Throughout the history of moral, political, and legal philosophy,many have portrayed passions and emotions as beingopposed to reason and good judgment. At the same time,others have defended passions and emotions as temperingreason and enriching judgment, and there is mountingempirical evidence linking emotions to moral judgment. InPassions and Emotions, a group of prominent scholars inphilosophy, political science, and law explore three clustersof issues: “Passion & Impartiality: Passions & Emotions inMoral Judgment”; “Passion & Motivation: Passions & Emotionsin Democratic Politics”; and “Passion & Dispassion:Passions & Emotions in Legal Interpretation.” This timely,interdisciplinary volume examines many of the theoreticaland practical legal, political, and moral issues raised by suchquestions.
Passing for what you are not–whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women–can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing's radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion . Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan's mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class. Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines–from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies –Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity. Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O'Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.
When the new medium of CD-ROMs emerged, industry figures and critics alike proclaimed their virtually unlimited potential. Adapting material from well-established media like television and film, CD-ROMs have quickly transformed genres such as science fiction and horror. At the same time, the realities of actual CD-ROMs often fall short of their utopian visions. On a Silver Platter marks a «coming of age» for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically significant medium demanding critical attention. Greg Smith brings together media scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to analyze how CD-ROMs offer alternatives to familiar places—to museums, to cities, and especially to classrooms. Examining specific CD-ROM titles, including, Sim City, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the contributors argue that CD-ROMs are complex texts worthy of close consideration, both for how they have changed our understanding of space and genre, and for how they will impact the development of future media. By examining particular CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for insight and understanding into the current state of multimedia and into the future of technology.
Rap music is often seen as a Black secular response to pressing issues of our time. Yet, like spirituals, the blues, and gospel music, rap has deep connections to African American religious traditions. Noise and Spirit explores the diverse religious dimensions of rap stemming from Islam (including the Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation), Rastafarianism, and Humanism, as well as Christianity. The volume examines rap’s dialogue with religious traditions, from the ways in which Islamic rap music is used as a method of religious and political instruction to the uses of both the blues and Black women’s rap for considering the distinction between God and the Devil.The first section explores rap’s association with more easily recognizable religious traditions and communities such as Christianity and Islam. The next presents discussions of rap and important spiritual considerations, including on the topic of death. The final unit wrestles with ways to theologize about the relationship between the sacred and the profane in rap.
Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more so than in New York City and Amsterdam, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have populations that are more than a third foreign-born. These cities have had to deal with the challenge of incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose cultures, languages, religions, and racial backgrounds differ dramatically from those of many long-established residents. New York and Amsterdam brings together a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of American and Dutch scholars to examine and compare the impact of immigration on two of the world’s largest urban centers. The original essays in this volume discuss how immigration has affected social, political, and economic structures, cultural patterns, and intergroup relations in the two cities, investigating how the particular, and changing, urban contexts of New York City and Amsterdam have shaped immigrant and second generation experiences. Despite many parallels between New York and Amsterdam, the differences stand out, and juxtaposing essays on immigration in the two cities helps to illuminate the essential issues that today’s immigrants and their children confront. Organized around five main themes, this book offers an in-depth view of the impact of immigration as it affects particular places, with specific histories, institutions, and immigrant populations. New York and Amsterdam profoundly contributes to our broader understanding of the transformations wrought by immigration and the dynamics of urban change, providing new insights into how—and why— immigration’s effects differ on the two sides of the Atlantic.
Finalist for 2010 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Awards Unwed teen mothers, abortion, masturbation, pornography, gay marriage, sex trafficking, homosexuality, and HIV are just a few in a long line of issues that have erupted into panics. These sexual panics spark moral crusades and campaigns, defining and shaping how we think about sexual and reproductive rights. The essays in Moral Panics, Sex Panics focus on case studies ranging from sex education to AIDS to race and the «down low,» to illustrate how sexuality is at the heart of many political controversies. The contributors also reveal how moral and sexual panics have become a mainstay of certain kinds of conservative efforts to win elections and gain power in moral, social, and political arenas. Moral Panics, Sex Panics provides new and important insights into the role that key moral panics have played in social processes, arguing forcefully against the political abuse of sex panics and for the need to defend full sexual and reproductive rights. Contributors: Cathy J. Cohen, Diane DiMauro, Gary W. Dowsett, Janice M. Irvine, Carole Joffe, and Saskia Eleonora Wieringa.
