Conservative Backlash Research Articles

Bisexuality in the Kinsey–Klein Continuum: An Interview with Kinsey Institute Scholar Dr. John Bancroft

In this interview for the 60th anniversary commemoration of the Kinsey Male report, Kinsey Institute director emeritus Dr. John Bancroft answers questions about Alfred C. Kinsey's research on bisexuality, compares the Kinsey Scale and Klein Grid and considers Kinsey's continued legacy in terms of conservative backlash against him for his influence in initiating sexual liberation movements of the late 20th century.

A Response to Bruce Burgett

It is a pleasure to respond to Bruce Burgett's timely and insightful analysis of the current state of sexuality studies. Burgett presents a stunning account of how the discursive invention by scholars of “sexual panics” simultaneously pictures intimacy as the scene of conservative backlashes and the locus of liberating social transformation. What sex/sexuality/intimacy academics often share is an urge to project progressive politics onto our intimate lives at the same time that intimate lives are imagined as potential springboards for successful democratic practice. I am especially interested in how “model” intimacies are so often construed as heralding “model” social formations, and vice versa. Burgett asks us to re-imagine how we might make our scholarly work do “work” in the society at large instead of interminably projecting our own psyches and practices backward as self-legitimation that consequently resists more precarious encounters with alternative “intimate events,” as Elizabeth Povinelli very usefully terms this broad and often unwieldy terrain of physical and emotional experience and attachments.1 Perhaps the difficulty lies in the emotional materials themselves, which are often structurally resistant to our abiding leftist academic imperatives.

Ellery's protest: how one young man defied tradition and sparked the battle over school prayer

Solomon s fascinating and sweeping history of the legal fight over mandatory school prayers is compelling, judicious, and elegantly written. Fabulous! David Rudenstine, Dean, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University Stephen Solomon s s Protest provides a brilliant analysis of a major Supreme Court decision that redefined the relationship between church and state almost a half century ago. This study goes well beyond simply offering a gripping account of the course of litigation that brought before the Justices the contentious issue of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, though the thoroughness of that account would merit careful reading by itself. Especially impressive is the author s deep probing of hitherto neglected sources, and invaluable primary material including extensive direct contact with the plaintiff, the Ellery of the book s title. Finally, and perhaps most impressive, is Solomon s careful placement of the issue and the case in a far broader context that is as critical to national life and policy today as it was four and a half decades ago when the high Court first tackled these questions. Robert O Neil, Professor of Law, University of VirginiaGreat legal decisions often result from the heroic actions of average citizens. s Protest is the story of how one student s objection to mandatory school prayer and Bible reading led to one of the most controversial court cases of the twentieth centuryand a decision that still reverberates in the battle over the role of religion in public life.Abington School District v. began its journey through the nation s courts in 1956, when sixteen-year-old Ellery protested his public school s compulsory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. Ejected from class for his actions, sued the school district. The Supreme Court s decision in his favor was one of the most important rulings on religious freedom in our nation s history. It prompted a conservative backlash that continues to this day, in the skirmishes over school prayer, the teaching of creationism and intelligent design, and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase under God. Author Stephen D. Solomon tells the fascinating personal and legal drama of the case: the family s struggle against the ugly reactions of neighbors, and the impassioned courtroom clashes as brilliant lawyers on both sides argued about the meaning of religious freedom. But Schempp was not the only case challenging religious exercises in the schools at the time, and s Protest describes the race to the Supreme Court among the attorneys for four such cases, including one involving the colorful atheist Madalyn Murray.Solomon also explores the political, cultural, and religious roots of the controversy. Contrary to popular belief, liberal justices did not kick God out of the public schools. Bitter conflict over school Bible reading had long divided Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Eventually, it was the American people themselves who removed most religious exercises from public education as a more religiously diverse nation chose tolerance over sectarianism. s Protest offers a vivid account of the case that embodied this change, and a reminder that conservative justices of the 1950s and 60s not only signed on to the Schempp decision, but strongly endorsed the separation of church and state.

