Bumper Stickers Research Articles

Listening and Hearing

In today’s polarized milieu doublethink is refined to “sayisms,” talking points, soundbites, bullet points, and bumper stickers, announcing a stance but not necessarily seeking a response beyond approval (like) or disparagement (unfriend). Conversations become stilted, guarded, or polemical. Often they simply cease. News media seek followers rather than listeners, and content in the educational sphere is increasingly displaced by the modeling of attitudes to be mimicked. Free speech is often transmogrified into silencing -- and violence that can be fatal. The rhetoric of ever expanding rights-claims, hallmarks of a progressive faith displaces efforts toward the kind of mutual accommodation needed in any healthy community. This article is a plea for less grandstanding and more listening, even to the voices of religious traditions, which have long served, and continue to serve, as a kind of communal conscience, being repositories of the highest values and deepest concerns of the majority of mankind.

Philomath

Philomath Devon Walker-Figueroa (bio) "Love of learning" is what Philomath means. This side of a ghosttown, what kids are here hang out in gravel parking lots & huntpixelated deer at The Woodsman. They break into gutted sanctuariesof timber mills, looking for places to leave their neon aerosoled names. In Philomath,Begg's Tires is the only place to buy new chains, Cherry Tree's the bestprice on feed, & Ray's has everything from meds to milk to LuckyStrikes & pocket knives. The only outlet in Philomath sells wood, the kind that growsjust here & in the holy lands. True Value boasts all the sturdy deadbolts for when the back door's gone busted again. My friendMegan is still giving out blow jobs to mechanics & drinkingred cough syrup until she doesn't care about her step-dad walking around, covered in nothing but sweat & dirt. "Me & you aregonna get trashed tonight," she says to me every night. I ask my dad if Megan can movein, & he says, "twelve cats & two dogs are enough." In Philomath, I'd be lyingif I said people don't get saved every week at the Nazarene Church, whereMegan & I go to vacation Bible school & sing about going "straightto heaven or down the hole," where the pastor slips nylons over our faces & tells us to suckpudding from a bucket just to show how far we'll go to be forgiven. We swallow it all [End Page 24] because this is how you get close to God in Philomath. When Megan's dad learnsshe's saved & he's not, he teaches her a lesson about beingsorry & how God is not watching Philomath. On Monday, Megan's eyescan hardly open, & our school bans liquid paper & permanentmarkers & the word "bomb," because they could cause usto die before our time. Megan spends breaks in the bathroom, & I know notto follow her. I go to the library, where I check out A Season in Hell because they don'thave Illuminations & never will, & I feel alone around all the smart kids who raise uppigs to pay for college. They belong to 4h & know how to sell livingmeat to the highest bidder. They get made fun of by people like Megan & me& the boys who only wear camo & talk about the beauty of a deerspitting up its life & most anybody the teachers have given upon, which is nearly everyone. I care about Philomath and its "Loveof Learning" bumper stickers that turn invisible under mud, its historicalsociety that hangs quilts over the walls of Paul'sPlace (where loggers get Bottomless Joe), that documents every haunting,every sighting of a ghost, & Megan is still in the bathroom stall, learning what it meansto be in Philomath for good. [End Page 25] Devon Walker-Figueroa Devon Walker-Figueroa lives in Iowa City, where she serves as the poetry editor of the Iowa Review and as co-founding editor of Horsethief Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House Online, Diagram, and Southword. She is completing her MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications

