The right to fashion in the age of terrorism

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in the fashionably modern - and implicitly Western - woman become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as a human rights concern, as a rescue mission, as a beautifying mandate. This article examines newer iterations of this opposition, in the wake of September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics on fashion and beauty. In "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism," the author examines the relationship between the U.S. war on terror, targeting persons whose sartorial choices are described as terrorist-looking and oppressive, and the right-to-fashion discourse, which promotes fashion's mass-market diffusion as a civil liberty. Looking at these multiple invocations of the democratization of fashion, this article argues that the right-to-fashion discourse colludes with the war on terror by fabricating a neoliberal consumer-citizen who is also a couture-citizen and whose right to fashion reasserts U.S.exceptionalism, which is secured by private property, social mobility, and individualism.     

On U.S. Foreign Policy in the Balkans in the 1990s: Spotlight on Croatia

In the 1990s, despite a change of administrations, U.S. policy towards the Balkans remained consistent. Post-Gulf War, the United States urged Europe to take the lead, but ultimately humanitarian considerations forced the United States to take an active, military role. Within the U.S. government, a struggle between ``incrementalism' and a longer-term ``visionary approach' characterized internal debate. Incrementalism ultimately prevailed. The framework for U.S. policy decisions, especially in the early 1990s, led the United States to active involvement, including a lack of consensus in the United Nations on the use of force. Events, culminating in the ``Washington Agreement', led Croatia to seeing that its interests coincided with those of Bosnian Croats and Muslims. Only later did Croatian and U.S. interests diverge. Since Dayton, U.S. focus in Croatia has been on democratization, human rights, and the implementation of the accords. As U.S. Balkan policy evolved, seeing a stable European future for the region became a fundamental security interest of the United States. The Balkan Wars contributed significantly to changing perceptions of the transatlantic relationship and of the U.S. global role.     

The Significance of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks for United States‐Bound Migration in the Western Hemisphere

The economic and political effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks weakened Latin American and Caribbean economies, reduced employment among Western Hemisphere immigrants living in the United States, and hindered new migrants' access to U.S. territory. Thus, the 9/11 events probably increased long‐term motivations for northward migration in the hemisphere, while discouraging and postponing international population movement in the short run. In addition, the terrorist assaults dealt a sharp setback to a promising dialogue on immigration policies between the United States and Mexico. Those discussions had appeared to herald constructive new policies towards migration into the U.S. from Mexico and possibly other nations in the hemisphere. A series of significant international migrant flows in South and Central America and in the Caribbean, not involving the United States, are unfortunately beyond the scope of this brief essay. I will first describe the consequences of the September 11 assaults for U.S.‐bound migration in the hemisphere, before turning to consider future social, economic and policy paths.     

Analysis of the Beauty of Lin Tai-yu in A Dream of Red Mansions

Analysis of Lin Tai-yu's image has been numerous ever since the beginning of Redology, especially the analysis of Lin Taiyu's beauty. Lin Tai-yu's beauty is distinctive, especially her talents of poetry. Therefore, based on this context, the paper, with its title as Analysis of the Beauty of Lin Tai-yu in A Dream of Red Mansions, will focus its main argument on the beauty of poetry. And the paper will draw a conclusion in the end to point out the theoretical and practical meanings of the beauty of Lin Tai-yu.     

The U.S. Economic Polity,Social Identity,and International Human Rights

In this essay, I provide some complementary perspectives on certain themes that emerge in Judith Blau's (2016) timely and insightful article, “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology.” In response, I offer some very brief reflections structured through two prisms by which we might think further about the United States and human rights. These perspectives pick up on the core issue of Blau's article, the U.S. rejection of socioeconomic rights, and how this issue in turn relates first to the “social identity” of the United States as a whole, and second to the role of the political economy in states' recognition of human rights.     

Promoting human rights in the era of globalization and interventions: the changing spaces of struggle

A new cartography of geopolitical and corporate interests is reshaping the international order after September 11, calling into question the state's ability to secure fundamental rights for its citizens and to preserve participatory democracy. If civil society tends, among human rights activists, to be the preferred venue to articulate human rights concerns against the state and other powerful entities, one may wonder whether civil society has not become an arena dominated by consumerism or the pursuit of security. With the weakening of social forces for human rights in civil society as a buffer between the state and the private realm, how can we protect individuals from deepening incursions by the state and the globalized market in our age of war against terror? This article considers these issues, by placing them in historic context. More specifically, it examines how selected events since the Second World War have transformed the spaces which support and shape campaigns for human rights struggle.     

