“Anarchy all over Baščaršija”: Yugoslavia's new socialist culture and the New Primitives poetics of the local

The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its “poetics of the local” as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's “new socialist culture” and its privileging of “external‐cosmopolitan” as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating “local‐parochial” as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally‐imposed frames of reference as the basis for self‐understanding, and to embrace a socio‐cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically “primitive”– i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio‐cultural self.     

The Dialectic of Pronouns: A Critical Assessment of the Folk-Urban Tradition in Sociology

Abstract

This article challenges the folk-urban evolutionary tradition that is exemplified by Toennies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and supported by Durkheim's concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity. I argue that the relationship between these dichotomous concepts is essentially dialectical. Hence, in modern industrial systems, Gemeinschaft (the thesis, symbolized by the pronoun “I”) and Gesellschaft (the antithesis, symbolized by “we”) ultimately transform into a qualitatively different system (the synthesis, symbolized by “they”). I conclude by briefly reassessing the contributions of Durkheim and Toennies to modern sociology.     

Between Money,Morality and Masculinity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the supply-side of Chiang Mai's gay bars, that is, the male sex workers called dek bar or “bar boys”¹ in Thai. I formulate some explanations why these young men -more than half of whom do not consider themselves to be “homosexual” -take on a job as a male sex worker. In this analysis I focus on certain notions in traditional Thai society, trends in contemporary urban Thai society, the economics of work in a gay bar, as well as the sexual behaviour of male sex workers and the concepts they use to describe their work.     

The Child Outside the Door: Primal Scene,Caesura, and the Primary Trauma of Race

ABSTRACT

We are supposedly a “postracial” America, yet we cannot contain our own excess, cannot keep the unmetabolized beta elements of our racial history out of the bedroom or let race stay in the bedroom so the mature genital couple can do what it pleases. Not only do we surveil, police, and monitor race’s own primal scene but also we continuously break and enter into its most intimate chambers, guns drawn, tanks crashing in, in order to prevent the primal scene from ever taking place. This article explores the idea of race in America as denied its own primal scene and the ways in which, contrary to the importance to Bion (1991) of preventing “someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space” (p. 578), we cannot allow race to hold open its own empty space, find its own manifestations of O. I draw from the work of Wilfred Bion, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, and others to attempt to theorize the complexities of “postracial” America’s relationship with race vis-à-vis the primal scene.     

Borrowing,Dwelling, Owing

Abstract

Taking the movie The Company Men (John Wells, 2010) as its starting point, the article attempts to think the condition of indebtedness in its connection with living in and with a home. Through readings of Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the article claims that the predicament of the indebted person and his or her house can be described as linked to a shift in the way we view houses, from “places of dwelling” to “standing-reserves.”     

Bioactive compounds of the Mediterranean diet and prostate cancer

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this review is to examine the evidence on the effects of bioactive constituents of the Mediterranean diet (MeDi) on prostate cancer (PCa) risk.

Methods: The search for articles came from extensive research in the following databases: PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. We used the search terms “Mediterranean diet,” “lycopene,” “vitamin E,” “vitamin C,” “Selenium,” “resveratrol,” “prostate cancer,” and combinations, such as “lycopene and prostate cancer” or “resveratrol and prostate cancer.”

Results: Numerous studies investigating the effect of various dietary nutrients on PCa have suggested that selenium is probably the most promising. Several studies reported reduced PCa risk associated with vitamin C and E intake, while other studies reported no association. Lycopene inhibits cell proliferation and inducts apoptosis, thus protecting against cancer. Also, it has been found in various in vivo and in vitro studies that resveratrol, inhibits PCa development.

Conclusions: The high content of bioactive phytochemicals in the MeDi is of particular interest in the prevention of PCa. Further large-scale studies are required to clarify the effect of MeDi bioactive compounds on prostate health, in order to establish the role of this diet in the prevention of PCa.     

Surplus,excess, dirt: slavery and the production of disposability in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005 Vergès, F. 2005. “One World, Many Maps.” Interventions 7 (3): 342–345. doi:10.1080/13698010500268155.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated “processes of disposability” that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into “surplus” and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country’s history. In this article, I use the lens of “dirt” to render such “processes of disposability” visible. I do so by analysing two texts in which African bodies are portrayed as filthy, menacing and contaminating – the novel Unconfessed and a television advertisement titled “Papa Wag Vir Jou” (“Daddy’s Waiting for You”) – which I situate within a discussion of South Africa’s extraordinarily high rates of incarceration and sexual violence. I point to the seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

Sexism,Erotophobia, and the Illusory “No”

SUMMARY

I examined erotophobic, sex-negative attitudes toward female sexuality as they relate to acquaintance rape. Evidence suggests that sexist assumptions about female eroticism are intrinsically related to sexual violence against women. The argument is made that society's willingness to acknowledge women as sexual victims while simultaneously failing to validate women as sexual agents creates an ideal breeding ground for acquaintance rape. Accordingly, an analysis will be offered: in a culture that denies women freedom to say “yes” to sex without negative stigma, “no” does not always mean “no.” In this article, I will assert mat those who care about stopping sexual aggression in dating relationships have an obligation to work to eradicate sexist assumptions that neuter women's erotic selves.     