Banjo Boy: Masculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance

Banjo BoyMasculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance Anna Creadick (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The "dueling banjos" scene in John Boorman's 1972 spectacular film adaptation of James Dickey's best-selling 1970 novel Deliverance is an iconic moment in American movie history … The "banjo boy" scene in Deliverance is pivotal for understanding how such a lasting legacy of hillbilly horror and banjo shame could have been instilled by one fictional crossing of America's monumental cultural divides. Still from Deliverance, Warner Brothers Studios, 1972. [End Page 63] 1. the backstory I'm what you might call a "closeted" banjo player, so this may well be my coming-out paper. My parents were hippie folkies, and I grew up in the Appalachian region marinating in so much old-time string band music that around age twenty I literally picked up a banjo and just knew how to play it. Soon after learning I could play, I took my banjo to Merlefest, and I bought a bumper sticker that read "Have You Hugged Your Banjo Today?" and put it on my car. But then I sold that car and went off to graduate school in Boston and, well, I just couldn't play the banjo there. It's not even that no one played, some did, but they always seemed to do so with a strange enthusiasm, an academic interest that made me nervous. When I moved to western New York for work, an African American historian friend who had grown up in New York City told me he actually could not stand to hear banjo music, because it always made him think of lynchings. That too gave me pause. Skating on the thin ice of being a North-dwelling southerner with a mild accent, I got to hear all the slurs about rednecks, white trash, and hillbillies. As a white southern Appalachian from a town called Boone, who had spent a lot of time on porches and a little time on food stamps, I was not about to tell anyone I also played the banjo. Everyone in my small New York town would keep paying a fortune to go see Béla Fleck, and I would just have to travel in the summers to my hometown in western North Carolina, where Doc Watson was from and where the tourist shops sell bumper stickers that read "Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjo Music." It's a damn shame. And it's about shame, damn it. I'd like to say it's nobody's fault, but it is. It's James Dickey's fault. Or John Boorman's. Or both. The "dueling banjos" scene in John Boorman's 1972 spectacular film adaptation of James Dickey's bestselling 1970 novel Deliverance is an iconic moment in American movie history. In the novel, the scene launches an increasingly unsteady communion between four urban outsiders and a series of increasingly dangerous mountain boys and men. As the film version unfolds into a violent "game" of kill-or-be-killed, the sporadic bluegrass score carries the dueling banjos scene forward, so that it echoes and intermingles with terrorizing incidents of violence, including the now infamous male-on-male rape. The "banjo boy" scene in Deliverance is pivotal for understanding how such a lasting legacy of hillbilly horror and banjo shame could have been instilled by one fictional crossing of America's monumental cultural divides.1 [End Page 64] 2. the scene The banjo boy scene begins when the four city-slicker businessmen, Ed, Bobby, Lewis, and Drew, finally arrive at a crossroads called Oree after driving ever deeper into the mountains from their urban and suburban Atlanta homes for a rugged weekend canoe adventure. They stop in Oree for gas and to find a couple of local drivers willing to drop off their cars at an agreed-upon spot downriver. Dickey's narrator Ed calls Oree a "sleepy, hookwormy, ugly, and inconsequential" rural county seat, and yet it offers the modern necessities the adventurers require: fossil fuel and paid labor. An old man, described as looking "like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie," approaches, chats, pumps gas, and then, spying the...

“Another Nun for ERA”: Buttons, Banners, and Other Ratification Campaign Ephemera

