День: 08.10.2015

SOCIAL POLICY IMPLICATIONS

As we have seen, Alzheimer’s disease is a devastat­ing condition, not only to patients, but to those who care for them as well. To the extent we can design effective interventions for caregivers so that they acquire the necessary skills to provide quality care, society would benefit by delaying placement into nursing homes, keeping the […]

BRINGING IN OTHER FATHERS

The Gorgona is a giant mermaid, a sister of Alexander the Great. She appears beside a boat, grabs the gunwale, and asks if her brother, King Alexander, lives. Woe betide the sailor who tells her Alexander is dead. Wise mariners answer ‘He lives and reigns: zei kai vasileri/’ or ‘He lives, he reigns, he rules […]

Personality as Practice

Personality, Society and Life History Chapters 8 and 9 have described how structures of gender relations enter into personal life and shape personalities. The fact is clear, but how to understand it is more difficult. ‘Enter into’ is a metaphor, and we might ask just what is being ‘entered’. Has personality some distinctive substance, as […]

Popular culture and the ‘postmodern body’

The intersection of postmodernism, popular culture and political economy can be seen to coalesce around the issue of consumer culture, where, as Schwichtenberg (1993:9) notes, ‘star packaging and targeted audiences are critical for profitability’. Susan Bordo’s essay ‘Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture’ (1993b) considers those aspects of the materiality of ‘the postmodern body’ […]

Psychotic Disorders

Some forms of psychopathology, called psychoses, involve losing touch with reality and the disintegra­tion of personality. Two behaviors that occur in these disorders are delusions, which are belief sys­tems not based on reality, and hallucinations, which are distortions in perception. Although the development of psychotic disorders is rare across adulthood, the number of new cases […]

Remediating women’s magazines

The ‘new’ media depend for their success on their ability to ‘remediate’ — that is, ‘adapt to a new medium’ — the forms that are already established in the ‘old’ media. The relationship also works in the opposite direction, with earlier technologies ‘struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: […]

Sexual meanings and assumptions

The young partners we interviewed invested sex with diverse meanings: it was important as a source of pleasure, linked to the ‘connection of souls and bodies’, an expression of love, and an aspect of intimacy and closeness. In some cases the quantity and/or quality of sex was seen as a measure of how the relationship […]

IN AND OUT OF THE CLOSET

Gay New York is essentially a work of retrieval. In it Chauncey seeks to recover the lives and lifestyles of those gay men whose past has been hidden from history, whose culture has been forgotten and in part erased or distorted. One of Chauncey’s central claims is that the common idea that same-sex desire was […]