From toothpick legs to dropping vaginas: Gender and sexuality in Joan Rivers' stand-up comedy performance

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 Intellect.This article employs sociocultural analysis to examine Joan Rivers’ stand-up comedy performances in order to reveal how she successfully operates in a sphere of artistic expression that has been, and continues to be, male-dominated. The analysis uncovers how Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance involves a complex combination of elements and how it fuses features that are regarded as ‘traditionally masculine’, such as aggression, with features frequently used by other female stand-up comedians, such as self-deprecating comedy and confessional comedy. Furthermore, the analysis exposes the complex ways in which constructions of gender and sexuality are negotiated and re-negotiated in Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance, and illustrates how dominant ideological identity constructions can be simultaneously reinforced and subverted within the same comic moment

Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

Cytoreductive Nephrectomy in the Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Era: A Question That May Never Be Answered.

Despite great interest, two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of cytoreductive nephrectomy in the tyrosine kinase inhibitor setting in metastatic renal cell carcinoma have either closed early (SURTIME) or are recruiting very slowly (CARMENA) after 7 yr. Challenges in RCT delivery in uro-oncologic surgery are many. Multiple steps are needed to ensure strong recruitment to trials addressing important urologic cancer questions. Feasibility/pilot studies are key stepping stones towards successful delivery of surgical RCTs

Commercial orientation and grassroots social innovation: insight from the sharing economy.

There is growing interest in the roles of the sharing economy and grassroots innovation in the transition to sustainable societies. Grassroots innovation research has tended to assume a sharp distinction between grassroots organisations and businesses within niches of socio-technical innovation. However, the non-profit sector literature identifies a tendency for non-profit organisations to actually become more commercially-oriented over time. Seeking to account for this tendency, we develop a conceptual model of the dynamics of grassroots organisations within socio-technical niches. Using a case study of Freegle, a grassroots organisation within the sharing economy niche, we apply the conceptual model to illustrate the causes, processes and outcomes of grassroots niche organisations becoming more commercially-oriented. We show that a grassroots organisation may be subject to coercive and indirect (isomorphic) pressures to become more commercially-oriented and highlight the ambiguities of this dynamic. Furthermore, we highlight that global niche actors may exert coercive pressures that limit the enactment and propagation of the practices and values of grassroots organisations. We conclude by highlighting the need for further research exploring the desirability and feasibility of protecting grassroots organisations from pressures to become more commercially-oriented

Provision, protection or participation? Approaches to regulating children’s television in Arab countries

One notable feature of Arab broadcasting has been the belated emergence of free-to-air channels for children. Today, with children’s channels a still-expanding feature of the Arab satellite television landscape, the region is witnessing growth in the local animation industry alongside intensified competition for child audiences through imported content and a selective squeeze on state funds. In this context the policies and rationales that inform production and acquisition of children’s content remain far from transparent, beyond occasional public rhetoric about protecting children from material that ‘breaches cultural boundaries and values’ and providing programmes that revere a perceived ‘Arab-Islamic’ heritage and preserve literary forms of the Arabic language. Attempts at promoting children’s genuine participation in Arab television have been rare. Drawing on theoretical literature that links protection and participation in the sense that children’s safety depends on their agency, this paper explores emerging guidelines developed by Arab regulators, broadcasters and others in relation to television content for children

‘A More Receptive Crowd than Before’: Explaining the World Bank’s Gender Turn in the 2000s

In the mid-2000s, the gender work of the World Bank took a different turn with a new Gender Action Plan. Up until then, gender equality had been on the margins of the World Bank, concentrated around a small number of advocates. This particular articulation of gender took as its tagline ‘gender equality as smart economics’. The Plan attracted three times the original budget of US$24.5 million, and moved gender analysis into new fields of work: labour, work, land and agriculture rather than the more usual areas of health and education. It emerged at a time when gender work was becoming more legitimate in the field of development economics; where World Bank economists were ‘a more receptive crowd than before’. The mid-2000s was also a time when the World Bank was becoming more conscious of its use of media technologies. The article draws on these two elements—economics and the use of media—to suggest the broader environment against which gender agendas take on meaning. Structural shifts in the field of development economics—the dominant discipline at the World Bank—made work on gender more legitimate and credible, and made World Bank staff ‘a more receptive crowd than before’, while the increasing use of media technologies meant the World Bank was conscious of how its work looked to outside audiences. These elements, only loosely related to what we might think of ‘gender’ as a normative agenda, nonetheless, changed what gender meant to many people working within the World Bank

Breast implants

Produced to accompany Equinox: Storm in a D cup first shown on Channel 4 May 1999Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:99/29441 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo