Innocence Of Youth Research Articles

Rubble and Rebirth: Postwar Rejuvenation and the Erasure of History

Abstract This article weaves together different postwar moments in the first half of the twentieth century to investigate how rejuvenationist narratives of a “fresh start” helped societies across the divides of geography and ideology to recuperate from the ravages of war. Apart from initiating boys and girls into ideologically specific and gendered regimes of citizenship, the older generation crafted reverse rites of passage to absolve themselves of responsibility for violent conflicts that had resulted in unspeakable death and suffering. Youth organizations became key sites for making young bodies useful to the dual task of regenerating war-torn nations and exonerating those whose actions had contributed to war in the first place. The need for acquitting the old was particularly pressing in light of disputes about who was to blame for the loss of young lives—disputes that often carried the tonality of ageism rather than party politics. If recapturing the innocence of youth became tantamount to deflecting questions of guilt and accountability, then bonding with youth allowed powerful men (less so women) who bore the scars of struggle to engage in deliberate acts of erasure. The disremembering of age and history endowed the ruling classes with seemingly innocuous possibilities, especially the possibility to acquire a clean slate on which to forge new collective identities within the redemptive framework of youth. Just as history is distorted by memory, rejuvenation opened up new futures while giving license to forgetting troubling pasts.

Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s by Victoria M. Grieve

Reviewed by: Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s by Victoria M. Grieve Joel P. Rhodes Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s. By Victoria M. Grieve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. x + 206 pp. Cloth $74. Unsatisfied with nostalgic tendencies that can limit our perceptions of American childhood in the 1950s to simply reflexive duck-and-cover civil defense drills or baby boomer sentimentality, Victoria Grieve thoughtfully examines the neglected ways youth were politicized and mobilized as little cold warriors in the global contest between the capitalist West and communist East. Grieve's work advances along the path of Marilyn Irvin Holt's 2014 book Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960, strengthening the case for the 1950s as a dynamic era in children's history. American children were not simply complacent victims menaced by Soviet indoctrination and the specter of nuclear war; rather, in Grieve's view, young people exercised pronounced agency in waging Cold War, demonstrating levels of civic engagement and defense work generally associated with the home front in World War II. As the US harnessed every resource at the republic's disposal, culture emerged as a theater of battle; over this contested terrain Grieve traces how childhood was weaponized to favorably influence foreign opinion and demonstrate American superiority abroad. Public and private interests enlisted American youth in new and unprecedented degrees of public diplomacy: trick-or-treating for UNICEF, exchanging original art, photo albums, and pen-pal correspondence with children around the world, donating books to restock war-torn European libraries and used clothing for refugees, or various types of people-to-people exchanges. In these roles, Grieve argues, American children operated as important ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of their nation. Akin to Margaret Peacock's 2014 volume Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, one of Grieve's chief arguments centers on the inherent paradox of innocence when childhood is politicized. Just as youthful innocence needed to be protected—a powerful rationale for containing communism—so too did that imagined innocence constitute the basis for these political activities on the state's behalf. But because adults preferred to see young diplomats as apolitical and free from state sponsorship (as opposed to the perception of brainwashed Soviet children), such youthful volunteerism was framed as an authentic gesture fostering world peace. [End Page 155] The five core chapters begin with the in loco parentis role of comic books in socializing children to America's new obligations as global superpower. Grieve sees The Lone Ranger specifically as a useful allegory for modeling "benevolent supremacy," a vision of the US as savior and civilizer, not conqueror or colonizer. While the idea of postwar children making meaning out of Old West narratives found in television, movies, and literature is well founded, I suggest an alternate childhood reading of the popular Western genre in view of events in the sixties. Perhaps, as writer Tom Engelhardt posits, the ultimate victory of normally peaceful but outnumbered "good guys" shooting it out against ruthless "bad guys" could be understood by children as justification for the winner's use of violence and validation of his virtue. Grieve's most convincing work focuses on children's involvement in several so-called "camouflaged" propaganda efforts, where governmental agencies, semiprivate organizations, and individuals indirectly collaborated in disseminating pro-American messages overseas and offsetting more overt Soviet information operations. The chapter on international, child-to-child artwork exchange programs uses the group Art for World Friendship (AWF) as an excellent case study for the ways in which the universal language of childhood creativity functioned to simultaneously cultivate international goodwill while showcasing American prosperity. Little Cold Warriors similarly breaks new ground in the chapter examining the Advertising Council's promotional campaigns as a type of citizenship training, particularly that nonprofit, public relations organization's Crusade for Freedom. In prolific, pro-business messages commonly targeting American schoolchildren, the Advertising Council's gospel of commercial market capitalism familiarized 1950s youth with a fundamental Cold War notion: patriotism demanded consumerism. As Grieve makes clear, the Crusade for Freedom—one of the era's many all-American contests and...

