Trigger Warning: Poetry as Feminist Response to Media Headlines

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042091740
Author(s):  
Sandra L. Faulkner

In a chapbook of feminist poetry titled, Trigger Warning, the author responds to media headlines about violence, gender, race, and class through verse. The author uses poetic inquiry as a form of feminist methodology to collapse the false divide between the private and the public, as a form of embodied inquiry, and as feminist political response. The author wrote response poems to news headlines that “triggered” memories of past inequities as a way to speak to media representation and personal experience and presents them in the form of a chapbook—a short collection of poetry organized thematically. Trigger Warning wrestles with themes of sexual harassment, gun violence, sexual violence, and media representations of class, race, and gender identities to show how feminist poetry uses personal, embodied experience to critique existing systems and structures of oppression.

2021 ◽  
pp. 96-131
Author(s):  
Nick Vaughan-Williams

Chapter 4 shifts the analytical focus from elite claims made in the name of ‘the people’ to EU citizens’ vernacular knowledge of migration. Particular emphasis is given to the vernacular knowledge and categories used by citizens to discuss the issue of migration as it is perceived to impact and disrupt their everyday lives, the underpinning assumptions about hierarchies of race and gender used to position citizens in relation to perceptions about different ‘types’ of people on the move, and citizens’ awareness of/support for dominant governmental and media representations of the issue of migration in Europe. As well as offering a map of these contours, the discussion identifies three overriding themes. First, vernacular conversations problematize the notion of a linear transmission between elite crisis narratives and their reception among diverse publics. Second, the claim that elite narratives merely ventriloquize what ‘the people’ think about and want in regard to about migration is challenged by the complexity and nuance of vernacular narratives. Third, EU citizens repeatedly spoke of what they perceived to be a series of ‘information gaps’, which led to a widespread distrust of mainstream politicians and media sources, anxieties about their individual and collective futures, and demands for more detailed, higher quality, and accessible knowledge about migration from the EU, national governments, media sources, and academics. By taking vernacular views and experiences of migration seriously we can better understand how the propagation of misinformation, confusion, and uncertainty among EU citizens set the scene for populist notions of ‘taking back control’ to thrive.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-374
Author(s):  
Carla Bittel

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.


Author(s):  
Shino Konishi

This chapter examines the way in which the Howard government and its supporters revitalized colonial tropes about Aboriginal masculinity in order to progressively dismantle and undermine indigenous rights and sovereignty, culminating in the quasi-military intervention into supposedly dysfunctional Aboriginal communities towards the end of Howard's fourth term. It critiques and historicizes a range of demeaning representations that assume Aboriginal men are violent and misogynistic. These representations can be traced back to initial encounters between European and indigenous men. The aim is to bring academic, media, and governmental discourses about Aboriginal masculinity into conversation with masculinity studies, which means contextualizing notions of Aboriginal masculinity in ways that avoid unreflective colonial conceptions. Finally, the chapter examines the public response of Aboriginal men to this demonization, and how they negotiate their own masculine identities in the face of a colonial culture that disparages them for their race and gender.


Author(s):  
Kia Lilly Caldwell

Brazil has been long considered a global leader in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; however, little is known about the effectiveness of these prevention and treatment efforts for the Afro-Brazilian population. This chapter examines the shift toward greater government action focused on HIV prevention for Afro-Brazilians. The chapter also explores HIV prevention initiatives developed by black women’s organizations and how the dynamics of gender, race, and class shape HIV vulnerability for Afro-Brazilian women. Finally, this chapter examines critiques of racially specific HIV prevention initiatives and the tensions between universalism and race consciousness that have characterized the shift toward focusing on the black population in HIV prevention efforts.


2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred F. Young

The author reassesses the public presentation of history on Boston's Freedom Trail, founded in the 1950s, in light of the reinterpretation of the American Revolution which has brought into focus the multi-sided struggle for liberty and equality within America. In eight propositions, he questions whether the many sites of the trail with a minimum of coordination, do justice to the "popular" side of the Revolution. Boston is at risk in dealing with race and gender, he suggests, of fragmenting the Revolution. In avoiding the "dark" side, it can fall into an exclusively celebratory history. To present a more coherent history, the author points to the need for greater collaborative efforts by the sites which make up the trail.


Author(s):  
Harvey Molotch

This chapter takes up what might at first appear an unlikely setting for examining security dynamics: the public restroom. There are lessons to be taken from this venue, so often ignored in serious scholarship and indeed the usual basis only for jokes. Here we can see anxieties in play and all sorts of unsavory mechanisms, both at the micro and macro level, that come in response. The toilet allows us to see the combination of factors that repress—the usual culprits of class, race, and gender discrimination—but also soulful anxieties that come with the more basic human territory. Some degree of capitalist plot is happening, but that is only part of the story—a larger lesson to be considered across other less intimate realms, whether market-based or not. Whatever the combination of sources, the chapter points the way toward a safer and more pleasant toilet and one with the promise of ecological reform.


2018 ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Oron Catts ◽  
Ionat Zurr

Neolife are technologically created and fragmented life forms that have been manipulated by humans and cannot survive without artificial life support. This essay focuses our attention on one of the main vessels of neolife - the incubator. In recent years, especially as a result of the human genome project and through the field of synthetic biology, there is a shift to obscure the incubator as a surrogate vessel and render it neutral, thereby obscuring how, throughout history, what life is chosen or forced to be put in an incubator reflects on human wants and desires. Neolife can be seen as the entanglement of life with its surrogate apparatus, echoing interests of human-centric control, which affect and effect the larger milieu. By focusing on the incubator as such, we question the very idea of biocitizenship, focused as it is on human life, on intact, whole bodies, and on the distinction between environment and biology. Furthermore, the incubator has, throughout its history, served to reproduce and recuperate the very ideologies of race and gender upon which normative biocitizenship depends, despite the fact that developments in biotechnology and the design of neolife may offer the illusion of a “new citizenship” that breaks free from hegemonic human social constructions of species, gender, race, and class.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Harris

Abstract This article examines the relationship of race and class using the lens of working-class experiences inside the US steel and auto industries. It focuses on the applicability of white skin privilege to the conditions of labor, and introduces the concept of comparative forms of oppression. Additionally, it considerations white skin privilege from the perspective of human rights, and ends with detailed statistical information and consideration of race and gender in relationship to various job categories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh

This article brings Papua New Guinean women’s perspectives on fashion, gender and morality into conversation with questions of colonial histories and global consumerism. The article shows that adherence to social norms is policed by women in the public sphere and that one person’s choices are enmeshed in ideas of responsibility and obligation to others. Increasingly, younger generations of women believe it is an individual woman’s right to wear what she wants in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Yet young women confront their peers in much the same way older women do. What women wear in PNG is embroiled in ideas of collective morality; plays out at intersections of class, age, race and gender; and demonstrates tensions between ideas of autonomy and collectivity. On whose terms do contemporary Papua New Guinean women get to decide how to dress: their own, or in accordance with community norms and standards? What are the contemporary and historical contexts of whiteness and colonial power that have influenced these norms and standards? This article brings together the experiences and perspective of a young professional Papua New Guinean woman, and her relatives, in dialogue with a young English–Iranian woman anthropologist.


Author(s):  
Nancy Whittier

Chapter 3 shows how ideologically diverse activists and legislators converged around a narrow, single-issue opposition to child sexual abuse and defined it as a politically neutral issue. The chapter shows how three challenges to this consensus emerged and were resolved: a 1981 Republican attempt to kill CAPTA; 1992‒1996 feminist organizing around child custody cases and False Memory Syndrome Foundation attempts to weaken CAPTA; 2000 forward, expansions of sex offender registration and notification requirements. Narrow neutrality facilitated the passage of legislation and pulled policy toward criminal justice and away from feminist challenges to the patriarchal family and conservatives’ emphasis on preserving the traditional family. Federal engagement shifted over time from a focus on violence within the family to a focus on child pornography and the control of sex offenders; although framed in terms of dangerous strangers, the new focus affected the larger number of familial offenders as well. Legislators and advocates downplayed race and gender while constructing an implicitly white victim, producing predominantly white offenders because of the prevalence of familial abuse. Experiential and expert knowledge and shared emotional rituals produced and maintained narrow neutrality in Congress, activist and professional groups, and media representations.


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