“Another Nun for ERA”Buttons, Banners, and Other Ratification Campaign Ephemera Jenny Gotwals (bio) Objects, even small ones, can tell big stories. They can bring immediacy to topics that may seem complex, dry, or even abstract. The ten-year campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment after its passage by Congress in 1972 produced innumerable three-dimensional objects—buttons, banners, T-shirts, board games, jewelry, scarves, aprons—that proclaimed support for or opposition to the ERA. The creation and survival of these artifacts offer a tangible record of the public nature of the ERA ratification campaign. The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study holds vast quantities of memorabilia and ephemera about the Equal Rights Amendment. These objects, which are found in many different collections, reveal the intersection of political action and personal struggle. The library aims to “preserve the past for the present and the future”; to that end we collect diaries, letters, writings, scrapbooks, films, organizational records, photographs, etc., that document lives of American women. The library’s founding collection documented the activity of suffrage activists and organizations; documenting women’s political engagement continues to be one of its goals. Just as the library’s suffrage-era sashes and metal bluebirds provide insight into how their bearers wished to enter and remake the public sphere, so the ERA ratification materials show the ways activists shaped their public identities around their support for or opposition to constitutional equal rights for women. Rallies and marches were crucial to the national scope of both the “Yes” and the “No” campaigns. Spreading the message depended in part on striking images and slogans—advertising through supporters’ bodies. The bright green “ERA YES” stickers and the red octagonal stop sign– shaped logo of the “STOP ERA” campaign were eye-catching and easy to understand. The kinds of messages reflected in these artifacts—mostly buttons and bumper stickers—vary. There are nationally focused messages (“ERA Let’s [End Page 41] make it the American way”), slogans germane only to the amendment’s passage in a particular state (“ERA for Me.”; “Equality an Iowa tradition,”), and items that identify the wearer as a member of a particular group (Republicans, children, people of faith: “I am an ERA Catholic”). There are puns (“ERAse Reagan”) and jokes (“Yes Virginia, there is an ERA”; “All I want for Christmas is the ERA”). Anti-ERA messages include “Equality Yes, ERA No”; “ERA is NOT the way”; “You Can’t Fool Mother Nature: Stop ERA.” A bumper sticker from this time period suggests “Ski ratified snow.” Most of the material falls between 1972 and 1982—the decade when activists across the country were working for state ratification, and those opposed were trying to stop the ratification process. Other buttons in our collections include “My daughter deserves equality. Ratify ERA”; “I gave my blood for the Equal Rights Amendment”; “Catholics want ERA”; “ERA No Time Limit on Equality”; “Kentucky’s OK with ERA”; “Season’s Greetings to all and to all Equal Rights”; “Give Mom equal rights for Mother’s Day Chicago 1980”; “Economists for ERA”; “Florida Parade for ERA”; “ERA is not an ‘exercise in futility’”; “Labor united for ERA, AFL-CIO ERA”; “Women are in chains without ERA”; and my own personal favorite, “Archivists for ERA.” Several games attest to the creativity and humor of activists. “ERAGO” is a reimagining of Bingo created by West Virginia NOW. Cards have images of famous women from history and contemporary activists, and eighty-two dominoes were painted white with corresponding names as well as letters painted on them. If the caller chose “Susan B. Anthony in the G column” and you had it, you could place the domino (or another piece) on your card. “Which Way ERA?” is a complex card game in which players answer multiple choice questions about the ERA. The backs of the question cards are printed with parts of brightly colored images; answering correctly allows the player to create a scene with the images that map out the way toward ratification. The fact that so many women wore, collected, created, kept, and then donated this material shows the importance of...

The Short Happy Life

The Short Happy Life Steffan Hruby (bio) The Short, Happy Life, buddhism, death, Steffan Hruby, Fiction, prose, story We used to coax ants onto our hands and trap spiders in empty glasses to release them into the yard. Moths and ladybugs went out the window, but we never did solve our winter problem in Minnesota. We thought about putting all of them into a terrarium, but that hardly seemed fair to the nonspiders. And yet we couldn't control them, so Mom had us murmur a short prayer and crush them in a tissue. We rationalized our little insecticides by telling ourselves each would be reincarnated as a praying mantis or something, though I never understood what was so great about those vicious things always hooking, fighting, killing. They'll even kill small birds, as if destroying their future selves. Birds are more evolved than any bug, since they are closer to Buddha nature. So it all seemed a little backward. It was hard being American Buddhists without teachers or cultural traditions to explain things. If we weren't misunderstanding, we were being misunderstood. Once Dad and I found this little red-faced man puzzling over our STOP TRANSMIGRATION NOW bumper sticker. The guy looked like an angry fetus. It was a bright spring day, the busy parking lot a glaring frantic field of pinballing light. Road grit from the recent thaw ground beneath our feet as we approached the car carrying groceries. The hunched little man looked up squinting through one eye. "I like your sticker," he said. My dad has a long somber face, grim mouth, and sad blue eyes, but hearing this he absolutely glowed. "Thanks," he said, extending his hand. "I'm Francis Macomber." Dad had been waiting for this moment a long time, yet his gesture went unnoticed. "Yep," said the man. "We should just build a damn wall. Fucking wetbacks." I laughed and laughed on the way home. "Oh my God, you looked so happy. I've never seen you look so happy. Then wham! You should have seen your face!" Dad was so embarrassed his eyes got all watery and I couldn't go on. "Well at least now you know why Latinos give you dirty looks," I said, remembering the time he complained to Mom. [End Page 175] "I guess so," he said thoughtfully. He never took it off, though. ________ Sometimes I think all my parents' talk about Buddhism and "inner peace" was just a bunch of lies. They argued constantly. Dad was stubborn, but Mom was persistent, and persistence always won. Mom was a planner. And once she started talking about her plans she'd go on with a lulling verbosity. She was like a wizard casting spells as Dad sat on their bed listening, his lean body sliding further and further down the wall like a collapsing marionette. Then something happened that changed everything. It began when we bought the new house. We'd lived in five houses and three school districts, and Dad and I were fed up. It wasn't the money exactly. Dad was a doctor and he had an inheritance; we were just sick of rearranging our lives all the time. But Mom was bored or something. She used to have some lame corporate job, back when she was "all anger and drama," then she married Dad and became a holier than holy wannabe monk and lover of all things Asian. "Oh my God, Mom. Again?" I asked. "What more do you want?" She tilted her head and smiled at me. "What a question, Ashoka," she said. "I have friends in this neighborhood. I don't want to move." Mom sat thinking for a moment with a playful expression on her face. She really was charming sometimes with her high cheekbones and dark, shimmery eyes. Pretty too. Some people said she looked like Ingrid Bergman and would kind of gush about her. Anyway, Mom just quoted a poem by Master Huong Hai. A silver birdflies over the autumn lake.When it has passed,the lake's surface does not tryto hold on to the image of the bird. "What?" I asked...

Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 by Zhao Ma

Reviewed by: Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 by Zhao Ma Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Zhao Ma. Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. 366 pp. $49.95 (cloth). Zhao Ma Opens Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing with the oft-quoted words of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: "Well-behaved [End Page E-28] women seldom make history." Though Ulrich's statement has been so intensely merchandised as to become trite (Ma spotted it on a bumper sticker), historians seeking to write history "from the bottom up" know it nevertheless carries more than a ring of truth. Well-behaved women—especially well-behaved poor and illiterate women—seldom make it into the archives; they rarely leave behind a documentary trail that would enable us to integrate their stories into historical narratives. The stories that are captured are of ill-behaved women, those who have somehow transgressed the rules of society or the state and thus been written about in newspapers and court documents. Though their cases may be few in number and not representative of women's experiences across the whole of a given society, these unruly women have left behind archival traces that enable us to "make history" as best we can. Ma trains his eye on the unruly lower-class women of wartime Beijing, who have not left behind diaries or personal accounts of their lives. Instead, they speak through cases found in the "Offenses against the Institutions of Marriage and the Family" records from the Beijing District Court between 1939 and 1949. Ma uses these files to understand the hardships that women faced in the war-torn city and the survival tactics they employed to overcome them, as well as how the Japanese and Nationalist states (and, at the very end, the Communist state) responded to those actions. For the vast majority of women living in Republican Beijing, economic struggles were a way of life (chapter 1). Social reformers viewed the city's high poverty rate (at least 50% and possibly as high as 75%, even before the war with Japan broke out) with alarm, regarding poverty as an impediment to national productivity and the development of a body politic.1 In the absence of a large industrial sector, however, Beijing's lower-class women did not have the opportunity to engage in the type of formal occupation (zhiye 職業) that the reformers encouraged. Instead of joining the factory line, poor women generally engaged in flexible and informal work arrangements, such as taking in washing, ironing, or mending. Ultimately, though, women were financially dependent on their husbands, and when those spouses failed to provide for the household during times of hardship, some women responded by running away and remarrying (chapter 2). As Ma explains, this was a survival tactic, not a feminist statement: "Runaway wives were hoping to find a solvent husband … it never occurred to them to resist the domestic hierarchy itself" (116). In the face of wartime instability and shortages, women whose spouses were good providers enjoyed some measure of security. In chapter 3, "Women in the Tenements," Ma explores the physical world of Beijing's lower-class women, who lived in the city's crowded alleyway homes. Migration from the countryside in the early twentieth century—itself a survival tactic for both men and women seeking escape from even more difficult conditions at home—had swelled Beijing's population, but available housing stock failed to keep pace with this increase. As a result, tenement neighborhoods grew ever more crowded. For many women, physical closeness with their neighbors also yielded intimate social networks, often built on the basis of shared kinship or native-place ties. These relationships [End Page E-29] enabled women to turn to trusted neighbors for assistance in times of trouble. In many of the runaway wife cases Ma recounts, the unhappy wife sought counsel and help from a neighbor woman who then played the role of matchmaker, aiding her escape from the original union and then introducing the woman to her second husband. In establishing these new marriages, runaway...

Content-Based Analysis of Bumper Stickers in Jordan

This study has set out to investigate bumper stickers in Jordan focusing mainly on the themes of the stickers. The study hypothesized that bumper stickers in Jordan reflect a wide range of topics including social, economic, and political. Due to being the first study of this phenomenon, the study has adopted content-based analysis to determine the basic topics. The study has found that the purpose of most bumper sticker is fun and humor; most of them are not serious and do not carry any biting messages. They do not present any criticism to the most dominant problems at the level of society including racism, nepotism, anti-feminism, inflation, high taxes, and refugees. Another finding is that politics is still a taboo; no political bumper stickers were found in Jordan. Finally, the themes the stickers targeted are: lessons of life 28.85 %; challenging or warning other drivers 16%; funny notes about social issues 12%; religious sayings 8%; treating the car as a female 7%; the low economic status of the driver 6%; love and treachery 5.5%; the prestigious status of the car 5%; envy 4%; nicknames for the car or the driver 4%; irony 3 %; and English sayings 1.5 %. Keywords : bumper stickers, themes, politics

Steps Toward Building a Better Team

Steps Toward Building a Better Team

Indigenous Health Initiatives, Frybread, and the Marketing of Nontraditional “Traditional” American Indian Foods

Indigenous Health Initiatives, Frybread, and the Marketing of Nontraditional “Traditional” American Indian Foods Devon Mihesuah (bio) Frybread, the staple of our Native Culture. Yep it just wouldn’t be a perfect meal without it! —anonymous comment on navajofrybread.com, september 24, 2012 I am so glad to shout from the rooftops that “Frybread” is not “our” Indigenous food and I hate that we have allowed it a place of reverence in our communities. —joely proudfit, pechanga band of luiseño indians, personal communication frybread varies from tribe to tribe in diameter, thickness, and shape, but is most commonly a plate-sized disk of flour, shortening, and salt that is fried in grease or oil. “Indian tacos” (or, as they are called in the Southwest, “Navajo tacos” and “Hopi tacos”) are frybreads topped with ground meat, beans, cheese, lettuce, and sour cream. Dessert frybreads might be crowned with butter, powdered sugar, chocolate, honey, or syrup. Frybread makes its appearance at fairs, tribal commemorative marches, festivals, powwows, and restaurants. Girls running for the titles of “Tribal Princess” prepare frybread as their talent component. T-shirts are decorated with the slogans “Frybread: Breakfast of Champions,” “Powered by Frybread,” and “Frybread Power.” Frybread enthusiasts are not deterred by Health magazine ranking frybread as one of the fifty fattiest foods in the country.1 Many Indigenous food and health enthusiasts argue that eschewing refined wheat flour, along with other unhealthy foods, in favor of traditional tribal foods is the key to eradicating the obesity and diabetes epidemic among tribal communities. Food activism, however, is not without challenges. In 2003 I wrote for the academic journal American Indian Quarterly about the repercussions of losing traditional foodways knowledge and opined against the overconsumption of frybread.2 My bumper sticker, wall clock, buttons, and T-shirt that feature the word “frybread” with a red line through it appeared for sale on the website CafePress in 2004. As a result, I was assailed by frybread fans as “anti-Indian” and “not really Indian.” [End Page 45] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The antifrybread bumper sticker from the author’s “decolonizenow” shop at CafePress.com. A year later the director of the Morning Star Institute, Suzan Shown Harjo, reiterated my notions about frybread in the popular online publication Indian Country Today.3 Frybread fans reacted angrily and the controversy spread across Indian country. Despite Harjo’s incorrect reconstruction of frybread’s history, her essay has been mentioned in almost every newspaper article about frybread since 2005. That same year, determined Native frybread defenders pressured the South Dakota Legislature into designating frybread the “Official State Bread.”4 Elsewhere, Kiowa elder Carol Bronaugh stated that “an Indian person always gets hungry for frybread. Cutting frybread out of an Indian meal would be like cutting out the main ingredient of the entire meal.”5 Gayle Weigle, webmaster of Frybreadlove.com, stated, “It’s like giving up turkey at Thanksgiving. It is a tradition.”6 Recent frybread drama occurred when fitness advocate and star of the weight-loss reality show The Biggest Loser star Jillian Michaels attempted to educate Yavapai Apaches about the dangers of fried flour at a 2010 tribal gathering. She dropped a plate of fried bread in the trash and called it “poison”; in return, a tribal member called her an “idiot” and threw a pile of bread at her. Afterward, she received a poor turnout for her diabetes discussion.7 Spokane writer Sherman Alexie has been called a “frybread expert,” and he states that “frybread is the story of our survival.”8 But whose survival? Most frybread-focused stories and “traditional Native American recipes” sites proclaim frybread the creation of desperate Diné (Navajos) at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, also known as Hwéeldi (“Place of suffering”), where the U.S. government confined Navajos from 1864 to 1868. This entrenched legend tells us that Navajo women fried their flour rations in lard and thus supplied their people with enough calories and nutrients to survive the ordeal. However, there are no government reports of Navajos at Bosque Redondo frying flour. Testimonies of Navajos whose ancestors who survived the Long Walk and lived at Bosque Redondo make no...