Suffering and Tears: Authenticity and Student Volunteerism in Postreform China

AbstractThis article examines a conundrum in my ethnographic fieldwork with Chinese university students who volunteered in service trips to rural communities: why did participants volunteer to suffer and to cry? This article explains students’ quest for hardship and tears in relation to emerging desires for authenticity in China. It discusses how the political state and student volunteers co‐constructed the peculiar expressions of these desires. As authentic emotions came to the forefront in students’ understanding of meaningful engagement, they diluted the political connotation of volunteerism and consequently undermined the state's moral authority as the “lead volunteer.” This created the room for students to align the definition of responsible citizenship with authentic commitment and youthful innocence. Delineating the paradoxes and obstacles that volunteers encountered in their quests, this article problematizes the potential and limits of authenticity in transforming the foundations of sociability and moral leadership in postreform China.本文通过大学生对情绪表达的追求分析志愿活动在中国的冒起。作者跟随大学生往赴农村「支教」, 发现志愿者都渴慕最苦最累的体验, 以及由心而发的泪水。这些追求反映了年轻人对社会上种种造假和功利主义的不满。志愿者以汗水和泪水明志, 宣告自己参与志愿工作不为名利报酬, 只为满腔热诚所使。这种热血主导的志愿精神对参与者的道德观带来什么冲击, 如何造就年轻人对社会状况的反思? [Authenticity, Emotion, Youth, Volunteerism, China]

Analysis of medical student's book reports on Cronin's The Citadel: would young doctors give up ideals for prestige and wealth?

Purpose:The purpose of this study is to find what medical students think the reward for their future work should be and whether they would keep their ideals or abandon them for prestige and wealth by analyzing the book reports of Cronin’s The Citadel.Methods:Participants were 50 medical students of junior class. A month before the classroom lecture, the book and digital video disk were provided. Students had discussions in groups of seven and wrote book reports which include answers of three questions.Results:Regarding what should be the reward for the medical doctor, two-thirds of students (66.7%) answered with spiritual compensation, while one-third (33.3%) chose material reward. In the situation presented to Manson, three-fifths (60.0%) answered they would keep their ideals (idealist), while the remaining two-fifths (40.0%) decided they would abandon them. Less than one-third of students (30.0%) answered they would reveal the corruptions of the doctor’s society, while two-thirds (64.0%) would not.Conclusion:The larger number of idealists who prefer spiritual reward rather than a material reward represents the innocence of youth as in portrayed in The Citadel.

The Shepherdess’ Progress: From Favart to Boucher to Sèvres

Summary A pair of Sèvres porcelain figurines, The Flute Lesson and The Grape Eaters, are known to be based upon scenes from a theatrical pantomime written by Charles-Simon Favart (1710–1792). A shepherd and shepherdess from the play were illustrated by François Boucher (1703–1770), in paintings that in turn inspired porcelain figures designed around 1752. The porcelains have been regarded as strictly imitative, without crediting the sculptor with any originality. The author seeks to challenge that assumption, by revisiting the original shepherd and shepherdess from Favart's play and analyzing in detail how the painter Boucher and the unknown sculptor of Sèvres provided their own interpretations. It will further be argued that the characterization of the shepherdess evolves, from the play to the painting to the sculpture, from youthful innocence to a more overt erotic complaisance.

Four Poems

Four Poems RACHEL HADAS Troys In medias res, or call it a beginning, here is Helen running away from her dull husband. No, abducted—violation that meant war, ten years of siege and slaughter all for beauty. Then victory or defeat: at last, an end? This war’s stories do not ever end. They peter out, loop back to the beginning. Greek heroes who had failed to win this beauty but sworn to defend whoever married Helen (they must have known he’d lose her), went to war, returning home victorious, yes? No. Because who finally triumphed? No one. Muddled start, murky middle, opaque end. What opened and then stanched the wounds of war? It’s tempting to go back to some beginning or middle. Ten years in, a homesick Helen calls herself “dogface,” damning her own beauty in Homer, whose rendition has a beauty that trumps all other versions we know. The watermark on every page spells Helen. Was she at Troy at the end? Was there a mistake from the beginning? Did Greeks and Trojans fight a ten-year war arion 24.3 winter 2017 for reasons that are themselves a cause of war? Amidst competing story lines, seek beauty in the apple, the contest—back to that beginning— but not in clarity. Each yes has a no. Motives drown in indeterminate endings. Always the name of Helen glimmers balefully. Greek puns on the name of Helen as hell, destruction, disasters of war. The heroine survives all kinds of endings and comes home cloaked in the same radiant beauty. Or did she never leave home? Did a phantom—no, press replay, and we’re back at the beginning. Achilles? Iphigenia? All those others? Beauty? Yes. Beginnings? Oh yes. Endings? Too many. None. Helen. Always a war. four poems 14 In Aulis: One Version We live our lives along the in-between. There is no clear-cut line, there is no border to demarcate the unseen from the seen. Here comes the princess, escorted by the queen. Step down from the chariot, my daughter. We live our lives along the in-between. Iphigenia eagerly jumps down. Let me go ahead and hug my father. Between the unseen and the seen youthful innocence and beauty run. This sleeping baby is her little brother. We live our lives along the in-between. In one of several sequels, having grown into a man, Orestes kills his mother. Between the seen and the unseen, before the scarlet setting of the sun, someone will lead the princess to an altar. We live our lives along the in-between zone that divides the seen from the unseen. Rachel Hadas 15 Cyan Beard of Poseidon, prow of a boat, a wave: changeable, nameless color of the sea which scooped up by the handful has no color but washes earth with its profundity and power, its hue wordless until this Greek word for deep blue. More diluted, blue of sky, of eye? Blue of the blood draining as we die so that cyanosis is a symptom? Default: the stuff we move through, bath of an element sweet and salty too. Call it cyan. Imagine the gradations: blue to blue to blue. Cyan-beard Poseidon dove beneath the cyan waves on which a cyan-prowed boat plowed gaily over the white foam toward home. four poems 16 Old Fortress, Corfu; First Cemetery, Athens A thin moon’s rising in a sky darkening now, still pearly-clear. Bats in the twilight wheel and veer. The stately pile past which we stroll— the British officers’ barracks once— has morphed into the music school (open window; grumble of percussion, and woodwinds squeal) of the same university we visited this morning. In a hall on the other side of town (the lecture topic was translation), the Department of Interpretation is housed in what was an asylum. The quad where inmates took the air, a modest green, is now a square where students sit and smoke and text. One purpose blends into the next. To retrofit seems Corfiot: barracks and madhouse into school; palace into art museum. What changes and what stays the same? Constants: the moon, the bay, the bats. Perched on...

