The consumption of patriarchy: commodification to facilitation and reification

There is an abundance of research from cultural, critical and feminist criminology that has recognized media as a vehicle to propagate various forms of gender inequality and violence against women. Likewise, there has been extensive research on how childhood products and toys replicate the patriarchal construction of gender. However, these bodies of research have been relatively silent on how the commodification of culture is consumed and reified by the very population it oppresses (i.e. women). Here, we argue that violence against women is commodified and eagerly consumed in an age of neo-liberalism, legitimizing the patriarchal power structures that subordinate women. Our goal is to begin a discussion of female consumption of the commodification that gives consent and facilitates the patriarchal perpetual power system. Using examples from media and the consumer market, we hope to begin a broader discussion of how patriarchy, gender roles and inequality are reinforced through everyday banal consumption by both sexes. However, this banal consumption by females not only lends to the legitimization of the heteronormative patriarchal status quo but also makes them active participants in the continuation of inequality and power structures inherent within this patriarchal society.     

Why the Debate Between Originalists and Evolutionists Rests on a Semantic Mistake

I argue that the dispute between two leading theories of interpretation of legal texts, textual originalism and textual evolutionism, depends on the false presupposition that changes in the way a word is used necessarily require a change in the word’s meaning. Semantic externalism goes a long way towards reconciling these views by showing how a word’s semantic properties can be stable over time, even through vicissitudes of usage. I argue that temporal externalism can account for even more semantic stability, however. Temporal externalism is the theory that the content of an utterance at time t may be determined by developments in linguistic usage subsequent to t. If this semantic theory is correct, then the originalist and evolutionist positions effectively collapse. Originalism is correct in that the original meaning of the text is the meaning that is binding on jurists, but evolutionism is vindicated, as it is the current practices and standards that determine the meaning the text now has, and has always had. Objections to temporal externalism, and to its application to the interpretation of legal texts, are considered and addressed.     

Fatal birth trauma due to an undiagnosed abdominal teratoma: case report and review of the literature

The fetus is subjected to mechanical forces during labor and delivery, which may result in traumatic injuries. Such injuries include intracranial hemorrhage, spinal cord lesions, cephalhematoma, cranial or peripheral nerve palsies, intraabdominal organ rupture, or bony fractures. Risk for perinatal trauma and mortality is increased in primigravidas, multiple gestations, abnormal presentations, maternal-fetal disproportion, oligohydramnios, forceps or vacuum extractions, and internal version maneuvers. Very-low-birth-weight neonates (<1500 g) are at high risk due to ease of deformity of the cranium. Infants with certain congenital anomalies or pathologic processes that distort normal anatomy are also at increased risk, especially when a prenatal diagnosis is lacking. The authors present a case of a term gestation neonate who sustained a cervical spine dislocation fracture of C5-7, with subtotal transection of the spinal cord and resultant paralysis. The fetus was in vertex presentation, and a manual vaginal delivery was attempted. When the infant lodged in the birth canal following a difficult delivery of the head and arms, its enlarged abdomen was palpated, and the delivery was converted to an emergent cesarean section. The infant lived for 3 days and then expired due to neurologic complications of trauma sustained during the attempted vaginal delivery. Autopsy revealed a previously undiagnosed intraabdominal immature teratoma. The pathology of teratomas, the most common neonatal tumor and occasionally implicated in cases of birth trauma, will be addressed, followed by a review of the literature concerning birth trauma.     

Natural death in the forensic setting: a study and approach to the autopsy

Although unexpected natural deaths comprise a large proportion of the cases seen in the forensic setting, the investigation of these cases remains a unique challenge. Some cases are straightforward; however, others require special examination and dissections, as well as the use of special dissections and ancillary studies. For the forensic investigator to accurately assign a cause and manner of death, one must be aware of the differential diagnoses, common scenarios, and typical victim. The authors reviewed all forensic cases referred to the Forensic Section of the Medical University of South Carolina over a 15-year period from January 1989-December 2003. The number of natural deaths occurring in adults (age 18 years and older) was 6932, compared with the overall number of 13,227 cases. The natural deaths were then analyzed as to autopsy findings, cause of death, cardiac versus noncardiac, age, race, and gender. Current techniques, special dissections, and ancillary studies that can assist in the classification of these deaths in the forensic setting are reviewed.     

