Mediated Kinship

Mediated Kinship PDF Author: Rikke Andreassen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351233416
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Illustrating the fascinating intersections of online media and new kinship, this book presents a study of the increasing numbers of single women and lesbian couples reproducing by using donor sperm. It explores how they connect with each other online, develop intimate digital communities and, most importantly, locate their children’s hitherto unknown biological half-siblings, throughout the world. The author discusses how these new families - consisting of only mothers - engage in extended families involving large numbers of ‘donor siblings’. The new families challenge previous understandings of kinship, and provide illustrations of how norms of gender, sexuality and family are challenged, negotiated and maintained in contemporary times. A crucial study of contemporary formations of family, gender and race, Mediated Kinship discusses the racial aspects of the world’s largest sperm bank exporting Danish sperm (termed ‘Viking sperm’), and explores the narratives of whiteness and imagined racial superiority that circulate among mothers, as well as the racialisations accompanying commercial online sperm sales. By analysing contemporary families of donor-conceived children in the context of legislation, reproduction technologies and online media, the book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness, gender, sexuality, kinship and the sociology of the family.

Mediated Kinship

Mediated Kinship PDF Author: Rikke Andreassen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351233416
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Illustrating the fascinating intersections of online media and new kinship, this book presents a study of the increasing numbers of single women and lesbian couples reproducing by using donor sperm. It explores how they connect with each other online, develop intimate digital communities and, most importantly, locate their children’s hitherto unknown biological half-siblings, throughout the world. The author discusses how these new families - consisting of only mothers - engage in extended families involving large numbers of ‘donor siblings’. The new families challenge previous understandings of kinship, and provide illustrations of how norms of gender, sexuality and family are challenged, negotiated and maintained in contemporary times. A crucial study of contemporary formations of family, gender and race, Mediated Kinship discusses the racial aspects of the world’s largest sperm bank exporting Danish sperm (termed ‘Viking sperm’), and explores the narratives of whiteness and imagined racial superiority that circulate among mothers, as well as the racialisations accompanying commercial online sperm sales. By analysing contemporary families of donor-conceived children in the context of legislation, reproduction technologies and online media, the book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness, gender, sexuality, kinship and the sociology of the family.

The Feeling of Kinship

The Feeling of Kinship PDF Author: David L. Eng
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392828
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism”—the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism. Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

Parenting in Global Perspective

Parenting in Global Perspective PDF Author: Charlotte Faircloth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136246924
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Drawing on both sociological and anthropological perspectives, this volume explores cross-national trends and everyday experiences of ‘parenting’. Parenting in Global Perspective examines the significance of ‘parenting’ as a subject of professional expertise, and activity in which adults are increasingly expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled. By focusing the significance of parenting as a form of relationship and as mediated by family relationships across time and space, the book explores the points of accommodation and points of tension between parenting as defined by professionals, and those experienced by parents themselves. Specific themes include: the ways in which the moral context for parenting is negotiated and sustained the structural constraints to ‘good’ parenting (particularly in cases of immigration or reproductive technologies) the relationship between intimate family life and broader cultural trends, parenting culture, policy making and nationhood parenting and/as adult ‘identity-work’. Including contributions on parenting from a range of ethnographic locales – from Europe, Canada and the US, to non-Euro-American settings such as Turkey, Chile and Brazil, this volume presents a uniquely critical and international perspective, which positions parenting as a global ideology that intersects in a variety of ways with the political, social, cultural, and economic positions of parents and families.

Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination

Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination PDF Author: Simon C. Estok
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317327675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Written from within the best traditions of ecocritical thought, this book provides a wide-ranging account of the spatial imagination of landscape and seascape in literary and cultural contexts from many regions of the world. It brings together essays by authors writing from within diverse cultural traditions, across historical periods from ancient Egypt to the postcolonial and postmodern present, and touches on an array of divergent theoretical interventions. The volume investigates how our spatial imaginations become "wired," looking at questions about mediation and exploring how various traditions compete for prominence in our spatial imagination. In what ways is personal experience inflected by prevailing cultural traditions of representation and interpretation? Can an individual maintain a unique and distinctive spatial imagination in the face of dominant trends in perception and interpretation? What are the environmental implications of how we see landscape? The book reviews how landscape is at once conceptual and perceptual, illuminating several important themes including the temporality of space, the mediations of place that form the response of an observer of a landscape, and the development of response in any single life from early, partial thoughts to more considered ideas in maturity. Chapters provide suggestive and culturally nuanced propositions from varying points of view on ancient and modern landscapes and seascapes and on how individuals or societies have arranged, conceptualized, or imagined circumambient space. Opening up issues of landscape, seascape, and spatiality, this volume commences a wide-ranging critical discussion that includes various approaches to literature, history and cultural studies. Bringing together research from diverse areas such as ecocriticism, landscape theory, colonial and postcolonial theory, hybridization theory, and East Asian Studies to provide a historicized and global account of our ecospatial imaginations, this book will be useful for scholars of landscape ecology, ecocriticism, physical and social geography, postcolonialism and postcolonial ecologies, comparative literary studies, and East Asian Studies.