The Other Side of the Sea by Louis-Philippe Dalembert, and: Memory at Bay by Évelyne Trouillot

Other Side of Sea. By Louis-Philippe Dalembert. Translated by Robert H. McCormick Jr., with foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. ISBN-10: 0813936470. 121 pp. $22.50 paperback.Memory at Bay. By Evelyne Trouillot. Translated by Paul Curtis Daw, with afterword by Jason Herbeck. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. ISBN-10: 0813938090. 152 pp. $24.50 paperback.Review by Toni Pressley-SanonThe Other Side of Sea, by Louis-Philippe Dalembert (2014), and Memory at Bay, by Evelyne Trouillot (2015), are two of latest additions to growing list of translations of Caribbean and African literature from French into English through University of Virginia Press's C ARAF Books series. I echo writer Edwidge Danticat who, in her foreword to Other Side of Sea, remarks that she is very grateful for this development (vii). Indeed, it is quite a gift to have these two stellar examples of Haiti's rich and powerful literary tradition now available to English-speaking readers.The novels are haunted by specters of three critical moments in Haitian history: nineteen-year occupation by US marines, Parsley Massacre in Dominican Republic in 1937, and, most strongly, reign of terror orchestrated first by Francois Papa Doc Duvalier and then by his son, Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier. two narratives are equally poignant, penned as they were by masters of literary form.Louis-Philippe Dalembert, author of a number of literary works of diverse genres, was born in Haiti in 1962 in midst of Duvalier regime, and spent his childhood and early adulthood under its shadow. Other Side of Sea is his third novel. First published as LAutre face de la mer in 1998, it is related by three primary voices: Grannie, her grandson Jonas, and an omniscient narrator. narrative is an extended meditation on multiple meanings of Haitian expression Idtbodlo-the other side of water-which refers not only to lands or countries on other side of Atlantic Ocean but also to divide between and death. novel reaches back in Haiti's distant history and memory to a time when Africans were imported to land as enslaved workers and connects this period to theme of twentieth-century exodus that drives narrative. As such, while ostensibly focused on story of Grannie and Jonas, text takes a long-view approach to political, economic, and environmental reasons for and repercussions of migrations/exiles and deaths that haunt it.The first narrative voice is from Grannie, nicknamed Noubot (new boat) because of her childhood love of watching boats arrive and depart from docks near her home and imagining their stories. Although she never travels abroad, name stays with her as a reminder of her youthful innocence: time before the tragedy (19), as she later names massacre in Dominican Republic that she and her family fled. Recalling her time in DR and trauma associated with it, she remarks: The trouble with this story was not so much bitter experience nor other language over there that made us feel more like foreigners. It was rather staying on same land. In short, to not really have left (32).Jonas, other narrative voice, also relates his and, by extension, Grannie's story in first-person. Whereas Grannie's narrative is dominated by her childhood experience of living in and fleeing DR, Jonas's story is preoccupied with migrations of friends and neighbors under Duvaliers. Couched within his narration of both forced and voluntary migrations is story ofjonas's parents, who dared to speak out against regime. In fact, at certain points in novel it is not clear which state of traveling Idtbddlo is being referenced-emigration or death. For example, while dropping off his girlfriend, Maite, at airport, Jonas comments that he wore the mask of a man used to seeing people around him leave, pass from one side to other of sea, of life (105). …