Theories of Farmer Knowledge and Food Security

Theories of Farmer Knowledge and Food Security

F#ck Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.

The Ethics of Teaching: Critical Thinking and Reflection to Promote Professionalism by Mitigating Biases Including those against other Healthcare Professions.

In the USA I see bumper stickers and t-shirts that declare “Critical thinking: the other national deficit.” Unfortunately here, and elsewhere in the world, these words are often true. Not only does the internet give us ample opportunity to express ourselves without much reflection or thought, but college and university courses do not always expect and foster critical thinking and reflection on the part of students, particularly when the courses have lecture formats and large enrollments. In my view, this is especially true of the basic and even the clinical sciences in healthcare professional education. Many of the latter educators do not heed well the admonition in McKeachie's Teaching Tips (McKeachie and Svinicki, 2014) “Teach your students to reflect both in and out of class. That reflection should never stop, because conscious reflection on values is perhaps the cornerstone of the ethics of teaching.”

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall (review)

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

Humane Education

Humane Education

Wearing a Rainbow Bumper Sticker: Experiential Learning on Homophobia, Heteronormativity, and Heterosexual Privilege

College campuses are known to be heteronormative environments that often foster heterosexism and homophobia. There is a broad call for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) awareness-building curricula as one avenue for positive change in campus climates. This study interrogates the effects of an experiential learning activity where students were tasked with wearing a rainbow bumper sticker on their person for 24 hours. The aim was to inspire deep learning through self-reflection on experiences of discomfort. Students positively rated the activity for helping them recognize how homophobia influences conformity to heterosexual norms; recognize heterosexual privilege; and empathize with others who hold nonnormative sexual identities.

Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations

Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations

Feminism, Theology, and the Personal in American Studies

Feminism, Theology, and the Personal in American Studies Joanna Brooks I find it wonderful that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s achievements in early American studies and women’s history are being celebrated by Marion Rust in “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women’s Studies,” and perhaps even more wonderful to see them celebrated in connection with Ulrich’s identity as a Mormon feminist. It has meant something to our often misunderstood and sometimes embattled Mormon feminist movement to know that the Pulitzer Prize– winning historian of American women’s experience and author of the feminist bumper sticker and tote-bag-adorning phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” was one of us: an affirmation that Mormon feminism was not an oddly improbable splinter group of the real women’s movement to be regarded with curiosity if not suspicion by mainstream feminism, but, as Laurel herself has argued in “Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism,” somewhere decidedly closer to the movement’s living core. Laurel’s graceful and understated but powerful presence and tremendous accomplishments in these multiple worlds have helped affirm to all of us in Mormon feminism that what may seem improbable or even accidental to others is no accident at all. In honoring her work we affirm our sense as women, as feminists, and as Mormon feminists that our lives are rich with meaningful and beautiful connections that reveal themselves if we pay attention and care for them. That apparent contradictions and accidents in human experience are imbued with the sacred possibility of meaning seems to me an article of faith basic not only to the lives of people of faith in general and Mormons in particular—as Laurel and I both are—but also to the lives of humanities scholars. In tracing out the connections between Laurel’s distinguished scholarly career and her “lifelong quest to reconcile her Mormon faith and her feminist convictions,” Rust does American studies a service by encouraging its practitioners to reflect on “our own ways of conducting scholarship” and perhaps thereby to arrive at a more conscious approach to our own work and its purposes (152). Laurel is gracious enough to credit important scholarly discoveries to “accident,” but this says more about her understated and pragmatic nature than it [End Page 173] does about the truth of how work gets done (qtd. in Rust 151). None of us goes to the archive without purpose, no matter whether the outcomes are discovery or disappointment. In a moment when the professional humanities needs to define and redefine its purposes, it seems like a good time for all of us to articulate more clearly what we expect to gain and what we expect others to gain by our work. What Rust sees in Laurel’s career of scholarly tending to the historic lives of American women is a continuity with the forms of women’s work and women’s handicraft that Laurel has always acknowledged through her scholarship: in Rust’s words, an honoring through care of the “simultaneous immensity and fragmentation” of human experience as it expresses itself in “mundanities” of daily life and “cumbersome states of being” (160, 161). I think this is a profound insight and one that resonates deeply with me. Just last month, at a Mormon feminist retreat in New Hampshire—Laurel is one of the historic retreat’s founding mothers, of course—I compared the work of assembling a scholarly anthology of Mormon feminist writing to needlepoint. That’s the handicraft I know best—I learned it from my Utah-born Mormon grandmother—and that’s what I always think of when I’m doing the curiously physical fine-pointed work that transcription, annotation, and other editorial tasks entail. Honoring through care and bringing coherence to the immensely meaningful fragments of experience suspended in the mundanity of time is a purpose shared by women’s work and humanities scholarship alike. Rust connects this work to the gendered idea of “roles” that come to us by “circumstance”—as gender itself often does—but which we play with grace and purpose nonetheless. This is one way of understanding the role...