More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century (review)

Reviewed by: More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century Jeffrey C. Sanders More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century, By Godfrey Hodgson. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. 2004. One moment in Godfrey Hodgson's More Equal than Others encapsulates both the book's strengths and limitations. In a chapter on the technological revolution, he writes: "I am writing this [book] looking out at the stone houses and a flock of sheep in a Costwold Village. Thanks to the internet I can call up U.S. government statistics, the websites of organizations, companies, associations of every kind. . . . I can have books sent to me from all over the world within days" (62). Despite his life in the trenches as a long-time British journalist and Washington correspondent for the Observer, Hodgson surveys his subject—the increasing tension between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of condition" in American society over the last 30 years—in panoramic form. The result is a useful, yet sometimes sprawling, synthetic history of deepening inequality since 1968. In his brief introduction Hodgson, who claims to be skeptical of American exceptionalism, describes an "American character" molded by "immigration," "the frontier," "African slavery," and "the ideals of the American Revolution" (xx-xxi) into a "distinctly American pattern." The pattern, he says, is paradoxically flexible and dynamic, yet conservative and "haunted by the guilt and fear of racial conflict" (xxi). His book attempts to reconcile this deeper set of cultural patterns with an era of "unregulated American version of capitalism." Each succeeding chapter—with titles including "New Politics," "New Immigrants," "New Women," "New South, Old Race"—presents discrete respective histories, that Hodgson labors to connect. Ultimately, according to Hodgson, it is the Johnson-era efforts to foster the conditions of equality—specifically desegregation and affirmative action—that led to the breaking point for the Liberal coalition, sowing seeds of our current political culture. He argues that profound cultural and demographic changes in the last 30 years in the United States have ultimately shaped the divisive political atmosphere that allowed this economic inequality. We are reminded, for instance, that recent immigration trends are reshaping the [End Page 181] political map and that the women's movement was both divided by class (he emphasizes the "language of esteem" that prevailed as opposed to "wages and childcare" (156) and met with a conservative backlash in the 70s. And conservative forces have won out in the end, using populist rhetoric and the quiescent corporate media culture to their advantage. But weaving together these cultural and economic threads, or assigning cause and effect, is harder to achieve. Hodgson reiterates the familiar story of post-1968 America. Part of the Princeton's Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America series, Hodgson does little to engage more recent scholarship in that series—Robert O. Self's American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, for example—that reaches for the origins of postwar political culture in the period well before 1968, and partly in the limitations of the very Cold War Liberalism that Hodgson implicitly celebrates. The core of Hodgson's argument can be found in chapters titled "New Technology," "New Economics" and "New Society." In these sections, Hodgson provides ample evidence regarding the rise of structured inequality. He demolishes the accepted wisdom about the 1990s boom as raising all boats, detailing the diminished power of unions, the shifting tax burden to the poor, and what he describes as the "myth" of the new economy and especially the "unique, liberating power of unregulated free-market capitalism" (108). In a similarly deflating chapter on the "New Technology," Hodgson counters the "myth" that the computer revolution was a product of "entrepreneurial capitalism" (64) and instead correctly traces the "revolution" to Cold War era "big government." After cutting through the now painfully obvious free-market hype of the last decades, Hodgson's chapter on the "New Society" is the most persuasive, linking inequality with concrete spatial changes in the last 50 years: namely, suburbanization. Here too Hodgson might linger longer on the origins of this geography, a product of Liberalism's promise for white middle class Americans at the expense of...

Islamic higher education and social cohesion in Indonesia

This study explores the role of public Islamic higher education in promoting better relations between various religious communities in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Based on field research conducted between December 2005 and March 2006, it documents how progressive Islamic education leaders have advanced a tradition of critical intellectualism in efforts toward the “renewal” of Islamic thought. This report provides an analysis of how this tradition has served as a foundation for educators seeking to promote democratization and address issues of social cohesion. It examines some of the core values expressed by educational leaders as they have aspired to transform the most prominent State Institutes for Islamic Studies (IAIN) into genuine universities. The study also highlights the conservative backlash against public Islamic higher education and other purveyors of progressive ideas within Indonesian society.

