Aesthetic hegemony?

I am not completely certain that this site is legitimate, and certainly it is sensationalist, but it seems  odd to me that the aesthetic hegemony of the idealized Western woman still maintains its hold.  According to an article on a website, a Japanese woman has undergone multiple cosmetic procedures to look like a French doll.

A new kind of security threat

A new kind of security threat resulting from a certain kind of body:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/omar-borkan-al-gala-is-this-the-man-who-is-too-sexy-for-saudi-arabia-8590104.html

The body thing that Global Political Economy texts don't include

O'Brien and Williams, in their truly excellent textbook, Global Political Economy (which I am teaching this semester), identify the key changes of the 20th century that have transformed the global political economy.  These are:

• the World Wars and the inter-war "economic turbulence,"
• the dominance of the US and the West,
• decolonization and "the struggle for development," 
• the liberalization of domestic and global markets (what I would call the Reagan-Thatcher revolution),
• "the growth of international organizations in governing global affairs" (what I would refer to as the expansion of regimes)
• "a revolution in information technologies and its impact upon social, political economic and military organization."

As I reviewed this material for today's class, it occurred to me that another major revolutionary change of the 20th century was not mentioned here and is not mentioned in any text that I know of:

• antibiotics, vaccines, and other advances in medical science that change humans' relation to the natural world.

(And not necessarily always for the better.)  

And yet one more, as yesterday's the article by Michael Moss in yesterday's New York Times magazine section reminds me:

• the creation of mass produced food, which acts on our bodies in ways that are becoming increasingly apparent.

I have not worked this out yet.  The inkling of an answer that I have has to do with the fact that there can be no global political economy without human bodies (workers, consumers, etc.), and the condition the human bodies are in will of necessity be deeply imbricated with the GPE.  I'll toss it out as a question to the undergrads and see what they think.  (It's a quiet class.)

Anyone have any ideas?

Salon article on David Jacobson's new book

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/the_war_on_female_sexuality_is_globalization_to_blame/

Visuality, Corporeality, Grievablity, and Violence

A student in my graduate seminar, Geoff Levin, wrote a great paper in which he turned Butler's notion of grievability upside down and showed how social processes making someone or some group grievable at a distance (across borders) can lead (and has led) to violence rather than peace that Butler expects.

Butler argues that since Iraqi and Afghani lives are not grievable for Americans, we Americans do not resist waging war on them.  Further, she suggests that if they did become grievable for us, we would question and (one hopes) stop the use of violence.  (Did I get that right?)

Geoff argues that in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the fact that Palestinians are grievable to other Arabs and to other Moslems has led to violence and a continuation of violence.  Making Palestinians grievable is yoked historically to the creation of transnational Arab and Moslem identities.  The conflict is fueled by the fact that to Arabs and Moslems outside the narrow confines of Israel and Palestine one group of Semites (Palestinians) is grievable and another (Jews) is not.  He does not go there, but it seems to me that the normative implication of his research is not that the grievability of Palestinians is bad but rather that Palestinians and Jews must be grievable to each other and to their transnational allies for peace to be possible.

So what flips the switch?  Why are some people grievable and others not?

First the obvious: enemies are generally not grievable.  It is no surprise that Israelis & Jews are not grievable in the Arab world; it is no surprise that Palestinians and other Arabs are not grievable in Israel.  Once an Other takes on the identity of a Schmittian enemy, there is no grief.  (Note that people in Turkey -- not Arabs and therefore not, at least initially, enemies -- are grievable to Israelis, as evidenced by rescue teams sent by Israel when Turkey suffered an earthquake.)

But sometimes, estwhile enemies do become grievable.  How?  One of my mentors, the late Edward E. Azar, and other scholar-practitioners like social psychologist Herbert Kelman used "contact groups" to make influential representatives of groups that are enemies to each other come to have empathy for each other.  Empathy and grievability, I think, are closely related (if not the same).  Contact groups bring people together, their physical presence with each other makes them real in ways that words on page do not.  When confronted with each other's humanity (with each other's Face, in Levinas' terms), the possibility of empathy emerges.

Yet pictures also may make the ungrievable grievable and restore the enemy population's humanity.   I am reminded of Kim Phuc, "the girl in the picture," captured on film fleeing naked from a napalm strike on her Vietnamese village.  Her corporeality, made visual through the picture, restored her humanity and by extension the humanity of the North Vietnamese.

My interest in this is the connection between materiality (corporeality in this case) and information.  In both the face-to-face contact groups and the image, content ("I am human; you are human; if you were me right now you would feel pain.") flows from a source (Kim via the photographer's photo; the influential participants in the contact group) to recipients (those seeing the photo; the "enemy" members of the contact group).

I'm offering no conclusion.  Just an observation.  Back to grading.

New Life After Death?

Should one's death end one's ability to procreate?  Should others be allowed to make that decision for you?

New life after death?

Dead Certain?

Science Magazine reports on new a new study that examines deaths and causes of deaths, a topic important for Global Studies as well as Global Public Health:

How Do You Count the Dead?
Gretchen Vogel Understanding how many people die of which causes is invaluable for designing effective public health programs, global health experts say. But most of the world's deaths occur in places with few or no hospitals or doctors to record deaths and their causes, forcing scientists to extrapolate from survey data, incomplete records, and research studies. Various groups use different statistical methods, sometimes resulting in very different numbers that are hotly debated. Now the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is conducting the most massive study of deaths and disease ever undertaken, which aims to assemble the cause of 1 billion deaths worldwide going back to 1980. It will be published in a series of papers later this year and is likely to trigger new debates. Some say that's necessary and healthy. Others worry that the sharply diverging estimates and the bickering will erode policymakers' trust in science.

Full Story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/336/6087/1372?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/15-June-2012/10.1126/science.336.6087.1372 

Sorry, it's by subscription.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to add here, but I thought that this article has a certain resonance with our Embodied World theme.  So, too, does this article, also available by subscription:

• Michael Spagat, 
• Andrew Mack, 
• Tara Cooper, 
• and Joakim Kreutz

Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of ContestationJournal of Conflict Resolution December 2009 53: 934-950, doi:10.1177/0022002709346253

The idea that death counts are highly contested is not considered enough in IR.  We don't really know how many people die as a result of conflict. Counts of bodies on the battlefield are not reliable; eye witnesses differ.  The concept of "battlefield" is hopelessly dated in today's warfare, anyway.  People die, too, not as a direct result of fighting, but rather as a consequence of the destruction wrought by fighting.

Studies of war that operationalize war in terms of N of battle deaths are flawed in my view.  (Correlates of War and Behavioral Correlates of War are widely used datasets that do just that.)  It never made sense to me to say that 999 battle deaths is "only"  a "militarized interstate dispute" (assuming it's interstate), while 1000 battle deaths makes the conflict a war.

And then there is "structural violence," a term introduced by Johann Galtung to refer to the years of life lost as a result of negative socio-economic conditions.  A problem for analyzing structural violence is it is difficult to see the act of violence on the body of the victim. There is no smoking gun nor any other obvious weapon to be seen if someone's life is cut short because of impoverished circumstances that came as a result of structural adjustment policies. No one has a "structural adjustment entry wound."