Non-fictional Writings Research Articles

Objectification of Women in Alhamad’s Novels: A Question of De-Humanization or Empowerment in a Post-Islamic Awakening Narrative

This paper reviews the work of the Saudi novelist, Turki Alhamad, who published in a post-Islamic Awakening in Saudi Arabia. The paper contextualizes his writing by defining the concept of sexual objectification in various theorizations of the term including several texts that represent the discourse of the Islamic Awakening movement. His work can be perceived to be de-humanizing of women particularly during the time of its publication in the 1990s and early 2000s when the movement was popular. However, a close reading of his work suggests a multiplicity of discourses in his representation of women. His work can be empowering women taking into consideration Alhamad’s non-fictional writings that promote social change in Arab and Muslim countries. Branded as a challenge of social values at the time of its publication, his work can also be interpreted as a precursor to the social shift towards women’s empowerment that took place in Saudi Arabia in recent years.

Between invisibility and having a voice: The marginalization of gendered non-fiction writers in the South Korean television industry

This article examines how gendered workers experience invisibility in the South Korean television industry, focusing on writers who produce non-fiction programs, such as journalism shows and documentaries. Based on my in-depth interviews with 41 research participants, I reveal how the patriarchal, capitalist, and intensely hierarchical labour management in the industry has shaped an invisible writing workforce who are mostly women. Specifically, my research suggests that the exploitation of this invisible writing workforce takes two forms: the devaluation and underpayment of their labour and putting to work their marginalized subjectivities to enhance the quality of the programs in the production process. Finally, this research shows how writers recognize themselves as invisible workers and understand their invisibility as a form of discrimination and exclusion.

‘He seems to be at the back of all the stories’: The Subtlety of Narnian Providence

Towards the end of The Horse and His Boy, as Shasta wanders blindly into Narnia, he unknowingly encounters Aslan, who explains to him the various ways that Aslan has watched over him dating back even to the boy’s infancy. It is a beautiful account of Aslan’s care for Shasta. If one were to focus exclusively on this passage, however, one might conclude that Narnian providence is merely a matter of external divine intervention and that creaturely agency plays little role in the way Aslan governs Narnia. An analysis of some of Lewis’s non-fictional writings in conversation with Thomas Aquinas uncovers a more subtle understanding of providence. For Lewis, as for Aquinas, providence incorporates the acts of free agents without compromising their integrity. Virtuous, indifferent, and even vicious acts all contribute in some way to God’s plan for the universe. The same can be said for Narnia, as one can see through representative examples from The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, and The Magician’s Nephew. In these stories Lewis illustrates, to paraphrase his own words about Oedipus Rex, ‘how providence and free will can be combined, even how free will is the modus operandi of providence’.

Ozick’s Idols

Abstract An exploration of Ozick’s critique of Harold Bloom, in which she argues that his literary critical schemas amount to a form of idolatry, is developed into a wider account of the place of the risks of idol making and idol worship in her fictional and nonfictional writings. Ozick is seen to gradually move from a vision of the imagination as intrinsically idolatrous—hence the very notion of a Jewish writer is seen as contradictory—toward a moderated stance in which the risks of idolatrous imagining can be navigated, if never eliminated altogether.

‘A Prisoner on the Rack’: Marital Rape, Consent, and the Gothic in Late-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Women’s Writings

ABSTRACT This article explores how marital rape was represented in the fiction and non-fiction writings of four colonial female authors – Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed. It examines how these women conceptualised marital rape as a form of domestic violence or ‘cruelty’ in marriage, intrinsically linked to other forms of marital violence such as physical and mental abuse, and with marital rape representative of the unacceptability and immorality of a husband’s total control over his wife’s body. It also analyses how these literary representations differed from discussions about marital rape and domestic violence by suffrage agitators such as Rose Scott and Maybanke Anderson. The article argues that Baynton, Cambridge, and Lawson used the language and tropes of the Gothic in order to generate understanding for and empathy with wives and their inability to consent in the marital bed. This article therefore illuminates the intersecting conversations by both female authors and suffrage agitators in late-nineteenth-century Australia about married women’s right to consent, domestic violence, and acceptable marital masculine behaviour, highlighting how access to Gothic tropes allowed colonial female authors to foreground women’s bodily autonomy and depict marital rape in the level of graphic detail that suffrage agitators could not.