Unsettling Calls for National Unity: The Pedagogy of Experimental Multiethnic Literatures

In the wake of the events at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, calls for national unity in the United States have too often constructed a homogenous and narrow national identity that violently others multiethnic voices and experiences. Combined with the War on Terror, the increasing militarization along the US/Mexico border, and recent challenges to bilingual education and affirmative action, this political trend reflects a deep anxiety over US national identity. Moreover, recent attacks on multicultural curriculum in higher education have come in the interconnected form of the corporatization of higher education, budget cuts in humanities programs, and a conservative backlash against diversity requirements housed in ethnic studies; gender and women's studies; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programs. In this climate, multiethnic literatures such as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La The New Mestiza, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Toni Morrison's Beloved offer invaluable potential to interrogate hegemonic constructs of the nation and reconceptualize both nation and national identity as a contestatory and changing set of categories. In my experience teaching these works, students express a kind of cognitive dissonance when reading such texts. As students perform the myriad shifting reading practices that the texts require, they hone productive tools with which to negotiate the different and sometimes conflicting responses to the literature that circulate within any given classroom space. These same tools can prove invaluable to re-reading narratives of national identity. This essay will first examine how the aesthetics of select multiethnic texts disrupt hegemonic constructs of the nation, and then will explore some pedagogical practices through which students engaged the dissonance produced by those contestatory narratives. One of the key issues this body of works raises is, of course, how multiethnic literature gets defined. In the larger field of literary studies, writing often conventional form, disrupts linear narrative and temporal sequence, mixes mediums and genres, shifts between characters' perspectives and voices, and self-reflexively comments on its form. Many of these aesthetic traits are also found in multiethnic literature, but the latter often questions the degree to which these characteristics are experimental since what breaks conventional form depends on how conventional form itself is defined, a definition which is shaped by historic and contemporary racial politics (see Morrison, Playing). Multiethnic literatures often reveal how meaning production is deeply embedded in the shifting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation. Such aesthetics, with a great deal of attention devoted to form, allow for the kind of cross-cultural pedagogy that Bonnie TuSmith calls for, in which multiethnic works are taught as works of art while also being situated within the specific cultural traditions from which they emerge, thus avoiding the reductive homogenization of multiethnic literary and cultural traditions (TuSmith 5). For instance, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza blurs established boundaries between theory and creative writing, poetry, essay, and autobiography to directly illustrate the thematic links among aesthetics, identity, and nation formation. Anzaldua's imagery illustrates that the violent splitting between cultures and nations is produced though international politics that have very real effects on the mestiza body. (1) Constant textual references to the US and Mexico, San Diego and Tijuana, mark the borders as more than internal divisions of personal identity, but also as external ones between nations that have material consequences for those inhabiting the borderlands: the border is a 1,950 mile-long open wound that not only divide[s] a pueblo, a culture, but also harshly divides the narrator, staking rods in [her flesh] (Anzaldua 2). …

Children of Color: Psychological Interventions With Culturally Diverse Youth, 2nd ed.

Children of Color: Psychological Interventions With Culturally Diverse Youth, 2nd ed.

Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (review)

