youth learning how some HIV-positive children exhibit stable functioning and resilience in coping with their health, but have difficulties exhibiting the same stability in other aspects of their lives realizing that the social stigma surrounding HIV has not lost its intensity and that this stigma is a part of the everyday reality for HIV-affected children and their families HIV Affected and Vulnerable Youth: Prevention Issues and Approaches brings to light the daily heartache and struggles of HIV-affected children and their families. The day-to-day challenges of families and youths due to HIV-infection, crime, substance abuse, and sometimes where and how they live pose problems to the well-being of these individuals and are significant obstacles to mental-health therapy and health care services. This helpful book offers you several intervention techniques in order to improve the lives of HIV-affected individuals and families in your community.