What are the proper aims of education in a liberal democracy? Given the deep disagreement about moral and religious values in modern societies, what is the proper balance between public and private claimants to educational authority? Should parents be given greater control over their children's formal education? Are today's public schools promoting a culture of rootless individualism? Do we increasingly resort to prisons and punishment instead of schooling and moral education to control young people? And what, finally, should be the fate of the great project of racially integrated schooling: a project that energized a vast expenditure of hopes and resources in the latter half of the 20th century in America? Should we recommit ourselves to the ideal of integration, or should we embrace other, perhaps better, ways to help the disadvantaged and promote social integration? Should we go further, and affirm that predominantly black educational institutions have intrinsic benefits, such as preserving black culture and providing role models for black youngsters? As education reform takes center stage these questions are at the heart of what it means to be an American and participate in a democratic society. The essayists in this volume bring philosophical, political, and legal reflection to bear on the practical questions of how education should be changed to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. In so doing they display a determination to illuminate the educational choices that lie before all modern democracies. Contributors: Anita L. Allen, Lawrence Blum, Harry Brighouse, Randall Curren, Peter de Marneffe, James G. Dwyer, Christopher Eisgruber, William A. Galston, Amy Gutmann, Michael W. McConnell, Rob Reich, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Yael Tamir, John Tomasi, and Andrew Valls.
Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc . provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture. Organized around the idea of «incorporation»–embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism– Modernism, Inc . covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's «hot house style»; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist kitsch and the recuperation of North America's «Great Lady painters»; Gertrude Stein and Jewish Social Science; the Reno Divorce Factory and the production of gender; Andy Razaf and Black Bolshevism. Collectively, the essays suggest that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is not one of rupture, belatedness, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting. Modernism, Inc . looks at our ghosts, and at the unspeakable secrets of modernity from which they're derived. Contributors: Maria Damon, Walter Kalidjian, Walter Lew, Janet Lyon, William J. Maxwell, Cary Nelson, John Timberman Newcombe, David G. Nicholls, Thomas Pepper, Paula Rabinowitz, Daniel Rosenberg, Marlon Ross, Jani Scandura, Kathleen Stewart, Julia Walker.
The essays in Marriage Proposals envision a variety of scenarios in which adults would continue to join themselves together seeking permanent companionship and sustenance, linking sexual intimacy to a long commitment, usually caring for each other, and building new families. What would disappear are the legal consequences associated with marriage. No joint income tax return; no immigration privileges like the “fiancée visa” or the right to bring in a husband or wife; no special statuses for prison visits or hospital decisions; no prerogative to remain silent in court by claiming “confidential marital communications”; no pension entitlements; no marital benefits and detriments regarding criminal or civil liability.The anthology makes a unique contribution amid the two marriage furors of the day: same-sex marriage and the Bush Administration's “marriage movement” (that marrying is good and more marriages would be better for society). Abolishing the legal category of marriage is the only policy suggestion in current American discourse that speaks to both causes. Activists on both sides of the same-sex marriage fight, along with marriage movement partisans, all seek improvement through law reform. Marriage Proposals gives them a viable reform—abolition of marriage as a legal status—for fighting battles in the courtroom and the streets. Contributors include Anita Bernstein, Peggy Cooper Davis, Martha Albertson Fineman, Linda C. McClain, Marshall Miller, Lawrence Rosen, Mary Lyndon Shanley, and Dorian Solot.
Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women’s history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women’s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women’s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future?The contributors discuss their discovery of women’s histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women’s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women’s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.