Distinctively queer in the Parish: Performances of distinction and LGBTQ+ representations in Flemish prestige television fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 548-563
Author(s):  
Florian Vanlee ◽  
Sofie Van Bauwel ◽  
Frederik Dhaenens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Social Deficit ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

This article troubles the intuitive link between emancipatory portrayals of sexual and gender diversity and ‘quality television’ by focusing on three Flemish ‘prestige’ dramas: Met Man en Macht (VIER, 2013), Bevergem (Canvas, 2015) and Den Elfde Van Den Elfde (één, 2016). Contrary to the United States, Flemish quality television portrays fewer LGBTQ+ characters and narratives than less ‘prestigious’ content. Approached from a Bourdieusian perspective, the cases discussed show that when LGBTQ+ characters are featured in prestigious domestic fiction content, they function as distinctive queers. This article argues that, whereas LGBTQ+ characters in US quality television affirm the socio-cultural disposition of the target audience, Flemish prestige television fiction delegitimizes that of the group from which the imagined audience distinguishes itself. Distinctive queers circulate in a larger cultural repertoire associated with Flemish prestige television fiction, recasting markers of ordinary Flemishness found in domestic content. This repertoire is organized around the motif of the parish, and discursively separates Flanders into two distinct temporal configurations: one decidedly pre-modern and inferior, the other expressively modern and superior. A synecdoche for ‘common Flanders’, the parish constructs the majority of Flemings as culturally coarse, backwards and innately unable to be legitimately modern. As the analysis shows, distinctive queers accentuate the social deficit of mundane communities, and textually perform the distinction of fashionable, socially liberal urban-minded Flemings. In consonance with the hyperbolic representations that recast ‘ordinary Flemish cultural life’ as grotesque and ridiculous, distinctive queers frame LGBTQ+ inclusivity as the prerogative of conspicuously absent urban, socio-culturally progressive Flemings.

Misinformation and Ideology

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Scott Timcke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter applies theoretical insights around misrecognition to better understand the intersection of misinformation and ideology in the United States. It argues that misinformation practices are products of modernity. American modernity is characterized by contradictions between its basic social forms such as the money form, the commodity form, and so on. The contradictions create a bind for rulers. On the one hand, these contradictions mean that their rule is never stable. On the other hand, acknowledging the contradictions risks courting redress that also threatens their minority rule. Due to the imperative to mystify these contradictions, social problems are subsequently treated as anomalies or otherwise externalized; they can never be features of the capitalist political economy itself. Misinformation is a common by-product of this externalization as the capitalist ruling class uses it to weld together pacts and alliances that preserve the social hierarchy. The chapter outlines the broad argumentation offered by securocrats, reactionaries and technologists on Russia-gate. It takes a look at the proof put forward, the ethical reasoning invoked and the emotive appeals employed. It also looks at why these explanations fall short.

LGBTQ Issues and US Foreign Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Tiemeyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

The impact of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) issues on U.S. foreign relations is an understudied area, and only a handful of historians have addressed these issues in articles and books. Encounters with unexpected and condemnable (to European eyes) sexual behaviors and gender comportment arose from the first European forays into North America. As such, subduing heterodox sexual and gender expression has always been part of the colonizing endeavor in the so-called New World, tied in with the mission of civilizing and Christianizing the indigenous peoples that was so central to the forging of the United States and pressing its territorial expansion across the continent. These same impulses accompanied the further U.S. accumulation of territory across the Pacific and the Caribbean in the late 19th century, and they persisted even longer and further afield in its citizens’ missionary endeavors across the globe. During the 20th century, as the state’s foreign policy apparatus grew in size and scope, so too did the notions of homosexuality and transgender identity solidify as widely recognizable identity categories in the United States. Thus, it is during the 20th and 21st centuries, with ever greater intensity as the decades progressed, that one finds important influences of homosexuality and gender diversity on U.S. foreign policy: in immigration policies dating back to the late 19th century, in the Lavender Scare that plagued the State Department during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, in more contemporary battles between religious conservatives and queer rights activists that have at times been exported to other countries, and in the increasing intersections of LGBTQ rights issues and the War on Terror that has been waged primarily in the Middle East since September 11, 2001.

Queer Intersectionalities in Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marla Brettschneider
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Both the terms queer and intersectionality emerged in the United States during late 1980s. The queer world has particularly contributed to political thinking and activism in regard to sex, sexuality, and gender. Work on intersectionality has helped scholars and activists utilize paradigms of multiplicity and multiple sensitivities to marginalized people and experiences. Each term pushes the other to question hierarchies and elitist assumptions.

White Domestic Goddess on a Postmodern Plantation: Charity and Commodity Racism in The Blind Side

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Montez de Oca
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
National Football League ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blind Side ◽  
White Family ◽  
Private Charity ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Commodity

This article looks at the Hollywood “blockbuster” movie The Blind Side (2009) to explore intersections of race, class, and gender in a significant neoliberal, cultural commodity. Animating the production and, apparently, the consumption of the film is the “inspiring” story of Michael Oher, an impoverished young African American man who was adopted by a wealthy white family and rose to success in the National Football League in the United States. The film mobilizes postracial and postfeminist discourses to tell a story of redemption and how private charity can overcome social problems that the state cannot. Ultimately, charity operates as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity.

Rethinking Innovation: Context and Gender

10.1068/a3710 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 681-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan K Blake ◽  
Susan Hanson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Advantage ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Contextual Influence ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many

Geographers have a keen interest in innovation because of its connection to regional economic advantage. We argue that, to date, understandings of innovation are predominantly technological and product driven and defined in universal terms such that the nature of innovation is stripped of its contextual influence and is overly masculinist. Through combined analysis of interview material from two complementary studies on the gendering of entrepreneurship based in the United States, this paper challenges current conceptualisations of innovation within geography. We show how the context, both social and geographical, of an innovation is elementary to its identification as innovative. Moreover, we reveal some of the many instances of innovation that occur in economic sectors and by agents that are typically ignored or undervalued by current research and by policy. Our analysis challenges researchers and policymakers to expand their concepts of regional and urban development beyond those processes associated with technologically defined and growth-oriented originality, such that notions of local development may enhance the social well-being of places and be more gender inclusive.

Talking Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor N. Carlson ◽  
Marisa Abrajano ◽  
Lisa García Bedolla
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Policy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Individuals arrive at meaning through conversation. Scholars have long explored political conversations in the United States, and the vast majority of this research suggests that political discussion has important effects on political attitudes and engagement. However, much of this research relies on samples of White respondents, making it potentially difficult to generalize these findings to our increasingly diverse electorate. In this book, we seek to understand how political discussion networks vary across groups who have vastly different social positions in the United States, specifically along the lines of ethnorace, nativity, and gender. We build upon seminal work in the field as we argue that individuals with different social positions likely discuss politics with different groups of people and, as a consequence, their discussion networks have different effects on their political behavior. We use a novel discussion network data set with an ethnoracially diverse sample, paired with qualitative interviews, to test this argument. We assert that this book makes three central contributions: (1) expanding the scope of the political discussion network literature by providing a comparative analysis across ethnorace, nativity, and gender; (2) demonstrating how historical differences in partisanship, policy attitudes, and engagement are reflected within groups’ social networks; and (3) revealing how the social position of our respondents affects the impact that networks can have on their trust and efficacy in government, political knowledge, policy attitudes, and political and civic engagement patterns.

Iran’s Second Revolution; A Millennial Challenge to the House of Saud

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Dilip Hiro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Remedial Action ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Government ◽  
Iranian State

Having overthrown the pro-Washington Shah, Khomeini set out to purge the Iranian state and society of American influence. He was aided by the surprise occupation of the United States Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 by militant students. The capture of secret CIA reports on the Middle East by the Iranian occupiers gave credibility to the regime’s description of the Embassy as a “nest of spies,” and created a rationale for taking 52 US diplomats as hostage. The crisis lasted 444 days and ended with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in January 1981 after his defeat of the incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Quite independently, Saudi King Khalid faced an unprecedented challenge to the legitimacy of the House of Saud when on the eve of .the Islamic New Year of 1400 – 20 November 1979 – hundreds of armed militant Wahhabis, led by Juheiman al Utaiba seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Utaiba called for the overthrow of the royal family for deviating from Wahhabism. Aided by the American and French intelligence agencies and Pakistani soldiers, the government regained control of the Grand Mosque. It then took remedial action by imposing strict Wahhabi rules on the social-cultural life of citizens.

Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions. By Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 342p. $55.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 478-480
Author(s):  
Carole Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
And Gender

This work is touted as the only book-length examination of the sociological model of vote choice in American politics since David Knoke's The Social Bases of Political Parties (1976), and it is, indeed, a well-researched examination of the role that race, class, religion, and gender play in our under- standing of voter alignments in the United States. At the same time, I have concerns about some of the methodological decisions made by the authors and the effect of these choices on their conclusions.

scholarly journals Religious mysticism of the “American Dream” in the tale “The King's Indian” by John Champlin Gardner Jr.

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Kseniya A. Vikhrova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constituent Elements

The metanarrative of the “American Dream” has a comprehensive impact on the social, political and cultural life of the United States, it attracts unflagging attention of researchers and it is interpreted in a significant number of works of art. This article analyses the functioning of the religious and mystical experience as a factor in achieving the “American Dream” “American Dream” in the tale “The King's Indian” (1974) by John Champlin Gardner Jr. (1933-1982), and it also attempts to determine the mechanism for the embodiment of the national utopian project in this work of fiction. The analysis examines the constituent elements of the project in synchronic and diachronic projections, it highlights the levels of the project actualisation in the work, it analyses how the characters try to implement it in relation to their worldview and individual existential plans; thus, successful and unsuccessful models of the achieving the “American Dream” are found. As a result, it is proved that the failure is due to the lack of religious mysticism. The failure leads to the destruction of the character's existential plan, built in accordance with the utopian project, and to its possible subsequent reconstruction. The successful realisation of the “American Dream” is possible only when the character follows “self-reliance" and trusts the transcendental forces. “The King's Indian” also reflects the philosophical and aesthetic program of “moral literature”, later formulated by Gardner in the essay of the same name.

scholarly journals The Extent of Membership Representation and Non-Representation on the IASB

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Accounting Standards ◽  
Internet Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Composition ◽  
International Accounting Standards ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

Status groups abound in financial markets and none more so than in the global accounting market. One such group is the powerful and closed International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). This study empirically examines the social control of IASB membership by considering the country<br />affiliation of members, Internet access, and gender composition over a five-year period. The results of the study show that over the period 2001-2005 representation on a four IASB committees was dominated by male members from high Internet access regions of the United States of America. <br /><br />

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document