“Secrecy or Silence with Her Finger on Her Mouth”: Jeremy Bentham’s Other Model of Visibility and Power

To challenge the Foucauldian legacy of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison, scholars often highlight Bentham’s later writings on the democratic power of public opinion. In doing so, they reaffirm Bentham’s reputation as a unreserved proponent of transparency. To recover the limits of Bentham’s embrace of publicity, I examine the model of visibility exemplified by his designs for the Sotimion, a residence for unmarried, pregnant women. The Sotimion draws our attention to Bentham’s appreciation for concealment as a method of preventing individual and social harms caused by publicity and his criticisms of ascetic sexual norms. By being able to see visitors without being seen by them, the residents of the Sotimion would have avoided social censure while continuing to meet with friends, family, and even lovers. The Sotimion designs eschewed the panoptic principle, the use of asymmetric surveillance to reform moral behavior, and offered what I call the “soteric principle,” the use of asymmetric surveillance to protect the observer from punishment. By comparing the Sotimion to the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes and Bentham’s discussions of panoptic institutions for women, I examine the Sotimion’s distinctiveness while acknowledging its normalizing effects for residents from lower socioeconomic classes. Just as the panopticon captured Bentham’s commitment to publicity, applying the soteric model to Bentham’s theory of public opinion highlights his commitment to secrecy for protecting critics of government abuses from retribution.

Nonmarital Intimacies

Chapter Five surveys the varied intimate and nonmarital relationships formed between free and freed people. A comprehensive survey of more than two thousand baptism records demonstrates that Jamaica had the highest illegitimacy rate in the British Empire. One in four of the children baptized on the island was born out of wedlock. This chapter explores the confluence of factors that led to the development of a sexual culture in Jamaica that afforded unmarried women more autonomy in their intimate lives. In contrast with other colonies in British North America, Jamaica adopted a remarkably lenient approach toward female sexuality. Women also commanded more authority and wealth, largely owing to their participation in slavery. In the absence of social censure and legal repercussions, a large number of free couples established families outside of marriage. Doing so protected women’s material assets and legal autonomy, which would otherwise be comprised by coverture—a set of laws that ceded a wife’s property to her husband. Instead, colonists used baptism rather than marriage to recognize, legitimize, and even legalize intimate relationships with free and enslaved partners.

Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

Non-normative burials are comparatively understudied for the Andean area as a whole and are almost completely unknown for the Bolivian Formative period (1300 BC–AD 200). The current research discusses a unique case from the site of Aranjuez-Santa Lucía, where an adolescent was recovered with their finger inserted anally/vaginally, in a highly ambiguous archaeological context comprised of industrial waste, yet also containing other, conventional burials and pars pro toto offerings of considerable value. It is therefore impossible to assume the burial’s somewhat unorthodox position to be purely a sign of social censure for the deceased’s modus vivendi or moriendi. Various hypotheses and comparatives are offered, with particular emphasis on demographic factors. This case study complements others in the current volume in emphasizing the depth and complexity of lifeways and deathways, and further underscores the fact that a solely negative sense of “deviant” burial must necessarily be a simplistic one.

Physical Activity Among Adolescents in India: A Qualitative Study of Barriers and Enablers

Inadequate physical activity (PA) levels are reported in Indian youth, with lowest levels among adolescents, particularly girls. We aimed to identify barriers to and enablers of PA among school children in New Delhi and examine potential differences by gender and school type (government vs. private). A total of 174 students (private school students = 88, 47% girls; government school students = 86, 48% girls) aged 12 to 16 years from two Delhi schools participated in 16 focus group discussions (FGDs) conducted by bilingual moderators. We conducted FGDs separately for girls and boys, for students in Grades VIII and IX, and for private and government schools. We conducted FGDs among government school students in Hindi and translated the transcriptions to English for analysis. We coded transcriptions using a combination of inductive and deductive approaches, guided by the “youth physical activity promotion model.” We identified various personal, social, and environmental barriers and enablers. Personal barriers: Private school girls cited body image–related negative consequences of PA participation. Social barriers: Girls from both schools faced more social censure for participating in PA. Environmental barriers: Reduced opportunity for PA in schools was commonly reported across all participants. Personal enablers: All participants reported perceived health benefits of PA. Social enablers: Several participants mentioned active parents and sports role models as motivators for increasing PA. Few environmental enablers were identified. This study highlights the need for further investment in physical activity within schools and for gender-sensitive policies for encouraging PA participation among adolescents in India.

Understanding the out-of-class English Learning Choices of Students in Taiwan

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%;" align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Research has established that successful foreign language students often seek out opportunities to supplement their language studies with out-of-class language practice. Little is known, however, about the forms of out-of-class English studies in which successful English learners in Taiwan engage with the reasons for these particular choices being especially unclear. To address this gap, this project considered the out-of-class English learning choices of 79 university English majors in Taiwan. Findings based upon ethnographic interviews with these individuals indicate that they believed out-of-class English practice to be important due to the limitations associated with their formal language study. Despite this impetus, their choices of settings and interlocutors for English practice were constrained by beliefs about language circulating in the society, in particular social censure associated with English use in public places and with other Taiwanese. As a result, they tended to practice English in online venues, within the confines of the home, with like-minded peers, and with those perceived as foreigners. These results extend our understanding of out-of-class English study by addressing it as a socially-situated phenomenon, foregrounding the sorts of constraints that even highly-motivated language learners may face in their efforts to build their language proficiency. </span></span></p>

Criminology through the looking-glass

This chapter examines the ways in which it might be wiser to look at criminology in reverse. Not only do the rich get richer and the poor get prison, as Reiman's famous book title suggests, but the law would appear to operate in such a way that the crimes of the rich are the ones causing the greatest social harm yet receiving the weakest social censure, whilst the crimes of the poor and young cause the least social harm yet receive the greatest social censure. This is the stuff of a through-the-looking-glass Jabberwocky criminology whose reverse message can only be read by holding it up to the mirror. This chapter assesses whether this strange criminology can be explained by the analysis of mimesis and the mimetic double bind in the work of Renee Girard, or whether the phenomenon is better seen as an inevitable reflection of the roots of dominant social censures within dominant and contradictory social relations.