Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

Fabricating the Thanatopolitical Body in Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Cárcel de Árboles

Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s first novella, Cárcel de árboles (1991), tells the story of a secret politico-medical experiment conducted on prisoners who have been condemned to death by the State. The experiment takes place in a prison camp located in the tropical forest. In this article, I examine the portrayal of power and embodiment in Rey Rosa’s novella, placing the text in dialogue with thanatopolitical theory and outlining the ways it evokes the historical context of violence and economic transition in Guatemala. I commence by discussing the forms of power at work in the novella’s prison camp, before examining the significance of medical science to Rey Rosa’s depiction of embodiment. I then explore the complex aesthetic and ethical questions embedded in the relationship between language, textuality and the body in the novella. Finally, I discuss the post-human dimensions of the text that emerge in the relationship between the human bodies of the prisoners and the non-human terrain. Over the course of this analysis, I contend that Rey Rosa marshals the body to invoke the ways in which the category of the ‘human’ is formed, deconstructed and reconfigured in the face of the destructive power that operates in the modern techno-scientific epoch.     

Multiphase flow simulation through porous media with explicitly resolved fractures

Accurate simulation of multiphase flow in fractured porous media remains a challenge. An important problem is the representation of the discontinuous or near discontinuous behaviour of saturation in real geological formations. In the classical continuum approach, a refined mesh is required at the interface between fracture and porous media to capture the steep gradients in saturation and saturation‐dependent transport properties. This dramatically increases the computational load when large numbers of fractures are present in the numerical model. A discontinuous finite element method is reported here to model flow in fractured porous media. The governing multiphase porous media flow equations are solved in the adaptive mesh computational fluid dynamics code IC‐FERST on unstructured meshes. The method is based on a mixed control volume – discontinuous finite element formulation. This is combined with the P_N+1DG‐P_NDG element pair, which has discontinuous (order N+1) representation for velocity and discontinuous (order N) representation for pressure. A number of test cases are used to evaluate the method's ability to model fracture flow. The first is used to verify the performance of the element pair on structured and unstructured meshes of different resolution. Multiphase flow is then modelled in a range of idealised and simple fracture patterns. Solutions with sharp saturation fronts and computational economy in terms of mesh size are illustrated.     

A Great Big Melting Pot: Exploring Patterns of Glass Supply,Consumption and Recycling in Roman Coppergate,York*

One hundred and ninety three glass fragments from the canabae in York were analysed (first to fourth centuries). They fall into six compositional groups: antimony colourless (Sb), high‐manganese (high‐Mn), low‐manganese (low‐Mn), mixed antimony and manganese (Sb–Mn), high iron, manganese and titanium (HIMT) and plant ash. Some groups represent production groups, some of which appear to be in limited supply in this western outpost, but are more prevalent elsewhere, and others reflect changing supply mechanisms. The majority of glasses fall into groups that demonstrate extensive recycling of glass. This has important implications for determining provenance using trace elements and isotopes.     

Intimate citizenship? Rethinking the politics and experience of citizenship as emotional in Wales and Singapore

Conversations around, and conceptions of, citizenship have changed over time. Assumed initially as a mark of membership, of belonging to a political community (Marshall 1950), the essence of what it means to be a citizen and what the contractual ties of citizenship are have evolved over time. This evolution has been encouraged by processes of migration and increasing mobility. More recently, our ability to traverse geographical and political boundaries has meant that notions of borders and boundaries, of who belongs where and why, have also been subject to dramatic changes. This article investigates the impact of such mobility on the individual lived experience of migrant women who, as a group, have been traditionally excluded from more formal political arenas, and asks questions of what citizenship means for them. Though I do not contest the very political fact of citizenship as status, this article challenges the way in which the nature of this status is assumed or implied for all. This article therefore argues that citizenship itself is a much more fluid concept, incorporating the emotional and lived experience of individuals and that it is in these emotional accounts through which citizenship, and its extended rights and political capabilities, must be understood through a sense of everyday, grounded and personal politics.     

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.