Language and Social Meaning in Bilingual Mexico and the United States

Author(s):  
Norma Mendoza-Denton ◽  
Bryan James Gordon

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyanna Slobe

AbstractMock white girl(MWG) performances parody a linguistic and embodied style associated with contemporary middle class white girls in the United States. The article identifies bundles of semiotic resources in the stylization of the white girl persona—for example, creaky voice, uptalk, blondeness, and Starbucks—in three genres of MWG:Savior,Shit white girls say, andTeenage girl problems. While semiotic variables used to index the white girl persona are consistent across performances, there is significant variation in performers’ ideological stances relative to the mocked figure of personhood: white girls in the US are not ‘heard’ in any one way by all social actors. Contextualizing MWG performances through analysis of stance reveals critical variation in how the white girl is interpreted, evaluated, and produced as a meaningful social entity by diverse segments of the population. (Gender, mock, race, parody, persona, stance, style)*



2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janelle Applequist

Pfizer, manufacturer of the erectile dysfunction prescription treatment Viagra, has been a staple in the pharmaceutical advertising arena since broadcast versions of such ads became legally permissible in the United States in 1997. Given that the patent for Viagra is soon set to expire, it is important that research take a look back in an attempt to contextualize the brand’s place in shaping medicinal marketing culture. Of particular interest is the period beginning in 2014, when Viagra’s most unconventional campaign yet began using a tactic that was the first of its kind for the pharmaceutical industry. By removing the actual consumer of the medication from these ads (males), Viagra has paved the way for pharmaceutical advertising to target the medicinal partner. This manuscript reviews the first use of the medicinal partner in the pharmaceutical advertising sector, conducting a textual analysis of Viagra’s use of this mediated relationship. The medicinal partner is the pharmaceutical industry’s attempt to target a patient’s social circle in an effort to promote a discourse that suggests a medicinal remedy for a problem. This analysis describes how social meaning and relationships underlie the market transaction of obtaining a prescription, as has been previously established through the processes of medicalization and pharmaceutical fetishism. These advertisements create belief in the larger sense, meaning Pfizer is infiltrating upon the patient’s process of choice and consumption of medicinal remedies. Viagra is simultaneously encouraging male consumers to celebrate the brand while using female ambassadors to influence the decision to request medicinal intervention.



2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Kimiko Matsumura

This article establishes historically specific connections between American artist Roger Shimomura’s paintings about Japanese American Incarceration and Incarceration Redress from roughly 1978 to 2003. Deploying a kind of history painting in the Minidoka series before turning to personal narrative in Diary and the juxtaposition of contrasting visual tropes in Stereotypes and Admonitions, Shimomura’s varying approaches reflect connections to timely emphases on raising awareness, sharing testimony, and preventing reoccurrences associated with significant moments in the detainment’s afterlife. Throughout these shifts in focus, Shimomura’s use of visual stereotype increasingly frames incarceration within its broader social meaning, rather than through its historical progression or its personal resonances. I show how Shimomura’s work comes to connect incarceration to its enduring social consequences, making it but one of many recent, racially motivated transgressions that provide greater lessons about the perpetuation of naturalized prejudice in the United States and its material effects.



1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. VAN DER VEEN

This article presents a reconstruction of Michael Walzer's pluralist theory in Spheres of Justice. It starts by noting that Walzer's main thesis (justice resides in autonomous spheres of social goods, according to principles reflecting each good's social meaning) is too restrictive to clarify his own concern with ‘complex equality’. After analysing the shortcomings of the thesis by reference to medical care and social security, this article proposes an account of ‘justice across spheres’: citizens adjudicate the boundaries of the distributive spheres so as to achieve complex equality, the state in which no one counts as another's social inferior. The citizens are held to be motivated by the desire to create and maintain what Walzer calls the ‘society of equals’. As a result, Walzer's theory is recast in a form that makes it easier to compare his distinctively pluralist approach with the abstract-egalitarian theories of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. The account of ‘justice across spheres’ is also used to explain Walzer's radical institutional recommendations for achieving complex equality in his own society, the United States.



Author(s):  
Eric Helleiner

This chapter explores ways in which nationalist values helped to shape the emergence of modern territorial currencies in the United States and elsewhere during the nineteenth century. Turning to international monetary systems, it shows how more cosmopolitan nonpecuniary values helped to inspire a failed initiative to create a world monetary union in the 1850s and 1860s. It also examines the international gold standard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering a critique of what many have seen as Karl Polanyi's well-known argument about the economy's socially disembedded nature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the creation of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1940s, the gold standard's successor, as a clear example of an international monetary system invested from the start with social meaning.



Sexualities ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Seidman ◽  
Chet Meeks ◽  
Francie Traschen


1975 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 641-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul T. David


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