Women’s magazines and socioeconomic change: Para Ti,identity and politics in urban Argentina

Popular media plays an important role in the production and reproduction of hegemonic cultural norms, as well as in the construction of class and gender identities. Periods of economic crisis generate struggles over ways of understanding social reality that can destabilize or reinforce different identities. The media often plays an important role in the reconfiguration of identities. Expanding on these ideas, I conduct a discourse analysis of a women’s magazine to examine how popular media reflected and influenced shifting gender and class identities in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1995 and 2008, a period of major socioeconomic change. By drawing attention to supposedly ‘non-political’ actors and spaces, I argue for expanding the range of sites we investigate in order to make sense of changing class and gender subjectivities during times of socioeconomic crisis.     

The Janulis Burial: A Case of Gender Fluidity in the Middle Archaic Period?

ABSTRACT

An amateur 1969 excavation at the Middle Archaic period Janulis site in Ontario unearthed the skeletal remains of three individuals and a dog. One of these, an adult female with an extensive offering, displayed several changes in the bones of her right arm and shoulder caused by the repetitive and intensive practice of an overhand throwing motion. The association of eight projectile points with her skeleton indicates that the activity was projectile throwing, suggesting a strong emphasis on hunting, normally a masculine role. She also had a turtle-shell rattle, an instrument usually associated with men in that time period. In contrast, the presence of two deer styliform bones in the burial point to a feminine role. These anomalies raise the possibility that this individual had adopted a nonbinary gender status, but the paucity of reliable comparative data makes it difficult to precisely define that status.     

Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal?

This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a shift in prevailing rationales for cultural policy, away from cultural justifications, and towards economic and social goals. Neo-liberalism is shown to be a significant but rather crude tool for evaluating and explaining New Labour’s cultural policies. At worse, it falsely implies that New Labour did not differ from Conservative approaches to cultural policy, downplays the effect of sociocultural factors on policy-making, and fails to differentiate varying periods and directions of policy. It does, however, usefully draw attention to the public policy environment in which Labour operated, in particular the damaging effects of focusing, to an excessive degree, on economic conceptions of the good in a way that does not recognise the limitations of markets as a way of organising production, circulation and consumption.     

Values and assumptions underpinning policy for children and young people in England

This paper provides an account of current ideas about English childhood that seem to underpin policies ‘for’ children. New Labour values the future adulthood of children more than their childhoods, and stresses children's responsibilities over their rights. Generally, child protection and provision for children has higher status than children's participation. Children are excluded from participation in social life. Traditional psychological formulations remain powerful in their stress on childhood as a preparatory stage of life, where children are socialised into conformity with the norms of social life. However, the last 15 years have seen greater respect for children's own views and experiences, for their rights and for the idea that childhood is socially constructed. But the idea that children are contributors to society is still rarely recognised and they continue to suffer from low social status accordingly.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

对青海出生性别比整体性升高问题的调查与思考

20世纪90年代后期,青海省出生性别比呈整体性急剧攀升之态势,出生人口性别结构严重失衡,成为人口结构性变化的重要特征之一,引起了政府和学界的广泛关注。积极探讨切实可行的解决思路,尽快遏制出生性别比升高趋势,统筹解决青海人口问题势在必行。     

A Popular Public Theology

Abstract

The article begins by exploring what is meant by a popular public theology drawing on the work of the missiologist Werner Ustorf. A popular public theology refers to the informal and unofficial theological speech of society, distinct from the more formal theology of the Church and academy. Such popular public theology is found in contemporary culture, albeit often in diffuse and incoherent form. It is then argued that a popular public theology has an inbuilt relevance to the concerns of society, avoids problems associated with public theologians needing to be fluent in more than one academic discourse, and is not in danger of being reliant on the social sciences. Finally, it is suggested that by discussing the implications of cultural theological statements, public theologians are able to contribute critically to social and political debates.     

Sweet nationalism in bitter days: a commercial representation of Zionism

ABSTRACT. This article identifies several theoretical approaches to the role of culture in the construction of national identity. Embedded in the presently emerging approach, which emphasises the relations between popular culture/consumerism and national identity, this study focuses on a specific consumer good manufactured in Israel in the early 2000s, the height of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising): small sugar packets bearing portraits of the patriarchs of Zionism. The analysis of this product, employing semiotic analysis, interviews and focus groups, locates it in the five ‘moments’ of du Gay's ‘circuit of culture’ (i.e. identity, representation, production, consumption and regulation). Three main gen e ral arguments were stated, empirically examined and largely sustained: (1) Consumer goods are used not only for constructing national identity but also as a means for ‘healing’ it; (2) in their ‘healing’ capacity, representations of nationalism on consumer goods do not add new elements to representations offered by the ‘high’ official version of nationalism but replicate them in a simplified way; (3) while trivialising the insights and concepts that originated in ‘high’ culture, consumer goods expose the prejudices, stereotypes and rules of inclusion and exclusion that in ‘high’ culture are often hidden in a sophisticated manner.     

THE SWEDISH CONSULAR SERVICE IN SOUTHERN EUROPE, 1720–18151

This paper deals with the origins and functions of the Swedish consular service in Southern Europe between 1720 and 1815. It is argued that establishment of the consular service was a necessary part of the Swedish policy of trade expansion. Consuls acted partly as commission agents of Swedish merchant and shipowners, because Sweden lacked established trading contacts in the area. Partly, consuls had official diplomatic functions, especially in North Africa. The consular service is conceived as an institutional arrangement reducing transaction costs of Swedish agents. This article suggests that reduction in protection costs in particular was a significant competitive advantage of Swedish merchants and shipowners and was due to peace treaties with the Barbary states in North Africa and Sweden's neutrality in the 18th‐century great power conflicts.     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.