Black Emasculated Patriarchy

This article posits that the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to what Mocombe deems emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, queers, and women (given the feminization and queerification of the postindustrial workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised, like their female counterparts, to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers. Black men in this social structure are, paradoxically, emasculated and hyper-masculinized. The former, given their poverty and under-education in the postindustrial social structure they are unable to assume the service-worker, consumer, and entrepreneur emasculated identity required to recursively organize and reproduce their being-in-the-world; the latter, the entertainment industry and athletic domain have become the spheres they are relegated to where their hyper-masculinity is overemphasized as means to the emasculated identity

Black Assimilationism in Neoliberal Globalization

This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, argues that since their arrival on North American soil, the constitution of black American identity has been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans, and this includes the so-called black radical tradition, have never been agents in the constitution of their own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to assimilate in the American social structure. Their assimilation takes place within the social practices of two social class language games (the black bourgeoisie and the underclass) that were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, respectively, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced African ideological apparatuses as found in Haiti, for example. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over, especially in the United Kingdom, which have tremendous consequences for their assimilation process. Under the assimilationist imperatives of the black bourgeoisie, the aim is integration and assimilation along the lines of traditional white Protestant agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on bourgeois prosperity, the black nuclear family, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. Conversely, the black underclass seeks integration and assimilation through the pathologies of their structural differentiation within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on identity politics, glorification of the self, wealth via sports and entertainment, and the communal thinking of the street life as the basis of black identity and culture

Urinary biomarker concentrations of captan, chlormequat, chlorpyrifos and cypermethrin in UK adults and children living near agricultural land

There is limited information on the exposure to pesticides experienced by UK residents living near agricultural land. This study aimed to investigate their pesticide exposure in relation to spray events. Farmers treating crops with captan, chlormequat, chlorpyrifos or cypermethrin provided spray event information. Adults and children residing ≤100 m from sprayed fields provided first-morning void urine samples during and outwith the spray season. Selected samples (1–2 days after a spray event and at other times (background samples)) were analysed and creatinine adjusted. Generalised Linear Mixed Models were used to investigate if urinary biomarkers of these pesticides were elevated after spray events. The final data set for statistical analysis contained 1518 urine samples from 140 participants, consisting of 523 spray event and 995 background samples which were analysed for pesticide urinary biomarkers. For captan and cypermethrin, the proportion of values below the limit of detection was greater than 80%, with no difference between spray event and background samples. For chlormequat and chlorpyrifos, the geometric mean urinary biomarker concentrations following spray events were 15.4 μg/g creatinine and 2.5 μg/g creatinine, respectively, compared with 16.5 μg/g creatinine and 3.0 μg/g creatinine for background samples within the spraying season. Outwith the spraying season, concentrations for chlorpyrifos were the same as those within spraying season backgrounds, but for chlormequat, lower concentrations were observed outwith the spraying season (12.3 μg/g creatinine). Overall, we observed no evidence indicative of additional urinary pesticide biomarker excretion as a result of spray events, suggesting that sources other than local spraying are responsible for the relatively low urinary pesticide biomarkers detected in the study population

Spectatorship and the new (critical) sincerity: the case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties

This article considers Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow Parties (2011) as an example of the New Sincerity – an aesthetic mode that has emerged in the wake of postmodernism, particularly visible in contemporary American fiction. The particular contribution here is the trans-disciplinary shift from fiction to theatre studies as the New Sincerity – as theorised by American fiction scholars via Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) and David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1993) – is assessed in terms of its applicability to the specificities of theatre performance. A trusting and trusted spectator is central to the operational practice of sincerity in performance. In many ways Tomorrow’s Parties succeeds in interpellating such a spectator; however, it remains a piece performed by an experimental theatre company renowned for engaging in metatheatrical innovation, immersive practice and ironic game playing, all of which haunt this particular postdramatic performance. To account for this troubling of sincerity – and all performance is on one level insincere – the term ‘critical sincerity’ is coined, a term that describes the knowingness that certain theatre pieces – like Tomorrow’s Parties – exhibit of the inherent insincerity of performance, while simultaneously striving for a sincere encounter

Predicting Phenotypic Diversity and the Underlying Quantitative Molecular Transitions

During development, signaling networks control the formation of multicellular patterns. To what extent quantitative fluctuations in these complex networks may affect multicellular phenotype remains unclear. Here, we describe a computational approach to predict and analyze the phenotypic diversity that is accessible to a developmental signaling network. Applying this framework to vulval development in C. elegans, we demonstrate that quantitative changes in the regulatory network can render ~500 multicellular phenotypes. This phenotypic capacity is an order-of-magnitude below the theoretical upper limit for this system but yet is large enough to demonstrate that the system is not restricted to a select few outcomes. Using metrics to gauge the robustness of these phenotypes to parameter perturbations, we identify a select subset of novel phenotypes that are the most promising for experimental validation. In addition, our model calculations provide a layout of these phenotypes in network parameter space. Analyzing this landscape of multicellular phenotypes yielded two significant insights. First, we show that experimentally well-established mutant phenotypes may be rendered using non-canonical network perturbations. Second, we show that the predicted multicellular patterns include not only those observed in C. elegans, but also those occurring exclusively in other species of the Caenorhabditis genus. This result demonstrates that quantitative diversification of a common regulatory network is indeed demonstrably sufficient to generate the phenotypic differences observed across three major species within the Caenorhabditis genus. Using our computational framework, we systematically identify the quantitative changes that may have occurred in the regulatory network during the evolution of these species. Our model predictions show that significant phenotypic diversity may be sampled through quantitative variations in the regulatory network without overhauling the core network architecture. Furthermore, by comparing the predicted landscape of phenotypes to multicellular patterns that have been experimentally observed across multiple species, we systematically trace the quantitative regulatory changes that may have occurred during the evolution of the Caenorhabditis genus