День: 01.11.2015

Pregnancy

While knowledge about contraception was systematically suppressed, knowledge of abortion techniques that would interfere with a pregnancy going to term were also increasingly subject to control in the nineteenth century. Although before 1800 it was a common-law offence to abort a foetus after the stage of quickening or ensoulment (after approximately eighty days) it appears […]

Life as lived and life as talked about: Family, love and marriage in twenty-first-century Vietnam

Catherine Earl On auspicious days — determined by a reading of the lunar calendar (am lick) — the steps of colonial-era buildings in downtown Ho Chi Minh City are crowded with bridal couples and their camera crews. Trailed by a flurry of tulle, a camera crew and her groom, a bride stops traffic as she […]

Postcolonial transformation and challenges to heteronormativity and pure-bloodedness in contemporary South Korea

The supposedly temporary division of Korea into the US-occupied South and the USSR- occupied North that began in 1945 when Korea gained its independence from Japan continues almost seventy years later. In this section, I discuss how major political, economic and cultural upheavals during this period have contributed to the new construction of sexuality in […]

Critical Mass

So what do you get when you have a workforce full of talented women who finally understand that what they want is to work differently, a substantial percentage of men who are starting to see they’d like the same thing, a much-in-demand younger generation that won’t be tied down, a looming talent shortage, and, most […]

The Naturals: Gens X, Y, and Z

If we’re increasingly frustrated by the sixty-hour office week, the next generation has no interest in it at all. When it comes to demanding freedom from the office grind, these guys are the power players. Because while we’ve learned it the hard way and are still racked with guilt about our choices, the younger generations […]

Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva argues that the symbolic realm is patriarchal, so the ‘femi­nine’ is an otherness that cannot be named. Femininity lies within what she calls the semiotic and is closely linked to the maternal (Kristeva, 1982). Most psychoanalysts follow Jacques Lacan in using the term ‘symbolic’ to refer to all forms of signification (Oliver, 1997: […]