Reviewed by: Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Eileen Cleere (bio) Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck; pp. xiii + 272. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004, $55.00. Raising the Dust takes its title from a passage in Sarah Grand's 1894 "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" where an extended metaphor of housecleaning is used to illustrate a distinctly female approach to social reform. "It is for us to set the human household in order," Grand explains, "to see that all is clean and sweet and comfortable for the men who are fit to help us make a home in it" (qtd. in Sutton-Ramspeck 23). Within a definition of "household" that is expansive enough to accommodate at least the British nation and its larger Empire, cleansing rituals certainly take on a more public function than we might normally perceive, and it is here that Sutton-Ramspeck develops her argument. Rather than evince covert antifeminism or conservative backlash, housekeeping tropes and terminology in the literary productions of Grand, Mary Ward, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulate a vision of domestic cleanliness as a form of civic participation and even activism. "Literary housekeeping" is the term Sutton-Ramspeck coins to describe an understanding of female domestic labor that exceeds the boundaries of the individual household, "sweeping away" traditional divisions between public and private, personal and political, artistic and practical, and even British and American (3). As Sutton-Ramspeck herself notes, the explosion of these dichotomies is hardly new practice in literary studies, and recent feminist criticism in particular has consistently pointed out the inadequacies and contradictions endemic to such categorization. But by reminding us that home economics, as a discipline, was very feminist in its origins, and was designed to reveal the fundamental link between the economy of the middle-class household and the economy of the nation, Sutton-Ramspeck manages to take a fresh look at housekeeping as a paradigmatic feminist activity. Sweeping away such boundaries also enables her to focus exclusively on Ward, Grand, and Gilman, three female writers not usually discussed in the same study, and encourages readers to understand "literary housekeeping" as both a genre of literature and a deconstructive tool. As Sutton- Ramspeck points out, the most productive periods in the lives of each of these writers roughly coincide, not only with each other, but with the eugenics movement, the "house beautiful" movement, the rise of print advertising, and the decline in available domestic labor for hire. These cultural events provide interdisciplinary context for Sutton- Ramspeck's carefully researched argument that all three writers fundamentally believed [End Page 477] that women's natural talents for household tasks like sewing, cooking, cleaning, and mothering could successfully solve a variety of social problems, from food adulteration, to bad sanitation, to sexually transmitted disease. Sutton-Ramspeck's goal is to demonstrate that these writers participated in the same cultural project, and she organizes her book to promote a sense of continuity rather than difference, devoting chapters to various aspects of housekeeping rather than to individual authors. While richly productive in some respects, this strategy fosters a degree of repetition in the volume and leads her to diminish salient distinctions between English and American contexts. It also causes her thesis to wane whenever it proves difficult to get these three diverse voices on the same page. To highlight their differences, Sutton- Ramspeck identifies three "approaches" in her literary housekeepers' work: the parabolic, the exemplary, and the dialogic. While Grand inspires through parable, and Gilman through modeling or "example," Ward unveils her political interests through the "clash of ideologies" found in dialogic writing (23). This classification of Ward reveals some of the real difficulties involved in including her in this study: she is the most unlikely member of the threesome, primarily because her status as a feminist is undercut both by her anti-suffrage stance and by the disappointing marriages that often conclude her novels. On the other hand, Ward's lifelong activism allows Sutton-Ramspeck to chart her involvement, interestingly if unevenly, in cultural movements with which we...

Patriarchy in Transition: Women and the Changing Family in the Middle East

The family is perhaps the only societal institution that is conceptualized as “essential” and “natural”, and its importance is emphasized by social conservatives across cultures. In this article I examine Islamic discourses on the family, their relationship to patriarchal social structures and neopatriarchal states, and implications for women’s legal status and social positions. Attention is then drawn to the contradictions and challenges that patriarchy and the family have encountered from economic development, the demographic transition, legal reform, and women’s increasing educational attainment in countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I argue that the combination of declining fertility and changes to the structure of the family, along with the conservative backlash and women’s activism, are signs of the crisis of Middle Eastern patriarchy.

