Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy

Jude Roberts is a researcher in gender and sexualities in contemporary popular cultures and a Teaching Fellow in English at Keele University, UK. She has published research on gender and sexual minorities, science fiction and fantasy, censorship, obscenity and critical theory and is currently completing a monograph titled Contemporary Pornographic Comics and the Politics of Sexual Representation. Esther MacCallum-Stewart is Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre of the University of the West of England, UK. She writes widely on player narratives in video games, sex, love and gender in games, and role-playing practices, as well as running gaming conventions and promoting inclusion in fandom. She is editor of Playing with Affection: The Game Love Reader and author of Players Vs Games: Online Communities, Social Narratives.

• Introduction, Jude Roberts and Esther McCallum-Stewart1. Hiding in plain sight: the invisibility of queer fantasy, Stephen Kenneally2. Queering magic: Robin Hobb and fantasy literature's radical potential, Lenise Prater3. It takes a pack to raise a child: anti-conservatism and the non-normative family in Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, Katharine Harris4. Strange boys, queer boys: gay representations in young adult fantastic fiction, Andrew M. Butler5. Even better than the real thing: fantasy and phantasy in Boys’ Love manga, Anna Madill6. Turning people into things: object relations and posthuman reproduction in weird short fiction, Lisa Bennett 7. ‘Everything’s interconnected’: anarchy, ecology and sexuality in Lost Girls and Swamp Thing, Matthew J. A. Green8. Playing past the 'straight male gamer': from modding Edwin(a) to bisexual Zevran, Steven Holmes9. Playing with gender: (re-)imagining men and women in fantasy board games, Adam Brown and Deb Waterhouse-Watson10. Supernatural hymens and bodies from hell: screening virginity through the gothic body, Katherine Farrimond11. The tale of the women: gender, gender roles, and sexuality in Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, Keridwen N. LuisIndex

‘Examining fantasy for both adults and young adults, and recognising the range of platforms which now support the genre, this is a sharp and incisive examination of gender and sexuality subversion in modern fantasy.’ – Professor Farah Mendlesohn, Anglia Ruskin University, UK'This incisive and wide-ranging essay collection provides a much-needed point of engagement with the exponential growth of contemporary popular fantasy, in which new ways of performing sexuality and gender are continually emerging, as the social constraints of traditional binaries and hierarchies dissolve before our eyes.' – Dr Nick Hubble, Brunel University London, UK