Bearing(s) in Life Writing by Caro Giles and Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (2023) by Caro Giles and Cacophony of Bone (2023) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh are both memoirs written by “northern women” during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Caro Giles is based in Northumberland while Kerri ní Dochartaigh is from the North of Ireland and their memoirs both deal with motherhood, loss, and isolation while foregrounding uplifting connections between human animals and the natural environment which surrounds them. Their “northernness” is central to the orientations of Twelve Moons and Cacophony of Bone, which toy with the tensions between losing one’s bearings, bearing the brunt of loss, traumatic past events, isolation, and political uncertainty, and re-engaging with what Donna Haraway calls ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2016). This article aims to tease out these tensions alongside Haraway and to interrogate the ways in which both these non-fiction writers, who paradoxically emphasize their northern anchoring, foreground loss of bearings as simultaneously uncomfortable and as a prerequisite for healing. Loss of bearings, they show, is what facilitates a reconnection between themselves and the natural environment and is what makes the pain of traumatic events more bearable.

A Market for Plenty: Immigrants and the Making of the Fulton Fish Market

Founded in the early nineteenth century at the southern seaport of Manhattan, New York, the Fulton Fish Market was, and remains, one of the largest seafood markets in the world. At its heart was a workforce capable of moving hundreds of millions of pounds of fish a year, that endured public suspicion and resisted activist reform, and which ultimately shaped the palate of not only New York City, but America as a country—a workforce that was, in its formative decades, predominantly immigrants. This article builds on pre-existing general scholarship regarding the Fulton Fish Market and introduces perspectives found in contemporary newspapers, memoirs, and other nonfiction writings to study the contributions immigrants made to the identity and functions of Fulton. It adds another piece to the ever-deepening literature on New York City's immigrant histories and foodways.

Dichotomy of Individualism and Collectivism in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Suketu Mehta is one of the most prolific writers of non-fiction writings emigrated to Newyork from Mumbai along with his family at the age of 14. In the year 1998 he returns to Mumbai and recaptures the maximity of it through various interviews of the local inhabitants and the emigrants from the country. Mehta encompasses these interviews in his narrative non-fictional book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. This insider outsider perspective of Mumbai resembles with Dante’s Inferno. This research paper basically aims at Mehta’s portrayal of the megacity Mumbai along with the dichotomy of individualism and collectivism. It analyses how the city reciprocates with its inhabitants. It also takes in to account that how this metropolis, despite all its scarcity, is a center of attraction for people across the country to upgrade their living and working status. The way the city caters all its residents, bring forth the juxtaposition of individualism and collectivism.

From Where Does She Speak?

This article investigates the rise of the feminine creative voice in the age of modernism through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s fictional and nonfictional writings. Her invaluable insights into the long history of women’s subjugation, as well as the fortunes of her contemporaries, provide a framework for an examination of how women established their position as capable members of society in the changing modern milieu. This essay examines Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, and her polemical essay A Room of One’s Own, with a view to demonstrating modern women’s path to creating their artistic identity. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity, I investigate women’s unique way of (re)gaining their confidence and articulating their own voice during the process of self-formation. Following Woolf’s lead, I consider their double status: as both an object of fascination in works of literature and a source of oppression in real life. I also use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of historically effected consciousness (Wirkungsgeschichtes Bewusstsein) to reveal the productive interpretative distance that can help us unravel the complexities of the historical and contingent nature of the development of the female artistic genius. An interrogation of women’s imaginative self-manifestations opens the way to the discovery of crucial truths that pertain to the hermeneutics of female creativity.