Chicana/o Activism and Education: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The Mexican American community has been involved in a struggle to improve the educational conditions of their children ever since the US invasion and continued occupation of Mexican territory (Gallegos, 2000). This struggle includes the successful litigation of court cases against segregation a decade prior to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (Moreno, 1999). But, perhaps the biggest event surrounding Education was during the early Chicana/o movimientos in the 1960s. An estimated 10,000 Chicana/o students walked out of classes on March 3, 1968 in East Los Angeles to protest the unequal conditions of their education (San Miguel, 1996; Solorzano and Delgado Bernal, 2001). Since then Chicana/o activism in Education has focused on the rights of Latina/o students, especially non-English speaking and migrant students and the right to bilingual education programs. Increased efforts to integrate Latina/o students, equal distribution of educational funding sources, and the constant struggle against alienating schooling practices such as tracking, standardized testing, the whitestream (Grande, 2000) curriculum, and access to higher education (Gandara, 1995) have also been important issues. This special issue of The High School Journal is dedicated to this struggle and legacy for social justice and change. Although arguments for a color-blind society claim that racial prejudice and discrimination are a part of the past, more realistic and critical examinations attest that race and discrimination are still big problems in US society (Baker, 1998). In fact, the conservative backlash unleashed by the Bush dynasty has reversed a lot of the gains of the civil rights movements creating a state of siege against minority communities and the poor at home and abroad. Corporate greed and neoliberal, market-oriented policies continuously push for educational changes that aggravate the racial and socio-economic inequities in society as do vouchers, charter schools, and high-stakes testing accountability that attempt to privatize and quantify education. More recently, to the amazement of many, proactive Chicana/o high school and college student organizations for community empowerment and advocacy such as Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA-Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan), have been attacked as racist and to the extreme even as terrorists for working for social justice (Gonzales & Rodriguez, 2003). During the recent gubernatorial race in California Lieutenant General Cruz Bustamante was chastised by conservative opponents for his early activism in MEChA, who likened MEChA to the Ku Klux Klan (Sifuentes, 2003). Irresponsible accusations like these, although aggravating, do call for self-reflection as we re/consider our recent past as Chicanas/os and plan for our future. This introduction intends to accomplish several goals. First to re-call what Chicana/o activism has been in education and what the outcomes of that activism have accomplished. Second, it is important to re-call what the conservative backlashes against the larger Latina/o community have redressed and how those redresses influence how we re/think activism for social justice. Third, I focus on the contributions this special issue hopes to make in tracing some of the legacies and accomplishments of Chicana/o activism as well as illustrate how the locus of practice concerning activism has changed and what that might mean for informed future action. Chicana/o Activism and Education Chicana/o identity officially arose within the context of the social movements of the 1960s. In an effort to self-identify and in response to both the material and symbolic oppression and subjugation of people of Mexican descent, the Chicana/o movimientos emerged. The Chicana/o movimientos were by no means a unified social movement given the large geophysical area of the Southwest and the diverse leadership and points of contention and struggles of its early founders. …

Scandal Writ Large in the Wake of the French Revolution: The Case of Amalia Holst

If feminist hopes during the French Revolution were betrayed by the wide gap between egalitarian rhetoric and actual gains for women, they were all but quashed following the Terror, when a pan-European conservative backlash snuffed out public debate over improving woman's status and social conditions. Amalia Holst was one of few women willing to put her reputation at stake to rekindle this debate. In her book-length treatise on advancing women's education, Holst traverses a precarious tightrope between feisty rhetoric and cultural accommodation. To walk with her is to witness a dazzling display of innovative strategies that would, she hoped, both inspire contemporaries to take action and deflect those quick to censure her as scandalous. (CSS)

