Got Milk?: Breastfeeding as an 'Incurably Informed' Feminist STS Scholar

'Got Milk?' considers the author's own commitment to and experience of breastfeeding as a mother/intellectual, examining ways of theorizing embodiment and complex bio-social practices while also showing just how complicated living/ embodying feminist STS theory can be. Many breastfeeding advocates are naive about nature, technology, and gender issues, and many feminist STS scholars focus on the pregnant body, rather than the lactating body, to discuss gender, technology, and embodiment. Pro-breastfeeding materials often represent breastfeeding as an organic practice free from the intervention of medical experts and technologies. The author's experiences of the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, the management of breastfeeding by medical experts, the lack of social support for the practice, and the lack of a non-essentialist feminist discourse about the importance of breastfeeding left her wondering on what grounds she could and should justify her commitment to breastfeed her children. Ultimately, recognizing that breastfeeding is an embodied practice that is not free from technological intervention or other social and political contexts can counteract the romanticized, essentialized representations of breastfeeding for a stronger, if more contingent, 'cyborg' breastfeeding advocacy

Copyright for Academics in the Digital Age

The article presents the authors' insights on the copyright issue in the digital age, which concerns the academic field. The authors say that instead of promoting knowledge, the act of putting materials for teaching on the web can undermine such goal. The authors suggest that when considering the blanket policies for posting such materials online, it is important to also recognize the cost to faculty administrators and members if ever external partisan groups decide to make charges. The authors add that the issue concerning course content's recording and distribution includes academic dishonesty cases

Partying With A Purpose

Reviews the book, Women at Work: Tupperware, Passion Parties, and Beyond by L. Susan Williams and Michelle Bemiller (2011). Women at Work considers the many in-home marketing plans directed at women. Using Dorothy Smith's The Everyday World as Problematic as their basis, L. Susan Williams and Michelle Bemiller examine the party plan economy as both a form of work and a form of consumption, and argue that the party plan economy genders us by eliciting our participation in the parties, work, consumption patterns, and lifestyles they generate. The authors frame the party plan economy as a "gender regime" and therefore also call these "gender parties" throughout the book. Some of the aforementioned parties are examined in this book by scholars other than the authors; their brief "case studies" are nested within some of the book's chapters. Bemiller and Williams describe their own experience of a Pampered Chef party (hosted by Bemiller and attended by Williams) to describe the way women get sucked into participating in such gender parties. The book is geared toward an undergraduate audience, one that has not considered gender before and that would have a limited tolerance for sustained arguments about theoretical matters. Williams and Bemiller include several personal anecdotes designed to relate to the focus of the book: why Williams's campus office bookshelves include personal items, and how she left her daughter on the curb as she attempted to juggle work and parental responsibilities; and how Bemiller's students sometimes share their stories of intimate partner violence. The authors' writing style and the book's layout are designed, I assume, to make the book seem down-to-earth and therefore readable for undergraduate students. Although an interesting and important topic to explore, this book does not put the many gender parties it mentions in an overall comparative perspective, offering only a superficial look at many such parties and ignoring some altogether. As such, its broad-brush coverage might serve as a useful springboard for those considering research on one or more of these parties. While its casual style might work for undergraduates in both marketing and gender courses learning about the variety of in-home party sales and the links between marketing and constructions of gender, the analyses will be seen as too simplistic by those seeking a serious scholarly study of gender and in-home marketing plans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved

Windows Without Curtains - Computer Privacy and Academic Freedom

Focuses on the computer privacy of professors at public universities in the U.S. Details of a university police investigation using a professor's computer; Assessment of the moral limitation of computer searches on ownership grounds; Application of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment to the electronic environment

Review Essay – Bodymakers - A Cultural Anatomy of Women’s Bodybuilding

Book Revie

Rape Education Videos: Presenting Mean Women Instead of Dangerous Men

This paper examines two ways to use visual images while teaching about sexual violence. We first present and critique the conventional approach, which employs images of men doing violence to women. We then discuss our approach, which employs images of women confronting and violently attacking men. We discuss our success in using these images in our rape prevention lectures over the past three years. Our analysis of students' reactions to the presentations reveals that showing images of aggressive women radically destabilizes men's sense of physical power over women

The Fighting Spirit: Women's Self-Defense Training and the Discourse of Sexed Embodiment

This article presents ethnographic research on women’s self-defense training and suggests that women’s self-defense culture prompts feminists to refigure our understanding of the body and violence. The body in feminist discourse is often construed as the object of patriarchal violence (actual or symbolic), and violence has been construed as something that is variously oppressive, diminishing, inappropriate, and masculinist. Hence, many feminists have been apathetic to women’s self-defense. As a practice that rehearses, and even celebrates women’s potential for violence, women’s self-defense illustrates how and why feminism can frame the body as both a social construction and as politically significant for theory and activism

Women’s Sex-Toy Parties: Technology, Orgasm, and Commodification

This article presents participant-observation research from five female-only sex-toy parties. We situate the sale of sex toys in the context of in-home marketing to women, the explosion of a sex industry, and the emergence of lifestyle and body politics. We explore the significance of sex toys for women as marketed in female-only contexts, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences with Tupperware’s marketing of plastic that promises happiness to women. We argue that sex-toy sales follow the exact patterns of Tupperware sales but, since the artifacts sold are for the bedroom rather than the kitchen, foster an even greater sense of intimacy between the women— which has both positive and negative consequences for thinking critically about the commodification of sexuality, bodies, and lifestyles in our capitalist culture. Vibrators and other sex toys constitute the technological route to a self-reflexive body project of female orgasm. We ask to what extent such a body project, achieved primarily through an individualistic, capitalistic consumption model, can offer a critique of normative discourses of heterosexual sex and identity. Is this new plastic purchased at parties liberatory or just another form of containment? In other words, how much Tupperware does a woman really need to buy, before she’s been bought

Perverting Evolutionary Narratives of Heterosexual Masculinity Or, Getting Rid of the Heterosexual Bug

Focuses on the characters of evolutionary stories about male sexuality. Cause of male grief; Discussion on heterosexual masculinity; Information on gay men

Can Unscrewed be Unskewed? Television Coverage of the Internet

This paper documents one way the Internet is presented to the public by analyzing a late–night TV talk show about the Internet called Unscrewed on the TechTV cable network. I gained the opportunity to study Unscrewed, and attempt to influence its focus, when I was invited to appear as a guest on their show after having e–mailed them a criticism of their sexist coverage of the Internet — specifically their positioning of women as pretty objects to be ogled online rather than as creative participants in online culture and as authors of a diversity of Web sites. Though I liked the program’s potential to challenge some aspects of an increasingly market–driven Internet, I was unable to unskew the sexist focus of Unscrewed precisely because market forces demanded the show remain male–centered