Suchergebnisse

Why are zombies consuming the popular imagination? This book--part social analysis, part theological critique, and part devotional--considers how the zombie can be a way to critically situate our culture, awash with consumer products. Matthew Tan considers how zombies are the endpoint of social theory's exploration of consumer culture and its postsecular turn towards an earthly immortality, enacted on the flesh of consumers.The book also shows how zombies aid our appreciation of Christ's saving work. Through the lens of theology and the prayer of the Stations of the Cross, Tan incorporates social theory's insights on the zombie concerning postmodern culture's yearning for things beyond the flesh and also reveals some of social theory's blind spots. Turning to the Eucharist flesh of Christ, Tan challenges the zombie's secularized narrative of salvation of the flesh, one where flesh is saved by being consumed and made to die. By contrast, Jesus saves by enacting an alternative logic of flesh, one that redeems the zombie's obsession with flesh by eucharistically giving it away. In doing so, Jesus saves by assuming the condition of the zombie, redirecting our logic of consumption and fulfilling our yearning for immortality

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

"The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship--husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy--corporeal, carnal, quotidian--tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World"

Examines the asymmetrical gender positions implicit in both theoretical & regulatory policy perspectives on commercial sexual activity, drawing on analysis of experiential interviews conducted with participants in sexual commerce in one US city. It is suggested that, in late-industrial societies, the self is constructed through consumption choices. In this context, masculinity is in part defined by new configurations of commercial practice & expressions of masculine privilege. In this gender construction, women's bodies are at once dismembered, commodified, disaggregated, reconfigured, & consumed. It is argued that this process is not captured by current models of sociolegal thought. These models, both sociobiological & postmodern, either fail to escape the traditional nature/culture antinomy common to 19th-century social theory, or embrace a false hope for emancipatory redemption in the market. The lived body as historicized & produced by economic & discursive representations is proposed as a preferable theoretical construct of subjectivity. 105 References. D. Ryfe

Thousands of women and children are trafficked every day. Girls are mostly fall prey to the prostitution rackets and land in the brothels or end-up being sex slaves. The study attempts to look at the extent, causes, manifestation and the interventions made on trafficking of children at Mandsour district at Madhya Pradesh in India. Total 59 cases were taken for the study. The method of content analysis has been adopted for the research work. The study reveals that rescued girls are found mostly between the age group of one to eight year old. Kidnapped minor girls are being administered steroid drugs to hasten their physical growth for early initiation into the flesh trade in the camp of Banchra tribe people. Now government and social workers are taking initiative to reform and rehabilitate the Banchra tribe women.

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world's first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab--a substance sometimes called "cultured meat"--and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem's capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not "succeed," it functions--much like science fiction--as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions..

The historical conditions of possibility of the life of the flesh: absolutism, civic republicanism and 'bare life' in Julius Caesar -- The life of the condemned: the autonomous legal system and the community of the flesh in Measure for measure -- Unsettling the civic republican order: the face of sovereign power and the fate of the citizen in Othello -- Life outside the law: torture and the flesh in King Lear -- Epilogue: The afterlife of the life of the flesh

Chapter 9 EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. With 11 international and comparative case studies, it offers a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship and explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.