“Would You Die for the Fatherland?”: Disciplining the German Commemorative Body

“Would You Die for the Fatherland?”Disciplining the German Commemorative Body Scott Venters (bio) Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia opens with a lyrical montage of the ruins of the Acropolis slowly breaking into view through a blanket of haze. The heroic sounds of Windt’s and Gronostay’s neo-Wagnerian score function as a docent, leading the viewer to marmoreal visions of the supple Medici Venus and the taut Myron Diskobolus. The latter deliquesces before the eyes to be replaced by the sinewy body of German decathlete Erwin Huber. The antique past is tenderly fleshed out by the German body, and classical Greece is sutured onto the present as an act of commemoration in this documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Yet there was another conversation with antiquity occurring during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, a conversation edited from Riefenstahl’s final cut; this conversation was a more subtle, more circuitous, more tendentiously manipulated dialogue between the Nazis and the ancients that produced an embodied transcript of Foucauldian-defined discipline enacted by the youth of Germany. Along with his fabricated torch-lighting ceremony and its spurious classical origins, the chief architect of the ceremonies, Secretary General of the Organizing Committee Carl Diem, entertained the crowd from forty-nine nations assembled in the newly constructed Olympiastadion with a four-part mass spectacle entitled Olympic Youth. Hans Niedecken-Gebhard, a pupil of Rudolf von Laban, directed an international agglomeration of children between the ages of eleven and eighteen through a series of lavish [End Page 39] displays. The first scene consisted of games and dances culminating in a human formation of the rings on the Olympic flag. Next followed a mass dance titled “Maidenly Grace” in which 2,300 youthful girls danced in circular, liquid motion and then parted to reveal the venerated modern dancer Gret Palucca, gracefully sliding through the steps of a waltz. In the third scene the children of all participating countries marched into the stadium with their respective national flags. But in the final movement this international harmony was shattered by a call to the youth of Germany to sacrifice their lives when the fatherland was in danger. Drilled into a rigidly formal position on the field by the upper ranks of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth), the affirmative answer was reinforced by the unrelenting mass of assembled young bodies beckoned by the Führer. A mock sword battle between professional dancers followed, culminating in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” sung by fifteen hundred voices in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which attempted to reestablish a rapprochement. However, the unsettling call upon the youth to die for Deutschland and the intimations toward war had been made. In just a few years, many would die for or because of the fatherland.1 It is at this performative moment, caught in valorizing official reports published without the benefit of hindsight—when the trained, docile body appears most at odds with the Athenian-Hellenic notion of liberty, when play rubs against war, and when the antinomies of youthful innocence and political ideology become a tangled mass—that disciplinary power is most evident. It is also at this moment—when the corporeality of youth seems completely confined by militaristic discipline, when freedom is coerced from their limbs, and when the romantic oath elicited from the young wears only the mask of voluntarism—that a disturbing call to antiquity is being made. It is in this moment that the hoarse whispers of antiquity mingle with the cries of modernity. Those young, pliant, healthy bodies that would go on to join the SS and gas those deemed adulterated, deformed, and impure—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, the hereditarily ill, and homosexuals—had actually been conditioned into premilitary formation by a complex genealogy that had its roots in a sublimated homoeroticism. In a sense, that very same desire, through a complex historical process, had turned in upon the non-normative “abject” parts of itself. I am referring not to the facile association between the Hellenic Olympics and its original culture’s valorization of same-sex desire but to the distinctly German influence that laid the foundations for Riefenstahl’s...

The Innocence of Youth Can Lead to Life-Threatening Events: A Case Report of Testicular Cancer in Adolescents

Innocence of youth and lack of awareness of danger can sometimes lead to fatal endings. Our case meets these conditions. Patient aged 15 years who is well-developed believe that nothing bad can happen. The increase in size of a testicle is considered by him as a sign of manhood and masculinity. The boy ignored this problem for 6 months. Only after six months of testicular tumor development, due to the occurrence of a troublesome cough and dyspnoea of effort present at a local medical service. Because of the symptoms described it is performed a chest radiograph which detect many well-defined opacities,with precise contours. Doctors suspected a possible Koch bacillus pneumonia and guided the case for investigation to our pediatric service. At the first consultation the patient does not mention of any testicular tumor. He totally ignores the issue, although in the last month due to the increase in size of the testicle have started pain and discomfort in walking. It is established the diagnosis of testicular tumor with multiple lung metastases and the case is referred to a specialized department of oncology for staging and initiation of appropriate therapy. Patient was diagnosed with testicular germ cell tumor for which appropriate treatment have been initiated.

Nittany Lions, Clergy, and Scouts, Oh My! Harmonizing the Interplay Between Memory Repression and Statutes of Limitations in Child Sexual Abuse Litigation

Day in and day out, sexual abuse dispossesses children of their youthful innocence. Part and parcel of this crisis imperiling America’s youth is the persistent failure among adults and institutions to lawfully fulfill their protective duties. Unfortunately, once children are practicably able to disclose the evils that underlie their resultant trauma and pursue civil recourse against all culpable parties, statutes of limitations often seismically compound the issue by denying access to our judicial system. But it is not merely the general existence of statutes of limitations that is problematic. Rather, the statute of limitations problems addressed in this note relate to how legislatures poorly handle circumstances that are exclusive to child sexual abuse litigation.This note exposes a dual threat that precludes many child sexual abuse survivors from attaining the full measure of justice. The threshold problem addressed in this note is that child sexual abuse survivors are vulnerable to unconsciously repressing memories of their sexual abuse, yet many legislatures fail to account for how such realities render the “timely” initiation of civil claims manifestly unfeasible. Paradoxically, the second problem arises when legislatures strive to remedy the threshold problem. To wit, some legislatures take curative action by redrafting tolling provisions to recognize memory repression. However, facially, textual ambiguities within only authorize its application against perpetrators, not third party defendants whose neglectful conduct enabled the abuse to occur and continue. My binary solution resonates well with what reason and logic dictate. I first argue that memory repression is a legitimate psychological condition that is supported by a wealth of research and, thus, must be appropriately reflected as a basis for tolling statutes of limitations. My second argument advises that when a legislature takes that appropriate first step by acknowledging memory repression, it must then ensure that its tolling provision applies to perpetrators and third party defendants with equal force. Indeed, child sexual abuse survivors deserve these reforms.

