A Proposal for Democratically Financed Congressional Elections

Ever since 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt proposed to Congress that [a]ll contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law, American political reformers have been proposing to break the bond between special-interest money and electoral politics by regulating the way candidates raise money to campaign for elective office. Since Teddy Roosevelt\u27s call, Congress has passed no fewer than twelve different bills to reform the campaign finance system. The first of these bills, the Tillman Act of 1907, was a direct result of Roosevelt\u27s effort. It sought to prohibit campaign contributions from corporations. In addition to offering no provisions for enforcement, the Act nullified the intent of its prohibition against corporate contributions by allowing individual contributions from corporate stockholders and executives

I Hate My Voice : Coming to Terms With Minor Bodily Stigmas

This article presents a narrative, autoethnographic, theoretical account of the public and private negotiation of “minor bodily stigmas,” which are mild physical “imperfections” that make us fear we stand out and might be rejected. To examine the situated complexity of stigmatized identity, I tell a story that shows concrete interactional details of an episode in which minor bodily stigmas evolved into a significant topic of conversation between strangers. My personal narrative explores the felt experience of minor bodily stigmas from the perspective of the experiencing and interacting holder. Thus, my work problematizes Erving Goffman\u27s sociological approach to stigmas, which examines inclusively all forms of stigmas from a distanced observational stance of beholder that privileges the outsider perspective of how others see us. Using minor bodily stigmas as a heuristic category, I emphasize how they are experienced as a double bind in interaction (to notice or not to notice) and a double bind in personal feelings (of moral character as well as physical appearance). I seek to connect theoretical and categorical understandings of minor bodily stigmas to their concrete felt experience in day-to-day life in order to examine possibilities for resisting and reframing stigmas in everyday life