Discourses of the “Too Abled”: Contested Body Hierarchies and the Oscar Pistorius Case

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Corrigan ◽  
Jamie Paton ◽  
Erin Holt ◽  
Marie Hardin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Body ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The Status ◽  
Athletes With Disabilities ◽  
Media Discourses

Using Foucault’s ideas about discourse and the body, this study explores coverage of Oscar Pistorius’s quest to compete in the 2008 Summer Olympics. The authors used textual analysis of coverage in The New York Times and Time magazine, two popular and influential general-interest U.S. publications, to interrogate fairness as the primary rationale in discourse about Pistorius. Journalists also privileged a medical view of disability, used descriptions of prosthetics to reflect cultural assumptions about “normal” bodies, and reinforced fear of the “cyborg.” Media discourses around Pistorius, as contested sites for meanings inscribed on the body, reinforced the body hierarchy and positioned progress for athletes with disabilities as threatening to the institution of sport and its values. The authors suggest alternative discursive strategies, such as those that question the Paralympic/Olympic divide or focus on the rights of athletes with disabilities to compete, as ways to radically challenge the exercise of biopower reinforcing the status quo.

‘Have a Quiet, Orderly, Polite Revolution’: Framing Political Protest and Protecting the Status Quo

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 733-751
Author(s):  
Tamara J. Lynn ◽  
L. Susan Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Print Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The Status

This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo – social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as ‘print capitalism’) utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as ‘outsiders.’ Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant ‘mainstream’ political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government.

scholarly journals Resisting Monosexism: Representations of Bisexuality in Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey T Heffers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Binary System ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Writing Pedagogy ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Creative Writing Pedagogy ◽  
Creative Resistance ◽  
The Status

In a New York Times review of James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Mario Puzo writes that “A propaganda novel may be socially valuable… but it is not art.” Puzo’s claim is a function of what creative writing pedagogy scholar Janelle Adsit calls “the particular privilege that comes with a denial of marginalization.” Assumptions of rigid binaries that categorise people as either hetero- or homosexual, a phenomenon that scholar Kenji Yoshino calls “the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” create and reinforce harmful ideas about bisexuality. Bisexual representation in literature can operate as a creative resistance to the status quo, undermining the alleged necessity for a rigid binary system of sexuality. From James Baldwin’s 1968 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone to Jen Wilde’s 2017 Queens of Geek, this article traces representations of bisexuality in literature, with special attention to the ways in which bisexuality is demonstrated, described, and labelled in literature. However, while acknowledging the problematic representations of bisexuality in older fiction, such as Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, this paper resists a narrative of pure progress of bisexual representation, examining both problematic and nuanced representations in contemporary literature.

The Birth of a Notion: Media Coverage of Contraception, 1915–1917

1998 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 560-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Flamiano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
New Republic ◽  
Media Discourses

This article analyzes the emergence of media discourses on contraception from 1915 to 1917, focusing on coverage in the New York Times, The New Republic, and Harper's Weekly. Considered legally obscene and unfit for public discussion, contraception first made headlines as a result of Margaret Sanger's birth control activism and ensuing legal troubles. After the New York Times covered Sanger's activities, several magazines began to publish articles on the contraception debate. This early coverage of birth control emphasized its scientific and social utility, virtually ignoring controversial issues of gender, sexuality, and power.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
John Vilanova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Drum Circles ◽  
Acoustic Device

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

Race

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Business Regulation ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Status

This chapter examines the status quo before the start of the civil rights realignment, showing that civil rights was simply not viewed as part of the standard “liberal program” as of the early 1930s. Although African Americans were vocal in attacking Franklin D. Roosevelt's weak civil rights record, they were largely alone. When whites on the left pushed Roosevelt to be a more forthright liberal or progressive, they criticized him for inadequate support for labor, weak business regulation, and insufficient recovery spending—but not for his failure to back civil rights. At this early stage, the “enemies” of a liberal Democratic Party generally were not identified with the South but instead were probusiness Democrats from the Northeast, associated with Al Smith of New York. Economic questions were the key battleground in the eyes of white liberals, and civil rights did not figure in these debates.

Otitis Media During Early Life: How Hazardous to Development? A Critical Review of the Evidence

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 869-873 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack L. Paradise
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Otitis Media ◽  
Middle Ear ◽  
News Media ◽  
Present Report ◽  
Acute Otitis Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Disease Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
Antimicrobial Drugs

In a number of recent reports1-3 developmental impairments of a lasting nature have been attributed to prolonged or repeated episodes of otitis media occurring during the first one to three years of life. The impairments described include intellectural and learning difficulties,1,2,4-8,10-13 impaired speech and language,3,5,8,9,11-13 and disturbed behavior.7,8 In some of the reports1,12 the impairments have been referred to as permanent or irreversible. These reports, having appeared in publications directed respectively to physicians,2-4,6,8-13 speech-language-hearing professionals,1-3,5 educators,11 and psychologists,7,12 and in some instances having been cited in widely disseminated professional and lay news media (reference 14; Newsweek, June 14, 1976, p 47; New York Times, Dec 26, 1978, p C2) quite naturally have aroused broad anxiety and concern. The reports also have served to provide the impetus, or the justification, not only for aggressive casefinding programs, but also, in infants and children with recognized middle-ear effusions, for early recourse to aggressive modes of treatment, most often in the form of myringotomy and tympanostomy tube insertion. The purpose of the present report is to review critically the body of evidence on which the supposed relationship between early otitis media and later developmental impairments is based. DISEASE PROCESS In the typical case of acute otitis media, pus fills the middle-ear cavity. Sooner or later the infection begins to subside—with or without the help of antimicrobial drugs—and the initially purulent middle-ear liquid changes in character, coming to resemble serum, mucus, or even glue. With continued healing the Eustachian tube gradually recovers its ventilatory function, and the middle-ear liquid eventually is resorbed, or drains, and becomes replaced by air.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

scholarly journals Augmented Reality in The New York Times: the experience of editorial content according to Brazilian audiences

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Regina Puhl ◽  
Roberto Tietzmann ◽  
Samara Kalil
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Digital Imaging ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Editorial Content ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
News Stories ◽  
And Behavior

<p>This article analyzes and seeks to reflect on Brazilian users’ immersive experience with content available in virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR), on the New York Times. The goal is to verify the perception of the immersive news stories made available by the newspaper in two articles that deal with fashion and behavior: “Augmented Reality: David Bowie in three dimensions”, published on March 20, 2018, which examines the costumes of the musician and composer based on the catalog of the exhibition “David Bowie Is” and “Ashley Graham: unfiltered”, published on September 5, 2018, which explores digital imaging resources to illustrate the model’s interview on the plus size fashion theme and acceptance of the body. The text begins with a literature review and research on the adoption of such technology by journalistic vehicles and proposes a study based on the investigation of the meaning/pertinence of the simulations for the interpretation of contexts and themes in journalistic matters.  Additionally, the text questions how these technological resources affect the processes of communication and perception, through a research dynamic with a group of Brazilian volunteers, to verify how these new technological resources explore the degree of immersion and the strategies of these experiences, with the preliminary results described at the end.</p>

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