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Purpose – This chapter examines how prison spaces are depicted in fictional contexts built around icons of popular music. Given that both icons and inmates occupy spaces that the majority of the population does not observe or experience, I am interested in the degree to which prisons serve as stagings for queer expression, even when inhabited by mainstream music stars.

Design/methodology/approach – The lyrical content and visual texts of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us,” Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” as well as material from mainstream musicals like Chicago, are closely analyzed and linked to other scholarly work on prison narratives.

Findings – In addition to binding the power of pop iconicity to the experience of incarceration, the musical numbers and cultural artifacts examined here also reveal differing manifestations of queer motifs in their visual and lyrical construction. Mainstream representations of prisons’ unique and liminal social orders are therefore considered to be open to queer renderings of affection and provocation.

Originality/value – Although prison sexuality is intensely studied by human rights organizations and criminologists, the possibilities for queer expression within fictional prison contexts have not been explicitly linked to the pop personas of music superstars and their creative projects.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

Black male teachers represent between two and five percent of the teaching force, yet many research studies have suggested the importance of their presence in the classroom. While most research focuses on the necessity of a larger force of Black male teachers to serve as role models for Black male students, minimal research examines their importance in teaching Black female students. In addition to this lack of research, teacher-training programs, even those that tailor their programming toward Black men, do little to address issues of teaching across gender. This phenomenon has implications for Black male teacher retention, Black female student success, and improved gender dynamics in the Black community. This chapter highlights the dynamics of teaching across gender through review of the literature and a case study. It presents the Gender Dynamic Awareness Model, a conceptual framework for use in teacher training that addresses five factors for Black men to consider when teaching Black female students.