Richard III’s Baby Teeth

Richard III’s Baby Teeth

The Old Man's Love Story

Fiction Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man’s Love Story. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2013. isbn 9780806143576 Love, grief, and memory form the thematic triad in Rudolfo Anaya’s The Old Man’s Love Story, a novel that speaks to our shared humanity and to what shapes our lives in their truest dimensions. Anaya’s narrative craft appeared fully developed in Bless Me, Última (1972), his founding novel that closes with Antonio’s grief over Última’s looming death but also with a consoling revelation: spirits can be invoked in moments of sorrow (“if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings”). The Old Man’s Love Story is a dignified portrayal of the novel’s main character, who is in the process of facing despair and loneliness: his wife and soul mate is now an angel gone homeward. The writer’s resolve to transform the personal experience of mourning into an art form is an evident attempt to reach the reader’s heart and imagination. The dramatic impact, however, transcends sorrow and desolation; comedy enters in unexpected moments, producing a range of emotions that offer the possibility of reading the novel as cathartic and thus as a personally significant experience. In Anaya’s words (and with the poetry of Nezahualcóyotl in mind): “That’s all that lasts, beauty of flowers and songs.” At one point in the novel the old man’s wife appears and gently whispers: “I am here as long as you remember me.” Utter the word “love,” the old man tells himself, and the image of the beloved “jumps up.” Like a modern-day Pygmalion in love with an image, the old man encounters the essence of his wife first in a photograph, then inside himself , followed by a moment of truth: “love is two persons becoming one.” Ole Hyltoft’s Danish humanism. Fiction, page 64 David Shook’s Mexico City silences. Verse, page 74 Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta canvas. Miscellaneous, page 75 review world literature in 58 worldliteraturetoday.org November–December 2013 • 59 Alai Tibetan Soul Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, tr. MerwinAsia Now a full-time writer after a long prelude as a farmer, a construction worker, a tractor driver, and a history teacher, Alai brings his myriad of experiences as a Tibetan to this collection of short stories. He combines elements of traditional folklore with modern life, giving a rich portrait of the varied culture in his homeland. Ai Mi Under the Hawthorn Tree Anna Holmwood, tr. House of Anansi Press Ai Mi’s bittersweet love story perfectly intertwines China’s politically volatile Cultural Revolution of the 1970s with the innocence of youth. Jingqiu wishes only to work hard and make her family proud. Through a series of political events, however, she meets Jianxin. The two fall into forbidden love, only to have it ripped apart by the cruel hands of fate in an unexpectedly heartwrenching ending. Nota Bene The novel consists of a preface and twenty-seven stories, combining to reach a number associated with lunar cycles, the “madness” of love beyond the grave (“I will always love you”), and the lunacy of a world that lacks a redemptive illumination, a darkening earth torn by wars abroad and by the political distortion of religious beliefs in the East and in the West (“my God is better than yours”). Anaya charts a journey of grief with moments of touching humor and critical stabs at our modern age, with its repression of the incantatory power of myth and an inclusive faith. I will not reveal the novel’s conclusion but will assert that it rivals the myth of Quetzalcoatl’s exile in the East, traditionally portrayed in a raft of serpents with the promise to return or leaving to immolate himself in a pyre, with birds of precious feathers rising from his ashes. Beyond the story of love, mourning, and dreams, the novel ignites the reader’s imagination through the symbolism of numbers and the alchemy of apparent opposites who become the eternal couple through death and transfiguration. In The Old Man’s Love Story, Anaya brings the power of magic and memory to a world of ashes and dust. Roberto Cantú California...

Conocimiento de los padres en la prevención del abuso sexual infantil

Child sexual abuse occurs mostly within the family, i.e. the parents, uncles, brothers, stepfathers, who prey on the innocence of youth, a situation that impacts greatly on the child’s life. This study was aimed at determining the level of knowledge parents have in relation to Child Sexual Abuse. A cross-sectional, non experimentan descriptive field study was made. The population consisted of 80 mothers of school age children from the Mara Hill II sector, Moron, Carabobo State. The sample consisted of 25% of the population surveyed, i.e. 19 mothers. Data collection was obtained through a questionnaire with 19 items of dichotomous response options (YES-NO), and was validated by expert opinion. The confidence coefficient was 0.79 according to the Crombach alpha. Analysis of the results concluded that 50% of the parents surveyed do not talk to their children about the situation, when talkimg is a vital method of preventing child sexual abuse. It is, theregore, of great importance implement educational strategies for prevention of child sexual abuse and so help to combat this social scourge.

