Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising

This paper argues that there has been a significant shift in advertising representations of women in recent years, such that rather than being presented as passive objects of the male gaze, young women in adverts are now frequently depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful. This analysis examines contemporary constructions of female sexual agency in advertisements examining three recognizable ‘figures’: the young, heterosexually desiring ‘midriff’, the vengeful woman set on punishing her partner or ex partner for his transgressions, and the ‘hot lesbian’, almost always entwined with her beautiful Other or double. Using recent examples of adverts the paper asks how this apparent ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’ should be understood. Drawing on accounts of the incorporation or recuperation of feminist ideas in advertising the paper takes a critical approach to these representations, examining their exclusions, their constructions of gender relations and heteronormativity, and the way power is figured within them. A feminist poststructuralist approach is used to interrogate the way in which ‘sexual agency’ becomes a form of regulation in these adverts, that requires the re-moulding of feminine subjectivity to fit the current postfeminist, neoliberal moment in which young women should not only be beautiful but sexy, sexually knowledgeable/practised and always ‘up for it’. The paper makes an original contribution to debates about representations of gender in advertising, to poststructuralist analyses about the contemporary operation of power, and to writing about female ‘sexual agency’ by suggesting that ‘voice’ or ‘agency’ may not be the solution to the ‘missing discourse of female desire' but may in fact be a technology of discipline and regulation

John F. Onion Jr. thanks Dr. Hector P. Garcia for his recommendation to serve on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

John F. Onion Jr., Presiding Judge on the Court of Criminal Appeals, writes to Dr. Hector P. Garcia expressing his appreciation for his recommendation to the President as a candidate for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has heard that the list of nominees reflects well on the Committee's future and the selection of federal appellate judiciary

Prize essays on roads and road making. 1870.

Mode of access: Internet

‘A place of magic’: enchanting geographies of contemporary wassailing practices

Orchard wassailing practices, along with other folk traditions have been overlooked by geographers. This paper considers how such practices can engineer spaces of enchantment in otherwise ‘disenchanted’ spaces. Furthermore, how this form of enchantment is never fixed but relational, unstable and contingent, or ‘borrowed’. Having nearly disappeared in the mid-20th century, wassailing has been ‘re-wakened’ for the contemporary world. A surprising feature of these contemporary wassails is that they are often performed in recently planted or restored orchards in suburban areas with little heritage of producing fruit. Spaces usually considered absent of ‘enchantment’. Drawing on interviews with organisers of contemporary and ‘reinvented’ wassails in the south and south-west of England, this research investigates contemporary wassailing practices in such otherwise ‘disenchanted’ spaces. In doing so it draws attention to the construction of ‘magical’ atmospheres that combine elements of the religious-spiritual, heritage and fiction enabling a temporary suspension of disbelief. The paper develops upon previous understandings of ‘enchantment’ in geography and introduces the notion of ‘borrowed enchantment’ that draws attention to forms of enchantment which are relational, emergent, unstable and contingent to locality

Instruction set synthesis with efficient instruction encoding for configurable processors

Application-specific instructions can significantly improve the performance, energy-efficiency, and code size of configurable processors. While generating new instructions from application-specific operation patterns has been a common way to improve the instruction set (IS) of a configurable processor, automating the design of ISs for given applications poses new challenges - -how to create as well as utilize new instructions in a systematic manner, and how to choose the best set of application-specific instructions considering the various effects the new instructions may have on the data path and the compilation To address these problems, we present a novel IS synthesis framework that optimizes the IS through an efficient instruction encoding for the given application as well as for the given data path architecture. We first build a library of new instructions created with various encoding alternatives taking into account the data path architecture constraints, and then select the best set of instructions while satisfying the instruction bitwidth constraint. We formulate the problem using integer linear programming and also present an effective heuristic algorithm. Experimental results using our technique generate ISs that show improvements of up to about 40% over the native IS for several application benchmarks running on typical embedded RISC processors.close3

The Witan, 1975-1976 Academic Year V. 3 No. 7, March 1976

Caseload Burden in CCA, Legal Services Update Proposal to Administration, Francisco Defines the Roles, Writing Without Understanding, Freshman Grades Analyzed, Bits on Burgers, The Care and Feeding of Legal Research Instructors, Moot Court Competition, C

The Witan, 1975-1976 Academic Year V. 3 No. 7, March 1976

Caseload Burden in CCA, Legal Services Update Proposal to Administration, Francisco Defines the Roles, Writing Without Understanding, Freshman Grades Analyzed, Bits on Burgers, The Care and Feeding of Legal Research Instructors, Moot Court Competition, C