Sex Crimes in the Fifties

Sex Crimes in the Fifties. By Lisa Featherstone and Amanda Kaladelfos (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016), pp.xii + 243, AU$59.99 (pb).     

New Governance,Green Planning and Sustainability: Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together1

Bridgman and Davis (2000:91) have argued that ‘ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives’. This article compares and evaluates two such frameworks or plans, Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, in terms of their potential to promote sustainability. It argues that they are very different exercises in new governance, aimed at reconnecting with community priorities and at redirecting macro‐policy setting away from a preoccupation with economic priorities, respectively. Nevertheless, both plans have the capacity to ‘green’ state planning, in Tasmania in terms of more purposeful benchmarks, and in Victoria in terms of enhanced sustainability emphasis in the macro‐policy setting. The article encounters tensions in its review of the plans between deliberation and planning, policy empowerment and policy progress, and policy institutionalisation and politicisation as means of achieving policy change. It finds that whilst Tasmania and Victoria are re‐engaged states that are reinventing state policy, as yet they are failing to meet the governance challenges of sustainability.     

‘grandpa lives in paradise now’: biological precarity and the global economy of debility

This paper examines the relations and the tensions between debility and disability in global contexts defined by complex forms of bio-social precarity. My focus is Baan Kamlangchay, in Thailand, a care home providing care for older people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease from the global North. I treat Baan Kamlangchay as one concrete example of emerging circuits of transnational care/reproductive labour in order to investigate the interrelations between disability and wider global bio-political inequalities. Using the concept of ‘biolegitimacy’, I discuss the power dynamics in the relationships between the racialised and gendered care workers in the centre and (white) disabled residents. I argue that debility, understood as the flexible gradation of dis/ability and in/capacity, allows us to better understand these novel forms of embodied precarity and their political implications in global contexts.     

Contextualizing the Construction and Social Organization of the Commercial Male Sex Industry in London at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

Feminist theories are concerned to analyse how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated, by understanding how patriarchal relations control and constrict them.(Abbott and Wallace, 1997: 284)Feminisms start from the position that women are oppressed within a society, which is patriarchal and socially constructed within knowledge which is malestream. This traditionally defines men such that they are rendered subordinate, within a social world constructed by men. Feminisms are engaged with making transparent patriarchal constructs, and illuminating the ‘spaces’ within which women-realities can become more visible.This paper presents research undertaken by two key services working with male sex workers in central London. The insights gained from this research are discussed, as they allow comparison between the traditionally subordinate position of women and the contextual experiences of the ‘hidden’ population of male sex industry workers. It demonstrates, that like women, for male sex workers, hegenomic and heterosexist constructs ensure that they also occupy a subordinated position within society.     

Rethinking the “good life”: the consumer as citizen

Joschka Fischer, Der Umbau der Industrie Gesellschaft (Rebuilding Industrial Society) (Frankfurt: Eichbom Verlag, 1989).

German Social Democratic Party, Grtindsatzprogramm der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Bonn, 1990).

Jurgen Hoffman, et al., Denn scttliesslicli produzieren wir Chemie: Die Externalisierung sozialen Kosten am Beispiel der chiorierten Kohlenwasserstoffe (Ultimately, We're Producing Chemicals: Externalization of Social Costs in the Chlorinated Carbon‐Dioxide Industry) (Hamburg: Hans Boeckler Stiftung, 1990).

Joachim Hirsch, KapitaSismus ohee Alternative? (Capitalism Without An Alternative?) (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 1990).

Geronimo, Feuer end Flamme: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Autonomen (Fire and Flame: On the History and Presence of the Autonomen) (Berlin: Edition ID‐Archiv, 1990).     

Disability and support relationships: What role does policy play?

Very little is known about how relationships between people with disabilities and their paid support workers are positioned in policy. With the policy shift toward choice of provider, individualised approaches, person centredness and self‐directed funding, the nature of their relationship assumes a more prominent role in the quality of support practice. The policy analysis in this article explores the extent to which current disability policy acknowledges, promotes, or diminishes the relationships between people with disabilities and workers, in their organisational context. It uses Honneth's conditions for recognition—love (cared for), rights (respected) and solidarity or social esteem (valued)—to understand how policy positions mutuality in the relationship. The policy review applied a three‐stage process: categorisation of policies, textual analysis and content analysis to policy documents at four levels—international, Australian federal, state and organisational in two case studies. The analysis revealed that while a rights framework is explicit in most policies, the emphases on the conditions for recognition within a relationship between people with disabilities and workers are compromised in instructional policies that attempt to manage the tension between choice and risk, particularly at the organisational level.