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Works

The Corpse in the Trash Room (writing as Colette Tajemna)

In a college dorm in the late Seventies, seven hallmates hold a funeral for a pet hamster, only to stumble upon a body ...

 

Startled but not exactly sorrowful at finding their unpopular dorm preceptor slumped atop a garbage can in the trash room, Keith and his friends can't resist investigating, and set to questioning a quirky set of potential witnesses and suspects. Could the killer be a fellow student? A member of the faculty or staff? The provost? Might it even be one of their friends?

 

Keith and his pals must navigate college politics, unruly druggies, and lesbian separatists in order to uncover the truth.

The Corpse in the Trash Room (writing as Colette Tajemna)

Too Early to Know Who's Winning

A novel of women approaching retirement in the age of Trump and climate crisis--available from Black Rose Writing and on Kindle Unlimited!

 

"With clear eyes, courage, and wit, Karla Huebner's Too Early to Know Who's Winning captures the uncertainty, fear, desperation, and grief of the early Trump era. ... Too Early to Know Who's Winning is also a penetrating exploration of mortality, companionship, mental health, and the search for glimmers of light in an ever-darkening world." –Fredrick Soukup, author of Bliss and Blood Up North

Too Early to Know Who's Winning

In Search of the Magic Theater

Available now from Regal House!

 

In Search of the Magic Theater, narrated alternately by the twentyish Sarah and the fortyish Kari, begins as something of a female version of Hesse's renowned Steppenwolf. Why, the rather staid young cellist Sarah wonders, should her aunt rent their spare room to the perhaps unstable Kari Zilke? Like the nephew in Steppenwolf, Sarah finds herself taking an unexpected interest in the lodger, but Sarah is unable to stop at providing a mere introduction to Kari's narrative of mid-life crisis and self-discovery, and develops her own more troubled tale of personal angst and growth, entwined with the account Kari herself purportedly left behind.

 

 

In Search of the Magic Theater

Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic

Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen's early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist's own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen's career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women's roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

 

 

Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic

The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Edited By Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, Mara Lazda. Leading scholars examine the region's diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces' organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe

In this wide-ranging study of women's and gender issues in the pre- and post-1989 Czech Republic, contributors engage with current feminist debates and theories of nation and identity to examine the historical and cultural transformations of Czech feminism. This collection of essays by leading scholars, artists, and activists, explores such topics as reproductive rights, state socialist welfare provisions, Czech women's NGOs, anarchofeminism, human trafficking, LGBT politics, masculinity, feminist art, among others. Foregrounding experiences of women and sexual and ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic, the contributors raise important questions about the transfer of feminist concepts across languages and cultures. As the economic orthodoxy of the European Union threatens to occlude relevant stories of the different national communities comprising the Eurozone, this book contributes to the understanding of the diverse origins from which something like a European community arises.

Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe

Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

Women have been important contributors to and readers of magazines since the development of the periodical press in the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, millions of women read the weeklies and monthlies that focused on supposedly "feminine concerns" of the home, family and appearance. In the decades that followed, feminist scholars criticized such publications as at best conservative and at worst regressive in their treatment of gender norms and ideals. However, this perspective obscures the heterogeneity of the magazine industry itself and women's experiences of it, both as readers and as journalists. This collection explores such diversity, highlighting the differing and at times contradictory images and understandings of women in a range of magazines and women's contributions to magazines in a number of contexts from late nineteenth century publications to twenty-first century titles in Britain, North America, continental Europe and Australia.

Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

The Flaneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives

This volume offers new perspectives on a crucial figure of nineteenth-century cultural history - the flaneur. Recent writing on the flaneur has given little sustained attention to the widespread adaptation of the flaneur outside Paris, let alone outside France and indeed Europe, whether in the form of historic antecedents, modern sequels, or contemporary echoes. Yet it is clear that the allure of the flaneur's persona has led to its translation and adoption far beyond Parisian boulevards and passages, and this in different media and literary genres. This volume maps some of the flaneur's travels and transpositions. How far the flaneur is dependent on Paris as a milieu is opened up for questioning: for all the international dispersal of this idea and model, in some sense Paris is always present, if only as a reference to kick against or replace. When modern flaneurs step out in foreign cities, how much of a Parisian ethos clings to them, however they might claim independence? Cities which provide counterpoints to Paris discussed here are Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Le Havre, London, Madrid, New York, Prague, and St Petersburg. This internationalised view also reconsiders the nature of the flaneur, and revises stereotypes based on Walter Benjamin's account of Baudelaire. Another key feature is the chapters which analyse the flaneur in terms of visual representations, whether graphic illustration, streetscapes, urban design, cinema, or album covers (related to musical examples from the 1950s to the present).

The Flaneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives

The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s Through the 1960s

"In The New Woman International, editors Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco have gathered a group of intellectually stimulating and provocative essays that present the emergence, both tentative and triumphant, of this new global icon and her increasingly multicultural image. Written largely by historians of art and film, these essays emphasize visual analysis of the photographic and film media that carried the new woman's influential message."
---Norma Broude, American University 

 

"The New Woman International focuses on the New Woman not simply as an image to be analyzed but also as a producer of images and text. This groundbreaking anthology represents a theoretically sophisticated set of essays that thoroughly examine the phenomenon of the New Woman in previously unexplored ways."
---Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, CUNY 

 

Images of flappers, gar onnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky---all embodiments of the dashing New Woman---symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. This volume examines the ways in which novel ideas about women's roles in society and politics were disseminated through these technological media, and it probes the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these original essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to reconceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world. 

 

The New Woman International brings together different generations of scholars and curators who are experts in gender, photography, literature, mass media, and film to analyze the New Woman from her inception in the later nineteenth century through her full development in the interwar period, and the expansion of her forms in subsequent decades. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, these essays show how controversial female ideals figured in discourses including those on gender norms, race, technology, sexuality, female agency, science, media representation, modernism, commercial culture, internationalism, colonialism, and transnational modernity. In exploring these topics through images that range from montages to newspapers' halftone prints to film stills, this book investigates the terms of gendered representation as a process in which women were as much agents as allegories. Inaugurating a new chapter in the scholarship of representation and New Womanhood and spanning North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and the colonial contexts of Africa and the Pacific, this volume reveals the ways in which a feminine ideal circled the globe to be translated into numerous visual languages. 

 

With a foreword from the eminent feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, this collection includes contributions by Jan Bardsley, Matthew Biro, Gianna Carotenuto, Melody Davis, Kristine Harris, Karla Huebner, Kristen Lubben, Maria Makela, Elizabeth Otto, Martha H. Patterson, Vanessa Rocco, Clare I. Rogan, Despina Stratigakos, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Kathleen M. Vernon, and Lisa Jaye Young.

The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s Through the 1960s

Heartwood

Raz-Shumaker Prize finalist (2020). Stay tuned!

 

Boat-dwellers, anarchists, extinct birds, women made of flowers, and cheese-eating demons populate these tales of love, magic, loss, and horrible workplaces.