Presentations and Criticisms of the Literary and Christian Work of the Writer, Journalist and Non-fiction Writer Luka Brajnović According to Hrvatska revija from 1951 to 2000

Luka Brajnović (Kotor, 1919.–Pamplona, 2001.) bio je hrvatski književnik, novinar, publicist i teoretičar medija, koji je velik dio svojega života proveo djelujući u španjolskoj Pamploni. Prije odlaska iz Hrvatske, bio je suradnik časopisa „Luč“ i „Hrvatska straža“, a objavio je romane „Zaboravljene suze“ i „Tripo Kokoljić“. U Madridu je s dominikancem Hijacintom Eterovićem uređivao katoličku reviju „Osoba i duh“. Osnovao je nakladu „Osvit“, u kojoj je objavio djela Vinka Kriškovića, Augustina Juretića i Lucijana Kordića kao i Sveto Pismo u prepravljenom prijevodu nadbiskupa Šarića. Gotovo trideset godina pisao je kolumnu za vanjsku politiku u dnevniku „Diario de Navarra“. Usput je bio urednik u časopisu „Nuestro Tiempo“, surađujući i u nekoliko drugih revija u Španjolskoj, Portugalu i Meksiku. Ovaj rad u prvome dijelu sažeto prikazuje spisateljsko djelovanje Luke Brajnovića nakon odlaska u izbjeglištvo 1945. Potom se u istraživačkom dijelu rada posvećuje istraživanju priloga koji su objavljeni o njemu ili koje je on objavio u Hrvatskoj reviji od 1951. do 2000. jer to istraživanje do danas nije provedeno. U prilozima se nastoji otkriti spominje li ga se u kontekstu vrijednosti kršćanstva, kršćanske duhovnosti i nadahnuća i ima li ih u njegovim književnim, publicističkim i novinarskim tekstovima objavljenim u tom časopisu i u spomenutom razdoblju. Usporedno se njegov opus stavlja u kontekst skromne recepcije književne kritike njegovih djela objavljenih u Hrvatskoj.

An Ecocritical Reading of Arundhati Roy’s Select Works – A Literature Review

Purpose: The theme of ecocriticism as it is presented in Arundhati Roy's nonfiction writings is the focus of the study. The interdisciplinary study of the environment and literature is known as ecocriticism. Several of Arundhati Roy's chosen writings contain allusions to ecocriticism. The challenges people had to deal with because of the different environmental crisis that mankind had caused are explored in ecocritical literature, especially nonfiction works. The purpose of the study is to investigate how ecocriticism is used in the nonfiction works of the author selected for this study. A careful reading of Roy's works demonstrates the impact of the suffering the individuals endured. Design: In order to identify the research gap, a review of the literature is conducted by gathering data from secondary sources like peer-reviewed journals, national and international publications, the internet, and research sources like Google Scholar, Research Gate, SSRN, Elsevier, and Academia. Using ABCD analysis, the main points of the study are highlighted. To complete the proposed research, information is gathered from academic publications, doctoral theses, scholarly articles, and websites. The methodology utilized largely relies on gathering, analyzing, and interpreting prior knowledge. The methodology will use the textual analysis and comparison method. A close reading of a few of Arundhati Roy’s works will be done on the related topics. The APA Manual has been used to conduct the study's analysis in accordance with its guidelines. Findings: After reviewing numerous papers, books, and theses, it has been determined that the focus of the study will be on ecocriticism in a few key pieces of Arundhati Roy. It demonstrates that ecocriticism studies the goals intended to take a review of the literature and a thorough investigation of the problem at hand. Through a parallel reading of the fiction works with her non-fiction works, the research hopes to gain a deeper understanding of Arundhati Roy's works. Ecocriticism in nonfictional works is not emphasized in analyses of these important literary works. Paper Type: Literature Review

Finding the “Ideal”: F. Marion Crawford’s Mystical Theology and Literary Form in Mr. Isaacs