Reach Out and Touch Someone: Thinking Through Sanrio's Social Communication Empire

Hello Kitty (b. 1974) in the year 2009 was all grown up. Indeed, Sanrio, the mouthless feline's maker, took the opportunity for a year-long celebration of her 35th anniversary that extended into 2010. Thirty-five: the year marks the standard end of young adult promise in Japan, after which traditionally new employment opportunities close, scholarships for post-baccalaureate education end, and fertility rates in women decline. But what does 35 years mean for a product? More specifically, what does it mean for a product that has achieved iconic status as a symbol of youthful innocence dubbed kawaii (cute) in ever-widening, global settings? Among other things, 35 years suggests the possibility of true trans-generational appeal, especially with mother-daughter pairs of Hello Kitty fans. In the case of Hello Kitty, 35 years also signals a sufficient time span from which nostalgia may be considered viable and ultimately marketable. In this paper I use Hello Kitty's 35th anniversary as a lens upon kawaii – Japanese Cute – by which we might look backward and forward to the consumer culture surrounding this now ‘middle-aged’ object, primarily in Japan, but extended through its global applications.

Paying for the Damage: The Quiet American Revisited

Paying for the damage:The Quiet American Revisited LCDR William S. Bushnell (bio) Graham Greene's The Quiet American, published in 1955, has twice caught the interest of respected filmmakers. Joseph Mankiewicz directed his adaptation of the novel in 1958, while Phillip Noyce returned to the text nearly a half century later. These radically different presentations reflect the different historical contexts in which they were filmed and show how the Vietnam War continues to be revisited and reshaped. Mankiewicz transposes what he called a "cheap melodrama in which the American was the most idiotic kind of villain" (qtd. in Geist 269) into an anti-Communist dramatization of America's fledgling foreign policy in Indochina. By returning to The Quiet American of the late fifties with four decades of hindsight, Noyce is able to treat his film with full awareness of America's pending escalation and defeat in Vietnam, something that Greene and Mankiewicz could only imagine. Greene's controversial and popular novel provides attractive adaptation possibilities. It is part political thriller, part romance, and part detective story set in exotic Indochina in 1952. A washed-up reporter for the London Times, Thomas Fowler pits his fatalistic experience against the newly arrived American's youthful innocence in an effort to hold onto Phuong, his Vietnamese mistress, in a contest that symbolizes old and new world attitudes towards Indochina. In the novel, Fowler underscores the danger of Alden Pyle's lethal innocence: he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, "Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy." (31-32) In the 1950s, Joseph Mankiewicz ennobles Pyle's idealism while simultaneously emptying Fowler of political significance. Noyce's 2002 departure from the novel also centers on the characterization of the American; this time, however, Pyle is less ignorant and more menacing in his idealism. Mankiewicz privileges the murder investigation and Fowler's jealousy of Pyle as a motive, while Noyce favors the self-reflective intimacy and pathos of Greene's work. The 1958 screenplay written by Mankiewicz and the 2002 script by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan both adhere closely to the novel. What separates the two films, principally the reimagining of the character of Pyle, does not occur until late in the story when Pyle responds to the terrorist attack he helped organize at the Place Garnier. Joseph Mankiewicz bought the movie rights to The Quiet American just a few months after it was published in the United States in 1956. Though the director/producer claimed he was not pressured by United Artists to put a pro-American spin on the novel, Robert Lantz, executive vice-president of Figaro Productions (the film's production company), claimed the filmmaker boasted about the change: "I will tell the whole story anti-Communist and pro-American" (qtd. in Geist 268). According to Mankiewicz' biographer, Kenneth Geist, the director denied ever making the boast; however, Mankiewicz was quoted in the Saturday Review on January 25, 1958, saying that he "often wanted to do a picture about one of those ice-blooded intellectuals whose intellectualism is really just a mask for completely irrational passion" (27). As director and screenwriter, Mankiewicz reversed the anti-Americanism of Greene's novel into a decidedly patriotic film. In an interview to promote it, Mankiewicz said, "Greene's book made me so mad, I was determined to make a picture of it" (qtd. in Weales 492-93).1 Some time in early 1956 he contacted Colonel Edward Lansdale, USAF, for advice on the plausibility of his intended revision. Lansdale was a legendary CIA operative and staunch Diem supporter—sort of the Ollie North of his day and the model for Marlon Brando's character in The Ugly American (1963). To his credit, through his numerous State Department and Vietnamese contacts, Lansdale knew more than any American about a "third force"—i.e., a third alternative to Communist or French rule in Vietnam. His alliance with this notorious spy makes clear the...

Closure in James Welch's Fools Crow

In her study of Asian American cultural politics, Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe reminds us that cultural institution of novel performs a function in reconciling readers to national social order. She points to interruption of novel form by immigrant writers, whose works displace representational of institutionalized novel and official historical narrative by writing out of limits and breakdowns of those regimes (101). Her analysis is helpful in under standing elongated closure of James Welch's Fools Crow and in addressing his legacy to writers and readers. As critics have long noted, Welch displaces familiar western and official historical nar ratives of victory of civilized over savage.1 He constructs story of Indian-white contact from inside Indian subjectivity and redefines meanings of religion, culture, and virtue for a diverse audience. With Fools Crow, Welch has produced a bildungsroman, which Lowe calls the primary form for narrating development of individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity. This form, she points out,

Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life

For many in contemporary culture truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject, in the diseased or damaged body. —Hal Foster, The Return of the Real Doc Hata, the protagonist and narrator of Chang-rae Lee's 1999 novel, A Gesture Life, begins his narrative by describing the typical greeting he receives while strolling around the small town he lives in, Bedley Run. "People know me here," he claims, "whenever I step into a shop in the main part of the village, invariably someone will say, 'Hey, it's good Doc Hata'" (1). Despite Hata's claims, however, his narrative soon becomes riddled with internal contradictions and the novel tells a story quite different from the typical tale of immigration and assimilation Hata wants to tell. Hata's narrative of successful assimilation becomes the story of a profound self-deception, the telling of which is structured around two relationships, each defined by a profound trauma, that haunt Hata despite his attempts to defray their costs by living a life free from affect. These two relationships—one with Kkutaeh (whom Hata calls "K"), a comfort woman he meets while serving as a medic in the Japanese army during [End Page 592] World War II, and the other with Sunny, his adopted daughter—soon overtake Hata's assimilation narrative, exposing the gendered constructions of citizenship on which Hata's masculinist national enfranchisement relies. In the novel, Lee constructs a doubled narrative register in which the stories of Sunny and Kkutaeh consistently undercut Hata's assimilation narrative. This overturning of the novel's primary narrative marks, I shall argue, a shift in perspective from a nationally oriented, patriarchally centered, narrative of immigration and cultural assimilation to a fragmented, transnational narrative driven by the stories of Kkutaeh and Sunny. In spite of Hata's every attempt, A Gesture Life does not narrate the production of a fully constituted national subject, but the failure of that subject to constitute himself within the bounds of hegemonic US citizenship. A Gesture Life marks a significant intervention in the literature of assimilation. In Lee's novel, Doc Hata orients his attempt to write himself into citizenship around the narrative conventions of the bildungsroman. Significantly, however, A Gesture Life cannot be understood as a bildungsroman proper because, despite Hata's attempts to replicate the form through his first-person narration, the novel becomes a traumatic narrative that consistently displaces Hata's tale of successful assimilation. Lee deconstructs the basic form of the bildungsroman and, in doing so, allows us to examine the pernicious logics of race and gender at its core. Lisa Lowe has argued that "the bildungsroman emerged as the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of the individual with the social order " (98; emphasis added). The bildungsroman narrates the incorporation of the individual within the sphere of the nation through the telling of a narrative of the loss of particularity. Because of this, the form has become an important genre in the literature of immigration and assimilation. The identification of the citizen with the nation narrated in the bildung narrative provides agency as the immigrant subject becomes, through this loss of individuation, unmarked and uncontested. To become a citizen is to lose one's uniqueness in the face of a communal national history and character one can take, indeed must take, as one's own. In its refusal of the standard trajectory of the bildung narrative, A Gesture Life continues a significant intervention into American letters by Asian American authors who, as Lowe suggests, often "explore alternative forms of memory, history, and collectivity . . . [by] challeng[ing] the concepts of identity and identification within a universalized narrative of development" (101). In contradistinction to the relinquishing of particularity Lowe describes as the original function of the bildungsroman, Asian American literatures of assimilation [End...

Not in front of the children: "indecency," censorship and the innocence of youth

From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from indecent information that might their development - whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of indecency laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato's argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the harm to minors argument rests on shaky foundations.There is an urgent need for informed, dispassionate debate about the perceived conflict between the free-expression rights of young people and the widespread urge to shield them from expression that is considered harmful. Not in Front of the Children spurs this long-needed conversation.

The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil (review)

