Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother “just another lifestyle choice,” President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for “heroic work,”...
How children are taught to control their feelings and how they resistthis emotional management through cultural production Today, even young kids talk to each other across social media by referencing memes,songs, and movements, constructing a common vernacular that resists parental,educational, and media imperatives to name their feelings and thus controltheir bodies. Over the past two decades, children’s television programming has provideda therapeutic site for the processing of emotions such...
Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography , Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn. Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women,...
