540 research outputs found
Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics, and the Retailing of Whiteness in the Work of Maria Cristina Mena
No full textThis article analyzes how Mexican American author María Cristina Mena’s short magazine fiction boldly illustrates the emerging U.S. beauty industry as effectively producing whiteness for sale in the neocolonial marketplace. Her representations of Mexican women’s use of cosmetics articulate how the beauty industry both lends structure to and is structured by the idea of race; at the same time, she reminds her audience that the impact of beauty products and services is in large part determined by the political and economic context of the goods themselves. Through the techniques of role reversals, character development and dramatic irony, Mena’s stories portray the U.S. beauty industry as a dynamic trade that exports new forms of whiteness across its southern border. Far from depicting Mexican women as passive consumers in the neocolonial marketplace, however, Mena shows how beauty products and services can be appropriated as limited yet potent acts of resistance.This article was published as Schuller, Kyla. "Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics, and the Retailing of Whiteness in the Work of Maria Cristina Mena," Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer 2009), pp. 82-104. No part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Indiana University Press. For educational re-use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center (508-744-3350). For all other permissions, please visit Indiana University Press' permissions page.Peer reviewe
Specious Bedfellows: Ethnicity, Animality, and the Intimacy of Slaughter in Moby-Dick
No full text“Specious Bedfellows” argues that Moby-Dick is an exploration of the deeply affective relationships pre-industrial whaling ironically nurtured between whales and whalers through the very intimacy of the hunt. Melville’s portrayal of whaling animates a key trope of sentimentalism in its manifestations in mid-century political economy, research in natural history, and domestic ideology – the feeling animal – in order to reveal the self-serving relations at the heart of the discourse of sympathy. He represents both whales and whalers as affective, emotional subjects deserving of empathy from the emerging middle classes who had veracious appetites for sperm whale oil. His animals reveal the ways in which sentimental feeling, now widely recognized as the ideology of the antebellum middle class, both depended on using animal bodies for their own purposes and was increasingly dependent on the exploitative, unsympathetic labor practices facilitating the accumulation of capital. In Melville’s acerbic critique, sentimental intimacy may take the form of slaughter.Article copyright the author. Journal compilation copyright The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer reviewe
The Fossil and the Photograph: Red Cloud, Prehistoric Media, and Dispossession in Perpetuity
No full textTwo late-nineteenth-century media technologies purportedly recording the evolutionary past —the fossil and the photograph—helped naturalize the spread of settler colonialism across the Northern Plains. Settler colonial biopower works in the spaces in-between life and death to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land in perpetuity, seizing prehistory simultaneously with the present and the future. I uncover how Oglala leader Red Cloud drew on indigenous epistemologies of both fossils and photographs to negotiate the nuances of temporal and material dispossession, particularly through his work as a photographic subject. Red Cloud’s interventions with paleontologists and photographers illuminate how new approaches to media history that question the biopolitical divide between the organic and inorganic could be important components of denaturalizing settler colonialism.Peer reviewe
In Memoriam: Nancy Shelby Schuller
No full textA memorial tribute and remembrance of Nancy Schuller, a founding member of the Visual Resources Association and distinguished educator, mentor, and author
Taxonomies of Feeling: The Epistemology of Sentimentalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Racial and Sexual Science
No full textThe essay explores how sentimentalism shaped racial and sexual science through examining the work of the American School of Evolution. I argue that this once-prominent School translated the sensationist epistemology of the era, in which the senses mediate all knowledge, into a theory of species and race formation. In their view, species originated in sense-based experience and civilization originated in sentiment, granting individuals and especially the civilized control over their own evolution. As sensibility and sentiment denoted a susceptibility to both progress and degeneration, I show how their concept of sex differentiation attempted to work out some of the contradictions of the sentimental body. Overall, the piece advocates a rethinking of sentimentalism as a scientific epistemology and suggests how the discourse of feeling shaped the modern logic of biological difference in scientific as well as literary fields.Peer reviewe
Avatar and the Movements of Neocolonial Sentimental Cinema
No full textIn this essay, I turn to James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar (2009) to explore how and to what ends contemporary sentimental cinema moves the bodies of its subjects and audience.Peer reviewe
Supplemental Material - Improving Hand Hygiene Adherence in Small Animal Hospitals: A Social Marketing Approach
No full textSupplemental Material for Improving Hand Hygiene Adherence in Small Animal Hospitals: A Social Marketing Approach by Bettina Höchli, Michael Dorn, Geraldine Holenweger, Claude Messner, Simone Schuller, and Helene Rohrbach in Social Marketing Quarterly</p
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