Spivak,in other words

The publication of texts by Chicana feminists in the 1980s offered an alternative mapping of feminist literary cartographies and subject positions. This article examines the work of contemporary Chicana writer, Sandra Cisneros, whose literary text enacts a practice of Chicana feminism that engages with a transnational, transfronteriza practice of feminismo popular, which literally translates as ‘popular feminism’. This type of border feminism articulates a feminist materialist aesthetics that enables us to re-examine an emergent formation of feminism on the border, a formation characterized by specific types of movements of Mexican women across geopolitical boundaries and borders. The complex movements of this transnational Chicana feminism are announced in the story ‘Woman Hollering Creek’, which complicates the binarisms of the metropolitan opposed to the rural, the core and periphery, and militates against a reductionist opposition of First World versus Third World. I argue that armed with a transfrontera feminism, the protagonist Cleofilas and her peers can resist the power of a transnational media. This story changes the subject of dominant, patriarchal discourse and lets readers imagine how Chicana transfrontera feminism and Mexican feminismo popular can converge in other spaces and under other circumstances to produce socially nuanced global Chicana Mexicana coalitions.     

When Feminists Don't Fit The Case of Pauline Hanson

The rise of the Far Right is a global phenomenon traditionally viewed as antithetical to feminism. However, in Australia from 1996–2001 Far Right politics was dominated by a woman, Pauline Hanson, thus calling into question the dynamics between organized feminism and the Far Right. A significant problem for Australian feminists trying to understand Hanson is that her ideology, activities and life-style are internally contradictory. This article draws on American analyses of similar women and examines the contradictions in Hanson's political philosophy and activism with a view to challenging current Australian feminist analysis of this controversial political woman.     

Narrow bridges: Jewish lesbian feminism,identity politics,and the “hard ground” of alliance

Abstract

The emergence of Jewish feminism in the late twentieth century produced a contradictory site for engagement with the Israeli state and its claims to both Jewish identity and the territory of historic Palestine. While some mobilizations of Jewish feminist identity politics promoted nationalism, others engaged the self-reflexive mode to question the coherence of group identity, to work against its codification in the state-national form, and to engender empathy and solidarity with targets of both U.S. and Israeli racial states. This essay maps two forms of Jewish feminist praxis: one liberal, normatively white, invested in both heteronormativity and Zionism; the other radical, emerging in close collaboration with women of color feminism, attuned to comparative racial relations, lesbian-led, and saturated with discourse and debate on U.S. and Israeli racism, and Zionism’s connection to Jewish identity.     

Appreciating the Beauty of Music,Painting and Architecture in English Writing

Wen Yiduo, a famous Chinese scholar, put forward "Three Beauty" theory that respectively refers to the beauty of music, the beauty of painting and the beauty of architecture, which is his view on poetry. This theory with important pioneering insight is of great significance to instruct translation from English to Chinese or from Chinese to English, additionally, to perfect English writing. This paper clarifies "what is the beauty of music and the beauty of painting, the beauty of architecture in English writing" and focuses on how to use "Three Beauty Theory" in English writing, as well as help students master the application of "Three beauty" theory.     

Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and,Yes, from American Sociology

The U.S. Constitution includes civil and political rights—as individual rights—but does not include what is internationally understood to be “human rights,” namely rights we enjoy as equals, including economic, social, and cultural rights, and protections for vulnerable persons, such as children, minorities, mothers, and refugees. The United States has not ratified any international (United Nations) or regional (Organization of American States) human rights treaty, is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, and is no longer a member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. It might be concluded that Americans do not know what human rights are. It is more complicated than that. While opinion polls show that Americans often endorse individual rights—e. g., the rights of women—they do not frame them as being interdependent or being within the purview of government. Can we conclude that human rights have no place in the United States? Not at all. This article concludes by showing that many U.S. institutions of higher learning have programs in human rights and that some academic associations, including the American Sociological Association, recognize human rights.     

Reinforcing the Divide

Abstract

Accounts of race in the United States have traditionally been steeped in prejudicial notions consistent with the society (Lusane, 2000; U.S. Census Bureau, 2000; Griffin, Caplinger, Lively, Malcom, McDaniel,&Nelsen, 1997). The U.S. Census has been used as an instrument in the continued dichotomous division of American citizens into either one of two groups, Whites and Nonwhites (Ngai, 1999). This essay examines the impact of the U.S. Census on U.S. law, public policy, and distribution of privilege between Whites and Nonwhites. This essay also addresses the influence of census-based racial classification on social work practice and education.     

Comparing housing affordability and quality among disability households: The United States and its regions

Two national data sets (the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Survey of Income and Program Participation) are analyzed to compare housing afford-ability and quality between U.S. disability households and other households and by region. The researchers conclude that disability households in the United States are at risk of inability to afford housing. In addition to higher housing-income ratios, these households are more likely to be older, in poverty, in poor or fair health, and on public assistance than other U.S. households. They are also more likely to carry severe housing cost burdens, to be in housing poverty, and to be receiving housing assistance. Regional differences among disability households and their housing seem to echo geographic economic and population trends, as well as regional variances in the housing stock. The data, which did not address housing accessibility, are less clear about disability households' risks relative to housing quality. Her research interests include housing for special needs populations, community housing needs assessment, and housing policy. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include professional practice and the housing needs of special needs populations, particularly the homeless. He received his Master's degree from California State University at Chico. He is a Housing Extension Specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service. His research interests include environmental issues, housing at-risk populations, and international housing. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University.     

