\u3cem\u3eBataclanismo\u3c/em\u3e! Or, How Deco Bodies Transformed Postrevolutionary Mexico City

In the spring of 1925, Santa Anita\u27s Festival of Flowers seemed to follow its tranquil trend of previous years. The large displays of flowers, the selection of indias bonitas (as the contestants of beauty pageants organized in an attempt to stimulate indigenism were known) and the boat-rides on the Viga Canal, all communicated what residents of neighboring Mexico City had come to expect of the small pueblo in the Federal District since the Porfiriato: the respite of a peaceful pastoral, the link to a colorful past, and the promise that mexicanidad was alive and well in the campo. Unfortunately, wrote Manuel Rámirez Cárdenas of El Globo, the modern newspaper, the next day, this idyllic tradition was rudely interrupted by a group of audacious, scantily clad women. The culprits were actresses of Mexico City\u27s Lírico theater, who walked around Santa Anita\u27s streets in picaresque clothing —stage outfits that left little to the imagination, particularly in broad daylight—and upset visitors and campesinos alike. According to Cárdenas, abuelitas and mamás were shocked by the display, averting their eyes from the female spectacle in fear of el pecado mortal. Thankfully, for the mothers and grandmothers in the audience, the festival continued in predictable fashion after the initial uproar. Organizers continued with the traditional dances, and judges selected an india bonita from a pool of young, decente mestizo girls to represent the pueblo and the festival. Unbeknownst to the residents of rural Santa Anita, the daring actresses of El Lírico were part of a new phenomenon that had swept through Mexico City like wildfire, turned the entertainment world upside down, and pushed many to reconsider what constituted female beauty, decency, and lo mexicano. A few months earlier, on February 12th, a grand variety spectacle named Voilá Paris: La Ba-ta-clán premiered in Teatro Iris and instantly sent shock waves throughout the Mexican entertainment world and the larger metropolis. The show featured seminude and nude French actresses, who performed dances and acts that appeared to be a mix of classical ballet, Ziegfeld Follies chorus lines, and tableaux vivants. Within weeks, Mexican copycat productions capitalized on the enormous success of the show, triggering a new entertainment phenomenon named after the original production: Bataclanismo. It also launched a new kind of female star, the bataclana, who came to represent the erotic, and more dangerous, attributes of the flapper for Mexican audiences, and whose body became the site of contested and divergent notions of modernity. In this article, I explore bataclanismo as a normative discourse that reached far beyond the theater into the practice of everyday life. I do so to gauge the transition of changing ideals of femininity in Mexico from 1925 to 1935, and the influence these changes had on the development of urban space. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz\u27 and Doreen Massey\u27s insights that place and gender are mutually constitutive, this article examines the articulation between the embodied city and changing gender norms in the wake of both the Mexican revolution and the advent of twentieth-century global capital. Analyzing these relationships from Judith Butler\u27s perspective of gender performance, especially as read through bodies, I argue that a new transnational aesthetic of feminine embodiment celebrated in bataclanismo influenced a distinct urban modernity and sociability in Mexico City. This new ideal female physique that stressed length, height, and androgyny—what I term a Deco body—helped to reconfigure Mexico City in terms of gender, space and race. It ushered in new gender ideals, helped visualize urban modernity, and bridged the gap between two divergent discourses that accompanied revolutionary reform, indigenismo and mestizaje, paving the way for a mestizo modernity

Classification of Chemical Compounds to Support Complex Queries in a Pathway Database

Data quality in biological databases has become a topic of great discussion. To provide high quality data and to deal with the vast amount of biochemical data, annotators and curators need to be supported by software that carries out part of their work in an (semi-) automatic manner. The detection of errors and inconsistencies is a part that requires the knowledge of domain experts, thus in most cases it is done manually, making it very expensive and time-consuming. This paper presents two tools to partially support the curation of data on biochemical pathways. The tool enables the automatic classification of chemical compounds based on their respective SMILES strings. Such classification allows the querying and visualization of biochemical reactions at different levels of abstraction, according to the level of detail at which the reaction participants are described. Chemical compounds can be classified in a flexible manner based on different criteria. The support of the process of data curation is provided by facilitating the detection of compounds that are identified as different but that are actually the same. This is also used to identify similar reactions and, in turn, pathways

Quantitative Machtkonzepte in der Ökonomik

Macht ist ein zentraler Bestandteil sozialer Interaktion. Obgleich eine Vielzahl gebräuchlicher Anschauungen und Begriffsdefinitionen zum Thema Macht existiert, erfordert ein wissenschaftlicher Umgang mit dem Konzept der Macht deren quantitative Operationalisierung. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die ökonomische Bedeutung des Machtkonzeptes und konzentriert sich dabei auf Möglichkeiten der Quantifizierung von Macht unter Berücksichtigung ihrer vielfältigen Erscheinungsformen. Hierfür werden einerseits unterschiedliche Konzepte der Machtmessung in der Ökonomik vorgestellt und im jeweiligen Kontext motiviert, so etwa im Rahmen verschiedenartiger Transaktionsbeziehungen, in (nicht-)kooperativen Interaktionssituationen, oder im Bereich der kollektiven Entscheidungsfindung. Zum anderen erfolgt eine Einschätzung darüber, welche der vorgestellten Analyse- und Messkonzepte Macht im Sinne bekannter Machtdefinitionen erfassen und operationalisieren können

Entrepreneurship and the development of global brands

Over the course of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs developed a number of successful global brands in consumer-goods industries. However, few independent brands survived the merger waves of the 1980s. To address the question of why so few independent brands survived, this paper examines successful brands in industries that rely principally on advertising for competitive success. Successful consumer-goods brands in several industries and countries are compared in order to highlight innovative strategies pursued by brand managers. The analyzed brands are mainly owned by Europeans, although a few examples of American and Japanese brands are covered as well

Media representations of the nouveaux riches and the cultural constitution of the global middle class

The article offers a distinctive account of how the nouveaux riches serve as an anchor for a range of upper- middle- class ambivalences and anxieties associated with transformations of capitalism and shifting global hierarchies. Reflecting the long- term association of middle- class symbolic boundaries with notions of refinement and respectability, it examines how the discourse of civility shapes how the nouveaux riches are represented to the upper middle class, identifying a number of recurrent media frames and narrative tropes related to vulgarity, civility, and order. The author argues that these representations play a central role in the reproduction of the Western professional middle class, and in the cultural constitution of a global middle class — professional, affluent, urban, and affiliated by an aesthetic regime of civility that transcends national borders. The findings underline the significance of representations of the new super- rich as devices through which the media accomplish the global circulation of an upper- middle- class repertoire of cultural capital, which is used both to police shifting class boundaries and to establish a legitimate preserve for univorous snobbishness

Logics of Affordability and Worth: Gendered Consumption in Rural Uganda

This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled

'Body training': Investigating the embodied training choices of/for mothers in West London

Framed by the UK Government's efforts to combat social exclusion by encouraging a shift from welfare to work through (re)training, this paper explores the types of training courses being offered to and taken by women with young children in West London. Drawing upon qualitative research, the paper explores the actual and desired uptake of 'body training' courses among mothers, linked, in part, to the current 'body work' skills gap in the local economy. The encouragement given to women and the interest they have in engaging in 'body training' is, we suggest, linked to the discursive construction and performance of a highly feminised and, often, maternal identity, which emphasises women's caring role and the caring self. By probing the body/training nexus through the motivations and choices of mothers in West London the paper raises questions about gender identity and stereotyping in relation to training-for-work policies and the role of training in (re)inforcing the woman-body coupling within Western dualistic thought