class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.     

The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

As part of a special issue on the geographies of citizenship, this paper considers the longstanding and popular metaphor of “the body politic” for a polity. The metaphor's comparative power is successful because it imports key geographic assumptions about how polities are best organized. It makes claims about society and space (premises about location, spatial organization), nature–society relations (how the two spheres do and do not connect) and cartographic representation (the human body is the optimal representation of spatial and natural relations in a polity). We describe three ways in which geographical imaginations are constructed: organic, mechanical, and posthuman bodies politic. Our goal is twofold: first is to consider the ways the deployment of the metaphor of the body is used in political theory to convey a normative conception of citizenship; second is to bridge the gap between political theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is a space. The metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships.     

Managing Public Service Contracts: Aligning Values, Institutions, and Markets

The contracting of public services has been an integral part of public managers’ work for a long time, and it is here to stay. This essay sums up current research on the topic for busy practitioners and scholars. Where are we today with respect to the problems and pitfalls of contracting out, from balancing equity with efficiency to confronting the frequent problem of imperfect markets?     

The law and practice associated with advance directives in Canada and Australia: similarities, differences and debates

This article is a summary of research that investigated the Canadian and Australian legislative framework associated with advance directives in health care. The research focused on the context in which older people are encouraged to use advance directives. These are directions about refusal of medical treatment given in advance of incompetence. An advance directive may be given in a written document (living will) expressing one's wishes, by appointing another person (proxy) to make the decisions, or as a combination of the two. A lack of consistency and clarity about the terminology was found in both countries. This could be a barrier for older people to express their wishes in advance. Several confusing issues were also identified with the legislation related to advance directives. There appears to be a move towards appointing a substitute decision-maker, but with significant differences across the Australian States and in Canadian Provinces. The "conversation" about future decisions emerged as an important theme, together with an emphasis on the process of "advance care planning" replacing the focus on advance directive forms.     

Improving suicide risk assessment in a managed-care environment

This article describes the quality improvement intervention of a managed behavioral healthcare company to improve the quality of suicide risk assessments by its panel of providers. At-risk cases are identified by the patient's self-reported high frequency of suicidal ideation on a standardized outcome measure. Clinicians also assess severity of suicidal ideation based on clinical interviews. The clinician's assessment is identified as probably erroneous if the patient report indicates a high frequency of suicidal ideation and the clinicians assessment of suicidal ideation is none. The article describes the methods used to encourage clinicians to utilize information from the patient self-report measure as part of the clinical assessment. Probable suicidal ideation assessment errors were subsequently reduced by 29% over a 1-year period of administration.     

Adolescents' moral dilemmas: The context

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology which outlines the kinds of real-life moral dilemmas adolescents spontaneously present in open-ended semiclinical interviews. A coding procedure is introduced which delineates three aspects of these moral dilemmas, conflicts, context, and content, and an analysis is done of the category labeled context. One hundred forty-eight adolescents from two school settings were interviewed. The results show that the majority of both boys and girls in these samples describe moral conflicts in the context of a relationship, particularly involving friends. However, boys are more likely than girls to focus on the the self as the context of the moral dilemma with no other relational context present and significantly more girls than boys focus on relationships rather than self.The authors thank the Dodge, Klingenstein and Kendall Foundations for funding these studies.Her Ed.D. is from Harvard University, M.Ed. from Boston University, and A.B. from Ohio University. She was the Project Director for Carol Gilligan on a coed high-school study. Her present research interests are preservice teacher training and women's development.She is the Project Director of a longitudinal study of moral and social development in female children and adolescents and is the editor ofA Guide to Reading Narratives of Moral Conflict and Choice for Self and Moral Voice. Her Ed.D. is from Harvard University and B.A. is from Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas. Her research focuses on a developmental analysis of narratives of relationship in girls.Her B.A. is from Brown University and her research interests are in female development and children of alcoholics.     

Reviews

Martin McCauley, Who's Who in Russia since 1900. London: Routledge, 1997, xxiv + 268 pp., £12.99 p/b.

Michael McFaul, Russia's 1996 Presidential Election. The End of Polarized Politics. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1997, xiii + 170 pp., $17.95.

Laura Belin & Robert W. Orttung, with Ralph S. Clem and Peter R. Craumer, The Russian Parliamentary Elections of 1995: The Battle for the Duma. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997, xii + 203 pp., $62.95.

Stephen White, Alex Pravda & Zvi Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics 4. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, xvi + 304 pp., £42.50 h/b, £13.99 p/b.

Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander Motyl & Boris Shor (eds), Nations in Transit 1997. Civil Society, Democracy and Markets in East Central Europe and the Newly Independent States. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997, 418 pp., $49.95.

Oskar Krejci, History of Elections in Bohemia and Moravia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs CDXXXIII, 1995, xliv + 425 pp.

Anne Lorentz & Marianne Rostgaard (eds), The Aftermath of Real Existing Socialism in Eastern Europe. Volume 2. People and Technology in the Process of Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, ix + 309 pp., £50.00.

Yudit Kiss, The Defence Industry in East‐Central Europe: Restructuring and Conversion. Oxford: Oxford University Press/Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1997, vii + 237 pp., £22.50.

Shiping Zheng, Party vs. State in Post‐1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xiv + 294 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, x +425 pp., £25.00.

David Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, viii + 478 pp., £15.99.

Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev & William G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. London: Edward Arnold, 1997, xviii + 782 pp., £59.99.

Michael David‐Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, xvii + 298 pp., £33.50. >Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins, Oxford: Westview, 1997, vii + 408 pp., £25.50.

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, ix + 468 pp., £47.00 h/b, £19.50 p/b.

Knut Andreas Grimstad & Ingunn Lunde (eds), Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein B0rtnes. Bergen: University of Bergen, 1997, 350 pp.