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In the novel, The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers probes the American malaise through the longings of a young adolescent girl. Twelve‐year‐old Frankie no longer sees the world as round and inviting as a school globe. No, the world is huge and cracked and turning a thousand miles an hour. Indeed, the world seems separate from herself. In the midst of chaos, Frankie sees her brother's upcoming wedding as a chance to feel connected, to feel that she matters. The story focuses on Frankie's efforts to be a “member of the wedding,” as she recognizes, “they are the we of me.”

This chapter offers feminist perspectives on the violence exercised by female avengers in popular audiovisual products about narcotrafficking from Mexico and Colombia. Through the case studies of the narcotelenovela Rosario Tijeras (RCN Televisión, 2010) and the B movie Sanguinarios del M1 (Alonso Ortiz Lara, 2011), we explore how recent Latin American narco-narratives rearticulate the ‘rape-revenge’ film. Following Valencia's conceptualisation of necroempowerment (2012), we argue that female characters respond to rape with ruthless methods in an effort to regain agency. We combine existing literature in feminist film studies with postcolonial readings of the specificities of rape-revenge in the narco-universe where the violence these heroines use as retaliation is already the norm for their male counterparts. A close reading of revenge sequences underscores how vengeance can constitute a cathartic outlet for enraged female characters, challenging stereotypes of feminine passiveness and subverting gender hierarchies. However, it also perpetuates a patriarchal order based on toxic ideals of individual power achieved through bloody methods. We examine how empowerment can entrap female protagonists and serve to differentiate the types of violence that each gender has access to, and we discuss the problematic representation of rape as a transformative moment necessary for women to later become powerful.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the representations of male and female social actors within the subversive gendered discourse of “equal opportunities for men and women” in Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks.

From the methodological perspective, this study fused van Leeuwen’s (2003) “Social Actor Network Model” and Sunderland’s (2004) “Gendered Discourses Model”.

Data obtained from this study showed the subversive gendered discourse of “equal opportunities” was supported through such representations within a narrow perspective in line with dominant gender ideologies in Iran. The findings suggest the resistance against such subversive gendered discourse in Iranian EFL textbooks underpins gender norms and religious ideologies existing in Iran.

Such representations of male and female social actors in school textbooks show inclusive education and the discourse of “equal opportunities” have yet to be realised in education system of many countries, including Iran.

Traditional approaches to organizational change are of little use in the bid for increased innovation as they reinforce top‐down predictability. An alternative approach is through the creation of pockets of good practice which act as role models of change. These pockets need to be subversive of existing practices but simultaneously deliver organizational success criteria. The success of this approach is dependent upon managers developing a critical perspective about organizational control systems. Contrary to received wisdom the foundation for this critical perspective may be most usefully developed from the manager’s own cynical experience of organizational life. In building this critical perspective management development may begin to fulfil a wider educational role in society.

The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

This article aims to explore how mainstream popular cinema, usually a vehicle of effortless and accessible entertainment, produces or reproduces prevailing discursive constructs about managers, management and corporate firms and provides a cultural reading of organizations. Using a post-structuralist framework, it seeks to deconstruct the representations of managers in several popular films. It aims to propose that the analysis of this representation allows complex questions about the nature of power in organizations and the “opportunity costs” of resistance to be addressed.

This article focuses on the discursive formation of managers and employees in popular films. The films were chosen using a popularity measure on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) and treated as “visual narratives”. A variation of Rose ' s discourse analysis method was used. To critically view the films, a post-structuralist perspective was adopted, in which questions of power, gender and sexuality are seen as fundamental. Gender is a discursive practice that becomes material through the power and resistance subjectified by the human body while “truth” is referenced through specific words and images – so constructed by the “reality” of popular culture.

The analysis reveals two seemingly competing discourses surrounding the representations of managers that encompass both a description of power and the resistance to this power. In this sense, although popular films position subjects – managers and those managed – in very specific ways, at the same time their construct of power is highly contextual and open to change. This finding leads to, first, a Foucauldian understanding of power and, second, a reconceptualization of power and resistance as one and the same construct, power/resistance, that may help address the “where”, “who”, and “why” of resistance that has previously been ignored.

The article brings popular culture to center stage in organization studies and argues that by not paying attention to its power to inform, society is cut off from valuable knowledge about how management is “done”. The article also reveals that although on surface the representations of managers in films seem to reinforce the dominant discourse of the “macho” manager, at the same time, a second representation – the bright, eager, usually working-class employee who wants to emulate the boss but then “sees the light” and becomes a “hero” – is offering a critique of this construct, making popular culture potentially subversive.

This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing, potentially, to processes of decolonisation. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, in their book Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, argue that Australian texts which seek to disturb readers by pursuing modes of post-colonial ‘unsettlement’ can activate new discourses and, thereby, inspire social change (1998). Focussing upon undergraduate student responses to two works of Aboriginal Australian literary adaptation, Melissa Lukashenko's short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013) and Leah Purcell's stage play, The Drover's Wife (2016), this chapter draws upon ideas pertaining to ‘affect’ to reveal how, through the subversive reimagining of tropes and structures commonly associated with Western dwelling, works of Indigenous literary adaptation elicit emotional responses in non-Indigenous readers and, in so doing, open up new spaces for listening within existing frameworks of white possession.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non‐conceptual or “sensational” way, adding “new varieties” that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi‐disciplinary, practice‐led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research.

The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating “alternative figurations” of “woman” which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of “woman” as a complex and multiple subject always “in process”.

By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative – in this case a novel – can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.

In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of “material thinking” that led to the final work.

Leadership is as widely used as it is misused and misunderstood. This paper seeks to argue that in an educational context it is important not only to revisit and reframe conceptions of leadership but also to see it as having an essentially subversive purpose. The paper aims to dicuss subversion in an intellectual, moral and political sense, as a sacred mission to confront the “noble lies” of politicians, the superficiality of the designer culture and the line of least resistance opted for by overworked and demoralised teachers.

The empirical base for this paper is a seven‐country three‐years study entitled Leadership for Learning which brought together staff from 24 schools in seven countries to explore the connections between learning and leadership and to arrive at some common understanding which could be tested in practice across national and linguistic boundaries.

While recognising the unique contexts and differing cultural traditions as diverse as those of Australia and Austria, the USA and Greece, engaging in an international discourse through face‐to‐face workshops, virtual conferencing and exchange visits led one to five key principles held in common.

The paper offers intriguing and insightful discussion into the subject of leadership as a subversive activity.