Methyl 3-[3',4'-(methylenedioxy)phenyl]-2-methyl glycidate: an ecstasy precursor seized in Sydney, Australia

Five 44 gallon drums labeled as glycidyl methacrylate were seized by the Australian Customs Service and the Australian Federal Police at Port Botany, Sydney, Australia, in December 2004. Each drum contained a white, semisolid substance that was initially suspected to be 3,4-methylenedioxymethylamphetamine (MDMA). Gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) analysis demonstrated that the material was neither glycidyl methacrylate nor MDMA. Because intelligence sources employed by federal agents indicated that this material was in some way connected to MDMA production, suspicion fell on the various MDMA precursor chemicals. Using a number of techniques including proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ((1)H NMR), carbon nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ((13)C NMR), GC/MS, infrared spectroscopy, and total synthesis, the unknown substance was eventually identified as methyl 3-[3',4'(methylenedioxy)phenyl]-2-methyl glycidate. The substance was also subjected to a published hydrolysis and decarboxylation procedure and gave a high yield of the MDMA precursor chemical, 3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl-2-propanone, thereby establishing this material as a "precursor to a precursor."     

What's the Problem in Public Sector Workforce Recruitment? A Multi-Sector Comparative Analysis of Managerial Perceptions

Public sector workforce recruitment is problematic, but the nature of that problem is not clearly defined. Workforce recruitment is essentially a matching problem that requires managers to recruit desired employees in available labor pools. This research asks whether sectoral differences and competition for labor affect whether public managers frame the major problem of workforce recruitment as the size, qualifications, or work ethic of the labor pool. Using survey data from about 2,300 managers from two US states, problem attributions are modeled using multinomial logit. The findings suggest that the public and nonprofit sectors find it more problematic to recruit qualified employees than the private sector, but public and nonprofit agencies hold a comparative advantage over the private sector in recruiting employees with sufficient work ethic. Therefore, public and nonprofit managers should emphasize retention and training to leverage their comparative advantage in recruiting employees with work ethic while addressing a comparative disadvantage in recruiting qualified employees.     

Teaching Criminological Theory: The Power of Film and Music

Interest in utilizing pop culture as a means of teaching and enhancing students’ understanding of complex or abstract ideas in the classroom has increased over the course of the past decade. This includes the use of film, television, fiction books, the internet, and music. The fields of criminology and criminal justice have also increasingly noted the value of using such means to teach about atrocities such as state crime, transnational crime and corporate crimes as well as issues of inequality, racism, and classism. Film, music and television can also be great tools to enhance the understanding of and ability to apply criminological theory. Most articles that have focused on incorporating the use of a ‘popular criminology’ within the classroom, however, have concentrated on one form or another of ‘pop culture’ (i.e., film). This article seeks to add to the existing literature by providing an example of how the use of film combined with music can not only enhance undergraduate criminology and criminal justice students’ ability to grasp criminological theory and apply it in their everyday lives, but also can be utilized as tools for exams.     

Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge relations? We use as the ground of our analysis our own embodied memories of achieving ourselves as appropriate(d) subjects (as girls and women, in relation to men--fathers, lovers, and husbands). Our trajectory in this paper is double. First, it has been towards uncovering the ways in which girls and women might be said to be powerful, even when they are complicit in their own subjection. Second, it has been to show that when Foucault defines all acts of power to involve the possibility of resistance and freedom, and he takes the opposite, a state of domination, to arise from 'economic, political, or military means', he has not fully acknowledged the extent to which the repeated, minute accretions of everyday practices can generate sedimentations of lines of force that may also be understood as a state of domination.