Critical Social Research

"Père et mère de la Grèce ancienne sont présentés dans les différentes sources de la tradition manuscrite comme devant nourrir leur progéniture. Allaitement maternel et paidotrophia paternelle sont les deux faces de cette fonction nourricière. Il arrive cependant que les enfants deviennent des objets de consommation : Lamia, Déméter, Thyeste, Térée, Cronos, Oedipe font partie des ces figures transgressives qui s’adonnent à la tecnophagie. Nous interrogerons la signification de ces instants mythologiques de dégustation paranomos.
"

Several changes to the UK criminal justice system have led to an increasing visibility and engagement with victims after decades of concentrating mainly on offenders.  Victim-focused policies have advanced from homogenising responses to victims of crime through to appreciating the diversity in victims’ needs and wants, while also seeking to reduce or prevent future victimisation.  However, several ‘victim-focused’ crime prevention policies are paradoxically dependent on the creation of a victim in the first place.  This paper considers this contradiction in relation to two recent Coalition Government proposals.  Both the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme and plans to criminalise stalking behaviours rely upon victimisation already having taken place.  The paper argues that these supposedly ‘preventative’ proposals are in fact responsive and problematic as their implementation relies upon the creation of victims.  Furthermore, it suggests that rather than effectively preventing abuse, victims’ voices are instead being used to enhance and expand legislation.  The paper suggests that criminal justice policies alone are unable to prevent violence against women and that more engagement needs to occur outside of the criminal justice arena. 

"""Postfeminist Education? challenges a contemporary postfeminist sensibility grounded not only in assumptions that gender and sexual equality has been achieved in many Western contexts, but that feminism has gone ‘too far’ with women and girls now overtaking men and boys - positioned as the new victims of gender transformations. The book is the first to outline and critique how educational discourses have directly fed into postfeminist anxieties, exploring three postfeminist panics over girls and girlhood that circulate widely in the international media and popular culture. First it explores how a masculinity crisis over failing boys in school has spawned a backlash discourse about overly successful girls; second it looks at how widespread anxieties over girls becoming excessively mean and/or violent have positioned female aggression as pathological; third it examines how incessant concerns over controlling risky female sexuality underpin recent sexualisation of girls moral panics. The book outlines how these postfeminist panics over girlhood have influenced educational policies and practices in areas such as academic achievement, anti-bullying strategies and sex-education curriculum, making visible the new postfeminist, sexual politics of schooling.

Moving beyond media or policy critique, however, this book offers new theoretical and methodological tools for researching postfeminism, girlhood and education. It engages with current theoretical debates over possibilities for girls’ agency and empowerment in postfeminist, neo-liberal contexts of sexual regulation. It also elaborates new psychosocial and feminist Deleuzian methodological approaches for mapping subjectivity, affectivity and social change. Drawing on two UK empirical research projects exploring teen-aged girls’ own perspectives and responses to postfeminist panics, the book shows how real girls are actually negotiating notions of girls as overly successful, mean, violent, aggressive and sexual. The data offers rich insight into girls’ gendered, raced and classed experiences at school and beyond, exploring teen peer cultures, friendship, offline and online sexual identities, and bullying and cyberbullying. The data illuminates how and when girls take up and identify with postfeminist trends, but also at times attempt to re-work, challenge and critique the contradictory discourses of girlhood and femininity. In this sense the book offers an opportunity for girls to ‘talk back’ to the often simplistic either wildly celebratory or crisis-based sensationalism of postfeminist panics over girlhood.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in feminism, girlhood, media studies, gender and education."""

"
Gender in the postmodern context, is a construct of culture, where men and women are categories, defined and stereotyped by a set of behaviours or the actions they perform, or are made to perform. Talcott Parsons' functionality theory identified men with instrumental functions like decision making, problem solving and so on, and women with the more expressive functions of the society like motherhood, domestic work that include cooking, cleaning and so on. Often, these roles are so rigidly constructed by the society that they cannot be exchanged easily. Historically and sociologically, these identities are attributed to both sexes, and they are expected to appear natural.
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique challenged the functional myth that women should just be mothers to their children and wives to their husbands. The National Organization for women (NoW) found by  Freiedan attempted to debunk stereotypes associated with women and the Second Wave of feminism found its roots and liberation in women, who were willing to leave behind traditional roles associated for them.
However, the identification of women with the traditional role of producer, giver and server of food appears to be a tough stereotype to break. Studies conducted as recently as in the year 2000 reveal that while there are slight improvements in the male contribution to domestic work, most men find associating with domestic shopping and other aspects of the kitchen life problematic (Warde and Martens 2000, Gregory 1999). Women are thus, still 'stuck' with domestic chores and the kitchen.
The kitchen, is not an innocent space. It is a brewing ground where domestic politics of power are played out. Carol Counihan states in her work Food and Gender, Identity and Power that "men’s and women’s ability to produce, provide, distribute and consume food is a key measure of their power" (2).  In the production and consumption of food, are unwritten rules and meanings that vary across cultures, classes, communities and sexes. Even today, among many families in India the men folk eat first, and the women are left to eat what is left behind. In western Amazon, men deal with meat while women are allocated to dealing with vegetables (Pollock 1992). In Papa New Guinea, the taro tuber is considered masculine food. Men eat it, while women are essential to the preparation and cultivation of the tuber. (Counihan 2005). Among the Zumbaguan Indians, the senior female is in charge of food, which vests her with the ultimate power of setting and establishing hierarchies, to determine the order in which the other people in her family are served and what they are served (Weismantel 182).  Food thus, in the different acts of procuring, rejecting, cooking, serving and eating, in addition to being necessity for biological survival, is a complex symbol saturated with multiple meanings. By assuming different roles and identifying with specific foods, femininity and masculinity in their similarities and their differences are defined.
Cooking has largely been regarded as a marker of female oppression by feminists, and food in relation to women has been studied largely from a psycho-biological axis that looks into problems of representation, the female body and the problems of bulimia and anorexia nervosa. (Avakian and Haber 2005). And yet, women write food. They contribute to cookbooks, community cookbooks, fiction and memoirs and they write about food. Perhaps it speaks for the society that still follows the functionalist ideology. Or perhaps, it is a marker of women's ambivalent relationship with food. Food that at one point vests power in a woman by making her the giver of a valuable substance (food) , and at the same time establishes the woman's subordination by her need to serve, defer and satisfy (Charles and Kerr 1988).
Without attempting to unify women's experiences with food and cooking, and without attempting to localise the food and woman in the culture that she is a part of, it seems prudent to investigate how women identify themselves in relation to food. If food can be taken as a post modern text in which multiple meanings are embedded, then the question of how women imagine the creation of the self as detailed by her psychological, emotional and physical responses to food and eating, consumption and rejection could be studied.

An interdisciplinary approach that borrows from gender studies, semiotics, post modern narratology and psychoanalysis would aid the attempt at understanding how women identities are construct through narratives of and by women on the multiple associations and experiences with food across divergent and diverse cultures and societies.
"

Niccolò Machiavelli, the founder of modern political and administrative thought, made clear that an understanding of politics requires distinguishing between formal politics and what later, with Ludwig von Rochau, would become known as Realpolitik. No such distinction has been employed in the study of rationality. Yet I will argue that distinguishing between formal rationality and real rationality is as important for the understanding of rationality and planning as the distinction between formal politics and Realpolitik has been for understanding politics.