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A landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire. In Becoming Lesbian, historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert c...
In 1951, the eight o’clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book. Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of...
In the world of Wikipedia, blogging and citizen journalism where huge masses of information and the capability to disseminate opinions, thoughts and ideas is available at the click of a mouse what is the role and impact of political experts? The contributors to this insightful and original volume argue that across the western world in general, the political expert occupies as important a role today as at any time in the past. The ubiquity of information and the fact that the experts and the organizations to which they are affiliated may be viewed as having an ideological agenda has not diminished their role, influence or status. Governments and the media still rely on them for information and advice whilst organizations in civil society need them in order to provide the evidence, arguments and policy recommendations that are essential to having a voice in the public conversation. By examining how these policy experts and their think tanks continue to exert influence across a range of modern western democracies a better understanding of the role of policy expertise and an examination of how it may develop and evolve throughout the rest of the world is reached.
The result is a lively, diverse offering from an extraordinary intellect. --Richard Wolin, the Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
Looking beyond the closet at the lives and works of renowned queer public figures
This engaging, knowledgeable book traces the American path France has followed since resolving its searing Algerian conflict in 1962. Barnett Singer convincingly demolishes two pervasive clichés about modern France: first, that the country never has been fit to fight wars, including wars on terror; and second, that the French have always been and remain overwhelmingly anti-American. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, Barnett Singer clearly demonstrates that a serious and organized France fought strongly until its own divisions, international pressures, and the actions of de Gaulle ended the conflict with tragic consequences. The outcome led to an important sea change, clearing the way for France to embrace American culture, especially rock 'n' roll, and more generally, an American-style emphasis on personal happiness. The author argues that today’s France, wounded by the loss of traditions and stability, is increasingly pro-American, clinging to trends from across the Atlantic as to a lifeline.
'Sounds French' reveals how French society mediated the challenges of globalization through the consumption and production of popular music, itself increasingly an expression of globalized culture. As recorded music became more commonplace and crossed national boundaries in the second half of the twentieth century, French musicians and their audiences articulated new types of communal identities around popular music genres that reflected the impact of social, political, economic, and cultural transformations after the 1950s.
This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.
Buying into Change examines how the development of a mass consumer society under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975) inserted Spain into transnational consumer networks and set the stage for Spain’s transition to democracy during the late 1970s. This transition is broadly significant to both a Spanish public still struggling to redefine their society after Franco and to scholars who have long debated the origins of Spain’s current democracy, yet many aspects of it remain largely unexamined. Buying into Change incorporates mass consumption into our understanding of Spain’s democratic transition by tracing the spread and social impact of new foreign-influenced depa...
How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the worldÕs nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory a...