Pain,pleasure and bridal beauty: mapping postfeminist bridal perfection

Despite renewed media attention on the wedding, and the emphasis that this pays to bridal performance, feminist analysis of wedding culture has made few inroads. Accounts are needed that understand women's experience of the wedding day, the narrative of becoming the bride, and the way this takes place against a backdrop of postfeminist ambivalence, where traditional wedding practices are re-fashioned through discourses of (consumer) choice and empowerment. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected with five married women from the Netherlands, who spoke to us about their wedding day and their experience of being/becoming brides. We show how retraditionalisation shapes a new romaticisation of wedding day storytelling, constructed through transformation and the experience of beauty. In analysing these narratives, we show how postfeminist bridal perfection comes to anchor the subjective and affective power of ‘the wedding’ in contemporary culture.     

Perceptions of Dishonesty: Understanding Parents’ Reports of and Influence on Children and Adolescents’ Lie-Telling

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Previous studies suggest parents lack knowledge regarding child and adolescent lie-telling; however, no study to date has examined children’s and...     

Omega-3 supplementation in young offenders: a randomized,stratified, double-blind,placebo-controlled,parallel-group trial

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To examine whether omega-3 supplementation reduces antisocial and aggressive behavior in offenders. In this randomized, double-blind trial, 145 young offenders...     

Passport to Parenthood: Reproductive Pathways In and Out of Denmark

Denmark has become a destination for single women, lesbians, and heterosexual couples wanting donated sperm. At the moment, women from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, and the UK travel to Denmark. Simultaneously, waiting lists for donated eggs and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile Danish women and heterosexual couples to leave Denmark and travel to Spain, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Greece for egg donation. Informed by Donna Haraway’s notion of “the apparatus of bodily production”, Marcia Inhorn’s development of “reproductive flows”, and the use of Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis”, this paper explores the question: How do global reproductive pathways in and out of Denmark emerge when fertility travellers narrate, negotiate, and cross national borders to go through fertility treatment? Methodologically, we use a multi-sited and multi-modal approach centring on interviews with fertility travellers moving to and from Denmark in combination with ethnographic observations carried out in Danish and Spanish fertility clinics and an analysis of legal regulations. The paper concludes by discussing how the concept of reproductive pathways helps to theorize transnational movements of bodies and contributes to feminist scholarship on transnational reproductive travel.     

In the twilight of democracy: public affairs consultants in Switzerland

• Modernization processes within different fields of political communication rise new challenges. Public affairs consultants are said to meet these challenges in both an effective and efficient way. Nevertheless, the rise of public affairs consultants also poses the question of their accordance with basic principles of modern democracy. Do public affairs consultants foster or impede the democratic process with respect to participation and representation? This question is answered on the basis of empirical data on public affairs consultants in Switzerland. The analysis points out three distinguishable fields of service: lobbying, political public relations and campaigning. Whereas campaigning has the strongest public‐orientation and emphasizes direct democratic institutions, the other two fields tend to be more in the backstage of the public. Results regarding public affairs services suggest a structural discrepancy between public and non‐public forms of communication, which according to normative democracy theory has to be judged critically. With view to clients, policy fields and party affiliations, the results show strong imbalances in interest representation, which seem to have mainly structural and economic reasons. In the conclusion, these results are discussed with view to the necessity of more transparency and a further professionalization.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.