Cultural Studies

Wine

Meg Bernhard, Freelance journalist, USA While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory — wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

UK June 2023 • US June 2023 • 160 pages PB 9781501383618 • £9.99 / $14.95 ePub 9781501383625 • £10.18 / $13.45 ePdf 9781501383632 • £10.18 / $13.45 Series: Object Lessons • Bloomsbury Academic

Pregnancy Test

Karen Weingarten, Queens College, City University of New York, USA In the 1970s, the invention of the pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic cultural that gave gynecologists—the majority of whom were men—control over information about women’s bodies. Pregnancy Test examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

UK March 2023 • US March 2023 • 160 pages PB 9781501376542 • £9.99 / $14.95 ePub 9781501376559 • £10.18 / $13.45 ePdf 9781501376566 • £10.18 / $13.45 Series: Object Lessons • Bloomsbury Academic

Grave

Allison C. Meier, Freelance writer, New York City, USA The expectation of a casket beneath a monument in a cemetery on the outskirts of town was created by decades of belief, politics, and business, as was the recent revival of the ancient practice of cremation. Now the cemeteries established in the 19th century are filling up and the harmful emissions from cremation are a concern. Green burial, human composting, and coral reefs of ashes are all emerging as new designs. Yet these solutions often overlook the indigent and unidentified who frequently are interred in mass graves, not unlike the potter’s fields of the colonial era. The grave may be a final destination, but it is not the great leveler, and permanency is always a privilege.

UK February 2023 • US February 2023 • 168 pages PB 9781501383656 • £9.99 / $14.95 ePub 9781501383663 • £10.18 / $13.45 ePdf 9781501383670 • £10.18 / $13.45 Series: Object Lessons • Bloomsbury Academic

OBJECT LESSONS

Explore the hidden lives of ordinary things

9781501383618 9781501383656 9781501376542 9781501383748