A Review of “Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don't Kill the U.S. Constitutional System”

How, and why, do presidents use the rhetorical content in signing statements for strategic purposes? The article analyzes the rhetorical content of the 985 signing statements from FDR through Carter and argues that the president's rhetoric is an effort to frame the accomplishment that has just occurred with an eye toward maximizing prospective power and building legacy. The article explores the impact of different political contexts (divided government and elections) on several important rhetorical characteristics found in signing statements. In addition, the study delves into three interesting cases related to presidential credit claiming and attribution. LBJ and Carter were the most likely to attribute credit to members of Congress, while Nixon was the most likely to claim credit for himself. The findings help illuminate the various motivations that presidents have to use signing statements for reasons beyond constitutional challenges.

Successful political leaders do not necessarily do more than other leaders; successful leaders control the political definition of their actions, the terms in which their places in history are understood. The failures are those who, upon leaving office, look to some time in the distant future when people might begin to appreciate the wisdom of what they did. (Skowronek 1997 Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar], 17–18)     

Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Shoe on the Coffin Lid and Other Grave Charms in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century America

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century graves excavated archaeologically in the United States are occasionally found in association with objects beyond the typical clothing or coffin hardware, such as ceramic vessels, coins, and perhaps most mysterious of all, a single shoe placed on the lid of the coffin or casket. Not clearly described in archival accounts, the single shoe phenomenon within a mortuary context is argued here to be a creolized practice, combining an African cosmology and belief in the liminal state of the soul after death with a European and especially British Isles tradition of shoes as magical objects and potential traps for evil.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

Hacking the master code: cyborg stories and the boundaries of autism

In this paper, we consider how the use of Internet technologies by individuals on the autism spectrum (AS) may contribute to recoding the spatial, sociopolitical, ontological, and epistemological boundaries commonly assumed to delimit autistic from non-autistic lifeworlds. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, we argue that the responses of AS individuals to a survey about online communication suggest these individuals are engaged in a form of cyborg writing, admixing constraints and opportunities in a way that opens alternative, polycentric, and indeterminate but nonetheless important political possibilities for people on (and off) the AS.