Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In the broad arc of postmodern scholarship, the unitary, solid, and willful ego of the Enlightenment subject has been thoroughly deconstructed and discredited. Freud's reality testing ego from "The Ego and the Id" has been replaced by the Lacanian ego that can only fantasize itself as a unity across a chasm of separation and lack, inevitably split in multiple directions by desire. Although the site of the modern ego's formation, Lacan's metaphorical "mirror stage," has occasioned a tremendous amount of theorizing (most especially the "lack" that the resulting ego formation suffers from), the fantasy of ability that actually constitutes the ego has received little attention.

In this paper, I examine the birth, life, and death of this ego from a disability studies perspective. An ego that is born out of a willful fantasy of ability remains trapped by that fantasy, and threatened by the prospect of inability. First, I will historicize this ego to the modern West, with its obsessive individualism and meritocratic ideology, which exalts the power of the individual will as the true sign of moral character. Then I will examine a reconstituting practice of the willful ego, the magically bizarre media sensation known as "inspiration," in which people supposed to be overwhelmed by the degenerative body "overcome" it through the sheer force of their will. I conclude with a look at the "Death with Dignity" movement and its insistence that bodily death is preferable when the ego fears its dissolution in total dependence on others.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Social mobility for persons reared in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty often occurs without the social stimulation usually encompassed in conventional understandings of significant others? influence. In this longitudinal case study of 613 children living in Cleveland?s high poverty neighborhoods, we examine the impact on educational achievement growth and behavior problem decline of the children?s capacity for resiliency and the opportunity for temporary residence with their mothers in a uniquely constructed total social environment, a therapeutic community for women addicted to crack cocaine. After reviewing the extensive literature on children?s resiliency, we develop a new instrument to measure the capacity for resiliency, a multidimensional construct comprising observable cognitive, moral, and relational strengths. We use hierarchical growth modeling to estimate the effects for children of this newly measured capacity for resiliency and the treatment setting while controlling for observable covariates of the mother and child and unobserved family heterogeneity and auto-correlated measurement error across the four annual time points of the test observations. Increases in math and reading achievement and a decline in behavior problems were significantly related to the child?s capacity for resiliency. Increases in math, reading, and vocabulary achievement were significantly related to time spent living with mother in the therapeutic community. After demonstrating the likely generalizability of our findings beyond the treatment sample of children and mothers, we examine reasons for the therapeutic community?s impact on these children.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, sport is conceptualized as an arena of change in which mutually interdependent agents interact affecting one another and the field itself. This research focuses on fans as one objective position in the field. In order to describe the habitus of fans developed in part through the consumptive process, one ardent group of fans is foregrounded, fantasy sport enthusiasts. Data from an online survey, participant observation and secondary data sources facilitate the construction of a theory of fanship habitus.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The photographic exhibition of Abu Ghraib as a state of exception—a site constituted by the US liberal democratic state where the permissibility to strip prisoners of various forms of psychic, social and/or corporeal life was integral to the Global War on Terror—raises complicated questions about modes of spectating the suffering of non-American subjects. In examining modalities of viewing the Abu Ghraib photographs released to the American public, this paper considers the role of American cultural fantasies of Muslims and the Middle East in viewing the violated Abu Ghraib prisoners in the photographs. If cultural fantasies play a complex role in structuring intelligibilities, in informing and normalizing the ways subjects see each other, the assumptions subjects implicitly make, the fears and desires subjects have of each other, this paper focuses on those cultural fantasies that contributed to forms of spectatorship that 1) could not register the Abu Ghraib tortures as violations and/or 2) viewed the instrumentality of Abu Ghraib prisoners as permissible and/or justified. The American public fascination with the Abu Ghraib photographs—particularly with their representations of sexual violation—suggests that the photographs are part of a historical genealogical legacy where the public viewing of sexually violated bodies functions as a mechanism that binds collective anxieties raised by racial, gendered and national conflicts. (The public practice of lynching in the US is the first example that comes to mind.) This paper considers correlations between national and transnational scenes of spectatorship, between historical and contemporary mechanisms of viewing violated bodies. The public viewing of the Abu Ghraib photographs also raises difficult questions about forms of pleasure (individual and collective) derived from watching violated bodies. The essay interrogates the role viewing pleasures play in sustaining and (re)producing American geopolitical states of exception like Abu Ghraib; and in how such pleasures affect possibilities for developing ethical forms of witnessing others’ suffering.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Religious institutions claim that they play the role of providing its congregations with their own interpretive methods for popular culture. For them to do this role, they utilize and incorporate various media symbolism into their theological viewpoints in order to reinforce their congregations about their ontological and epistemological position. In this process, identity as a “religious” community is expressed in forms of rhetoric and discourse. Children’s movies like Harry Potter and Spirited Away provide good examples of the media symbolism for evangelical Christian communities to express, discuss, and distribute their own way to deal with popular culture. Reviews of these movies by evangelical Christian communities help us to understand the perceptions and assumptions about children, parents, popular culture, and the role of religion in the children’s interaction with the media. From the analysis of the film reviews, this study identified six themes that these communities make use of when they evaluate and critique popular cultural products for children: (1) Children, parents, and development; (2) Fantasy vs. reality; (3) Plot line of good vs. evil; (4) Children’s media as “parable” for moral and religious values; (5) “Doomed popular culture and entertainment; (6) The Bible and faith: preparing the warfare.