Women on the Edge: New Perspectives on Women in the Petrine Haustafel

In October 1998 an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times detailing the difficulty that some mainstream churches have when dealing with domestic abuse. In the article, Nancy Nason-Clark of the University of New Brunswick noted that although domestic violence occurs no more often in families than in nonreligious families, religious families be more vulnerable in confronting the problem because of biblical beliefs about the honor of suffering and sacrifice, the premium placed on family unity, the dominant role of men in many traditions and the creed of transformation and forgiveness that could let perpetrators off the hook too easily.1 In one story, a woman told her pastor that her husband woke her up at two in the morning and started beating her with a metal tricycle. She was advised to go back, be a kinder wife; then you will win him to Christ because that's what the Bible says.2 That pastor clearly was referring to 1 Pet 3:1-2, where the author explains to Christian wives that their unbelieving husbands may be won over without a word by their wives' conduct when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.3 But although the advice in 1 Peter seemed to fit the situation perfectly, the pastor's use of that text was a misappropriation of NT ideas because the network of discourses that prompted the original advice is no longer in place.4 In addition, the women addressed in the Petrine Haustafel deserve closer analysis; because the exhortations have received so much attention, the women themselves have rarely been discussed. As women negotiating problematic familial and social boundaries, they offer a valuable example of an ancient hermeneutic of resistance. Although most of the letter focuses on the causes, meaning, and proper response to suffering, the authors summary of how to behave while suffering is centered in the Haustafel, or household code, found in 1 Pet 2:18-3:11. It is within that pericope that the exhortations to Christian women are located. Certainly it is a significant piece of Christian parenesis, but the Petrine Haustafel has quite often been lost in studies of the Christian Haustafeln as a group, as such codes appear in Col 3:18-4:1 and Eph 5:21-6:9 and in extracanonical Christian writings such as Polycarp's Philippians. Previous studies of the Haustafeln have focused on the origin of their form, and the earliest modern interpretation was that the NT codes were a derivation of Stoic duty lists, which the Christians had lightly Christianized.9 Others have since argued for the Christian, rabbinic, or Hellenistic Jewish origins of the Haustafel form. All of these previous studies conclude that the meaning of the content of the Haustafeln is based on the origin of the form, and nearly all conclude that the NT writers used the codes to encourage stability within Christian households.10 This consensus is important because recent feminist interpretations of 1 Peter have used Balch s thesis too simplistically to argue that the exhortations to women and slaves in the Petrine Haustafel were purposefully included to encourage them to behave in ways that were acceptable to Greco-Roman patriarchs (particularly silent submission), in order to prevent household conflict and resulting local persecution. For feminist critics, Batch's theory supports their own opinion that all of the household codes (in Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Titus, and 1 Peter) represent the pervasive conservative backlash among the first-century male Christian leadership.14 While Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza recognized that the strategy Balch hypothesized would have been ineffective in actually rescuing the reputations of disruptive Christians or calming divided Greco-Roman households, she agreed that the encouragement of assimilation was indeed the point of the Petrine Haustafel and that the pattern of submission sought to lessen the tension between the Christian community and the pagan patriarchal household. …

Title IX: Forced to Wrestle up the Backside

Many doors of opportunity in educational endeavors opened for women following passage of Title IX (1). In 1971, year before enactment of law, women earned only one percent of dental degrees, nine percent of medical degrees and seven percent of law degrees. By 2000 number of women completing these professional programs grew to 40 percent of dental degrees, 43 percent of medical degrees, 46 percent of law degrees. Moreover, 44 percent of doctoral degrees went to women in year 2000, up from 14 percent in 1971 (Digest of Education Statistics, 2001). (2) Yet these impressive educational gains for women have not been focus of public attention regarding Title IX. Rather, impact of Title IX on scholastic athletics has dominated public discourse since passage of law. More specifically, women's success in education has met with a conservative backlash (3) focusing on Title IX and division of resources within collegiate athletics. Whereas Title IX became law thirty years ago, issue of Title IX compliance in athletics remains as hotly contested today as it was in 1972. Most recently, debate has been framed as an either/or division of resources between men's 'minor' (4) sports and women's athletics with Title IX as crux of argument. According to those who view Title IX as a threat to men's minor sports, rise in participation numbers in women's sport not only correlates to a decrease in men's 'minor' sport participation numbers, but is also cause of that decrease. In response, women's sport advocates argue that relationship between men's minor sport and women's sport is a spurious one with confounding factor being development of a big business sport model within collegiate programs. This model is reflected in escalating costs of men's football and basketball along with an 'arms' race for bigger and more elaborate facilities. skewed spending within athletic departments has not only contributed to decreases in opportunities in men's minor sport, but is also reason that women continue to receive less than their full share of athletic pie. In relation to wrestling, issue of Title IX has become more complicated in last decade, as women's grappling participation has grown. focus of this paper is a critical analysis of publicly mediated debates over issues surrounding Title IX and athletics with an attempt to understand cultural climate and far-reaching consequences for women. In this analysis, I examine public discourse surrounding Title IX and wrestling from 1972 through 2002. Sources include daily newspapers, Sports Illustrated, wrestling periodicals, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Using a critical cultural studies approach, I read media representations with an eye to deconstructing underlying intersecting lines of power relationships within broader social context. These mediated debates carry significance far beyond determining allocations of resources between men and women within athletic departments. Ultimately results and tone of debate have potential to bring changes to law that will carry far-reaching effects for gender relations starting with education and extending into professional realms women have accessed through increased opportunities in education. While mediated debates over Title IX may not dictate what people think, they do have power to determine what they think about. To put it simply: mass media have become core systems for distribution of ideology (Gitlin, 1980, p. 2). processed image, Title IX in this case, becomes the thing for a public that has few alternative sources of information, or none at all, for a perspective outside mainstream media. The media--at least in liberal capitalist society--take account of certain popular currents and pressures, symbolically incorporating them, repackaging and distributing them throughout society (Gitlin, 1980, p. …

BOOK REVIEW: Laurel Brake.PRINT IN TRANSITION, 1850-1910: STUDIES IN MEDIA AND BOOK HISTORY. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001.

