Articulations of Same-sex Desire: Lesbian and Gay Male Dating Advertisements

A survey of self and other categorisation in 200 lesbian and gay male dating advertisement texts, taken from current magazines and newspapers, reveals the discursive means by which homosexual advertisers in our corpus commodify and market sexual/self-gendered identities. Detailed analysis of a sub-sample of the advertisements allows us to trace the discourse processes and conventions used in formulating identity in such texts. We interpret these discourse practices in relation to a social critique of gay attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles. The different conventions for self-commodification followed by lesbians and gay men in this survey suggest generalisable differences in sexual stance and cultural identification     

Exclusion of HIV-positive people with disabilities in the media

This current issue piece aims to address the harmful exclusion of people with disabilities in the Iranian media. In a case study, this author collected news related to statistics of HIV-positive people covered by popular news websites written in the Persian language between June 2011 and June 2012. Within the analysed electronic texts, no reference was made to the number of HIV-positive people with disabilities. Under the rubric of critical discourse analysis, one can argue that this lack of representation may also be linked to a more general level of discourse that constitutes the marginalization of people with disabilities. This damaging exclusion both legitimizes and reproduces the ideology that people with disabilities are social minorities who can be excluded to the benefit of powerful people. This current issue piece also discusses the potential negative consequences of excluding HIV-positive people with disabilities from the discourse of HIV/AIDS in the media. Ultimately, the conceivable reasons for the Iranian government failure or refusal to publish the statistics of HIV-positive people with disabilities will be provided. Studies from various countries could shed more light on the exclusion of HIV-positive people with disabilities in the media and the interplay between HIV/AIDS and disability issues.     

海湾地区“什叶派新月带”兴起的宗教政治影响

伊拉克战争推翻萨达姆政权造成的一个最重要结果就是,解除了伊拉克对伊朗什叶派神权政府的多年遏制,还使得伊拉克什叶派在战后政治重建中逐步占据了政治主导地位。随着伊朗什叶派政权和伊拉克什叶派势力的联系日益加强,他们已在海湾地区形成了一股强大的什叶派宗教政治势力。在其影响下,周边其他逊尼派国家内部的什叶派民众纷纷要求扩大政治权力,逊尼派君主制国家政府也感到了什叶派神权思想反对君主制度的严峻压力。目前,正在日益兴起并标志着伊朗伊斯兰革命第二阶段的“什叶派新月带”,已经改变了海湾地区什叶派长期遭受逊尼派压制的传统局面,并直接关系到拥有世界最大石油资源的海湾地区的安全秩序和政治前景。     

Prom Dreams and Prom Reality: Girls Negotiating “Perfection” at the High School Prom*

Adolescent girls are often assumed to be extremely vulnerable to media influences; however, this study argues that girls actually negotiate meaning from media texts. Content analysis of teen prom magazines is combined with ethnography to explore how magazine texts operate within their readers’ worlds. This article argues against two commonly accepted dictates. First, I propose that popular magazines for adolescent girls are more complicated than previously acknowledged and do not rely on a singular message of perfection derived from beauty and heterosexual romance. And second, how girls engage with the magazines is more complicated than prior research has argued; girls use “strategic selectivity” (a term proposed to explain how girls make meaning of cultural texts) to negotiate the dominant meanings found in prom magazines and other cultural texts.     

‘Khalas! Literature is the resistance against politics,and this is the politics of literature’: an interview with Atiq Rahimi

ABSTRACT

Atiq Rahimi is a director, photographer and translingual author who has published in Dari (Persian) and in French since 1999. As an outspoken author, Rahimi did not refrain from narrating loss, trauma and fundamentalism already in the 1990s. For his first publication in French, Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience, he was awarded the highest literary price in France, the Prix Goncourt. With his recently published novel Les Porteurs d’eau, set in Afghanistan and Europe, Rahimi also explores challenges of the global Afghanistani diaspora. Inspired by his personal experiences of travelling from Kabul to Paris, Rahimi explores, with his Kafkaesque narratives, themes of loss, suffering and survival, all located in a war-torn country. In this interview, conducted in Paris, conversing in Persian and French, Rahimi talks about his personal journey and discusses cultural as well as literary theories. He mentions literature without borders, considers the power of literature as a means of taking a stand against political reality, learning French as a teenager and depicting strong female characters. Additionally, Rahimi explains to what extent Persian linguistics allowed him to depict the absurdity of living exile in his latest novel and ends the interview explaining the rationale behind the idea of authors without borders.     

Collateral damage on the home front: The gulf in America

Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

That's classic A Gadamerian defence of the classic text in sociology

Many in sociology believe the discipline to be ill served by its classic authors, and that there are now good strategic and cognitive reasons to dispense with the canon. To some, in this more heterogeneous, postmodern world, Marx, Weber and Durkheim have outlived their usefulness and inhibit rather than encourage the growth of sociology. Using Gadamer's hermeneutics as a resource this paper challenges such claims, arguing instead that classic texts are an important and valid product of the human sciences. Classic texts illuminate the real nature of the present by showing how much it still shares with the past. To jettison classic texts would not democratise, but impoverish the discipline.     

Collateral Damage on the Home Front: The Gulf in America

>Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

“Drawn” into the community: Re‐considering the artwork of Latino adolescents

This qualitative study of drawings created by inner‐city, Latino, junior high school students examines how these drawings are made, how they are used, and how they are read by other Latinos as visual texts that encode and communicate culturally important information. The study is based on interviews with young Latino adults about the roles these drawings played during their adolescence. The interviews revealed that these drawings function as texts in a system of visual communication. They also illustrate how such drawings can be linked to cultural identities, and how their power derives not just from the imagery they include but from how they are used to shape and support social interaction.     

Foreign worker dependence in the Gulf,and the international oil companies: 1910-50

"This article demonstrates that foreign worker dependence in the [Persian] Gulf dates from the establishment of the oil industry in the early twentieth century. The composition of labor inflows [was] mainly determined by political and strategic, rather than commercial, concerns. Contrasting patterns of labor force composition evolved between those areas under British control, which imported labor from the Indian sub-continent, and the independent Saudi Arabia where labor was drawn from more diverse sources including the Italian settlers in Eritrea."     

Death and Transfiguration: The Final Hours of Muscovite Monks

The aim of this article is to draw attention to certain theological and liturgical factors that enter into the composition process of hagiography, and in particular, in the depiction of the death scenes of Muscovite monks. The monks who wrote the major portion of medieval Russian literature did so from a particular cultural context in which theological and liturgical texts played a prominent role. The article looks for evidence of this monastic culture in the memorials written to honour deceased members of monastic communities. It outlines some features of the monastic culture that produced the vitae, rehearses previous investigations into the production of Russian medieval hagiography and offers a detailed analysis of four texts from the Muscovite period. The Dormition and Transfiguration are important foundational motifs underlying death scenes in particular. Attention to liturgical and theological principles in other saints’ lives and biographical sketches will enhance our appreciation for the artistry of medieval Russian authors, who appropriate a lengthy Christian tradition in the production of their texts.     

The Federal Constitution as Viewed by the Newspapers of 1787

The purpose of this study was to describe a group of fifth grade students as they engaged in process drama during their social studies class. The author found that students who engaged in process drama learned to combine texts to understand and create new texts. As they became engaged in the material, students collaborated with each other and became leaders in class while honoring the cultures they studied in their social studies textbooks.     

A Desire to Return to the Country of Birth as a Function of Language Preference: An Empirical Study with Iranian Immigrants in the United States

It was hypothesized that bilingual Iranian immigrants in the United States who prefer to use the Persian language, compared to Iranians who prefer to use English, would be more likely to express a desire to return to Iran to live. Participants were 292 bilingual Iranian immigrants in the United States (128 men, 164 women) who completed a questionnaire with a similar content, prepared in Persian on one side and in English on the other side. Participants were given the option to either complete the Persian or English version of the questionnaire. Results confirmed the research hypothesis suggesting that the immigrants’ preference in using their native language serves as a “pull” factor that increases the probability of a desire to return to the country of birth. It was also found that women and younger respondents were less likely to express a desire to return to Iran. Level of education, marital status, years of living in the United States, and attitudes toward marriage and the family did not predict such a desire. Implications for acculturation research and for counseling culturally diverse clients are discussed. Policy implications to attract immigrants back to their country of birth were also discussed.     

