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Since the 1990s, Charlize Theron has appeared in films from a wide range of genres but has seen significant financial success from starring in action films, such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Atomic Blonde (2017). However, unlike some female action leads, she has not solely been defined or pigeonholed by these roles but has been able to transition between action roles and more ‘respectable’ dramatic roles, as well as the other conventions of female celebrity, such as being the face of advertising campaigns for perfume brands.

Theron has notably received several physical injuries during filming, such as breaking her teeth practising fight choreography during the production of Atomic Blonde. These injuries have frequently been added as part of the publicity campaign for the films and Theron's star image overall as signs of ‘authenticity’, leading these action films a sense of increased legitimacy. Tasker states that a female action star's ‘[public] formulation is indicative of the uncertainties generated by her image’ (1993, p. 14). Media attention is divided between focusing on Theron's physicality, both in the sense of the traditional Hollywood gaze and in terms of Theron's molding of her marketable image. Theron has managed to succeed as both a mainstream star and an action heroine. This has enabled Theron to transition between genres and franchises such as The Fate of The Furious (2017), and an Oscar-nominated dramatic role in the biopic Bombshell (2019).

This chapter will unpack the public persona of Charlize Theron as an action film star, exploring both the filmic texts and the presentation of Theron's often complicated and contradictory image in the media.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

In early 2017 I was watching YouTube, and being bounced around by its algorithmic recommendations. One suggestion appearing down the side bar column of jpegs was MARROW, from Anohni’s 2016 album Hopelessness. It figures a black background and foregrounds an ageing, smiling, bejewelled woman lip-syncing to the song. She is the American artist Lorraine O’Grady. Watching it felt odd, as if something was `out of place’.

Anohni speaks through her, using ventriloquist tactics to displace her own body and O’Grady’s voice. This interested me. It was the first time I had been presented with the body of an ageing woman without knowing what she looked like in youth (unlike Madonna or Aretha Franklin for example). And it was the first time I had seen lip syncing done in such an eerie fashion. The tactic is used on other music videos for tracks taken from the album where ageing women and women of colour are centre stage.

Using the idea of a place that it is ‘out of time’, in that the music videos are set in a blank space and the lip- syncing upsets the idea of a single sutured speaking author, the chapter explores the idea of `queer temporality’ by using Judith Halberstam’s 2005 work. It suggests that the music videos are potentially transgressive in their presentation of a non-normative and fractured bodies. It uses work from ageing studies (Baars, 2012) and trans-ageing (Moglen, 2008) to suggest the transgressive potential of Anonhi’s music videos in how they position transgendered voices and ageing bodies.

This article examines the early post-World War II civil rights organizing of black women radicals affiliated with the organized left. It details the work of these women in such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress and Freedom newspaper as they fought to challenge the unjust conviction and sentencing of black defendants caught in the racial machinations of U.S. local and state criminal justice systems. These campaigns against what was provocatively called “legal lynching” formed a cornerstone of African American civil rights activism in the early postwar years. In centering the civil rights politics and organizing of these black women radicals, a more detailed picture emerges of the Communist Party-supported anti-legal lynching campaigns. Such a perspective moves beyond a view of civil rights legal activism as solely the work of lawyers, to examining the ways committed activists within the U.S. left, helped to build this legal activism and sustain an important left base in the U.S. during the Cold War.