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Generating Intimacy: Rage, Female Friendship, and the Heteropatriarchal Household on TV after #MeToo
Get PDFThis article looks at three post-2016, post-#MeToo television shows that depict friendships between heterosexual mothers—friendships that are forged through rage and murder: Dead to Me (Netflix 2019–22), Good Girls (NBC 2018–21), and Big Little Lies (HBO 2017–19). We situate these shows as indicative of a wider context where rage is increasingly legible in popular culture and where it holds particular kinds of political promise. We argue that the legibility of rage emerges from the specific historical, social, and economic forces of the present conjuncture, including increasing precarity and the unequal distribution of assets. In our shows, rage is directed against what Angela McRobbie calls the “lie of the postfeminist contract” and what Lauren Berlant terms the “cruel optimism of the happy ever after,” representing the possibility of subverting the heteropatriarchal household as well as politicizing social reproduction. This possibility suffuses these shows with the vitality of feminist promise, heightening the visual pleasures of intimacy between the women. The potential for subversion drives the shows’ affect—what we call their “epistemerotics of rage”: a narrative arc whose forward drive derives from watching women coming into their knowledge about men’s violence. Yet rage also recuperates the household it seems to threaten, and we argue this has to do with the racializations of that household in the American imaginary. Our attention to rage reveals a historical shift in sensibility that, though potentially radical, also risks retrenching oppressions. Though they differ in their ability to grapple with this, these shows are useful case studies for how feminist inquiry responds to rage in the contemporary moment
Social entrepreneurship and social innovation: A bibliometric review and research agenda
No full textDespite the increasing focus on scientific maturity in social entrepreneurship (SE) and social innovation (SI), scholars still place a greater focus on defining theoretical boundaries than on the commonalities and complementarities between these phenomena. We address this gap by investigating when, how, and to what extent SE and SI are interrelated via a bibliometric analysis of the intersection of the SE and SI theoretical domains that combines cocitation analysis, historiography, and bibliographic coupling. Building on these results, we advance the theoretical debate by introducing a novel framework, documenting that while the SI process can occur beyond social enterprises’ boundaries, SE can contribute to creating, enabling, and scaling SI solutions. Moreover, we document historical convergence in a new trend accompanying the increase in SI research under the SE umbrella. This leads to a research agenda that can prompt the cross-pollination of these theories, fostering a novel theoretical construct through this combination
Cinch, filter, erase: virtual bodies and the editable self
Get PDFSelfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We draw on qualitative data, including in-depth semi-structured interviews and participatory selfie-editing group workshops which used an innovative “smartphone live capture” method, where participants screen recorded on their smartphones and narrated how they edit selfies in real time to understand how bodies materialize through the everyday technologies of visual culture. We theorize that editing apps facilitate a “virtual gaze” that can create new ways of sensing embodiment, producing both intensified self-scrutiny and a seemingly increasingly plastic virtual and physical body, available for remaking according to intensifying demands for visual perfection
Effects of visual working memory load and item priority on susceptibility to distraction and memory accuracy
No full textVisual working memory (VWM) can store multiple items with varying degrees of attentional priority. We investigated how different load and prioritization status of memory items affected both memory precision and distractor resistance. We used a dual-task paradigm in which 48 participants encoded sets of oriented Gabor patches and completed a flanker task during the retention interval. The design varied status of memory items as currently relevant (CR), and future relevant (FR) and their load as one and two across three load conditions using retro-cues. Results showed that increasing CR load reduced distractor interference and memory precision, while increasing FR load had no effect on either measure. Importantly, no consistent advantage was observed for prioritized items in later memory tests, aligning with recent findings that retro-cue benefits can degrade under external attentional demands. These results support a functional dissociation between CR and FR items in VWM and highlight how attentional state—not memory load alone—shapes the functional impact of VWM representations
Exploring the limits of volunteering as a pathway to youth participation: Ethnographic Insights from Young People’s Volunteering towards HIV/AIDS Awareness in the Philippines
No full textThe chapter problematises the seemingly simplistic assumptions about who young volunteers are and what kind of development volunteering can facilitate for them. Youth participation has been framed and used as a pathway for young people’s engagement, solidarity and activism, including through volunteering. However, research literature addressing volunteering focusses predominantly on concepts, experiences and identities of volunteers from the global North (e.g. international youth volunteering), while the South is often framed as a ‘host’ for services coming from Northern, more ‘developed’ countries. The research literature fails to capture or provide frameworks for understanding Southern practices, forms and concepts of youth volunteering. This chapter seeks to re-orient such dominant discourse of volunteering to focus on the experiences of Southern youth volunteers who come from ‘vulnerable’ backgrounds. It draws from an 11-month ethnographic research with a voluntary organisation in the Philippines. The organisation advocates for HIV/AIDS awareness and adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Its volunteers are out-of-school youths, adolescents living with HIV, transgender women and youths from low-income households. Focussing on these young people’s contextual and cultural realities, this chapter explores whether and how volunteering challenges or reproduces dominant identities attached to their vulnerabilities, and the barriers and facilitators of their participation
Value Capture and Value Production in the World Economy: A Marxian Analysis of Global Value Chains, 2000–2014
Get PDFThe paper estimates the production, realisation, and capture of economic value in the world economy from 2000 to 2014. Estimates show how value is produced and transferred across 56 sectors and 43 countries. The methodology builds on the Marxian literature and the productive-unproductive classification. Value production is the labour directly and indirectly required to produce goods and services within global value chains. Value capture is the deviation between value realisation and production. Results show that China is the largest giver of value while the USA is the largest capturer of value in the world economy. Unproductive activities (real estate, finance, and trade) and capital-intensive industries (manufacturing, mining, and oil) are value capturers. Labour-intensive industries (health, education, construction, agriculture, and services) transfer value away. The paper also demonstrates that the theory of unequal exchange is incompatible with the conventional assumption that all activities are productive. Only under the Marxian productive-unproductive classification do the results converge with unequal exchange theory
“We Were Paralysed”: Ecological Grief, the Everyday Anthropocene, and Climate Crisis Ordinariness in The High House
Get PDFDespite arguments to the contrary, this article contends that climate realism both is and is yet to become a useful and valuable genre for aestheticising an environmentally threatened and threatening present. It conceptualises Jessie Greengrass’s The High House as a contemporary novel that mobilises climate realism through the “everyday Anthropocene” paradigm to convey the affective experience of living through and with climate crisis for a Western Global North populace. This affective climate is most typified by a paralysing ecological grief that implicates the novel’s characters in wider political inertia. As such, I argue that The High House deploys climate realism to scrutinise the structures of feeling that directly or indirectly contribute to this inertia, intimating that a living with and through climate crisis – what can, after Lauren Berlant, be called climate crisis ordinariness – might in effect equate to political quiescence if not indirect complicity in ecocide
Remembering (in) the absence of memorials
No full textThe title of this article evokes the present of remembering the Shoah in the Estonian context, through the example of a recent play by the Estonian-Russian theatre maker, Julia Aug, Mum, is our cat also a Jew? Aug’s testimonial dramaturgy allows for a dialogue between different generations for whom the question of their Jewish identity in Estonia (including the author’s own) is not subsumed in a “national” understanding of the past. As much as the living, the dead also speak in the present of the play, where the entanglements of pre- and post-Soviet memory culture, as between official and unofficial histories, are movingly explored. Aug’s play brings to light multidirectional questions of remembrance, not only in terms of “nationalities” but of gender, exposing a marginal-central configuration of voices in established accounts of memorialising Estonian independence