A Theory of Prudence

A Theory of Prudence PDF Author: Dale Dorsey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192556991
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Much of knowing what to do is knowing what to do for ourselves, but knowing how to act in our best interest is complex—-we must know what benefits us, what burdens us, and how these facts present and constitute considerations in favor of action. Additionally, we must know how we should weigh our interests at different times—-past, present, and future. Dale Dorsey argues that a theory of prudence is needed: a theory of how we ought to act when we are acting for ourselves. A Theory of Prudence provides a comprehensive account of prudence, including the metaethics of prudential value, the nature of the personal good, the reasons of prudence, and the structure of prudential normativity over time.

Embodied Progress

Embodied Progress PDF Author: Sarah Franklin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000768759
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This new edition of Sarah Franklin’s classic monograph on the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) includes two entirely new chapters reflecting on the relevance of the book’s findings in the context of the past two decades and providing a ‘state-of-the-art’ review of the field today. Over the past 25 years, both the assisted conception industry and the academic field of reproductive studies have grown enormously. IVF, in particular, is belatedly becoming recognised as one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a far-reaching set of implications that have to date been underestimated, understudied and under-reported. This pioneering text was the first to explore the emergence of commercial IVF in the United Kingdom, where the technique was originally developed. During the 1980s, the British Parliament devised a unique system of comprehensive national regulation of assisted reproduction amidst fractious public and media debate over IVF and embryo research. Franklin chronicles these developments and explores their significance in relation to classic anthropological debates about the meanings of kinship, gender and the 'biological facts' of parenthood. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with women and couples undergoing IVF, as well as ethnographic fieldword in early IVF clinics, the book explores the unique demands of the IVF technique. In richly detailed chapters, it documents the ‘topsy-turvy’ world of IVF, and how the experience of undergoing IVF changes its users in ways they had not anticipated. Franklin argues that such experiences reveal a crucial feature of translational biomedical procedures more widely – namely, that these are ‘hope technologies’ that paradoxically generate new uncertainties and risks in the very space of their supposed resolution. The final chapter closely engages with the ‘hope technology’ concept, as well as the idea of ‘having to try’ and uses these frames to link contemporary reproductive studies to core sociological and anthropological arguments about economy, society and technology. In the context of rapid fertility decline and huge growth in the fertility industry, this volume is even more relevant today than when it was first published at the dawn of what Franklin calls the era of 'iFertility'. Embodied Progress is an essential read for all social science academics and students with an interested in the burgeoning new field of reproductive studies. It is also a valuable resource for practitioners working in the fields of reproductive health, biomedicine and policy.

Eco-Trauma Cinema

Eco-Trauma Cinema PDF Author: Anil Narine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317649419
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related, and even symbiotic: the traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us. Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.

The Artificial Ear

The Artificial Ear PDF Author: Stuart Blume
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813549116
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
When it was first developed, the cochlear implant was hailed as a "miracle cure" for deafness. That relatively few deaf adults seemed to want it was puzzling. The technology was then modified for use with deaf children, 90 percent of whom have hearing parents. Then, controversy struck as the Deaf community overwhelmingly protested the use of the device and procedure. For them, the cochlear implant was not viewed in the context of medical progress and advances in the physiology of hearing, but instead represented the historic oppression of deaf people and of sign languages. Part ethnography and part historical study, The Artificial Ear is based on interviews with researchers who were pivotal in the early development and implementation of the new technology. Through an analysis of the scientific and clinical literature, Stuart Blume reconstructs the history of artificial hearing from its conceptual origins in the 1930s, to the first attempt at cochlear implantation in Paris in the 1950s, and to the widespread clinical application of the "bionic ear" since the 1980s.

Grandmothering While Black

Grandmothering While Black PDF Author: LaShawnDa L. Pittman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520389956
Category : African American grandmothers
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In Grandmothering While Black, sociologist LaShawnDa L. Pittman explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren). She prioritizes the voices of Black grandmothers through in-depth interviews and ethnographic research at various sites--doctor's visits, welfare offices, school and day care center appointments, caseworker meetings, and more. Through careful examination, she explores the various forces that compel, constrain, and support Black grandmothers' caregiving. Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. Grandmothering While Black illuminates the strategies used by grandmothers to manage their legal marginalization vis-à-vis parents and the state across a range of caregiving arrangements. In doing so, it reveals the overwhelming and painful decisions Black grandmothers must make to ensure the safety and well-being of the next generation.

Legalism

Legalism PDF Author: Georgy Kantor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198813414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This volume brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how property and ownership operate and are understood across contexts ranging from Roman provinces to modern-day piracy in Somalia. Among other things it examines the way legal property regimes intertwine with economic, moral-ethical, and political prerogatives.