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Voyager Inn International (Bethesda) is negotiating a master contract with TourAmerica, an international tour operator, for hotel rooms during the 1995 tourist season. Issues under consideration include number of rooms during peak, mid-, and off-periods; room rates; breakfast prices; and the cost of ancillary services. The hotel manager is evaluated on the basis of several criteria, including adjusted daily rates, occupancy rates, and food and beverage profitability. To facilitate trade-offs among the various criteria, the manager articulates a utility scheme. This case is a role-play exercise, and must be used in conjunction with “TourAmerica” (UVA-QA-0464). Reporting forms for the evaluation of alternative contracts are provided with each case.

Bob O'Connell, CFO of General Motors, is considering a variety of equity alternatives to fund a large shortfall over the next couple of years. His tasks are to map out a financing strategy for the long term and to choose the equity instrument to be issued immediately. Of particular interest to O'Connell is a new security called PERCS (preferred equity redemption cumulative stock).

In mid-1992, Christine Olsen, the chief financial officer (CFO) of this large CAD/CAM equipment manufacturer, must decide on the magnitude of the firm's dividend payout. A subsidiary question is whether the firm should embark on a campaign of corporate-image advertising and change its corporate name to reflect its new outlook. The case serves as an omnibus review of the many practical aspects of the dividend decision, including (1) signaling effects, (2) clientele effects, and (3) finance and investment implications of increasing dividend payout.

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

This chapter explores the presentation of women's violence in Tamil mega serials. Tamil mega serials are produced in India and aired six days a week on satellite television channels. The story revolves around households with extended families living together and issues affecting women such as family well-being, motherhood and fertility. Women mostly take the role of the main protagonist and antagonist in Tamil serials. This chapter analyses the presentation of violence in 10 episodes of Chandralekha, a Tamil mega serial. Perpetrators of violence in Tamil serials are mainly female antagonists and other characters supporting the antagonists. The rivalry between the protagonist and antagonist centres around the struggle for property or the love of or marriage with a man. The type of violence ranges from mild to severe kinds of physical violence, and non-physical violence. The presentation of violence in Tamil serials reflects gender inequality in society. The meaning of some forms of violence in mega serials is closely related to the traditional gender roles and notion of traditional femininity in society.

For much of its peak popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, women in action films were relegated to the damsel in distress and/or the romantic interest for the male lead. This was particularly evident in action films where women were depicted as being petite and submissive, especially towards the heroic male. Rarely did women occupy the primary focus in action films. Nowadays women are more frequently occupying positions of creative power as producers and actors, and there are some notable examples of progressive female roles in modern film. Female action stars tended to occupy one of two roles, that of what Marc O'Day (2004) labelled ‘action babe’ cinema, using the colloquial and dismissive term ‘babe’ as an indication of the derogatory nature of the female action hero who was often just a supermodel with a gun. However, there has emerged another type of female action star, the tough, aggressive and physically capable female action star, such as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1992).

Yvonne Tasker coined the term ‘musculinity’ to define this new model of tough women; female action stars who appropriate what are considered traditionally masculine traits (developed muscles, aggression, confidence, leadership skills, bravery). The presence of athletic women in action films, especially when compared to their male counterparts, defies expectations for women, and as such provides a unique example to analyse in terms of gender dynamics. This is especially true of combat sports, where aggression is a feature of the sport and still considered a testosterone-oriented attribute. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, the peak of the male action star, martial arts and associated combat sports provided opportunities for many former athletes to transition into action films. Using Tasker's framework of musculinity, I will examine Haywire (2011) as a notable progression in the representation of female action stars and musculinity. Focusing on a case study of Gina Carano's role in Haywire, and her subsequent career narrative, this chapter highlights how perceptions of masculinity and femininity in both combat sports and action films have previously limited roles for women and how much that has shifted in contemporary filmmaking.

While popular genre fictions like detective novels are often centred around formulaic plots and stereotypical characters, they also undergo several exciting changes when adapted in a diverse array of cultural and linguistic contexts. My chapter examines the first female detective of a Bangla crime writing series, Detective (Goyenda) Krishna as a figure that challenges patriarchal stereotypes related to violent women and dismantles the illusory neatness of binaries associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ femininity. The gun-toting, vengeance-seeking literary detective is also examined as mediating shifts and transitions in gendered practices and norms in Bengal – its socio-political as well as literary contexts – as it negotiated ideas of decoloniality from the first decade of the twentieth century and emerged as part of a new, partitioned nation in 1947. She is seen as a creative response to the changes related to gender that had been gradually taking shape in colonised Bengal and as articulating radically re-imagined possibilities and opportunities related to female subjectivities in a newly decolonised nation.

The iconic vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returned to cinema screens via Death Wish 2 (Michael Winner) in 1982 and vigilantism would remain a key theme in American urban action films throughout the 1980s. Susan Jeffords subsequently argued that Hollywood's ‘hard bodied’ male action heroes of the period were reflective of the social and political thematics that distinguished Ronald Reagan's tenure as America's President (1994, p. 22). But while Jeffords' arguments are convincing, they overlook contemporaneous films featuring female and ‘soft’ bodied urban action heroes.

The Angel trilogy (Angel, 1984; Avenging Angel, 1985; and Angel III: The Final Chapter, 1988) features three such understudied examples. Indeed, the films' diverse and atypical range of action heroes demand that they are interrogated in terms of their protagonists' gender, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices and age. Featuring narratives about the prostitutes and street folk who frequent Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, the films' key characters are a teenage prostitute and her guardians: a transvestite prostitute, a lesbian hotelier and an elderly cowboy. All three films feature narratives that revolve around acts of vengeance and vigilantism.

This chapter will critically discuss the striking ways in which the films' ‘soft’ bodied and atypical protagonists are presented as convincing action heroes who subvert contemporaneous ‘hard’ bodied norms. It will also consider to what extent their subversive rewriting of typical urban action film narratives and character relations might be understood to critique and deconstruct the themes and concerns that usually characterized such films during the Reagan era.