День: 06.10.2015

Building a Transracial Family

Adopting a child of color catapults women into an experience of scrutinizing and then organizing their lives through a new lens: race. They have never previously seen their whiteness as a socially organizing frame that segregates their public life from those they include in their intimate circle of friends.26 Their status as white women determines […]

Politically incorrect: queer lifestyle drama

During the latter half of the 1990s, Channel 4 as a fully fledged commercial company selling its own advertising sought to capitalize on its ‘alternative’ image in a branding exercise designed to attract youthful and affluent audiences to its platform of channels. These now included E4 and the subscription film channel FilmFour. Caughie’s (2000: 192-7) […]

Quality drama: the politics of difference

The institutional space for lesbian and gay drama on Channel 4 is distinct from that on BBC2, the other minority channel on terrestrial television in the UK. It was based from the beginning on a very different conception of public service broadcasting from the BBC. Discussing the Annan report that preceded the formation of Channel […]

THE CULTURE’S RESPONSE

Estrangement from display, from feeling, and from what feel­ings can tell us is not simply the occupational hazard of a few. It has firmly established itself in the culture as permanently imaginable. All of us who know the commercialization of hu­man feeling at one remove—as witness, consumer, or critic — have become adept at recognizing […]

THE HUMAN COSTS OF EMOTIONAL LABOR

Massive people-processing—and the advanced engineering of emotional labor that makes it possible —is a remarkable achievement. It is also an important one, for a good part of modem life involves exchange between total strangers, who, in the absence of countermeasures and in the pursuit of short­term self-interest, might much of the time act out suspicion […]

Inside prison, U. SA

Women felons go to a former school a few miles east of the state capitol. The men’s institutions are prisons, plain and hard. They offer cells, guards, cell block gangs. . . The women’s institution feels like the school it was built to be, and its staff encourages reform and rehabilitation. Attorney David D. Butler,23 […]

QUEERING THE PITCH

Kafka’s Gregor Samsa represents one version of masculinity’s vanishing point. Here is another: after the British Football Associa­tion had charged two rival players with misconduct following a fight during a match between Chelsea and Liverpool in February 1999, the man who threw the first punch alleged that he had been provoked by his opponent’s cries […]

The Dominant Culture and Questions

Children try to make sense of their situation as they confront definitions of families and life experiences their adoptive mothers can’t control, although mothers are prepared to ease the difference. The experiences their children face are not always ones that their adoptive mothers know firsthand. White mothers have not experienced the same racial discrimination that […]