Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle PDF Author: Mark D. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894118
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Clinton and Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sosuke Uno and a geisha. In Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, Mark D. West organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what’s public and what’s private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media didn’t cover Uno’s affair, why Uno’s wife apologized on her husband’s behalf, and why Uno—and not Clinton—resigned. Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle offers a novel approach to viewing the phenomenon of scandal—one that will be applauded by anyone who has obsessed over (or ridiculed) these public episodes.

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle PDF Author: Mark D. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894118
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Clinton and Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sosuke Uno and a geisha. In Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, Mark D. West organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what’s public and what’s private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media didn’t cover Uno’s affair, why Uno’s wife apologized on her husband’s behalf, and why Uno—and not Clinton—resigned. Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle offers a novel approach to viewing the phenomenon of scandal—one that will be applauded by anyone who has obsessed over (or ridiculed) these public episodes.

Street Corner Secrets

Street Corner Secrets PDF Author: Svati P Shah
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376512
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Street Corner Secrets challenges widespread notions of sex work in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city of Mumbai that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame—brothels, streets, and public day-wage labor markets (nakas), where sexual commerce may be solicited discretely alongside other income-generating activities. Focusing on women who migrated to Mumbai from rural, economically underdeveloped areas within India, Svati P. Shah argues that selling sexual services is one of a number of ways women working as laborers may earn a living, demonstrating that sex work, like day labor, is a part of India's vast informal economy. Here, various means of earning—legitimized or stigmatized, legal or illegal—overlap or exist in close proximity to one another, shaping a narrow field of livelihood options that women navigate daily. In the course of this rich ethnography, Shah discusses policing practices, migrants' access to housing and water, the idea of public space, critiques of states and citizenship, and the discursive location of violence within debates on sexual commerce. Throughout, the book analyzes the epistemology of prostitution, and the silences and secrets that constitute the discourse of sexual commerce on Mumbai's streets.

Empire of Illusion

Empire of Illusion PDF Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307398587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.

A Spectacle of Corruption

A Spectacle of Corruption PDF Author: David Liss
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588362426
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Benjamin Weaver, the quick-witted pugilist turned private investigator, returns in David Liss’s sequel to the Edgar Award–winning novel, A Conspiracy of Paper. “[A] wonderful book . . . every bit as good as [Liss’s] remarkable debut . . . easily one of the year’s best.”—The Boston Globe Moments after his conviction for a murder he did not commit, at a trial presided over by a judge determined to find him guilty, Benjamin Weaver is accosted by a stranger who cunningly slips a lockpick and a file into his hands. In an instant he understands two things: Someone wants him to hang—and another equally mysterious agent is determined to see him free. After a daring escape from eighteenth-century London’s most notorious prison, Weaver must face another challenge: to prove himself innocent when the corrupt courts have shown they care nothing for justice. Unable to show his face in public, Weaver pursues his inquiry disguised as a wealthy merchant seeking to involve himself in the contentious world of politics. Desperately navigating a labyrinth of schemers, crime lords, assassins, and spies, Weaver learns that in an election year, little is what it seems and the truth comes at a staggeringly high cost. Praise for A Spectacle of Corruption “[A] rousing sequel of historical, intellectual suspense. ”—San Antonio Express-News “Liss is a superb writer who evokes the squalor of London with Hogarthian gusto.”—People “In Benjamin Weaver, Mr. Liss has created a multifaceted character and a wonderful narrator.”—The New York Sun

Sexual Blackmail

Sexual Blackmail PDF Author: Angus McLaren
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674009240
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in England and the United States through the Victorian era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal--abortion, infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality--armed would-be blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its loss. Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers, from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.

Spectacle

Spectacle PDF Author: Susan Steinberg
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970648
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
An inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love * A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year * In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets. In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew. "Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." —Publishers Weekly

Law in Everyday Japan

Law in Everyday Japan PDF Author: Mark D. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894096
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Lawsuits are rare events in most people's lives. High-stakes cases are even less commonplace. Why is it, then, that scholarship about the Japanese legal system has focused almost exclusively on epic court battles, large-scale social issues, and corporate governance? Mark D. West's Law in Everyday Japan fills a void in our understanding of the relationship between law and social life in Japan by shifting the focus to cases more representative of everyday Japanese life. Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes—karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide—Law in Everyday Japan offers a vibrant portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan. Each example is informed by extensive fieldwork. West interviews all of the participants-from judges and lawyers to defendants, plaintiffs, and their families-to uncover an everyday Japan where law matters, albeit in very surprising ways.

Public Secrets

Public Secrets PDF Author: Ken Knabb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The greatest hits, and a fine read for anyone interested in situationist ideas, anarchism, the 60s counterculture and beyond. Includes both two substantial new texts - 'The Joy Of Revolution' and 'Autobiography,' and reprints of all his old pamphlets, co-authored work, and translations of various situationist texts. A veritable treasure trove of pamphlets, texts, posters, comics, articles, leaflets and essays. Over 400 pages, and every one is a winner!

The Iliac Crest

The Iliac Crest PDF Author: Cristina Rivera Garza
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1936932067
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Surreal and gothic, The Iliac Crest is a masterful excavation of forgotten Mexican women writers, illustrating the myriad ways that gendered language can wield destructive power. On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s identity. The women are strangely intimate―even inventing together an incomprehensible, fluid language―and harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale is “utterly weird yet deeply resonant in its portrayal of gendered violence” (The Millions). Through layered and haunting prose, Cristina Rivera Garza unravels the cultural and political histories of Mexico, probing at the misogyny that fuels the disappearance of women in literature and in real life. "Astounding and thought-provoking." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons

Sex and the City and Us

Sex and the City and Us PDF Author: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 150116483X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The bestselling author of Seinfeldia offers a fascinating retrospective of the iconic and award-winning television series, Sex and the City, in a “bubbly, yet fierce cultural dissection of the groundbreaking show” (Chicago Tribune). This is the story of how a columnist, two gay men, and a writers’ room full of women used their own poignant, hilarious, and humiliating stories to launch a cultural phenomenon. They endured shock, slut-shaming, and a slew of nasty reviews on their way to eventual—if still often begrudging—respect. The show wasn’t perfect, but it revolutionized television for women. When Candace Bushnell began writing for the New York Observer, she didn’t think anyone beyond the Upper East Side would care about her adventures among the Hamptons-hopping media elite. But her struggles with singlehood struck a chord. Beverly Hills, 90210 creator Darren Star brought her vision to an even wider audience when he adapted the column for HBO. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha launched a barrage of trends, forever branded the actresses that took on the roles, redefined women’s relationship to sex and elevated the perception of singlehood. Featuring exclusive new interviews with the cast and writers, including star Sarah Jessica Parker, creator Darren Star, executive producer Michael Patrick King, and author Candace Bushnell, “Jennifer Keishin Armstrong brings readers inside the writers’ room and into the scribes’ lives…The writing is fizzy and funny, but she still manages an in-depth look at a show that’s been analyzed for decades, giving readers a retrospective as enjoyable as a $20 pink cocktail” (The Washington Post). Sex and the City and Us is both a critical and nostalgic behind-the-scenes look at a television series that changed the way women see themselves.