A Hero in All of Us?

Abstract: Readers often consider modernity as distinct from the medieval past. This article rejects a clear 'break' between the two eras and considers similarities in how medieval and modern texts imagine sexual violence. Using Capellanus' De Amore and Game of Thrones , this article argues that both works invite the audience to observe and potentially enjoy depictions of sexual violence but rely on the fantasy that such violence is 'contained' in a fully fictional world. Nonetheless, the article asks whether such containment is truly possible. (EL)

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Teaching American Political Thought to Students of American Government

This encyclopedia provides a real-world guide to American political journalism and news coverage in the 21st century, from the most influential media organizations and pundits to the controversies and practices shaping modern-day political journalism. Over the last 20 years, political campaigns and the media that cover them have been fundamentally altered by a mix of technology and money. This timely work surveys the legal, financial, and technological changes that have swept through the political process, putting those changes in context to help readers appreciate how they affect what the public learns—and doesn't learn—about the candidates and lawmakers at the local, state, and federal levels. The encyclopedia offers a critical examination of a broad range of topics organized in a narrative, A-to-Z format. Written by journalists and political experts, the two volumes cover the major issues, organizations, and trends affecting both politics and the coverage of political campaigns. Some 200 entries treat everything from news organizations, think tanks, and significant individuals to questions concerning money, advertising, and campaign tactics. Objective, unbiased, and comprehensive, the encyclopedia is an unequaled resource for anyone seeking to understand American political journalism and news coverage in the 21st century.

By affirming the relativity of the American historical imagination, political theorist Michael J. Shapiro offers a powerful polemic against ethnocentric interpretations of American culture and politics. Deforming American Political Thought analyzes issues that range from the nature of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an egalitarian nation to the persistence of racial inequality. Shapiro demonstrates how history, architecture, film, music, literature, and art are valuable resources that help us comprehend several viewpoints of American political thought from the founding to the present. Exploring such diverse works as slave narratives, contemporary films, genre fiction, and blues and jazz music, Shapiro reveals that there have always been dissenting voices casting doubt on the moral purpose and exceptionalism of the American mind. This book will reinvigorate discussions about the essence of American political thought.

When Lee H. Hamilton joined Congress in 1965 as a US Representative from southern Indiana, he began writing commentaries for his constituents describing his experiences, impressions, and developing views of what was right and wrong in American politics. He continued to write regularly throughout his 34 years in office and up to the present. Lively and full of his distinctive insights, Hamilton’s essays provide vivid accounts of national milestones over the past fifty years: from the protests of the Sixties, the Vietnam War, and the Great Society reforms, through the Watergate and Iran-Contra affairs, to the post-9/11 years as the vice chairman of the 9/11 commission. Hamilton offers frank and sometimes surprising reflections on Congress, the presidency, and presidential character from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. He argues that there are valuable lessons to be learned from past years, when Congress worked better than it does now. Offering history, politics, and personal reflections all at once, this book will appeal to everyone interested in understanding America of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A Companion to Chivalry

standard of care all over the world.Why is this so?In the 21st century we should have higher ambitions than merely keeping patients alive.

The naming of the Anthropocene (or epoch of Man) portends precarious futures for twenty-first century children. In deciding how best to respond, feminist scholars warn against perpetuating the heroicism and grandiosity of Man-to-the-rescue scripts. Instead they suggest paying close attention to what is already going on in the world beyond the dominion of Man, and refiguring our place in this more-than-human world by telling different kinds of stories. The author responds by recounting minor stories from a common worlds research project about a group of young Australian children's confronting encounters with wild European rabbits. These stories illustrate how assumed-to-be minor players are quietly getting on with the job of inheriting and cohabiting damaged worlds without recourse to human heroicism and dominion. She argues that by scaling down, researching and thinking with minor players outside of the main game, childhood studies is well positioned to counter the conceits of the Anthropos.