Limiting Political Contributions after McCutcheon, Citizens United, and SpeechNow

There was something unreal about the opinions in McCutcheon v. FEC. These opinions examined a series of strategies for circumventing the limits on contributions to candidates imposed by federal election law, but they failed to notice that the limits were no longer breathing. The D.C. Circuit’s decision in SpeechNow.org v. FEC had created a far easier way to evade the limits than any of those the Supreme Court discussed. SpeechNow held all limits on contributions to super PACs unconstitutional.This Article argues that the D.C. Circuit erred; Citizens United v. FEC did not require unleashing super PAC contributions. The Article also considers what can be said for and against a bumper sticker’s declarations that “MONEY IS NOT SPEECH!” and “CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!” It proposes a framework for evaluating the constitutionality of campaign-finance regulations that differs from the one currently employed by the Supreme Court. And it proposes a legislative scheme of campaign-finance regulation that would effectively limit contributions while respecting the Supreme Court’s campaign-finance decisions.

The Game of Curiosity: Using Videogames to Cultivate Future Scientists

According to a report from the National Research Council (NRC, 2011), children have an innate curiosity about the natural world, yet many students loose interest in science after elementary school. A national survey of middle‐ and high‐school students reports that only 20% of the students surveyed expressed an interest in science as a career (Project Tomorrow, and PASCO Scientific, 2008). Mayo (2009) suggests one way to increase the number of students interested in science is through videogames. Her initial work indicates learning through videogames can yield a 7%–40% positive learning increase over standard learning through lectures. A key component inherently built into videogames is trying something, failing, and then unabashedly trying again. This “we will all fail” concept is counter to the “everyone is a winner” perception that is proliferating in our culture, where sporting events issue medals and trophies to anyone who participates, the suburbs are littered with “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers, and high‐schools have not one but multiple valedictorians (Best, 2011). Most videogames, to the contrary, are considered boring if everyone wins all the time. Similarly, scientists rarely excel if they do not experience failure to some degree. A recent article by Gerber (2012) posits that to prepare our future scientists, we need to teach them how to experience failure, over and over again, and to teach them how to learn from their failure. Gerber claims today’s science educators are doing the opposite, conveying that failing at science, even a little, is unacceptable. Although conclusive evidence is not yet in place, research suggests that using gaming to present scientific concepts can engage our younger generation of science learners and get them interested in learning (Wang and Hannafin, 2005; Federation of American Scientists [FAS], 2006; Kirriemuir and MacFarlane, 2006; Kiili and Lainema, …

Cosgriff transforms care for chemotherapy patients

Sean Cosgriff, PharmD, BCOP, is one of a kind at the Portland Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center. Patients travel as far as 300 miles to receive cancer care at the VA's chemotherapy infusion clinic and at the oral chemotherapy clinic, a pilot program currently being tested by Cosgriff. As the only clinical pharmacy specialist in hematology/oncology, Cosgriff touches the lives of patients in Oregon and Southwest Washington by providing efficient, lifesaving care