День: 22.09.2015

Sadist or Masochist? Voyeur or Victim?

Mainstream media and legal discourses responded to innuendoes of Karla Homolka’s possible sadism in a typically hysterical manner. On the one hand, they vilified her, considering her inhumanly evil and more wicked than her male partner;16 on the other hand, they hurriedly scrambled to rewrite her tale as one of loving self-sacrifice, or, in other […]

SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS?

The question of how this transformation came about is almost never asked.1 Instead, historians, literary critics, philosophers, legal theorists, and other scholars routinely take it for granted, and focus instead on its consequences, often supposing that the change was the result of new scientific ideas. Particularly influential in cementing this presumption has been the work […]

Factors That Preserve Memory

As indicated by the Adams research placing mem­ory in a social context, in many situations, older adults perform quite well at memory tasks. In addi­tion, a number of cognitive reserve factors, such as IQ, educational level, occupation, and activity levels, may enhance cognitive functioning as we grow older (Scarmeas & Stern, 2003; Valenzuela & Sachdev, […]

MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND FEMINISM

Waugh (1992) argues unequivocally that feminism clearly emerged from Enlightenment modernity, with its conceptions ofjustice and subjectivity as being ‘universal’ categories. However, she notes that, in articulating issues of sexual difference, feminist discourses weaken the extremes of universalism in Enlightenment thought. It is in this sense of articulating difference that Waugh argues feminism can be […]

Prospective Memory

One area that has received increasing attention is prospective memory. Prospective memory involves remembering to perform a planned action in the future (Henry et al., 2004; Zacks et al., 2000), such as remembering to take medication. The study of prospective memory is a good illustration of how performance on everyday memory tests stacks up to […]

COMMODIFICATION OF FEELING

In the beginning I asked how reeling rules might vary in salience across social classes. One possible approach to this question is via the connections among social exchange, commodification of feeling, and the premium, in many middle-class jobs, on the capacity to manage meanings. Conventionalized feeling may come to assume the properties of a com­modity. […]

COMMODIFICATION OF FEELING

In the beginning I asked how reeling rules might vary in salience across social classes. One possible approach to this question is via the connections among social exchange, commodification of feeling, and the premium, in many middle-class jobs, on the capacity to manage meanings. Conventionalized feeling may come to assume the properties of a com­modity. […]