The figure of the cyborg has, to date, been predominantly conceptualized and examined in terms of human–machine or animal–machine hybridization. Outside the field of psychopharmacology, little has been written on cyborgs arising from human–drug combinations. This paper, however, explores the twenty-first century masculinity of Viagra cyborgs, the recent creations of sexuopharmacology. Using material from interviews conducted in 2001 with New Zealand men and women, the ways in which the experiences and perspectives of those using Viagra and engaging in Viagra-assisted sex are reinforcing and/or disrupting the discursive construction of nature and culture, originality, and authenticity are explored and the kinds of stories being told about hyper-masculinity and super-natural erections are investigated.

The relationship between American political thought (APT) and American political development (APD) as phenomena as well as subfields in American Politics has not been sufficiently theorized. This essay takes up what I call the Second Founding of 1787–89 as the critical case for examining the close relationship between APT and APD. The statesmen of that era were thinkers and developmentalists of the first order; they understood the inseparable link between political justification and political change. This dynamic relationship between American political thought and development practiced in 1787–89 can be used as a blueprint for understanding the entwined cycles of political justification and change in American politics.

American Politics and Global Progress in the Twenty-First Century

Latinx Agencies:Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants Kris Klein Hernández (bio) Benjamin Francis-Fallon , The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava , The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump . New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin , Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Michael Fortner's 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: "black middle-class morality" and "members of the black silent majority" compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to "prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against 'hoodlums' instead of seeking reform of society." 1 Fortner's analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration's origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan's "war on drugs." 2 Fortner asked scholars to take "black agency seriously" when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance. 3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes. 4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner's reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class. 5 Yet Fortner's book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities, [End Page 599] how have people of color contributed to conservative, and at times, racist legislation? I start this review essay with Fortner's consideration of agency for a myriad of reasons. The three books under consideration all examine groups of people who have been understood within the lens of conservativism, traditional (white Euro-American) values, and at times, religious exclusion. Framing an analysis of these monographs through the lens of structural agency helps move past political and cultural attitudes to grapple with the everyday choices that Latina conservatives, Hispanic Republicans, and Pentecostal Mexicans have made over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Like Black Silent Majority, some of the content in these monographs illuminates the lives of people of color who helped forge federal policies that have been characterized as exclusionary or conservative. Benjamin Francis-Fallon's 2019 The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History is one of several recent introductions to post-1960s U.S. politics that detail how Latinos and Hispanics contributed to and ultimately helped shape American government. Francis-Fallon illustrates how scholars of political science and history must reconsider the role that Latinos played within the federal administrations of presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and even into the Bush eras (both George H.W. and George W.) In eleven chapters, the author demonstrates how Latino politics even "transformed the [U.S.] Republican Party as well," providing the reader a bird's-eye view into American politics (p. 5). In short, the monograph is a good entry into the growing field of Latinx political history, and will no doubt help spawn further regional studies into Latinx political science and Latinx history. I appreciate how Francis-Fallon begins his monograph with a quick overview into early Cuban, Mexican American, and...

American Conservative Rage: How the Conservative Right Created an Angry Outlaw and Split the Republican Party

Throughout this interview, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the humanity of her fictional and nonfictional subjects – subjects whose humanity has been eviscerated by what has been characterized as the postwar, neoliberal shift in American politics and economics. The socioeconomic and political neglect of African Americans was, of course, demonstrable in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revealing the structural racism that had often resided in the US's political unconscious. Ward's emphasis on the ideas of survival and renewal – a “savage” resilience of humanity in its most precarious state – offers a corrective to the proclivities of some critical theory deployed in the framing of Hurricane Katrina's victims and the longer history of suffering they represented. For examples, theories of biopolitics used to conceptualize the ways in which African American life has been removed from the protections of citizenship and state sovereignty do run the risk of universalization. A transhistorical version of that life, consistent from slavery to the present day, might emerge from such theory, indistinct from examples of “bare” lives rendered by states of emergency beyond the US and across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Giorgio Agamben might describe such life. In other words, theory risks a process of re-othering and a suspension of historical agency. Anna Hartnell finds in Ward's work the resonance of the jeremiad, and so narratives that are structured by the possibility of the redemption of historical experience – future-oriented narratives. These are narratives that represent the negotiation of historical conditions, not utter submission to them, and following Hartnell's reference they are aptly framed by Henry Giroux's reconceptualization of biopolitical life and the limits of American democracy.