Private Narratives and Infant Views: Iconizing 1970s Militancy in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

This is the author's accepted manuscript, made available with the permission of the publisher.This article analyses the connections between the subjective turn in the representation of militancy, iconicity, and historical examination in Infancia clandestina, a recent Argentine film that portrays the 1970s armed struggle through a child’s lens. Breaking with the leading interpretation that praises the movie because of its original exposition of left-leaning violence, I contend that this coming-of-age story fits within a version of militancy that originated in the mid-1990s and that has become quite common since the advent of the Kirchner administration in 2003. This particular version relies on a privatized and archaic image of activism that is at the core of the global iconization of 1970s militancy. An analysis of the filmic use of an infant perspective and of anime-style cartoons illuminates how contemporary Argentine cinema both registers and participates in this iconizing process

Balancing food risks and food benefits: the coverage of probiotics in the UK national press

The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a series of food crises, environmental disasters and the emergence of so-called 'superbugs'. At the same time, social scientists, such as Ulrich Beck, began to study the rise of a modern 'risk society'. The late 1990s and early years of this new millennium have been marked by increasing consumer interest in organic and natural foods but also in novel food products, such as probiotics or friendly bacteria which, as supplements or added to yoghurts, promise to help fight various effects of 'modernity', from stress to superbugs. Using thematic analysis and corpus linguistic tools, this article charts the rise of probiotics from 1985 to 2006 and asks: How did this rise in popularity come about? How did science and the media contribute to it? And: How were these bacteria enlisted as agents of attitudinal change? Analysing the construction of certain food benefits in the context of a heightened state of anxiety about food risk might shed light on aspects of 'risk society' that have so far been overlooked