Reproductive technologies and the family in the twenty-first century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Cutas ◽  
Anna Smajdor
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Manual Labor

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Social Enterprise ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
First Century ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Due Date ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Moment

The twenty-first century canonical pregnancy in Japan is one where from the moment of conception the incipient mother is molded internally and externally by both the medical profession and the advice manual industry. In two works, authors push back against the notion of canonical motherhood, by rejecting the idea of the mother-fetus dyad. Pregnancy they say is a social enterprise, demanding that the mother develop or strengthen bonds with her husband and family. In Kakuta Mitsuyo’s My Due Date is Jimmy Page’s Birthday (2007), she traces a conventional story of how a woman grows closer to her husband and family through her pregnancy. In Tadano Miako’s 2005 Three Year Pregnancy, her protagonist remains pregnant for three years while she works out her relationship with her husband, her mother, and finally her sister. These narratives reflect changes in Japanese society—the woman’s demand for the father’s participation in the family.

Gothic Comedy

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Catherine Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

What is IT? Ambient dread and modern paranoia in It (2017), It Follows (2014) and It Comes at Night (2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Stranger Danger

This article finds its impetus in the curious convergence of three twenty-first-century horror films around the ambiguous ‘It’ foregrounded by their titles: Andrés Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 It Follows and Trey Edward Shults’s 2017 It Comes at Night. In each of these films, the titular ‘it’ is difficult or impossible to pin down; it can assume the form of anyone (or, in the case of Shults’s film, infect anyone) and appear anywhere; it cannot be reasoned with, explained or swayed from its course; and conventional sources of protection – the law, and particularly the family – all come up short when confronting it. In this way, the ambiguous ‘its’ of these three films can be seen as crystallizations of a twenty-first-century zeitgeist in which monstrosity seems particularly difficult to locate and defuse. In the age of terrorism, mass shootings and ‘stranger danger’, climate change, and global pandemics, these films suggest that contemporary anxieties cluster around the ambiguous nature of modern threats.

Afterword

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Organic Farming ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores the role of women in late twentieth and twenty-first century Japan and explores how young women look at marriage and the family. Young women, often the focus of the Japanese media, are refusing to get married or have children in larger and larger numbers. This refusal is cataloged in a number of humorous books and essays by female cultural critics such as Sakai Junko, famous for her book Howl of a Loser Dog, Kusunoki Potosu who comes from the field of organic farming, and Haishi Kaori, a journalist. Using all the same demographic data, they make the case that fewer children are better for women and for Japan as a whole.

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