While popular nineteenth-century writer F. Marion Crawford’s interest in religion is well-documented, his fiction has been categorised as not carrying overt theological overtones. In contrast to this critical view, this article argues that Crawford’s fiction can be linked to his religious thinking; however, the manner in which his works articulate this interest is non-prescriptive. The article contends that Crawford’s handling of religious dilemmas shapes the unusual generic form of his literary works, in particular Mr. Isaacs (1882). To this end, the article examines Crawford’s mystical position on the Idealism-materialism question that was much debated within theological circles in the nineteenth century. Through an analysis of his non-fiction writings and Mr. Isaacs, I demonstrate how Crawford places ideas from Buddhism and Christianity in conversation to arrive at a “mystical” position on a spiritual “Ideal,” which he defines as an aspiration towards the transcendental that can be partly grasped in reality. As I demonstrate, Crawford draws on this unusual mystical notion of the “Ideal” to develop a new literary form that merges romance with elements from realism in Mr. Isaacs.

Suffrage and subjectivity: reassessing May Sinclair’s feminist writings

ABSTRACT This article reassesses May Sinclair’s feminist writings, arguing that the subjectivity foregrounded within them is not evidence of ambivalence or conservatism, but rather a means for Sinclair to strengthen her unconventional yet deeply held feminist conviction. I examine the subtly wrought arguments in Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction to demonstrate how she used these texts to articulate her own relationship to the increasing militancy of the women’s suffrage movement and develop her own critique of the patriarchy. I argue that Sinclair arrives at a far-sighted conception of feminism which is informed by her status as a walking woman writer, as she marches in women’s suffrage demonstrations under the banner of the Women Writers’ Unit. Sinclair’s self-conscious following in the footsteps of her nineteenth-century literary forebears has consequences for her feminist writings. Sinclair’s feminist non-fiction writings thus elucidate her commitment to an egalitarian feminism which condemns the gendered conventions of nineteenth-century womanhood.

Solitary Confinement, Aloneness, and Sociability in Sterne

Laurence Sterne develops his complex approach towards solitude throughout his fictional and non-fictional writings. Ranging between A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Bramine's Journal, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne's sermons, this article explores how Sterne juxtaposes the pleasures of retirement with more painful loneliness, and the opportunities that each opens up for sometimes challenging self-contemplation. Various locations stimulate Sterne's engagement with this relationship in differing ways: simply, the enjoyable solitude of country retreat contrasts with the superficial busyness of city life; but for Sterne the opportunity to attain greater self-knowledge comes through his interactions with others. Alone, he must construct imaginary forms of sociability, especially with his beloved but absent Eliza, whom he brings into a fictive conversation through his writing. In the process, the quixotism of Sterne's sentimental authorial persona leads not to a performance of feeling, but to an embrace of human frailty and hopefulness alike.

Salvaging

Abstract: “Salvaging” is both a memoir and a craft essay about reconciling with the fact that my mother’s habits of hoarding, reusing, and repurposing everything she has ever owned --never letting anything go to waste -- are actually very similar to the habits I have developed as a writer of memoirs and creative nonfiction.

A Ticket To Kalamazoo!

James Carter, an award-winning children's poet, non-fiction writer, musician and an ambassador for National Poetry Day shares his writing journey.

Julia Wedgwood, a Victorian feminist and female intellectual. Who was she and why has she been forgotten?

ABSTRACT Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) was a non-fiction writer who chose an unusually wide range of subjects, including theology, the Classical world and German Biblical criticism. She was also a leading feminist who wrote several influential pieces on female enfranchisement, campaigned in the 1870 elections to the London School Board and taught informally at what became Girton College. She was the niece of Charles Darwin, the great scientist, and had a short but intense relationship with Robert Browning, the poet. She was also close to many other leading Victorian cultural figures. Yet her achievements as a writer are now largely forgotten as is her role as a feminist. This article re-examines her life and career before considering why she has fallen out of the record and what that suggests about the influence of misleading stereotypes in our approach to nineteenth century women’s non-fiction writing and the study of first wave feminism.

Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology, By Taylor Driggers

The study of religion has long known how to show students where to find religion where they might not at first see it. The tradition of fantasy literature is one such site. University students can easily see Christian elements in various works of C.S. Lewis’ fiction that they might not have seen when they first read them as children, and how the genre of fantasy literature was imagined along theological lines in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and its account of fantasy as offering consolation through what he called ‘eucatastrophe’. But, given Lewis’ and Tolkien’s traditionalism, how do we show students how to find dissident religious expressions where they might not at first see them? Taylor Driggers offers at least two answers to this question in Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature. The first answer has to do with canon curation. The works that Driggers focuses on here are Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Lewis’ Till We Have Faces (1956). Some of these choices are obvious. As Driggers shows, ‘Carter juxtaposes religious narrative with the tropes and trappings of fantasy precisely to undermine any claims to ultimate or “natural” reality’ (p. 43), and the work of Le Guin’s book in getting past the binary of two sexes that is fundamental to theological orthodoxies is well known, even if a tad messy or even unsuccessful (pp. 94–101). The attention to Till We Have Faces is a bit more surprising, but Driggers convinces that ‘the inevitable failure of language and religious doctrine’ (p. 54) is an important theme in that book, and one that might ground the development of a theologically heterodox reading, one that is pro-sex and feminist (see pp. 117–18). The display of another possible Lewis, contrary to the traditionalist known from The Chronicles of Narnia and other fictional and nonfictional writings, is the greatest of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature’s pleasures.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin

Reviewed by: The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin Katharina von Kellenbach Erin McGlothlin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 346 pp. We will never be able to fully understand the mind of another person. This is especially true of people involved in atrocity, who are both eminently “ordinary” (Browning) and “monstrous” (Mohammed). “Perpetrator studies” has emerged as a new field of inquiry with its own scholarly networks, journals, and book series. The scholarly and popular fascination with the minds of perpetrators is partly driven by their inscrutability. Perpetrators are notoriously obtuse, in part because of their vested interest in keeping their crimes hidden from critical view, but also because their hearts and minds have become impenetrable—even to themselves. Acts of violence involve a “hardening of the heart,” to use a biblical term, as perpetrators avert their eyes and block their ears from seeing, feeling, and responding to the suffering of others. The ability to shield against empathy is integral to codes of conduct that allow agents of mass violence to dehumanize and degrade [End Page 217] victims. And generally, they show little awareness of culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities create force fields that suck entire communities into moral indifference, complicity, and denial. Erin McGlothlin, professor of German and Jewish studies at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzes fictional and nonfictional approaches to the mind of the perpetrator, distinguishing “mind-reading” from “imagination.” “Mind-reading” refers to practices of nonfiction writers attempting to penetrate and intuit the thinking and feeling of individual perpetrators in direct interaction. Fiction authors, on the other hand, use “imagination” to invent and envision the interior world of Holocaust perpetrators. Choosing her samples was, I am sure, the hardest part of writing the book. McGlothlin settles on four writers to make her case about “mind-reading.” Three observed Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt, the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, and the American Pentecostal minister William Hull; the fourth author, Gita Sereny, interviewed Franz Stangl in the early 1970s. The second part of the book examines Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971), Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and The Zone of Interest. Out of the profusion of possible titles, this choice of authors serves McGlothlin to develop a theoretical framework that bridges fictional and nonfictional literature. This linkage of fiction and nonfiction is startling and somewhat disturbing at a point in history when the boundary between fact and fiction is hotly contested, and the objective truth is systematically challenged by peddlers of conspiracy myths and purveyors of alternative facts. But McGlothlin is right to point out that fact-driven historical descriptions of perpetrators also follow narrative conventions. While Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is different from Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, both authors enter into the imagined interior world of a perpetrator. McGlothlin proposes the “theory of mind” to ground the human capacity to decode the thoughts and feelings of others in order to anticipate their plans and actions. Human beings learn early on to interpret facial expressions, behavioral cues, and body language to predict behavior, especially in situations of vulnerability and moments of danger. This, argue cognitive psychologists, is a critical survival skill. Literature, argues McGlothlin, builds on this human ability to experience the world through the eyes of others. Authors of perpetrator literature must enter into a depraved mental world of cruelty and dehumanization. This requires “empathetic identification” and “intersubjective intermediation” that filters mendacity and maintains ethical adjudication. It is probably no accident that most of McGlothlin’s authors are Jewish (except for Amis and Hull). There is little appetite among German non-Jewish fiction writers to enter into the minds of Holocaust perpetrators, which involves impossible balancing acts between intimate familiarity and disassociation, fears of contamination and apology. For Jewish authors, entering into the Nazi universe is tempered by embodied identification with the victims. Gita Sereny, for instance, can extend sympathy to Franz Stangl, because she is also mediating his thinking against her own experience and ethical position. Her strategy of eliciting a confession from Stangl...

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates

Reviewed by: American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates Michael Fuchs Ruined Cities. Robert Yeates. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction. UCL P, 2021. ix+201 pp. $40 pbk. Open access ebk. In American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Robert Yeates sets out to show that “America has its own specific history with urban ruins in fiction” and that these “ruins have functioned in very different ways in the individual historical contexts of particular US cities and in relation to particular media formats” (16). After setting the stage by referring to studies ranging from those by Georg Simmel and Lewis Mumford to James Berger and Stephen Joyce’s much more recent Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (2018), Yeates explores representations of post-apocalyptic American cities in six particular cultural and media-historical constellations, from fiction in the early twentieth century to the transmedia storyworlds of the early twenty-first century. The opening chapter situates Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) in the context of “the inconsistent but vital relationship between the emerging genre of sf and the magazines,” which Yeates considers a reflection “of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization of America” (47). This chapter presents a convincing reading of The Scarlet Plague as an extension of London’s nonfiction writings about the San Francisco earthquake, epitomizing the author’s turn “towards fantastic tales of possible future catastrophes” after 1906 (36). In addition, Yeates outlines the publication history of The Scarlet Plague, drawing on archival sources and providing great insights into Gordon Grant’s simple yet powerful illustrations. [End Page 129] The second chapter moves to the 1950s, when radio became the dominant medium due, in part, to changes in urban planning and transportation. As Yeates explains, whereas “the early twentieth-century commuter look[ed] to magazines for entertainment while aboard public transport, the commuters of the 1950s pilot[ed] private automobiles” and “found in radio an indispensable source of entertainment that could hold their attention without distracting them from their drive” (51). Next to the changes in media properties, Yeates emphasizes a distinct change in the causes of imagined urban disasters, as “wilful acts of sentient forces, whether human or alien” replaced chance and natural causes (55). The chapter discusses two episodes of the fantasy-horror series Quiet, Please (1947–1949) and three episodes of the sf anthology series Dimension X (1950–1951), highlighting the particular media properties of radio plays and demonstrating how these media artifacts negotiated scientific optimism and belief in technological progress with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Chapter three continues the exploration of Cold War anxieties, this time in the medium of film. Yeates’s focus turns to aerial warfare here, which was employed as a military strategy in World War II and then became a key element of how sf films of the 1950s and 1960s imagined urban destruction. Using The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960) as his main examples, Yeates echoes Jennifer Fay’s analysis of “nuclear conditioning” through motion pictures in her excellent book Inhospitable World (2018), suggesting that sf movies of the 1950s and 1960s not only reflected the anxieties of their times but also allowed viewers to confront and ultimately overcome their fears of urban and nuclear destruction. The next chapter provides a structurally not entirely convincing yet nevertheless enjoyable detour to the Blade Runner franchise (centering on the 1982 film) that showcases “what about this franchise resonated at the different moments of its development, and how the texts’ differing contexts reveal the strengths of Blade Runner’s particular take on the post-apocalyptic American city” (91). Starting from the observation that “little has been written to situate [the original Blade Runner] film in the movement of the late 1970s and 1980s towards demonizing and policing sexuality in America’s major cities” (92), the chapter focuses on Othering and how marginalized characters “navigate the liminal spaces of the ruined city as acts of experimentation, improvisation and expression in resistance to the policing of their identities” (115). Using Wasteland (1988) and Wasteland 2 (2014) as a launching pad, the fifth chapter turns to videogames and their...