BUYING AND BECOMING: NEW WORK ON THE BRITISH MIDDLE CLASSES Gender, civic culture and consumerism: middle-class identity in Britain, 1800–1940. Edited by Alan Kidd and David Nicholls. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+223. ISBN 0-7190-5675-4. £14.99. The Victorian parlour: a cultural study. By Thad Logan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii+282. ISBN 0-521-631182-3. £40.00. Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of London's West End. By Erika D. Rappaport. Bognor Regis, UK: J. Wiley for Princeton UP, 2001. Pp. xiii+323. ISBN 0-691-04476-7. £13.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1004
Author(s):  
DEBORAH COHEN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
French History ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Significant Measure

The history of consumption in nineteenth-century Britain has largely been told as the story of the middle classes. Increasingly, as the three books under review demonstrate, the reverse is also true. The middle classes, they argue, derived their identities in significant measure from their consumerist habits rather than their relation to the means of production or the body politic. That was, as one might imagine, especially the case with women. What they bought, how they shopped, where they lived: these things came to define who a person was. How dramatically the literature on the Victorian middle classes has changed is apparent even from this brief description. Most obviously, the research focus has shifted from structures to identities. The old subjects – the professions, the movements (free trade, the franchise, anti-slavery), evangelical religion – are hardly anywhere to be seen in these volumes. Instead, they take up topics more often associated with French history: urban culture, shopping, interior decoration. With this shift in subjects has also come, either implicitly or explicitly, a sense that the defining characteristics of the British middle classes must be sought in the realm of culture, not politics or production.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

From Hard-Copy to Digital Law via “Illustrated Courtrooms”: Visualising the History of Legal English

Pólemos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Law ◽  
Digital Law

Abstract This essay addresses different patterns of the visualisation of the law. It examines how scholars attempt to depict, represent, and perform the law and its founding authority. It also focuses on the pragmatics of legal language: written and spoken standard legal English are pragmatically enriched within contexts where the law is interpreted, uttered, or performed. The linguistic notion of “context” discloses the interrelations between the agendas of law and power and reveals how the law conveys its content to the body politic as its ultimate addressee. It then proposes a renewed concept of legal linguistics. In order to determine the different ideologies underpinning the evolution of English legal language, as well as its prototypical forms of the visualisation of the law, three stages in the history of the English language will be examined: Late Middle English, Early Modern English, and Contemporary English. Each of these stages will be likened to the different parts of judicial proceedings. This will allow us to examine how English legal language has been used in a specific context, the trial, where the law is both uttered and performed.

‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault, the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The City

Revisiting Foucault's month-long stay in Toronto in June 1982, this article explores the reception and appropriation of the first volume of The History of Sexuality by activist-intellectuals associated with the Toronto-based publication, The Body Politic, and some of their fellow travelers. Reading Foucault's introductory volume through the intersecting frameworks of social constructionism, historical materialism, and socialist feminism, gay-left activists forged a distinctive relationship between sexual theory and political practice. If Foucault had a significant impact on activists in the city, Toronto also left its mark on Foucault. Based on the recently rediscovered and unedited transcript of a well-known interview with Foucault in Toronto, along with an interview with one of Foucault's interlocutors, the article concludes with Foucault's forays into Toronto's sexual and political scenes, particularly in relation to ‘bodies and pleasures’ and resistance to the sex police.

Many Tongues, Many Senses: Pentecost, the Body Politic, and the Redemption of Dis/Ability

Pneuma ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Amos Yong
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Pentecostal Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

AbstractDisability studies and Pentecostal studies have not interacted much in the young history of both fields of inquiry. This essay identifies some of the reasons for this missed interface, explores how disability perspectives might bring to the fore resources for rethinking Pentecostal understandings of disability, explicates (with the help of a disability hermeneutic) the Pentecostal theology of "many tongues" bearing witness to the gospel with the correlative motif of "many senses" capable of receiving and giving witness to the works of God, and reassesses the possibility of Pentecostal contributions to theology of disability and disability studies in light of the "many senses" motif. My thesis is that the dialogue between disability studies and Pentecostal studies will be challenging but also helpful for both sides, even as our joint efforts might also testify to the wonders of God in and through the diversity of embodied human experiences.

Some Thoughts on the Mutual Displacements/Appropriations/Accommodations of Culture in Several Fictions by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Emily Miller Budick
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

‘The Government is the One Who Caused Cholera’: State Transformation and the Politics of Public Health During Zimbabwe’s Crisis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simukai Chigudu
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
State Transformation ◽  
Cholera Outbreak ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Economic

Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic of 2008/09 is almost unrivalled, in scale and lethality, in the modern history of the disease. The disease infected nearly 100,000 people, claiming over 4000 lives over a ten-month period. This chapter examines the political and economic origins of the outbreak and analyses some of the meanings, memories, and narratives that the outbreak has left in civic life. It makes three key arguments. First, it contends that the origins, scale, and impact of the cholera outbreak were overdetermined by a multilevel failure of Zimbabwe’s public health system, itself a consequence of the country’s post-2000 political conflicts and economic crisis. Second, by recounting stories of the relentless suffering and dispossession that accompanied the cholera outbreak the chapter reveals how the disease mapped onto and exacerbated the contours of abandonment, abjection, and exclusion within Zimbabwean society. Third, the chapter ultimately argues that cholera emerged from prolonged and multiscalar political-economic processes for which no short-term or easy solutions are available. While the outbreak aroused public anger and outrage at the government for its causal role in the epidemic and the inadequacy of its relief efforts, this anger did not translate into any effective political mobilization or permanent change. Thus, the politics of cholera, in its making and aftermath, show the grim and profound consequences of state transformation for public health and for notions of belonging in the body politic.

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