With Print in Transition, 1850-1910, Laurel Brake makes a strong case for the central role book and publishing history can play in a theoretically informed approach to English literary and cultural studies. The Yellow Book, for example, has long functioned as a reference point for decadence prior to Oscar Wilde's arrest and trials in 1895 and conservative backlash against dissident sexualities afterward. There is some truth to this assumption, but by reading the Yellow Book horizontally—in tandem with contemporary periodicals and the journal's immediate predecessors—Brake constructs a less bifurcated, more nuanced account. The journal competed against rivals in the New Journalism market through sensationalism (for example, in Arthur Symons's "Stella Maris" or Aubrey Beardsley's drawings) even while emulating the distinguished quarterlies of old in its publication schedule and the aesthetic book in terms of its illustration, print layout, and heft. Even in pricing structure the Yellow Book crossed multiple markets: each issue was more expensive than most periodicals, inviting a high culture audience, but cheaper than a one-volume novel and hence a bargain to other consumers. As in aestheticism generally, high art and commodity culture met in the pages of the Yellow Book throughout its run.

The swing of the pendulum: the detraditionalisation of the regulation of sexuality and intimacy in Belgium (1973–2003)

The current transformation of sex legislation in liberal democracies is usually described in terms of growing permissiveness or, on the contrary, as the result of a conservative backlash. A review of the changes in the Belgian sex legislation during the past three decades, however, demonstrates that both models are inadequate to understand this transformation. Indeed, in the 1973–1989 period various Acts resulted in a liberalisation of sexual behaviour in Belgium, while from 1989 onwards new legislative restrictions were introduced. While traditional regulations referred to a vague notion of public morality, these new measures explicitly aimed at protecting victims of sexual violence, e.g., minors or prostitutes from Third World countries. This new regulatory regime can therefore be considered as an example of ‘detraditionalised’ (Giddens) regulation of sexuality: new rules can only be considered as legitimate if they are congruent with the fundamental values of contemporary, individualised and rationalised societies.

Lost for words?: Brazilian liberationism in the 1990s

Lost for Words? explores rise and decline of progressive Catholic grassroots activism and its drive for social justice and democratic change in four low-income neighborhoods in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Ottmann focuses on obstacles faced by poor who took seriously claim that the people were to transform Brazilian society bottom up. He follows their travails through periods of democratization, mass unemployment, and conservative backlash within Church. Goetz Frank Ottmann moves beyond purely political analysis to record how residents and progressive Catholic activists were drawn into a struggle for a juster society, and how this movement began to unravel even before it reached its peak in early 1980s. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, and drawing on theoretical insights from recent debates on social movements and sociology of religion, he examines how, by early 1990s, liberationist movement had lost its following, lost its allies, failed to achieve its core goals, and seemed to die. Ottmann then shows how in recent years activists have worked to create a new and pragmatic form of religious activism, one that draws on a range of agendas, including Catholic feminism.

Outsiders, Foreigners, and Aliens in Cinematic or Literary Narratives by Bohm, Dische, Dorrie, and Oren