Pharmaceutical Intimacy: Sex,Death, and Methamphetamine

ABSTRACT

In this article, I draw from ethnographic work conducted among residents of an “in-house” drug and alcohol treatment center in Baltimore, Maryland, to discuss the relationships born of pharmaceutical (ab)use. By looking in close detail at the autobiographical accounts of one man in treatment for addiction to methamphetamine, I attempt to chart the way life and death are at times brought into close proximity, and at others wedged firmly apart, by such things as love and avoidance. My concern is with the ethics of care that emerge through the so-called “small events” in everyday relations; that so often define a life or a relationship as falling under the category “normal” or “pathological.” I ask how such things as the known demands placed on the body by the need to maintain or avoid relations, whether pharmaceutically mediated or not, come to bear on the decision to “let die” or the resurgence of moral worlds. I end by discussing the different aspects of relatedness revealed by the dependencies and alliances formed by the kinship between pharmaceuticals and humans.

In compliance with current ethical research standards, the names of all informants have been changed to assure their anonymity.     

The “New Mestiza,” the Old Mestizos: Contrasting Discourses on Mestizaje*

This article analyzes varying, inconsistent, representations of “mestizaje” (generally construed as racial or cultural mixing in the Americas) deriving from different historical settings and ideological frameworks. It particularly focuses on what I here term “old mestizaje,” summarized in the writings of Latin American intellectuals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, such as Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race); and “new mestizaje,” articulated in the works of such contemporary thinkers as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The NewMestiza). The center piece of the article is the contradictions and fractures between old and new discourses in terms of their underlying views of race, identity, and “destiny.” It examines the links of old mestizaje with essentialist, Social Darwinist, concepts, and the foundations of new mestizaje on a critical cultural studies paradigm. I propose that various aspects of old mestizaje infused hegemonic racial ideologies throughout Latin America and engendered a form of “color blindness” that obscured pervasive racial inequalities in the region.     

Three Types of Memory for Childhood Sexual Abuse: Relationships to Characteristics of Abuse and Psychological Symptoms∗

ABSTRACT

Data from a clinical sample (N?=?88) reporting childhood sexual abuse was compared by types of memory, abuse characteristics, and psychological symptoms. Three types of memory were identified from a questionnaire (“Always” n?=?27 [31%], “Recovered” n?=?41 [46%], and “Both” n?=?20 [23%]). When compared with narrative reports from a subset (n?=?30) of the sample, the lines between “Always,” “Recovered,” and “Both” types of memory were ambiguous. Consistency across reports, however, was 83%. Memories classified as either “Recovered” or “Both” were associated with earlier age-at-onset and more severe psychological symptoms compared to those who “Always” remembered CSA. No significant differences were found between the “Both” and “Recovered” groups.     

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.     

Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

Housework,Housewives, and Domestic Workers

ABSTRACT

This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.     

Undutiful daughter(s): troubling geographies of the gendered nation and belonging in Adichie’s Americanah and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

ABSTRACT

This paper proffers a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a Bildungsroman that represents a moment of a daughter’s “undutifulness” to domesticating national patriarchies and cultures, textual and epistemic genealogies. In this regard, I posit Adichie’s twining of national romances and a heterosexual romantic love that travels and returns as a framework for examining gendered experiencing and relations to the “home.” The article considers the text’s representation of migration and return not simply as moments of re-domestication and formulaic reunification but as incidents that enunciate expanded relationalities to the nation and reconfigure domestic intimacies in a manner that radically unsettles “home.” Americanah is read alongside Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in an attempt to show how the development of the protagonists’ interpersonal romances goes together with a studied engagement with the national space and communities in ways that inscribe women’s labours of love, care and intellect into the public domain and charts transformative possibilities of being in the world and inhabiting home. Ultimately, Adichie and Atta’s texts demonstrate alertness to celebrations of transnational black femininities, its vulnerabilities and bonds that transcend the limited “ethical” commitments delineated by the horizons of gendered roles and the national home.     

Appropriate Terminology for the Alcohol,Eating, and Physical Activity Relationship

Abstract

“Drunkorexia” merges prior literature identifying positive relationships between (a) alcohol use/abuse and disordered eating/eating disorders, (b) alcohol use/abuse and physical activity, and (c) disordered eating/eating disorders and physical activity. The term, highlighting an individual's proactive and/or reactive weight management behaviors (ie, disordered eating, physical activity) in relation to alcohol consumption, originated in news editorials and has recently gained recognition via use in scholarly publications. The purpose of this commentary is to recommend discontinuing use of the term “drunkorexia” due to (a) inconsistent definitions of drunkorexia across investigations, (b) drunkorexia being a misnomer, and (c) the medical community's lack of recognition/acceptance of drunkorexia. Because the behaviors encompassed by drunkorexia are of concern to researchers and health professionals, future investigations are still warranted. However, until a medically recognized term/phrase is accepted, scholars should utilize more appropriate characterizations such as “weight-conscious drinkers,” “weight management behaviors of drinkers,” or “Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified” (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision).     

A Review of: “Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys,Uncharted Paths. Edited by J. Ari Kane-DeMaios & Vern L. Bullough.”

THE SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION OF CHILDREN. Mary de Young. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &; Company, 1982; 179 pages; $18.95.

“FEMININITY,” “MASCULINITY,” AND “ANDROGYNY” A Modern Philosophical Discussion. Mary Vetterling‐Braggin (Ed.). Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, &; Co., 1982; 326 pages; $8.95.

IMPOTENCE: Physiological, Psychological, Surgical Diagnosis and Treatment. Gorm Wagner and Richard Green. New York: Plenum Press, 1981; 182 pages; $24.50.

Bullough, V. L. Age at Menarche: A Misunderstanding. Science 1981, 213, 365–366.