Environmental Hazards and Veterans'Framing of Gulf War Illness

Military personnel and other civilians were exposed to numerous environmental hazards during their service in the Persian Gulf Crisis. Nearly a decade later well over 100,000 veterans, spouses, and other civilians are claiming illnesses related to these exposures. The U.S. government denies a connection and refuses to sanction these claims of environmental illness. Analyzing data from in-depth interviews and various documents, the author examines the veterans'framing of Gulf War Illness and the government's response to this environmental illness frame.     

Sociological literature in an age of computerized texts

Although scholars have quickly adopted computers for word processing, new forms of interactive electronic texts pose important questions for the nature of scholarly literature in the social sciences. The social relationships constructed by interactive electronic texts devalue the authority of the writer and empower the reader. This is due in part to the phenomenology of electronic texts; in part to the social contexts governing the use of textual artifacts; and in part to the origin of electronic texts in the reading culture of computer technologists. Although narrative reading cultures empower the writer (as “author”) over readers, technical reading strategies construct the text as information which is given form by the reader. New information technologies thus challenge the scholarly concept of authorship, the status of scholarly writing as a “literature,” and the notion of copyright of texts.     

Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions

This paper examines the problem of how institutions and the phenomena called formal or large-scale organization exist—the problem of the ontology of organizations and institutions. It addresses this problem using an approach that has been developed as part of a sociology exploring the social from women's standpoint, from which standpoint the extra-locality and objectification of these forms of organization are problematized. For the most part, sociology formulates the phenomena of organizations and institutions in lexical forms of organization, institution, information, communication and the like, which suppress the presence of subjects and the local practices that produce the extra-local and objective. This paper argues that texts (or documents) are essential to the objectification of organizations and institutions and to how they exist as such. It suggests that exploring how texts mediate, regulate and authorize people's activities expands the scope of ethnographic method beyond the limits of observation; texts are to be seen as they enter into people's local practices of wrking, drawing, reading, looking and so on. They must be examined as they coordinate people's activities.     

Organizational texts lost and found in the architecture of organizing

This paper will discuss some of the texts absent in organizational discourse. Its aim is to illustrate the architecture of organizing through simultaneous, interactive abstract machines, which are constituted by their contextual, local genealogies. Organizing is viewed as simultaneously producing, structuring, escaping and killing. This is a nomadic approach. Nomads, like those who organize, are in constant motion, crossing borders. However, in actuality, they do also have ordered social structures and tend to travel along the same routes.

Just like this text among texts organizing basically has no beginning nor an end it is inbetween interbeing intermezzo an actuality a becoming something that bears yesterday and tomorrow within seeing oneself simultaneously producing and being produced but never completely.     

Native American Literature and Its Place in the Inter-American Project

Abstract

Issues of Native American literature and culture are placed in a comparative and inter-American perspective, where texts from Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil are discussed and contrasted. Native American texts are analyzed in the context of inter-American literary study, which is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures of North, Central, and South America. The argument is made that Native American literature represents the cultural and historical foundation of the entire inter-American project.     

Patricia Hill Collins's Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy of the Strong Black Woman

Increasingly, as Black Sexual Politics nears its ending, a shift in tone and level of intensity makes a reader aware that Collins's analysis of interlocking social institutions and media representations is aimed not just at informing, but at liberating, individual African American readers—that she wishes to give African American men and women the tools to resist the internalization of racist sexual ideology and denigrating gender roles. The texts that I examine here—by young Black feminist writers Veronica Chambers, Joan Morgan, and Kimberley Springer, along with a response to their work from Sheila Radford-Hill—continue Collins's deconstructive work on Black gender stereotypes by focusing on the Strong Black Woman role. These autobiographical/theoretical texts not only provide a historical context for the role's origins and development, but also add a psychological and emotional dimension: they tell us what it means to individual African American women to live up to the gender role requirements of Strong Black Woman. Juxtaposed through my analysis, these texts provide a kind of dialogue that moves, in the spirit of Collins' earlier pioneering work on standpoint theory, toward a collective standpoint on the Strong Black Woman gender role and its psychic and emotional costs.