scholarly journals Blondes have Less Fun, Actually: Depictions of Traditional Femininity in the Post-Zombie Apocalypse Metropolis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Rose Peacock

Introduction Rarely in our world, in what we believe to be “modern,” “civilized” society, is chaos considered desirable. Order is what we strive for instead: it gives us our government, the social systems upon which we rely, and shapes the structure of our daily lives. While in the abstract, chaos can seem like an exciting, even desirable departure from the status quo, in the context of a global pandemic (like the one through which we are currently living), disorder and uncertainty often prove more terrifying than the virus itself. Which stores will close, and for how long? Who exactly is at risk of infection? When will we be allowed to see our friends again? Chaos, in this context, becomes the enemy of societal survival, threatening humanity’s civilized self-image and testing communal ideals. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts both use the pandemic setting to investigate ideas about chaos and its relationship to civilization, but their pathogen of choice is no ordinary infective. In both books, a zombie crisis is responsible for the destruction of humanity as we know it, making tangible anxieties about how we define ourselves in opposition to one another, and what it really means to be “civilized.”

Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.


Author(s):  
Tahir Abbas

This article situates the debate on the United Kingdom’s Prevent policy in the broader framework of the global paradigm for countering violent extremism (CVE), which appeared at the end of 2015. It argues that omission of a nuanced focus on the social, cultural, economic, and political characteristics of radicalised people has led to a tendency to introduce blanket measures which, inadvertently and indirectly, have had harmful results. Moreover, although Prevent has been the fundamental element of the British government’s counterterrorist strategy since 2006, it confuses legitimate political resistance of young British Muslims with signs of violent extremism, thus giving credence to the argument that Prevent is a form of social engineering which, in the last instance, pacifies resistance by reaffirming the status quo in the country’s domestic and foreign policy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan Lee Cheng

AbstractReview of “Interregional Recognition and Enforcement of Civil and Commercial Judgments” by Professor Jie Huang (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2014) which analyses the status quo of judgment recognition and enforcement in the Mainland China, Macao and Hong Kong under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ regime. The book also presents a comparative study of the interregional recognition and enforcement of judgments in the US and EU.


2020 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 20-29
Author(s):  
Igor’ Yu. Sundiev ◽  
◽  
Andrey B. Frolov ◽  

The article analyzes the causes of an extreme social event in the format of a global pandemic. They are associated with the “re-quantization of reality” — the change of universal attractors of the historical process, which set specific ways of regulating system structures. The old system-forming meaning of the development of society as a Zoopopulation has finally exhausted its regulatory possibilities; the new meaning is just beginning to integrate social elements for the transition to a psychosocial formation. The clash and struggle of old and new causal connections generates causal dissonance, leads to an increase in entropy in social systems, which, in turn, generates an extremum that threatens humanity with self — destruction-an omnicide. The specifics of a possible suicide of humanity is of relative importance: epidemics, earthquakes, asteroid crashes, and other variants of global misery can threaten and increase until a new sense of development dominates the social consciousness. A real pandemic is the best time for a quantum transition from the old regulation to the new: as soon as the new anthropic principle of managing causal connections prevails, the disease will disappear, and civilization will pass to a new period of its development.


NAN Nü ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Wanning Sun

Abstract The social problem of “leftover men” among the most marginalized members of China’s rural migrant population has become widely known, but how these rural migrants themselves talk about and make sense of their failures to secure a marriage partner is relatively less understood. Answering this question may also shed light on how socioeconomic marginalization makes an impact on rural migrant men’s masculine identity. This paper is a longitudinal study of a cohort of unmarried rural migrant men born in the 1980s. This study shows that the emotional experience of cohort members is marked by a mixture of persistent feelings of loneliness, bitterness, and dissatisfaction with the status quo of their lives, and a quiet yearning for the possibility – however remote – of “finding someone” in the future. The paper also points to “masculine grievance” as a useful concept for understanding how unmarried migrant men rationalize their emotional hardships.


Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician, social theorist, and musician, Adorno throughout his life remained committed to a decidedly secular and socialist European consciousness, even when dissecting German anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Yet his notion of utopian political transformation owed much to his early reading of Ernst Bloch’s insistence on a hunger for the transcendent that Bloch added to Marxian materialism. Adorno’s understanding of the work of art—a crucial element of his thinking, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory—was equally in tension over the historical necessity of its progressive secularization and rationalization. On the one hand, any "contamination of art with revelation" would uncritically embrace the mystical, fetish character of art. On the other hand, "the eradication of every trace of revelation from art" would reduce the artwork to a mere repetition of the status quo—that is, the lifeless routines of an administered society, including film and jazz, both of which Adorno denigrated.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 381-385
Author(s):  
Tan Lee Cheng

AbstractReview of “Interregional Recognition and Enforcement of Civil and Commercial Judgments” by Professor Jie Huang (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2014) which analyses the status quo of judgment recognition and enforcement in the Mainland China, Macao and Hong Kong under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ regime. The book also presents a comparative study of the interregional recognition and enforcement of judgments in the US and EU.


1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-239
Author(s):  
Mokgethi B.G. Mothlabi

AbstractThere is a certain paradox inherent in Marx's criticism of morality. On the one hand, he rejects morality as a form of bourgeois ideology which serves mainly to justify the status quo. The status quo in question is one which is mainly detrimental to ordinary working people, while favouring property owners as well as owners of the means of production. In this sense Marx's condemnation of morality resembles his condemnation of religion, which he saw as the opium of the people. On the other hand, Marx employs morally significant language to challenge what he regards as the evils of capitalism and their destructive effects on the working class. It becomes clear from all this that capitalism cannot be seen as purely an economic matter. Insofar as it affects the lives and well-being of people, it is also a moral issue and deserves to be judged accordingly. How Marx steers between his seeming rejection of morality and, at the same time, using it to criticise capitalism is the main concern of this article. In the process, Marx's concept of ideology is explained while the focus and motivation of his social critique is also briefly considered.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 411-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Mund ◽  
Christine Finn ◽  
Birk Hagemeyer ◽  
Franz J. Neyer

When examining the associations between personality traits and partner relationships, the majority of studies have focused on the one-way effects of personality traits on the quality and stability of relationships. Recent work, however, has shown that relationships likewise retroact on personality traits and their development. Apart from these mutual influences, recent studies have also emphasized the necessity of considering both members of a couple in order to understand how their personalities and perceptions of the relationship interact. We review the status quo of research on personality-relationship transactions and outline suggestions for future research that move the focus from predicting the interplay between the two domains to explaining how personality traits and partner relationships dynamically interact. Specifically, we propose the need for (a) a functional perspective on personality traits, (b) a differentiated view of behavior, and (c) acknowledgment of the dynamic nature of traits and relationships in appropriate analysis models.


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