Reviewed by: The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil Christine Perkell Mark Petrini. The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 152 pp. Cloth, $37.50. This brief study of youthful figures in the Aeneid proposes that Vergil represents the “coming of age” or initiation into adulthood as the devastating collision of the innocent child with the treacherous, deceitful adult world. Failure of youth to thrive, analogous to (according to this reading) the portended failure of Augustus to achieve his goals of Roman renewal, has causes embedded in “human nature, in nature itself, and therefore in history” (2), so that the question implicitly posed by the poem, specifically in this motif of early death, becomes, for Petrini: can the future ever be different from the past? Iulus, poised on the edge of childhood, functions in the poem as a symbol of the possibility of reconciliation of Roman hopes of renewal (as in the prophecy of Apollo, 9.641–44), on the one hand, versus a set of “facts,” as constructed by Vergil, of politics, nature, and history that would suggest that such hopes are illusory (2). Whether there could be a glorious Roman future if Iulus could shake free of the past or whether he is doomed to repeat the worst of Troy remains unresolved through the end of the poem by virtue of Iulus’ suspension in youth. [End Page 464] This argument is set forth in Petrini’s introduction, summarized above. The main part of the book runs to six chapters, represented here by citing some of the author’s own summary remarks. Chapter 1: The Child and the Hero. Child characters, writes Petrini, “exemplify various ideals of innocence—cultural simplicity, enduring love, pietas, an idealized heroic past—and they flourish briefly and die as they come of age” (8). The deaths of the young signify the loss of renewal (9). Another related theme revolves around what the author terms Homeric heroism, read as an expression of cultural innocence. The failure of Homeric heroism in the world of the epic thus marks for Petrini a kind of cultural decline: “Vergil presents the ideals and tokens of conventional heroism—spolia, laudes, virtus—as illusions that betray and deceive in an inverted heroic world” (12). Chapter 2: Catullus. Petrini suggests that failure of innocence, pathology of adulthood (19), faithless love, friendships betrayed, death as separation (17)—motifs found in Catullus 64, 65, 66—were imitated by Vergil. It is from these texts especially that Vergil develops his own themes of the innocence of youth and the deception of the adult world. Chapter 3: Nisus and Euryalus. Petrini finds an elaboration of this initiation into death and corruption theme in the Nisus and Euryalus episode, wherein “Euryalus’ departure from his mother and participation in the night mission become the death of innocence in a corrupt world . . . , and his initiation from childhood to adulthood is a travesty of natural growth” (47). Euryalus “is out of context in battle and the throng of heroes, and in his death we feel the passing of simplicity and delicacy, the destruction of an ideal of amor” (48). Euryalus is initiated into adulthood by Nisus, whom Petrini reads as a cultural primitive, as denoted, for example, by his wearing of a lion skin, thus a representative of precivilized innocence (25). He attributes the failure of the mission of Nisus and Euryalus to the corrupt world they find in Italy and not, in the first instance, to their own reckless choices. In fact he reads the question of whether their actions are right or wrong as negligible; his interest rather is in what he sees as the inevitability of their behavior in the corrupt world of the epic (25–32). Chapter 4: Pallas. “Aeneas’ tutelage of Pallas and the introduction of the younger hero to the world of the older is presented as an assault on innocence, and Pallas’ death as the violation of a figurative childhood. The puer, innocent and inexperienced, is drawn to the attractions of heroism; the rewards and values of the heroic world emerge as illusions, which threaten and...

Safe to Talk: Abortion Narratives as a Rite of Return

now understand why women have died from abortionsit was the secrecy that killed them. (from personal correspondence with D.M.) Defamiliarizing Assumptions] America's worst-kept secret is its 1.5 million women who annually choose to abort their babies.2 Worst-kept, because everybody knows and everybody is talking about it; secret, because everybody knows and nobody's talking about it. was secretive about it, only telling a very close woman friend of mine from high school. I did not tell the man until after the abortion. I told my boyfriend that I had minor surgery and couldn't have sex for two weeks. I did feel secretive about it at the (from personal correspondence with M.P.)3 did not tell many people about this abortion. I was deeply ashamed to be in this situation for a third time. How could a bright independent woman be in this predicament AGAIN?? I spiraled into a deep depression. I contemplated suicide and engaged in self-destructive behavior. (from personal correspondence with K.C.) was 22 years old, eight-and-a-half years ago. At the time, there didn't seem to be any safe environments for speaking about it. My doctor knew, and my two closest friends. I never told the father, as we weren't in a relationship. I'm not sure if this was a smart thing to do or not, but I went through it by myself. (from personal correspondence with C.J.) filled out an insurance claim just to see if they might pay it, and of course, they didn't. I wish I hadn't filed that claim. I hate knowing that some huge organization knows such personal information about me. I don't feel good about it. I certainly don't feel safety in their knowledge. (from personal correspondence with S.V.) Many women experience abortion without remorse or guilt; indeed, they celebrate it as a motivator to get on with the business of life as usual.4 For others, the subject of this study, (in which I asked women to speak about their abortions in terms of contributing factors to their decision; pregnancy loss; secrecy and silence ; trust; subsequent sexuality, self-esteem; and relationship with the baby's father), an abortion signifies multiple sacrifices. Among them, women cited: a potential child; youthful innocence; parenting or familial fantasy; relationship with the baby's father; trust; and the sense of control or security. These varied responses depend on personally constructed meanings and expectations of loss, death, parenthood, womanhood and pregnancy, (Madden, 1994: 87) and whether the fetus had been considered a child. In the small Idaho ranching community where I grew up there was ah old woman, the matriarch of one of the wealthier ranching families, who had had a number of illegal abortions in addition to several children. When she was dying in the hospital, her last words, whispered to one of the nurses, were `Oh, all those little babies! I'm so sorry. What can I tell them? Will they forgive me?' (from personal correspondence with V.M.) still cry at the thought of the ordeal, but I am still confused as to whether it is grief over the loss or grief over the becoming of what everyone said I would. (from personal correspondence with M.K.) Though a woman may perceive her abortion as an occasion of profound loss, she is deprived of the opportunity to publicly grieve in our high-tech pronatalist culture where death is never an acceptable peri-natal outcome. As a not-mother, the woman who has an abortion is marginalized. Our lives remain untheorized (Morell, 1994: xv). The not-mother is unspeakable, unknowable and uninteresting in a world where sources for gratification are denied women if they are pursued in lieu of children (Morell, 1994: 59), and where feminist culture has not produced alluring images or thinkable identities for the childless (Snitow, 1993: N145). Often, a woman who has an abortion conceals her actions, and may never find a safe venue for mourning. …