The day after William Kennedy Smith was accused, he was in every tabloid and on every TV screen; he came into supermarkets and bedrooms — most people saw more of him than of their families. But the identity of his accuser was kept so secret that few men would recognize her if they met her […]
День: 17.10.2015
Acritique of the orthodox. histories of sociology
T he history of sociology, as taught a century after it began in different industrialising countries, prioritises various scholars, but they are all men. Not only the three giants, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, but the supporting cast, are routinely presented as all-male. So, for example, two British scholars, Giddens (1971) and Hawthorn (1976) wrote histories […]
Prerogatives usurped?
conclusions A manda Cross’s (1981: 102) heroine, Kate Fansler, tells her friend Sylvia: ‘Men are always writing books about murdering women — it’s one of their favourite fantasies: revenge for having their prerogatives usurped: sexual prerogatives, political prerogatives, social prerogatives….’ In this book I have displayed some of the wide range of empirical, methodological and […]
THE POLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF AMBIVALENCE IN THE. SEXUAL POLITICS OF RACE AND ETHNICITY
The emphasis on cultural readings and the implication for the ‘polyvocal quality’ of texts is central for debates around both sexual and cultural representations and identities. Mercer (1992:23) claims that the struggle for identity and agency always ‘entails the negotiation of ambivalence’. Debates around the political importance of ambivalence have been particularly important in theories […]
Concluding Notes on the World to which a Social. Theory of Gender Might Lead
For the ultimate goal of the transformation of gender relations there are two logical candidates. One is the abolition of gender, the other its reconstitution on new bases. Along the first track some bold spirits have proposed the abolition of sexual reproduction. David Fernbach, in a recent and sophisticated version of this argument, goes so […]
Double standard of rape shield laws
Rape shield laws shield a woman’s sexual past from being used against her In court. They do not shield a man’s sexual past from being used against him in court. When first suggested by feminists, the laws were assumed to be a flagrant violation of our constitutional right to due process (because they shielded one […]
Present and Future
The Present Moment Hegel invented, and Marx made popular, a way of schematizing history in which there is an origin, a dialectic of necessary stages and a culmination — the ethical state, the classless society. It is tempting to schematize the history of gender relations the same way. Thus the story of primitive matriarchy, disrupted […]
Dealing with One’s Own Death
Thinking about death from an observer’s perspective is one thing. Thinking about one’s own death, like Ricardo is doing, is quite another. The reactions people have to their own impending death, long thought to be the purview of religion and philosophy, were not researched until well into the 20th century. 504 CHAPTER 13 Many authors […]
How Do You Describe a Life?
If you have ever looked carefully at a newspaper, you know that everyone who dies has a brief summary of his or her life published in an obituary. Obituaries serve several purposes, including telling the world the important aspects of one’s life and listing one’s surviving family members. If you have ever read an obituary, […]
Thinking about Death: Personal Aspects
LEARNING OBJECTIVES • How do feelings about death change over adulthood? • How do people deal with their own death? • What is death anxiety, and how do people show and cope with it? R icardo recently learned that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He knows the disease is […]