Drawing on original empirical research, this book provides a critical understanding of current theory in the study of sexuality.

Inter-disciplinary in approach, Jennifer Harding identifies a series of key issues on contemporary discourses: essentialism vs constructionism; gender and sexuality; representation and concepts of identity; Foucalut's notion of discourse'; and Butler's theory of gender performance'. These topics are explored in the light of contemporary cultural contexts - for instance, the debate on hormone theory and the social construction of sexuality, gender bending' and...

This interdisciplinary review of the literature identifies a series of key issues in discourses on sexuality, including gender and sexuality, representation and concepts of identity, and Foucault's notion of 'discourse'. These issues are explored in a series of contemporary contexts, such as 'gender bending' and masculinity and the maternal body.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry's need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers...

This cutting-edge book covers emerging, evolutionary and nature inspired optimization techniques in the field of advanced manufacturing. The complexity of real life advanced manufacturing problems often cannot be solved by traditional engineering or computational methods. Hence, in recent years researchers and practitioners have proposed and developed new strands of advanced, intelligent techniques and methodologies. Evolutionary computing approaches are introduced in the context of a wide range of manufacturing activities, and through the examination of practical problems and their...

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry's need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers...