Rewriting the How-To of Parenting: What Is Really Modern about ABC’s Modern Family

Despite its unconventional family structures and playful gestures at redefining traditional gender scripts, ABC’s domestic comedy, Modern Family, perpetuates perceived notions of femininity and masculinity within the context of three families whose differences from the nuclear family are far from radical. Reassuring even its most conservative viewers on these counts, the show does, however, portray a potentially unsettling approach to parenting. The dynamics of parenting are unstable, bending gender rules and disregarding boundaries normally set by age, race, and social class. As normative notions of parenting are questioned and expanded, parenthood is no longer an immutable institution built on hard rules and clear hierarchies. However chaotic in appearance, such parenting takes a tremendous burden off the shoulders of viewer-parents and, particularly, viewer-mothers who, in a climate that equates the decline of family values with the failure of society as a whole, are culturally mandated to be unshakeable sources of stability, consistency, and guidance. Rather than blaming parents for their inability to follow a socially sanctioned parenting protocol, Modern Family grants fathers and especially mothers leeway to approach parenthood and family according to their individual abilities and limitations

A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Business Complaint Management Expectations

This paper is in closed access until 9th Dec 2016.Copyright © Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. This study explores the complaint management expectations of 72 British and 74 German organizational buyers using automated online means-end laddering and a Hierarchical Value Map presentation. It conceptualizes the links between expected complaint resolution attributes by the buyer (i.e., means) and the buyer's value perceptions (i.e., ends). Unlike previous research, we highlight similarities and differences in the drivers behind and attributes of complaint management expectations across two countries (Germany and the United Kingdom). Even in countries appearing to be similar economically and culturally, we find differences in the desired attributes. British buyers, for example, emphasize softer complaint resolution attributes compared to Germans. Our study is the first to present a model of complaint management expectations incorporating the role of culture, and it provides managerial directions on standardization and adaption of complaint resolution attributes. Furthermore, it evaluates justice dimensions (especially interactional justice) and their impact on perceptions of complaint management

Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Brazil, January 1, 1502 and Max Jacob\u27s Etablissement d\u27une communauté au Brésil : A Study of Transformative Interpretation and Influence

Elizabeth Bishop\u27s misgivings about free translation are well known to scholars of her work. Fearful of misappropriating creations not her own, her preference was to translate cautiously and literally.1 In her unpublished Remarks on Translation - (Of poetry, mostly), she enumerates several complaints about translations/\u27 including inaccuracy - the wrong word and using three words - or more - when one would do (2). She offers the following advice: When a word is repeated - repeat it! (Just be- cause English has more words than any other language except Russian - doesn\u27t mean we have to use them all. . . .) When a line is repeated - repeat it - and also - stick to the structure. Translations were to be handled, as she wrote in a letter to Anne Stevenson, with a minimum of bloodletting or seepage (qtd. in Lombardi, 138). Even Robert Lowell\u27s Imitations (1961), a body of work that, as most critics agree, is best understood as creative personalized reinterpretation of French poems rather than free translation, triggered discomfort in Bishop. Responding to Imitations in several letters that emphasized to Lowell the importance of fidelity to rhyme, meter, and poetic intent, she concluded with the com- ment: I just can\u27t decide how \u27free\u27 one has the right to be with the poet\u27s intentions

Moms do badly, but grandmas do worse: The nexus of sexism and ageism in children\u27s classics

While the origins of the absent or dead mother in literary classics have been explored at length,less attention has been paid to the role grandmother figures play once the impact of the mother has been minimized or eliminated. In many of the most influential tales our children read,female elders, unlike the mothers, are granted the right to live but are cast in hopelessly stereotypical terms. The result is a handful of characters with a handful of attributes that perpetuate themselves throughout literary history, crowding out more diverse and multi-dimensional portrayals. Doing away with important female characters reveals a deeply entrenched sexism which is then compounded by a hefty dose ageism when female elders are permitted to appear only to be diminished. Women in children’s classics fare badly, but old women even do worse

