Women of Color in State Legislatures: Gender,Race, Ethnicity and Legislative Office Holding

SUMMARY

This article investigates the puzzle of women of color's proportionately higher percentage of office holding in state legislatures compared to white women legislators by testing the predictive capacity of variables commonly used to explain percentages of women at the state level. Using an original dataset that includes characteristics for all 50 U.S. states, the results suggest that standard indicators of women's office holding do not work equally well for all groups of women. The study demonstrates that race and ethnicity do make a difference in regards to women's office holding at the state level when the racial and ethnic characteristics of female legislators are considered.     

理论研究社团促进大学生思想政治教育实效性研究

采用文献资料法、调查访谈法、理论分析等方法,对高校思想政治理论研究社团促进大学生思想政治教育实效性进行研究。理论研究社团是进行大学生思想政治教育实效性的载体,加强高校理论研究社团的全面建设与积极引导,有利于提高学生思想政治理论水平,有利于解决大学生世界观、人生观、价值观方面的问题,有利于提高大学生思想政治教育的实效性。     

Public spheres,hidden politics and struggles over space: boundaries of public engagement in post‐apartheid South Africa

The development of a public sphere forms a central ingredient in the consolidation of a new political culture following a transition to democracy. The Habermasian idea of the public sphere has been challenged for not taking into account the role of ‘part’ and ‘counter public spheres’, particularly with reference to ‘developing’ societies. ‘Actually existing’ public spheres must therefore be conceptualised within the framework of a broader category of ‘public space’. A national public sphere in South Africa is held back by inequalities of wealth and power. A minority public of privileged consumers has access to a structure of print and electronic media, while the majority population relies on different systems of networking that make up counter publics. After 1994, the public sphere has been influenced by a dominant‐party system, accompanied by a division into formal and informal politics, with formal politics assuming a ritualistic function and ‘Realpolitik’ being played out within the non‐public structures of the dominant party. Meanwhile, critical public debate has had to find its course through varieties of informal politics. The article examines how moral debates around HIV/AIDS and crime in KwaZulu‐Natal have constituted an alternative arena for debate, and how cultural and religious discourses have been the channels of a local public sphere. The article discusses to what extent debates have constituted a local democratic ‘deliberative public sphere’, and looks at the ways in which the local state in the form of the eThekwini Municipality has interacted with local publics since 1994.     

“The ANC brand is bulletproof”: accountability and the logic of the brand in South African politics

In this paper, I draw on analyses of the brand in the commercial world to explore the implications of branding when applied to political parties and politicians. Specifically, I examine the ramifications of the logic of the brand for accountability within a multi-party democracy. I argue that in branding discourse, the brand serves as a risk-management strategy by creating relations of loyalty with consumers, designed to secure forgiveness for possible transgressions on the part of the brand and thus protect brand equity. Through an analysis of how branding discourse is applied to South African politics by journalists, political parties and participants in social media, I show how in this arena, branding logic works to defer accountability for political parties and politicians who fail to deliver on election promises. Culpability becomes assessed in terms of damage to brand.     

Aliens,Subjects and the State: Surveillance in British Hotels during World War I

The apparatus of the state expanded in unprecedented ways during World War I, with implications for longstanding practices and legal principles which governed the relationship between guests and staff within hotels and similar lodgings. Commercial hostelries were required, under successive Orders in Council, to register the movement of guests and supply these details to police authorities on state-mandated forms. This idea was new to the United Kingdom, where jurisprudence had upheld the right of guests to receive accommodation in anonymity. Exploring how institutions grappled with new regimes of surveillance, this article reveals how the British hotel’s relationship to the state and to guests of all nationalities changed dramatically in the course of war, with implications for the operation of the post-war hospitality sector.     

A mundane voice

This essay offers strategies of speaking and studying ‘the mundane’ as a means to inaugurate an interventionist politics in cultural studies. Using Meaghan Morris’s example of anecdotal and colloquial address, a mundane voice is shown to situate and contextualize our understanding of major concepts circulating in international theory, and broaden the audience for academic debate. Studies of ‘everyday life’ have been hampered by a too-close affinity with hegemonic structures of knowledge production, requiring further gestures of parochialism to hasten a speaking position aware of its own partiality and limitations. Attention to the singularity or ‘this-ness’ of a cultural site humbles the tasks cultural studies can perform, introducing some curiosity to what we think we know about the cultures from which we speak. Reflecting on the fate of Michel de Certeau’s work in the boom period of cultural studies’ expansion, the paper suggests that cultural studies’ radical potential can be expanded if we are not inflected by preconceptions about what defines politics, especially against the fashions of intellectual commodification. Morris creates affective connections between past, present and future political concerns: a different temporality for political investment than the cycles of electoral models, or the dictates of commodity culture, afford, and one that cultural studies might still learn to adopt.     

