Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the Mensendieck exercise program bridged the modern body cultures of German Nacktkultur (nudism) and American labor efficiency. At its core was a rationalized approach to body mechanics and the visual strategy of assessing and correcting posture, gesture, and movement through a self-disciplining gaze. In this paper, I analyze Mensendieck’s strategies for visualizing subtle and invisible muscle movement, and argue for her significance in the making of international body cultures of modernity. Mensendieck practice constitutes an international crossroads between Germany and the United States, and simultaneously offers an interdisciplinary crossroads between the histories of the body and visual culture. This study builds on the historiography of modernism and the body (Karl Toepfer, Tim Armstrong, Hillel Schwartz, Elspeth Brown, Jonathan Auerbach), medical imaging (Barbara Stafford, Lisa Cartwright, David Serlin), and theoretical approaches to vision, power, and the body (Michel Foucault, Laura Mulvey).

Originally from New York, Dr. Bess M. Mensendieck (1864-1958) developed a network of schools in northern Europe in the early 1900s, making significant contributions to German Nacktkultur (nudism) and the international modern dance movement. When Mensendieck returned to the United States at the outbreak of WWI, her program was adopted in American physical educational collegiate curriculum. Nacktkultur combined back-to-nature nude frolicking in outdoor settings with notions of self-discipline and increased labor productivity. Although highly influential on Nacktkultur, Mensendieck’s work was noticeably more rationalized and embedded in the language of industrial efficiency and military inspection. One of her students, Fritz Giese, compared her work to that of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American time-movement study efficiency expert.

While her influence on expressive German modern dance is now recognized, how her training system coincided with and contributed to strategies of modern self-inspection, rationalized movement, and kinesthetic efficiency has not. Mensendieck was concerned that the habits of modern everyday life eroded the body’s efficiency, creating poor body mass alignments that had long-term damaging effects. With proper posture, breathing, and movements, the muscles could be re-educated so that the relationship between nervous system, musculature, and skeletal alignment worked together to achieve the smoothest, most concise, and most energy-efficient and energy-enhancing ways to sit, rise, stand, walk, and breathe. Believing that muscular realignment could not occur without seeing how the body worked, Mensendieck instituted effective methods for visual inspection of muscular function. Techniques of self-inspection, aided by mirrors and nudity, trained practitioners to internalize and enforce their own body’s efficiency. Mensendieck’s illustrated instructional volumes and a rare physical culture film, the primary sources for this paper, also visualized the body’s posture and movement. In schematic and metaphoric images that demonstrated kinesthetics with and without skin, Mensendieck exercisers learned to visualize muscles and bones in movement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, to use Giorgio Agamben?s formulation, the people in Iraq existed in a zone of indistinction, ?life that may be killed without the commission of homicide.? For Agamben, when ?life becomes the supreme political value , not only is the problem of life?s nonvalue thereby posed, as Schmitt suggests but further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in the decision.? What Agamben is arguing is that sovereign power decides on life that is unworthy of being lived: a decision has been made on the nonvalue of life in Iraq. It is in this sense that life exists in a zone of indistinction: in our desire to protect the security of our nation?s biological body, a decision has been made that the people in Iraq are not fully human, not a form of life valuable enough to prevent being killed, a form of life that has yet to achieve the status of life worth being lived. The zone of indistinction is between the Iraqi people?s biological existence ? what Agamben refers to as bare life ? and what they, or their descendents (this zone of indistinction has a significant temporal dimension, unlike the zone of indistinction in the concentration camp where the aim is to erase the possibility of life), could become, subjects of free Iraq, the dream of Bush and Blair. So it is no surprise that we saw no ?signs of life? in the mass media in the months leading up to the war; the people in Iraq were already in a zone of indistinction, not fully alive, a nonvalue. Yet what was interesting was the ?blogs? that emerged from Iraq, most notably the blog written by Salam Pax. This paper will give a critical reading of Pax?s challenge to the construction of Iraq?s people in terms of bare life and the representation of Pax?s work as a media event. The essay is informed by Jacques Derrida?s writings on the problems of ?real time? media culture and the artifactual nature of web events alongside Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari?s writings on minor literatures and the problems of post-colonial writing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Abu Ghraib photographs reiterate the importance of visuality to a global environment dominated by and often predicated upon imagery. This essay argues that visuality’s prominence in the 21st century public sphere calls for a corresponding prominence of viewing practices that proffer ethical engagement with images of human trauma. Distributing the Abu Ghraib photographs led to political action and censure—action and censure not forthcoming without the public dissemination of the photographs. However, insofar as distributing the photographs also led to widespread public affirmation of Iraqis as Other, this distribution also led to an unethical engagement with these images and the Iraqis violated in and by them. Without an appreciation of the Abu Ghraib photographs as sublime, audiences are unable to meet the ethical obligations attached to viewing human trauma.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We conduct a neural network analysis to exam the differential response among partisans and political independents to negative campaign advertising in terms of their expected probability of voting in the 2000 Presidential election.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: To See Ourselves as Others See Us:
How Publics Abroad View the United States in the Post-9/11 Era
Ole R. Holsti, Duke University
ABSTRACT


The United States is without question the world’s most powerful country but some of its recent experiences in foreign affairs provide compelling evidence that overwhelming military and economic power may not always yield a comparable level of international influence. This paper explores the hypothesis that the reluctance of leaders in many countries—especially in democracies—to support the United States may be traced at least in part to the attitudes of their publics; specifically, to the ways in which those publics appraise the U.S. and its foreign policies.
Data for the study are derived from surveys conducted during the past five years by the U.S. Department of State, the Gallup Organization, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Council on Foreign Relations/German Marshall Fund. All of the data pre-date revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, but post-Abu Ghraib surveys will be included in a later draft. The evidence reveals that the wave of support and sympathy following the September 11 terrorist attacks had largely eroded by early 2004.
The conclusion assesses four possible sources of anti-American sentiments abroad: [1] irrational hatred and envy; [2] ignorance about the U.S. arising from sabotage of Bush administration policies by State Department officials; [3] inadequate resources for an effective public diplomacy program; and [4] U.S. actions that have needlessly antagonized others, including many of America’s traditional allies.