To recognize a social structure in sexuality it is necessary first to see sexuality as social. The following analysis therefore presupposes the argument, made in Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Conduct, Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Weeks’s Sexuality and its Discontents, that sexuality is socially constructed. Its bodily dimension does not exist before, or outside, the […]
Месяц: Сентябрь 2015
Power
Particular transactions involving power are easy enough to observe. Mr Barrett the Victorian patriarch forbids his daughter to marry; parliament makes homosexual intercourse a crime; a bank manager refuses a loan to an unmarried woman; a group of youths rape a girl of their acquaintance. It is often difficult to see beyond individual acts of […]
The politics of Agent Orange
The United States sprayed Vietnam with roughly 11 million gallons of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant that contains dioxin. Laboratory tests on animals link dioxin to birth defects, cancer, infertility, and miscarriage as well as to damage to the liver and to the nervous and immune systems.77 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was responsible for the decision […]
Delphy and Leonard (1992: 266)
For Delphy and Leonard, the point is that ‘marriage is a relationship between men and women who because they are men and women do different things; who because they do different things are unequal; and who because they are unequal are seen as different sorts of human being (one more human than the other)’ (ibid). […]
Ordinariness, acceptance and difference
A striking feature of the stories of Hanna and Tammy, Kathryn and Louise and Fredrick and Tim is their confidence in their ordinariness. Hanna and Tammy’s story is of an ordinary relationship that is actively embedded in mundane practices linked to mutual family care, local commitments and supports for the couple. Their story is also […]
Helene Cixous: and ecriture feminine
Cixous founded Women’s Studies at the University of Vincennes in 1975 and is a keen proponent of ‘feminine writing’—texts which subvert dominant phallogocentric logic. She criticises Freudian psychoanalysis for its thesis of a ‘natural’ anatomical determination of sexual difference, but endorses Freud’s belief in the bisexual nature of all individuals. Rowley and Grosz (1990:198) note […]
SOCIAL POLICY IMPLICATIONS
One recurring theme in this chapter is the problem of financing health care interventions in later life for people in the United States. The Current Controversies feature raises several key points about the costs of nursing homes in the United States and the lack of ways to finance those costs. With the aging of the […]
Feeding the Market
What Schumpeter’s analysis failed to detect was that the deterioration of traditional family life in many ways nurtures the market economy (at least once the engines of capitalist productivity were primed). Along with the decline in marriage, increasing levels of cohabitation, and the rise in childlessness, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the traditional […]
Feeding the Market
What Schumpeter’s analysis failed to detect was that the deterioration of traditional family life in many ways nurtures the market economy (at least once the engines of capitalist productivity were primed). Along with the decline in marriage, increasing levels of cohabitation, and the rise in childlessness, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the traditional […]