THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE STATE OF THE FIELD

In this concise volume, Jeffrey Weeks traces the development of the history of sexuality from its earliest days, more than a century ago, to the present. He identifies dominant themes and subject matter as well as analyzing and commenting upon some of the key theoretical frameworks that have driven this scholarly endeavor. He devotes special attention to LGBT history, to histories of gender, power, and sexuality, and to globalization and the transnational turn in historical writing. He gives attention to the tensions that have often existed between a community‐based activist history produced from within the LGBT community and the history produced within the academy. Finally, he considers the degree to which sexual history has been mainstreamed and the dangers and the value of that process.     

NARRATORS OF THE ARCTIC: IMAGES AND MOVEMENTS IN NORTHLAND NARRATIVES

While the use of public policy to construct a Canadian identity has been established in the literature, what is less well understood is whether national identity, once established, might shape Canadians' feelings about these same public policies. This article examines the extent to which citizens' national identities influence their pride in Canada's social security system, and how this relationship may be changing over time. Using data from the International Social Science Programme's 1995 and 2003 National Identity Modules, the article argues that citizens' national identities help explain the contours of social security attitudes in Canada, and that this relationship persists despite significant policy change in the field. Additionally, the paper suggests that political actors may successfully increase public support for their social security policies by “framing” them in ways that appeal to citizens' definitions of Canada.     

REVIEW ARTICLE USE-WEAR ANALYSIS: THE STATE OF THE ART

This paper is a review of the recent developments in use-wear analysis. The focus is on some key issues: polish formation, quantification of use-wear, residue analysis and the way these related themes have affected methods of use-wear analysis. A brief history of the development of use-wear analysis is presented and a discussion of blind tests, expert systems (explained at length in the ‘Appendix’) and how use-wear analysis can be incorporated into the chaîne opératoire approach to the interpretation of Stone Age sites.     

THE ALLURE OF DARK TIMES: MAX WEBER,POLITICS, AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM

This article argues that realist invocations of Weber rely on an unrealistic reading of Weber's realism. In order to escape the allure of Weber's dramatic posture of crisis, we place his seminal lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” (1919) in its historical and philosophical context of a revolutionary conjuncture of dramatic proportions, compounded by a broader crisis of historicism. Weber's rhetoric, we argue, carries with it not only the emotion of crisis but is also the expression of a deeper intellectual impasse. The fatalistic despair of his position had already been detected by some of his closest contemporaries for whom Weber did not appear as a door‐opener to a historically situated theory of political action but as a telling and intriguing impasse. Although the disastrous history of interwar Europe seems to confirm Weber's bleakest predictions, it would be perverse to elevate contingent failure to the level of retrospective vindication.     

GENTRIFICATION AND THE SPATIAL CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE: THE RESTRUCTURING OF LONDON'S DOCKLANDS*

This paper argues that despite recent advances in research concerned with gentrification, the role of the state in this process has not been adequately conceptualised. Existing perspectives largely fail to provide a thorough analysis of the way in which the duality of the states ‘political’ and ‘economic’ functions are related, and how these are represented in concrete spatial situations. Through an empirical focus upon London's Docklands, the way in which the state, through the London Docklands Development Corporation, is spatially constituted and has influenced the gentrification process are examined. First, some conceptual and theoretical questions are discussed. Second, a brief historical context in which gentrification in the Docklands can be situated is provided, followed by an examination of how the restructuring of this area relates to the broader restructuring of state relations. The central role of the state in the gentrification of the Docklands is then considered by looking first, at how the LDDC has aided, through capital subsidisation, the production of a gentrified built environment giving rise to restructured patterns of socio-spatial polarisation. Second, the question of how this action and the inequalities arising from it have been legitimised, through political, ideological and socio-cultural means, is examined. Finally, some of the theoretical and political implications of this analysis are addressed.