Prejudicial Distribution of the HPV Vaccine

July 2, 2011

[1] Release of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine on the market sparked controversy: Teen girls, sex, politics, religion, and cancer intersected in the push to inject the vaccine into arms. The focus of this paper is the mythology of the vaccine, and the means in which various standpoints have created a...

Manufacturing Hysteria: The Import of U.S. Abortion Rhetorics to Poland

Dec. 1, 2010

[1] When I first heard about the Post Abortion Syndrome (also known as Post Abortion Stress Syndrome) as a strategy used by American anti-choicers, I did not give it much thought. There were by far greater issues to worry about in my own backyard. Poland, the Central European state where...

Who’s in Prison in the U.S.? Who’s Not? A Special Call for Papers

Jan. 2, 2010

Recent gender studies about criminality have tended to focus on the decriminalization of same sex relationships or on controversies about a woman's right to choose an abortion. While these issues are important, their implicit legal and political contexts have been considered narrowly. How are these issues reframed when we include...

On Mothers Without Citizenship: An Interview with Lynn Fujiwara

Jan. 2, 2009

[1] THOMA: In your book, Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform , you analyze how a new nativism and foreigner racialization intensified in an anti-immigrant movement in the mid 1990s, a period of heightened white anxiety about an emerging non-white majority. The political debates...

Eminem, Masculine Striving, and the Dangers of Possessive Individualism

Nov. 1, 2007

Indeed if one is to be a man almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. -Norman Mailer, The White...

Male Stewardesses: Male Flight Attendants as a Queer Miscarriage of Justice

June 1, 2007

[1] To find work as a flight attendant in the 1960s took more than affability, patience, good looks and an openness to travel. While all these traits were certainly essential, there were also more pernicious criteria that made this field rife with discrimination. African Americans were only reluctantly hired at...

Postcolonial Masculinity: 1947, Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere

Feb. 1, 2006

If the humanities have a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense...

Why Must They Take the Bus? Editorial on the New Orleans Disaster

Sept. 2, 2005

[1] “About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans convention center grew increasingly hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead,” reported the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Thursday, September 1, 2005. There were helicopters, there were boats, and there were even...

“Let’s Moider Mother”: Heavenly Creatures and the Politics of Delusion

Aug. 15, 2005

Our main idea for the day was to moider Mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea. Naturally, we feel a trifle nervous...

Elaine de Kooning, Portraiture, and the Politics of Sexuality

Sept. 1, 2003

[1] In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning used the Abstract Expressionist style of “action painting” to create sexually- charged images of men. For example, in Fairfield Porter #1, 1954, de Kooning pushes the seated faceless figure to the foreground, confronting the viewer with his open-legged stance; an invitation to visually...

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