Meaningful Labor Research Articles

“To eat the flesh of his dead mother'’: Hunger, Masculinity, and nationalism in Frank Chin's Donald Duk

Throughout Asian American literature, the acts of eating and cooking have been productive metaphors for the poetic process. These acts associated with food reveal a complex and sometimes contradictory cultural economy that links identity politics to the production of labor and the exchange of commodities for social values. Implicit in the roles of the cook and the eater is their embodiment of cultural enterprise: they are not only symbolic bodies that assign meaning and value to their work, they also bear information for developing personal and communal identities. For Asian Pacific Americans who have been historically deprived of the symbolic value of their history and their subjectivity, constructing meaningful labor as identity represents a popular avenue for seeking self-affirmation. For example, many Asian Pacific American texts incorporate the metaphor of culinary activity as positive social work that produces a cultural nationalist vision of an Asian American subjectivity. However, the affinity between eating and ethnic subject formation, noted by Asian American literary scholar Sau-Ling Wong, elicits other concerns about gender, class, and sexuality. “Eating is one of the most biologically determin-istic and, at the same time, socially adaptable human acts” (18) through which cultural and sexual agendas are repeatedly inscribed. Frank Chin’s Donald Duk offers some of the most lucid material for exploring the problematics of constructing a cultural hero through the language of cooking and eating. Chin’s story, a bildungsroman of a Chinese American boy learning about his ethnicity through his father’s participation in food preparation, festivity, and storytelling in San Francisco’s Chinatown, is explicit in the author’s intent to create a positive masculine identity. In his narrative, Chin manipulates cultural signs of culinary productivity to define a cultural nationalist hero who, consequently, also signifies a “rebirth” of an Asian American masculinity. While I sympathize with Chin’s frustration and understand the urgency to assert Chinese American visibility, I am concerned about his chosen avenue for reaching his goal: why is his project inflated within a capitalistic economy which animates a consumerist desire where one’s gain is exchanged for another’s loss?

Saving the Children: The Promise and Practice of Parens Patriae, 1838-98

Although the doctrine of parens patriae has served as the legal and moral foundation of the American juvenile justice system for the last 142 years, it has been the subject of but a few empirical or historical inquiries. This study addresses the problem by contrasting the theory and practice of parens patriae as it was applied in juvenile re formatories from the landmark decision incorporating the doctrine into the American legal structure in 1838—Ex parte Crouse— until it was extended and applied as the underlying rationale for the founding of the juvenile court in 1899. A review of Ex parte Crouse and ensuing legal decisions reveals that nineteenth century judges invoked parens patriae and committed minors to reformatories for noncriminal acts on the premise that juvenile institutions would have a benevolent ef fect upon their charges. In theory, reformatories were "schools" which provided parental discipline, meaningful labor, religious in struction, education, and a beneficial apprenticeship to their charges. The assumptions underlying parens patriae are assessed by con trasting the internal operation and effects of a number of juvenile reformatories with the stated expectations of the courts. An examina tion of the records of reformatories—including annual reports, daily journals of superintendents and matrons, minutes of indenture com mittees, case histories, as well as a number of investigations—suggests that there was a significant disparity between the care promised to minors by committing judges and the implementation of parens patri ae in nineteenth century institutions.

Health Care Institutions Under the National Labor Relations Act

This article reviews the right of employees to organize at workplaces including private non-profit hospitals. Cognizant of the special vulnerabilities of healthcare institutions to strikes, Congress amended the National Labor Relations Act, detailing obligations for contract negotiations notices, impasse resolution and case handling procedures, as well as strike notice requirements. This article considers the impact of the surge in organizing activity as these hospitals, and advises that the success of these amendments will be judged by the frequency and seriousness of strikes and their impact on patient care. The author advises that if unions and administrative personnel pursue responsible collective bargaining, the proper framework will exist for meaningful and peaceful labor relations in the health care industry.

"With Your Own Face On": The Origins and Consequences of Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry gathered its concerns from two cultural forces: awareness of emotional vacuity of public language in America and insistent psychologizing of a society adrift from purpose and meaningful labor. This mode of poetry arose from experience of fifties in America, when country first used its mass media to probe and lament lack of cultural continuity. But before long, discontinuities became fads, glibly explained in shallow historical terms. Public discussion, like a voracious consumer, seemed to thrive on new models, a quick turnover, and sleek packaging. Analyzing (and often excusing or attacking) phenomena on basis of decade in which they occurred was to become a widespread habit. These are tranquilized Fifties, / And I am forty. Ought I regret my seedtime? queried temporally out-of-joint Lowell in his Life Studies (1959). This sectioning of personal and public growth by a calendric measure suggests that historical impotence is at hand. The fifties also witnessed a new understanding of mass man and his futilities: now it was a post-industrial society that provided his background, and sociologist identified his prototype with such terms as alienation, the lonely crowd, and inner-directed. Poets went against grain of this social atomizing, and yet reflected its inevitable, distorted enlargement of individual psychology. As public and social goals crumbled or were emptied of meaning by too much chatter or inflated rhetoric, private satisfactions grew more desirable even if less clearly defined. In a sense confessional poetry can be seen as one degraded branch of Romanticism, placing sensitivity of poet at center of concern. In other terms, it mockingly inverts nineteenth-century