Fat Liberation in the First World: Lucille Clifton and the New Body

In their 1999 study titled Women’s Bodies: Disciplines and Transgressions, Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw discuss the centrality of body to nineteenth- and twentieth-century theory and discourse, from Darwin to Foucault. One can safely say that this obsession with the body goes back further than Darwin. We need only think of the deep-rooted notions surrounding the Jewish race: sprouting in the Middle Ages, coming to a bloom with the science of craniology in the mid nineteenth century, and taking on monstrous proportions a century later, the belief that Jews were a biologically distinct race with specifically shaped skulls produced images of “hooked noses, twitching eyelids, clenched teeth, protruding ears, square fingernails, flat feet, and round knees” (Corcos 26). Myths surrounding the African body, too, have thrived for centuries. Aphra Behn’s great surprise at finding in Oroonoko a black man so “admirably turn’d from Head to Foot” and her catalog of praise for his Roman nose, thin lips, and straight hair does more to lay bare the pernicious racial stereotypes of her day than to question their validity (43). Thomas Jefferson’s notorious, degrading reflections on the characteristics and inferiority of the African physique, detailed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), is further evidence of our culture’s investment in the body and, specifically, in constructing and then devaluing bodies that are other

Of Creative Crones and Poetry: Developing Age Studies through Literature

As a comparative look at the works of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich shows, literature can contribute to the development of age studies in a variety of ways, some of which may not be obvious. Sarton\u27s direct treatment of aging provides a key to the less apparent approaches Rich takes in her later career to further our understanding of age. Employing radically different strategies, the two writers constitute an odd couple of creative crones whose combined efforts have begun to generate a critique of aging that we as feminists and human beings desperately need as we confront the future

The Glamor Fades Away: Fictional Spies Vs. Real Life Intelligence Agents

Spies have been featured in fiction for centuries. As the spy fiction genre developed and spying became one of the principal national preoccupations in many countries during the Cold War, spy narratives increased in popularity and were successfully adapted for film. Perhaps the most notable spy films come from Ian Fleming’s James Bond franchise. This study uses the James Bond and Jason Bourne film franchises as models of fictional spy portrayals. The project evaluates the representations of spying in fictional writing and film, comparing these to the actual traits, tasks, and lives of real-life spies. Real-life spies live dramatically different lives from fictional spies. The study cites evidence from interviews with real-life spies and features a case study of a female spy who rose through the ranks of the CIA during the height of the Cold War. This information will provide useful context for students of literature and film as the nature, parameters, and substance of historical intelligence work throw into stark relief the artistic imagination, devices, conventions, and vocabulary applied in fictional approaches to spying

Fat Liberation in the First World: Lucille Clifton and the New Body

In their 1999 study titled Women’s Bodies: Disciplines and Transgressions, Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw discuss the centrality of body to nineteenth- and twentieth-century theory and discourse, from Darwin to Foucault. One can safely say that this obsession with the body goes back further than Darwin. We need only think of the deep-rooted notions surrounding the Jewish race: sprouting in the Middle Ages, coming to a bloom with the science of craniology in the mid nineteenth century, and taking on monstrous proportions a century later, the belief that Jews were a biologically distinct race with specifically shaped skulls produced images of “hooked noses, twitching eyelids, clenched teeth, protruding ears, square fingernails, flat feet, and round knees” (Corcos 26). Myths surrounding the African body, too, have thrived for centuries. Aphra Behn’s great surprise at finding in Oroonoko a black man so “admirably turn’d from Head to Foot” and her catalog of praise for his Roman nose, thin lips, and straight hair does more to lay bare the pernicious racial stereotypes of her day than to question their validity (43). Thomas Jefferson’s notorious, degrading reflections on the characteristics and inferiority of the African physique, detailed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), is further evidence of our culture’s investment in the body and, specifically, in constructing and then devaluing bodies that are other

A network of trans-cortical capillaries as mainstay for blood circulation in long bones.

Closed circulatory systems (CCS) underlie the function of vertebrate organs, but in long bones their structure is unclear, although they constitute the exit route for bone marrow (BM) leukocytes. To understand neutrophil emigration from BM, we studied the vascular system of murine long bones. Here we show that hundreds of capillaries originate in BM, cross murine cortical bone perpendicularly along the shaft and connect to the periosteal circulation. Structures similar to these trans-cortical-vessels (TCVs) also exist in human limb bones. TCVs express arterial or venous markers and transport neutrophils. Furthermore, over 80% arterial and 59% venous blood passes through TCVs. Genetic and drug-mediated modulation of osteoclast count and activity leads to substantial changes in TCV numbers. In a murine model of chronic arthritic bone inflammation, new TCVs develop within weeks. Our data indicate that TCVs are a central component of the CCS in long bones and may represent an important route for immune cell export from the BM