Cultural studies as praxis: (making) an autobiographical case

This autobiographical essay ‘takes cultural studies personally’, drawing on experience, identity and the personal to indicate how and why the author is proponent of and is working on developing a model of cultural studies as social justice praxis despite the constraints academia in general and of the university as an institution in particular. The paper travels roughly from the author’s student and teacher days in Sierra Leone through his graduate student days in Canada to his current role as university teacher in the USA. He selectively concentrates on his experience as a teacher of literature (and African multi-role utilitarianism), education and cultural studies (using one of his cultural studies courses and students’ questions about the utility of cultural studies as example), his shifting and overlapping racial/ethnic identities (African/black) and the politics of identity, and his thoughts on the place of theory in cultural studies and a black approach to theory (black ambivalent elaboration) as contributory factors. While this account acts in its own way as an argument for conceptualizing cultural studies as praxis, the primary focus is more modestly on my own autobiographical account as a specific case. In fact, an autobiographical approach is employed precisely to be specific and in the attempt to avoid the pitfalls of over­generalization and the authority of authenticity.     

Exploiting the Fifty Shades of Grey craze for the disability and sexual rights agenda

This paper does not present a literary critique of Fifty Shades of Grey, nor does it aim to take sides in the fierce disputes about the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of the storyline. Instead, it examines these debates with curiosity. It becomes apparent that the popular trilogy by E.L. James has encouraged more open discussions about sex and sexuality amongst groups who, until recently, have taken a backseat. The significance and usefulness of drawing on these debates is highlighted. For instance, a revived openness towards sexual issues could be an advantage for disabled people seeking support with creating spaces and opportunities for intimacy. At the same time, there is a risk that ‘kinkphobia’ could inform some adult protection interventions. This paper reflects on the opportunities that would arise if disabled people would seek to make the most of the possibilities arising from the Fifty Shades of Grey craze.     

Everyday people: public identities in contemporary hip-hop culture

As scholars on culture have suggested elsewhere, cooption through consumption by the music culture industry has forced those who want to be part of the hip-hop subculture to go back underground. But to label all of these individuals in the underground merely ‘hip-hop’ would be as equally uninformative as labeling anyone who wears baggy blue jeans and can rhyme words together as being hip-hop. My year of field research in Chicago revealed that five major identities emerged: Professional Headz, Refugee Headz, Hip-Hop Fundamentalists, Black Headz and Tech Headz. These identities were characterized by the personal values that my participants indicated were most reaffirmed through hip-hop culture. This article contributes to the literature on hip-hop by providing an ethnographic study on how the Hip-Hop Nation defines itself, while examining some of the tensions that these identities provide within the Hip-Hop Nation. It also reinforces the view that subculture must still be experienced in the flesh and is not fully experienced by being able to engage in the culture industry of hip-hop through purchasing records, watching videos or buying hip-hop fashions. This article also provides a more complex qualitative understanding of what values constitute being hip-hop and which ones do not.     

Jewish Hatzolah and the barriers to equivalent Aboriginal Australian cultural adaptation

Insofar as they perceive secularisation as loss of attachment to tradition and community, Orthodox Jews face difficulties somewhat similar to those facing Aboriginal Australians. Both fear that engagement with the wider society equates to loss of cultural particularity. Orthodox Australian Jews have responded to this fear by countering the trend to secularisation and adapting traditional cultural beliefs and practices so that they may be retained while also allowing engagement in modern secular life. Hatzolah is one adaptation that reconciles dissonances between cultural heritage, secular life and good health. My interest in Hatzolah is as a metaphor that may help in exploring the possibility of equivalent Aboriginal responses, whereby Aborigines may negotiate the discourse that, for them, pits culture against health, education and socio-economic status. In this case, powerful discourse makes structured adaptation like Hatzolah less likely than it might otherwise be. Yet in their everyday, Aborigines do negotiate the tensions of being modern, much as Orthodox Jews. I argue that the discursive oppositions are the product of public policy and identity politics that are both invested in a solidary culture, unitary identity and binary difference. I also argue that the emergence of Hatzolah-like adaptations depends on the recognition and full consideration in policy of Aborigines' contemporary lived realities of interculturality, subjective multiplicity and ambiguity.