Ongoing heated exchanges on the merits of dual citizenship in the Federal Republic show how difficult it is for many Germans to conceive of their identity in anything other than ethnic terms. By inaugurating dual citizenship in certain cases, however, the parliament and its constituents have signaled a readiness to explore other concepts of identity less concerned with lineage. Yet the political successes of a conservative backlash against such ideas demonstrate that a sizable portion of the population still retains a desire for a stable sense of ethnic or racial Germanness.1 Although the tradition of constructing identity around a mythical Germanic past or blood is yielding to the reality of Germany's increasingly multicultural social make-up (Dirke; Jarausch; Zeit; Leggewie/$Senocak 131-36), almost half of youth claim to be suspicious of (Williams) and some assert the primacy of their own ideas of violently and adamantly. This combination of anxiety about and yearning for a definitive identity is increasing at a time when changing laws and demographics in Germany make it more and more difficult to pinpoint who is and who is not.2 Exactly this quandary has intrigued writers and film directors in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1960s, and growing numbers have been probing the complexities of identity politics through various figurations of the German and the foreigner.3 A recurring literary and cinematic trope used to enact evolving ideas about Germans and non-Germans in the FRG is the figure who is neither the one nor the other. In films, novels, and stories, characters whose identities fluctuate between German and foreign offer contesting notions of what means by challenging the very desirability of being German. This essay investigates a selection of four such challenges. In Irene Dische's short story Eine Judin fair Charles Allen (1989) [The Jewess in the original], Aras Oren's novella Bitte nix Polizei (1981), Hark Bohm's film Yasemin (1987), and Doris Dorrie's film Keiner liebt mich (1994) the figure of the German becomes just as much an outsider as the ostensible foreigner and vice versa.4 The diverse backgrounds of the authors and directors preclude the possibility of pigeonholing the questions they address into neat categories that concern only specific groups. Dische frequently populates her fiction with culturally disoriented, urban figures and explores stereotypes about Germans and Jews. Oren's work focuses on the difficulties Germans and Turks in Berlin confront in their attempts to negotiate intercultural differences. Hark Bohm has created numerous films about young people and the difficult process of maturation (Gollub/Stern 25), often involving youth of different ethnicities. Dorrie has achieved renown for her cinematic probing of gender and multicultural issues. Yet the representative narratives analyzed here all culminate in different scenes of emotional or physical (dis)union to illustrate the disastrous consequences of privileging one aspect of self over others. These unsuccessful couplings expose a broad range of constantly and often violently shifting, interrelated positions between the boundaries of and nonGerman, of insider and outsider. In these narratives, the intermediary figure who is also inscribed as Jewish, Turkish, American, or African, prevents any settled sense of self from permeating the story.5 Encounters between such figures and textualized mainstream Germans and/or foreigners in the FRG set in motion a dynamic of attraction and repulsion that alters the central position the figures occupy, a dynamic with repercussions for the positions of the non-mainstream figures. These attempts at cultural redefinition are at the same time efforts to reconceptualize an increasingly blurred German/foreigner duality without resorting to a relativity that would deprive Germanness of any meaning. …

Competing Conceptions of the First Ladyship: Public Responses to Betty Ford's 60 Minutes Interview

Has the debate about women's roles in U.S. society allowed first ladies greater latitude in choosing the role(s) they will perform? To answer this question, two points on the spectrum of possible first lady roles–“first political wife” and “wife”–were identified. Public correspondence responding to Betty Ford's 60 Minutes interview was then studied. Ford's critics and supporters each articulated coherent ideologies of gender and presidential power, which were congruent with the theoretical constructs of first political wife and wife. In this instance, the role of first political wife mobilized more critics than supporters and influenced campaign strategies throughout the second half of the Ford administration.

‘The New Woman’: Lady Macbeth and sexual politics in the Stalinist era

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.

The Fall of an empire, the birth of a nation: national identities in Russia

Origin and power - Russian national myths and the legitimation of social order, Elena Hellberg-Hirn orthodox identity at Russian holy places, Chris J. Chulo in quest of values - religion and nationality in the early Soviet period, Arto Luukkanen nationalism and internationalism - how did the Bolsheviks cope with national sentiments?, Timo Vihavainen ethnicity and nationalism in contemporary Russian ethnography, Kaija Keikkinen Russian in the 1990s - manifestations of a Conservative backlash philosophy, Thomas Parland the problem of identities in the Baltic countries, Ralph Tuchenhagen the fall of an empire, the birth of a nation - perceptions of the new Russian national identity, Timo Piirainen Russia's minorities and the Soviet legacy, Jeremy Smith.