This chapter presents an overview of the presence of male and female characters and speech, in each film and across the entire set of films, and discusses issues of representation, conversational dominance, and talkativeness. In the Disney Princess films, male characters and male speech are both overrepresented. While Disney’s branding talks a big game about progressive feminist values, the films still consistently under-represent female characters, and reinforces the expectation that women should speak less than men. While Pixar also overrepresents male characters, at times even more drastically than Disney does, analysis of male and female co-leads showed neither gender consistently talking over the other. This suggests that Pixar has an issue of attention: when Pixar focuses on writing women, the result is a diverse set of talkative, well-rounded female characters with varying levels of power and assertion within their relationships. However, the presentation of femininity outside these one or two characters in each film tends to be much lazier, or altogether missing in favor of a host of male background characters. In films from both studios, male characters consistently take up more space, both in aggregate and in individual conversations, but the framing and characterization of talkativeness suggests that it’s women who are emotional, gossipy, and overly talkative.

This chapter traces the crtical reception of Roth's Portnoy’s Complaint, released to significant controversy. While many deemed the novel to be brilliant and hilarious, others found it offensive. Many readers were taken aback by its unabashed engagement with sex: protagonist Alex Portnoy speaks frankly about many aspects of his sexual life, particularly his propensity for masturbation. As is the case with many of Roth’s works, readers interpreted the protagonist to be almost wholly autobiographical. Moreover, many Jewish critics and rabbis, specifically, felt that the book’s material further revealed Roth to be a “self-hating Jew."Yet for many of the same reasons that it was criticized, Portnoy’s Complaint has also been hailed as one of Roth’s signature works, which exemplifies a coming into his unique voice and trademark sense of humor.

This chapter will provide context for Roth’s interrogations and representations of masculinity. In Roth’s texts, Jewish protagonists often face competing expectations for their manhood: one definition of manhood is offered by a their Jewish family and culture while another, more aggressive and violent model of manhood, however, is operative and idealized within the larger constructs of American society, performed by white, Gentile men. These competing definitions are further complicated by anxieties over the history of victimization and feminization associated with Jewishness

Many times over the course of his career, Roth was accused of antisemitism, even though he explored and criticized antisemitism in his own works. This chapter will explore this conundrum, examining how and why Roth faced such accusations, and pointing to where they are misguided.

Since its establishment in 1948, the State of Israel claimed Philip Roth’s allegiance. The allegiance was granted, but with reservations. Despite his satirical treatment of his New Jersey cultural environment, Roth loved his birthplace and had not much love left over for Israel, which his avatar Nathan Zuckerman sees as an “unharmonious” country, “where it appears that nothing, from the controversy to the weather, is ever blurred or underdone,”yet which somehow makes demands on an American Jew.

The sixth chapter continues this focus on the theme of adoption by considering the portrayal of orphans and foundlings in the ‘adoption’ novels of George Eliot. At a time when questions of filial dependence or entitlements were being rigidly regulated in the colony, writers from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot imbued adoptive relations with special sentimental and social value to expansively reform ideas of how family, home, and kinship are understood. So, for instance, this chapter shows how Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) champions the surrogate parental relation over wealth and property inheritance precisely when the Sumroo case legally restricts these ties in the Indian context. Yet, even for Eliot, when adoption raises the specter of racial or national difference as in Daniel Deronda (1876) kinship remains ancestral, its hallmark being genealogical and not open to the caprice of nurture. What this chapter thus clarifies is a contrapuntal relationship between law and literature around the question of adoption. Some of the most celebrated nineteenth century English novels use adoption to break with the family romance plot, upending legal assumptions about rights and descent. However, race proves a limit point even for these works with otherwise capacious imaginations.