Imagine losing the ability to smile. After suffering permanent facial difference, Faye Linda Wachs finds a community of people reconstructing identity while coping with what she terms a social disability. By detailing personal accounts and interviews of those facing microaggressions and internal disruptions to communication, Metamorphosis explores the process of reconstructing the self.
 

Mainstreaming Gays examines a key transitional period linking the eras of legacy and streaming, when queer production and interaction was transformed by the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ content. It is critical reading for those interested in media production, fandom, subcultures, and LGBTQ digital media.
 

Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the Garbo mystique, a tough negotiator who used her newfound power in Hollywood to develop a distinctly new feminist screen persona. Examining how she was an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century, the book also considers Garbo’s spiritual and sexual exploration away from the camera’s glare.  

The Prism of Human Rights illustrates how women’s human rights campaigns have taken off in rural Ecuador. Drawing on two decades of research and activism, Friederic shows how the initial promises of legal empowerment often give way to self-blame, social isolation, and more extreme structural violence, and she demonstrates how one rural community is renegotiating beliefs about gender, the family, the meaning of violence, and even community development.

A tale of false accusations, social stigma, and adultery, The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello. Combining elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics, the novel is notable for its deft use of irony and its resourceful and resilient heroine. 

The Cyborg Caribbean examines twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction, showing how it negotiates legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. It traces histories of four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed corporality and humanity in the Caribbean.

Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! is a whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love. One of the first environmentally-conscious works of Italian literature, it questions the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness.
 

Maid for Television examines the racialized female domestic by tracing the maid’s representational and narrative function in American television. As domestic service has been a long-standing occupation for women of color, the figure of the maid in the employer’s home is a recurrent and patterned image, simultaneously enacting and revealing the nexus of race, class, and gender hierarchies in American culture.

In Islam and Me, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel tells her story of being a Somali immigrant in Italy and shares the experiences of other Muslim women in southern Europe. She reveals the common prejudices they encounter and explores how Italy might reimagine its national culture and identity to become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist.