(De)Constructing 'Body Love' Discourses in Young Women's Magazines

<p>This thesis is about the recent emergence of ‘love your body’ messages and discourse in mainstream women’s magazines available to New Zealand audiences. It is situated culturally and historically, in a time when media discourses about women and their bodies are dominated by post-feminist and neo-liberal conceptualisations of bodies as commodity objects of production, representative of successful femininity and an inflexible natural order. This thesis contributes to the existing feminist research literature about magazines by investigating an apparently ‘new’ textual feature of young women’s magazines, and through adding to an emerging literature about the production of magazine content. Methodologically, the thesis draws upon critical, feminist, and post-structuralist approaches as the basis of its own understanding of bodies and the undertaking of research. The research upon which this thesis is based has two parts. First, an in-depth investigation of the text and image content of magazine ’body love messages’ in two different titles – Cleo (New Zealand) and Cosmopolitan (Australia) – employed thematic and discourse analysis to explore the kinds of discursive ideas made available through the magazine’s communication of positive body messages to their readers. The analyses presented illustrate how ‘body love’ magazine content i) is framed within heavily dualistic discourses of the woman and her body, using obsessively repetitive images to illustrate its point, ii) constructs women’s bodies as essentially difficult to love, and then in turn constructs love itself as a visually evidential practice, and finally iii) introduces a heterosexual (male) partner as an accomplice / audience for this visual practice. The second study involved a discursive analysis of interviews undertaken with magazine editorial staff based in New Zealand and Australia, asking participants about the production of positive body messages in the title(s) they work for. Drawing upon this work, the latter analytical chapters of my thesis address i) how various discourses are used by magazine employees to simultaneously legitimate the limits around positive body content in their magazines, and at the same time construct their practices as those of a ‘good magazine’, and ii) the centrality of ‘images’ as a carefully managed topic in these interviews, and what this implies about how ‘love your body’ content is conceptualised within the industry which produces it. In undertaking this work, my intention was to provide a basis upon which feminist questions about the use and purpose of magazines as cultural-discursive spaces might be revisited in light of the new ‘body love’ content. The concluding chapter to the thesis comprises a dialogue in response to these questions about contemporary magazine body messages; weighing arguments of hope and promise against more conservative concerns about misrepresentation and appropriation. It also reconsiders the implications of the analyses with a view towards evaluating what, if anything, has changed about the way young women’s magazines address their readers’ bodies through the production of body love discourse.</p>

(De)Constructing 'Body Love' Discourses in Young Women's Magazines

<p>This thesis is about the recent emergence of ‘love your body’ messages and discourse in mainstream women’s magazines available to New Zealand audiences. It is situated culturally and historically, in a time when media discourses about women and their bodies are dominated by post-feminist and neo-liberal conceptualisations of bodies as commodity objects of production, representative of successful femininity and an inflexible natural order. This thesis contributes to the existing feminist research literature about magazines by investigating an apparently ‘new’ textual feature of young women’s magazines, and through adding to an emerging literature about the production of magazine content. Methodologically, the thesis draws upon critical, feminist, and post-structuralist approaches as the basis of its own understanding of bodies and the undertaking of research. The research upon which this thesis is based has two parts. First, an in-depth investigation of the text and image content of magazine ’body love messages’ in two different titles – Cleo (New Zealand) and Cosmopolitan (Australia) – employed thematic and discourse analysis to explore the kinds of discursive ideas made available through the magazine’s communication of positive body messages to their readers. The analyses presented illustrate how ‘body love’ magazine content i) is framed within heavily dualistic discourses of the woman and her body, using obsessively repetitive images to illustrate its point, ii) constructs women’s bodies as essentially difficult to love, and then in turn constructs love itself as a visually evidential practice, and finally iii) introduces a heterosexual (male) partner as an accomplice / audience for this visual practice. The second study involved a discursive analysis of interviews undertaken with magazine editorial staff based in New Zealand and Australia, asking participants about the production of positive body messages in the title(s) they work for. Drawing upon this work, the latter analytical chapters of my thesis address i) how various discourses are used by magazine employees to simultaneously legitimate the limits around positive body content in their magazines, and at the same time construct their practices as those of a ‘good magazine’, and ii) the centrality of ‘images’ as a carefully managed topic in these interviews, and what this implies about how ‘love your body’ content is conceptualised within the industry which produces it. In undertaking this work, my intention was to provide a basis upon which feminist questions about the use and purpose of magazines as cultural-discursive spaces might be revisited in light of the new ‘body love’ content. The concluding chapter to the thesis comprises a dialogue in response to these questions about contemporary magazine body messages; weighing arguments of hope and promise against more conservative concerns about misrepresentation and appropriation. It also reconsiders the implications of the analyses with a view towards evaluating what, if anything, has changed about the way young women’s magazines address their readers’ bodies through the production of body love discourse.</p>

Conjoint expression and purification strategy for acquiring proteins with ultra-low DNA N6-methyladenine backgrounds in Escherichia coli

DNA N6-methyladenine (6mA), a kind of DNA epigenetic modification, is widespread in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. An enzyme activity study coupled with 6mA detection using ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-quadruple mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) is commonly applied to investigate 6mA potentially related enzymes in vitro. However, the protein expressed in a common Escherichia coli (E. coli) strain shows an extremely high 6mA background due to minute co-purified bacterial DNA, though it has been purified to remove DNA using multiple strategies. Furthermore, as occupied by DNA with abundant 6mA, the activity of 6mA-related proteins will be influenced seriously. Here, to address this issue, we for the first time construct a derivative of E. coli Rosetta (DE3) via the λRed knockout system specifically for the expression of 6mA-related enzymes. The gene dam encoding the 6mA methyltransferase (MTase) is knocked out in the newly constructed strain named LAMBS (low adenine methylation background strain). Contrasting with E. coli Rosetta (DE3), LAMBS shows an ultra-low 6mA background on the genomic DNA when analyzed by UHPLC-MS/MS. We also demonstrate an integral strategy of protein purification, coupled with the application of LAMBS. As a result, the purified protein expressed in LAMBS exhibits an ultra-low 6mA background comparing with the one expressed in E. coli Rosetta (DE3). Our integral strategy of protein expression and purification will benefit the in vitro investigation and application of 6mA-related proteins from eukaryotes, although these proteins are elusive until now.

Revisiting the supersymmetric Pati–Salam models from intersecting D6-branes

Employing novel random and supervised scanning methods, we systematically revisit the construction of three-family $$N=1$$ N = 1 supersymmetric Pati–Salam models in Type IIA orientifolds on $$\mathbf{T}^6/({\mathbb {Z}}_2\times {\mathbb {Z}}_2)$$ T 6 / ( Z 2 × Z 2 ) with intersecting D6-branes. Arising from the stacks of D6-branes with U(n) gauge symmetries, the Pati–Salam gauge symmetries $$SU(4)_C\times SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$$ S U ( 4 ) C × S U ( 2 ) L × S U ( 2 ) R can be broken down to the Standard Model via D-brane splitting as well as D- and F-flatness preserving Higgs mechanism. Also, the hidden sector contains USp(n) branes, which are parallel with the orientifold planes or their $${{\mathbb {Z}}_2}$$ Z 2 images. We find that the Type II T-duality in the previous study is not an equivalent relation in Pati–Salam model building if the model is not invariant under $$SU(2)_L$$ S U ( 2 ) L and $$SU(2)_R$$ S U ( 2 ) R exchange, and provides a way to obtain new models. We systematically construct the new models with three families, which usually do not have gauge coupling unification at the string scale. We for the first time construct the Pati–Salam models with at least one wrapping number whose absolute value reaching 5. In particular, for one large wrapping number equal to 5, we find that one kind of model carries more refined gauge couplings, and thus with more possibilities to have approximate gauge coupling unification.

Periferno u globalnom? Hrvatske serije u odnosu na domicilnu i globalnu kulturu (Novine i Uspjeh)

Since the 1980s, especially with the HBO rise, there has been a development of different type of TV series that are designated as the quality TV series in order to be distinguished from the regular TV series. The most important conditions for the creation of the quality TV series are explained, followed by a short resume of the development of Croatian TV series. Furthermore, the paper analyses poetics and politcs of the series The Paper (Novine) and The Success (Uspjeh), with a special attention given to a representation of (peripheral) space. In conclusion, Novine and Uspjeh are recognised as the quality TV. This term is problematized through a perspective of series’ double effect – as both economic and cultural products, with a focus on importance of global interpretive community of contemporary cultural omnivores. Making their own choices, they establish their own cultural and symbolic capital and at the same time construct global TV series canon as well as partially deconstruct dichotomy of the central and the peripheral.

Lifestyle of People Living in Harsh Climatic and Geographical Conditions

The goal of the present empirical study was to describe the lifestyle of people who have to live in harsh climatic and geographical conditions. The research featured the people of Kamchatka and involved several stages. During the first stage, the author obtained descriptive characteristics of the environment in question based on self-reports of respondents. The interviewed included those satisfied with their living conditions and those willing to leave Kamchatka. The lifestyle features were grouped into the differential assessment of environmental characteristics and the factors that directly affect the construction of one's individual lifestyle, e.g. climate, or the so-called geophysical factor, society, household, economy, etc. During the second stage, the author identified the nuclear and peripheral lifestyle structures typical of individuals that have to live in harsh conditions. The nuclear lifestyle structure consisted of characteristics that reflected activity, emotional assessment, safety, meanings, and truth. These features were associated with the direct implementation of specific goals, motives, and needs. The content and structural components of one's lifestyle appeared to be affected by one's chronotopes, or space-time structures. A time construct proved to build itself into one’s individual lifestyle, which led to a special type of constructing relationships heading from the past to the present and the future. This specific feature also determined the assessment of one’s life activities.

Ongoing change in post-independence São Tomé: The use of rhotics as a marker of national identity among young speakers of Santomean Portuguese

This paper examines variation in the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese. In Portuguese, the distribution of rhotics is determined by syllable structure (Bonet & Mascaró, 1997). However, the emerging variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe diverges from the standard norm and shows great variability in its use of rhotics; specifically, Santomeans often use a strong-R in positions that require a weak-r in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Sociolinguistic interviews with 56 speakers from the capital of São Tomé and Príncipe and its surroundings provide 5287 data points for analysis. Based on the apparent-time construct (Bailey, 2004; Bailey et al., 1991), variation patterns show a language change in progress in the use of the strong-R, with younger speakers using it more frequently. Results also reveal the emergence of rhotic fricatives in the speech of Santomeans born after the independence of the country.

MEMBANGUN PARADIGMA BARU HUKUM PERUSAHAAN DAN ETIKA KEWIRAUSAHAAN

Curriculum of corporate law must be prepared to enter into the world of the industry with a very characteristic and distinctive, and the corporate law is not separated from the external business culture conditions develop. This means, the conditions of the external culture assumed already embedded in advance within the students, before they work in a company and then drift in the culture of the company. Because of its implication, build a new paradigm of curriculum into an absolute obligation to be met by faculty of law at this time. Construct curriculum based corporate law building the entrepreneurial spirit in faculty of law is the solution. The results showed that the revitalization of the new paradigm in developing corporate law should be immediately done. Where in the era of free market today many businessmen doing business without an understanding of corporate law and a strong corporate culture. The implications of this, the theories of corporate law, in the curriculum of lectures, also great for hindsight

The changingfuture: competition, specialization and reorganization in the contemporary English future temporal reference system

The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (willandbe going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time,be going tohas been gradually increasing in frequency relative towillover the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towardsbe going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.