Soap,pin‐up and burlesque: Commercialization and femininity in Danish television

The article takes a close look at the performance and mise‐en‐scène of some new young Danish television hostesses in relation to commercialization and deregulation of television. It is observed that the female hosts not only incarnate visual pleasure as sexual objects and emotive images, but also personify extravagance and visualize abstract ideas. Thus female hosts are of vital importance in deregulated television, which is based on form and style and the ability to catch the eye. It is further observed that the hostesses perform in a detached and ironic mode. Their various pastiches on female stereotypes and their ambiguous playing with surface identify the new hostesses with the postmodern masquerade of the media. Postmodern television provides a space where some female performers can transcend the norms and turn the conventional image of women inside out.     

Constructing the diasporic body: ritual practices among South Asians in Britain

In this article, I explore the ways bodies are trained, made and re-made in diasporic settings. Looking at South Asians in Britain, I argue that ritual practices are a relevant context to observe the process when the diasporic body is constructed. First, I bridge the gap between the anthropology of migration and the anthropology of the body through the process of diasporic self-making. Second, I explore ethnographic data on ritual activities among South Asians in Britain and outline different ways the diasporic body is constructed during these practices.     

Order Beyond Crisis: Organizing Considerations Across the Public Service Configuration Life Cycle

This article responds to the preceding paper by Stephanie Moulton and Charles Wise, critiquing the dimensions that those authors use as organizing guides in the delivery of public services through public–private institutional configurations, including the evaluation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In this essay, Eva M. Witesman proposes a modification to the framework and provides suggestions for future research.     

Creating bodily gender in the fields of symbol and power

This article is a contribution to the ongoing process of elucidating and questioning the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory, and the presupposition that the body and its sex are “givens”. The article argues, constructively, that the time has come for feminist sociology to re‐establish contact between the acting body and the symbolic body. The aim is to create a frame of reference in which the body, charged with symbols and power, becomes a category of transformation. The concepts “bodily gender” and “constitutive rules” and “regulative rules” are introduced as analytical tools. The theoretical reflections are bounced off empirical material on sexualized violence in a contemporary Norwegian subculture.     

The problem of single parent/child paternity analysis--practical results involving 336 children and 348 unrelated men

In a certain amount of paternity investigations, only DNA from child and alleged father is analyzed, thus increasing the possibility of false paternity inclusions. The aim of this study was to determine how many wrong paternity inclusions could be detected in a rather small geographical area comparing empirical results from 336 children and 348 men (13-15 STRs were investigated per person). This comparison between each child and all unrelated men (i.e. all putative fathers from the other cases) with an especially designed computer program resulted in 116,004 man/child pairs. Less than three excluding STRs were found in 1666 child/unrelated man pairs (1.44% of the comparisons). At least one unrelated man with only two or less STR mismatches could be determined for 322 children (95.8% of all investigated children). In 26 comparisons no STR mismatches between a child and an unrelated man were detected, thus at least one and up to three "second father(s)" under 350 men could be found for 23 children, if the mother is excluded. Paternity probabilities between 95.475% and 99.996% were calculated. Our results underline the difficulties in motherless paternity cases using only STR analysis and advise great precaution in assigning verbal predicates such as "paternity proven" in those investigations.