The Family and Medical Leave Law

Abstract

This essay asks whether the Family and Medical Leave Law (1993) is feminist social policy, as it was touted to be by its political supporters. The study takes three approaches to feminism outlined by Lorber in her 2001 text, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, which considers women in their roles as mothers and workers. Data taken from a Department of Labor FMLA utilization study are then analyzed in the context of these three approaches to feminism. I conclude that the FMLA is not feminist in a substantive way despite its symbolic value.     

Reflections on Donald J. Trump’s First 100 Days

The arrival of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States is frightening to U.S. intellectuals on many grounds, not the least of which is his narrow conception of who and what is an “American.” This essay explores this broad worry but also reflects more personally on those dangers. It contrasts visions of ‘America’ and argues that the U.S. is indeed a house divided unto itself, but not in terms of geography or citizenship. And, contrary to much wishful thinking over the years, that right-wing of the U.S. population is not a fringe element of U.S. society.     

Social Relations, Core Values, and the Polyphony of the American Experience

This essay examines social relations and cultural values in the United States, paying special attention to recent characterizations of Americans as increasingly isolated, disconnected, and dangerously individualistic. In this essay, I refute such claims. And building on earlier work ( Cerulo, 2002 ), I show that U.S. social relations and cultural values are more multifaceted than such "new individualism" arguments suggest. Indeed, as Robin M. Williams Jr. discovered 50 years ago, when studied in a systematic way, U.S. values and beliefs present us with a multiplex system—a system in which individualism plays only a supporting role. This is true, I suggest, because Americans'"value focus"—that is, the prioritization of one value over another—shifts in concert with certain social events and structural conditions. In this way, we can think of U.S. values as part of a "cultural toolkit," with actors selecting or foregrounding the values needed to support certain strategies of action.     

Remembering Lucky Dragon,re-membering Bikini: worlding the Anthropocene through transpacific nuclear modernity

This paper examines two recent Godzilla-themed cultural artefacts that highlight the entanglement between nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy: first, the 60th anniversary Godzilla exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall; second, the 2014 American Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. This paper frames these two distinctive post-Fukushima cultural texts as memory work that mediates post-WWII genealogies of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power as constitutive elements of U.S. militarism and transpacific technological modernity. Specifically, this paper foregrounds how these two recent cultural texts, produced at different Pacific shores, bring the complexity of the often-absented Pacific back into focus. By enacting what Rob Wilson and Chris Connery call ‘worlding’ to make sense of divergent representations of the tragic Lucky Dragon/Bikini incident that decidedly informed the creation of the original Japanese Gojira [1954. Film. Directed by Honda Ishiro. Japan: Toho Co., Ltd.], this paper analyses geopolitical figurations of the Pacific and its peoples in both the specific context of this tragic incident and the broader formation of transpacific nuclear modernity. In so doing, this paper unravels the ways in which these divergent representations grapple with nuclear modernity’s reordering of necropolitics and biopolitics and its effects: specifically, the ways in which the renarration of death-making nuclear technology as a technology of good life conveniently erases the victims of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and nuclear waste that the reproduction of U.S. nuclearism depends on and continues to produce.     

Making the Perfect Queen: The Cultural Production of Identities in Beauty Pageants

Beauty queens are symbolic representations of collective cultural indentities and beauty pageants are fields of active 'cultural production'. This article surveys the growing literature on beauty pageants to better understand how culture is produced within the contexts of pageants. To do so, the article examines how beauty pageants operate as sites of commodification and consumption in a world increasingly influenced by global markets and media institutions. It also illustrates how culture is produced in beauty pageants by examining beauty pageants as sites of oppression, sites to articulate cultural agency, and sites of ethnic, gender, cultural, and sexual identity production.     

Reflections on front‐line medical work during COVID‐19 and the embodiment of risk

Drawing on the voice of a woman NHS front‐line doctor during the current COVID‐19 pandemic, we explore her lived experience of the embodiment of risk in the crisis. We explore her struggles and difficulties, giving her voice and mobilizing our writing to listen to these experiences, reflecting on them as a way of living our own feminist lives. Her story illustrates that the current crisis is not only a crisis of health, but a crisis for feminism. Through telling her story, we cast light upon the embodied amplification of inequalities, paternalistic discourses around risk and lived experience of exposure to risk of contracting a deadly virus. We explore her work on the NHS front line, providing a conceptual framework of the multi‐level facets of the embodiment of risk, through lived experiences of risk and observations of the inequality of risk in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK.