Harvard University Press

The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation

beth — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Saul Levmore, Martha C. Nussbaum

The Offensive Internet is a collection of essays that focus on abuses made possible by the freedoms provided by the Internet. The essays deal with the issues of privacy, free speech, cyber-bullying, misogyny, and anonymity. Each essay focuses on one issue to discuss and concludes with what can and cannot be done legally at this time to solve a particular Internet issue.

The book is broken into four parts and each of these parts is comprised of multiple essays on a specific topic. The first is titled “The Internet and Its Problems” and features essays that explore how anonymity on the Internet has lead to widespread cyber-bullying and civil rights abuse. These essays focus on the objectification and abuse women suffer due to these issues (according to one study cited, between the years 2000 and 2007, 72.5% of cyber-harassment victims were women) and what effect this has not only on the victims of these abuses but on society as well. While the authors of these essays are mainly concerned with women's rights, they do also acknowledge that other minority groups (homosexuals, racial minorities, religious minorities) are often targeted by cyber-mobs, signaling a violation of civil rights all around. The real life examples of harassment and slander that these authors reference are disturbing and appalling, and as a reader, one begins to wonder why there are not more laws to regulate and punish cyber-harassment.

The second section of the book is “Reputation.” As the title suggests, these essays deal with how people's reputations can be damaged by the Internet through social networks, Googling, and rumor spreading. These essays address not only the issues we are having currently (for example, people getting fired for things they post on a Facebook page), but also how these issues will shape our society in the future.

The third section, “Speech,” is probably the one topic that is the most controversial. It deals with free speech, a topic that is as debated in the real world as it is in the cyber one. How much free speech should there be on the Internet? What constitutes as free speech and what is slander? Should people be allowed to use foul language or should some censoring be done? And if there is censoring done, who should be responsible for it? These questions and more are posed and discussed throughout the three well thought out essays on speech.

The last section, “Privacy,” concentrated on what information should be considered private, how that privacy should be protected, and what effect the Internet is having on our social norms in terms of privacy. I found the essay on social networks to be the most interesting. The fact that many people consider the information they post onto a social network page to be private, despite being displayed on the very public Internet, is an intriguing phenomenon in our society and this section explores the reasoning and consequences of this train of thought.

While I found many of the topics and issues discussed in this collection to be fascinating and intellectually stimulating, my favorite thing about it was that it didn't so much offer answers as questions that society needs to be asking. Whether you agree with the opinions expressed in it or not, this a book that makes you think, making it a worthwhile read for anyone.

Written by: Victoria Granado, March 28th 2011

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 10th 2010

The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:59:00 +0000

By Michael J. Rosenfeld

Harvard University Press

Michael Rosenfeld’s The Age of Independence is refreshing, yet scholarly application of demography. Though demography is often seen as merely a slew of statistics flat on a page, in actuality it is the soul of society spelled out as best we can. So do not fear the potential for academic formulaic boredom; it may be there, but it is adeptly soared over into a realm of accessible, interesting, and relevant information about the changing American family.

Rosenfeld argues that the substantial rise in inter-racial and same-sex families starting in the 1960s stems from what he coins the “independent life stage,” and that these changes have further reverberations throughout almost every level of society. Essentially, Rosenfeld reasons that the other elements (beyond this independent life stage) were all lined-up by the '60s, and that’s why the introduction of the independent life stage in the '60s initiated the rise towards interracial and same-sex unions.

The independent life stage is in essence the life of a single, college–educated, twenty-something: not living at home, exposed to a wider world through leaving home to go off to college and learning about and with people beyond their native communities. Extrapolating the independent life stage from census data is complex because there are no questions directed at assessing it yet. Though this is Rosenfeld’s niche of demographic expertise, there is unfortunately only enough data available to make hypotheses based on general themes.

Nuggets of information, like how more twenty-somethings are not living with their parents in greater numbers than in the past, are the gems that anyone can take away and truly appreciate, regardless of their educational background. The media flurry around this phantom phenomenon is an example of when something is rarer, people take greater note of it.

Rosenfeld aims to provoke sociologists and others to reflect on the independent life stage and its further influence; the book also serves as a call to arms to demographers to push for new questions in the decennial census to evaluate the independent life stage. But this is only the beginning—Rosenfeld sees great change in our collective American future, and we must learn as much as we can to prepare.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, February 11th 2010

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:03:00 +0000

By Crystal N. Feimster

Harvard University Press

Southern Horrors explores the racial and sexual politics of the Post Civil War South predominantly through the political writings, speeches, and lives of two prominent female figures of the era. Feimster describes the period through Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white woman from the stately plantation class, educated and raised during antebellum south, and Ida B. Wells, a the daughter of former slaves, raised during the reconstruction era.

The author begins by describing the two women’s origins and how they came to rally around the issues of rape and women’s protection. “Protection”, in this context, is what would be, in modern times, included in the definition of women’s suffrage. It was a push for women to obtain the right to own property, have a bank account, inherit estates, and seek justice for wrongdoings or violence done against them. Both Felton and Wells were revolutionary in their own ways, challenging and breaking through the gender norms and expectations of the era. However, their experiences were staunchly different and in many ways based solely upon their racial identities.

I found it intriguing that Feimster chose to follow both a white woman and a black woman to describe the sexual and gender violence embedded in early twentieth century politics. The strategy definitely helped to paint the entire picture of the conflicting struggles of the Southern reconstruction. On the one hand, there was a push to preserve traditional Southern norms; on the other, pressure from the black community for inclusion and equality.

Both women were particularly fascinating, especially in their approaches and ideologies. Wells highlighted that the threat of rape and sexual assault was used as a tool of control, a justification of violence against women, and a way to maintain white male supremacist power. She was a radical voice and decades ahead of her time; her ideas were characteristic of activists of the women's movement in the United States in the 1960s. Felton started her political career by advocating for rights and protection for all women, regardless of race or class, but later completely switched her views to better appeal to the male audiences and supporters.

My initial reaction to Felton’s shift in politics was outrage. I was terribly disappointed, though not surprised, in her neglect and discarding of black women’s issues. I saw a parallel of second wave feminist activism and marginalization of women of color in Felton’s shift. Her lack of conviction was frustrating and left me wondering how history may have been altered if she had held true. The text also discusses more general ideas of Southern white masculinity, black masculinity, the convict leasing system, the politics behind lynching, and both women’s involvement in and victimization of lynching.

I admire and respect the way in which Feimster presented the two women. Her analysis of the events was critical and highly thought provoking, and I often found myself sitting lost in thought after finishing a chapter. While not a leisurely read, it was enjoyable overall. There was quite a bit of material to process and think about, and I often found myself wishing I had someone to discuss it with.

While it is relatively easy to find people to discuss the issues of race and class in the South in general terms, to really engage in the material presented proved more difficult. This book would be an excellent basis of discussion on early women’s movement and the intersections of race, class, and sexuality. It also presents many hidden histories of the South, which can be shocking and intense at times.

Written by: Liz Martin, February 7th 2010

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Heather Love

Harvard University Press

Feeling Backward is a brilliant book that attempts the “impossible” and succeeds. Using Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick as theoretical touchstones, and incorporating Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” Heather Love “feels backward” to reimagine and connect with aspects of a queer past that had been rendered invisible. In doing so—in risking (as she puts it) the fate of Lot’s wife in turning back to revisit a painful past—she embraces the ruins, the “fugitive dead,” the loneliness and failures and all the “negative affect” that need to be reclaimed as part of that history.

She invokes José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of a “gay shame day parade” to help insist, in her reconception of queer history, on those aspects of queer experience otherwise rendered too painful, too unhelpful, too outside the margins of “modern gay identity.” All of the literary figures she chooses to exemplify her project are liminal, largely rejected as part of gay historiography as it has been constructed since the early 1990s. And yet it is figures as diverse and complex as Walter Pater, Willa Cather, and Radclyffe Hall that provide Love with opportunities for “emotional rescue.” She dismisses the ancient admonitions against personal involvement with historical subjects and seeks passionately the play of recognition she feels in the struggles of these figures and their often subtle and disguised “queer performativity,” to use Sedgwick’s term.

Cather is one of those authors who, like Love herself, reaches into the past for a sense of community and identity and yet who does so with great ambivalence and a complicated pathos concerning her own gender and sexual identity. It is precisely that ambivalence—and the loneliness and melancholia it stirs—that need to be understood and confronted.

Another object for reclamation in the backward march is romantic friendship or, more generally, the examination of a mode of intimacy that has remained relatively free of stigma and yet contains much of the erotic and social connection between same-sex people that also needs to be included in queer historiography. And yet the indeterminacy of the term and its historical ambiguity renders it a kind of shadowy and poorly understood phenomenon in literature and history.

Queer theory has challenged the categories of sexual identity, even the notion of identity itself. As Love reminds us, so many have felt left out of the categories which were designed, in part, to help forge the sorts of connection and recognition, current and historical, that Love sees as desirable in our backward reach. The troubled, the alienated, the stigmatized, the personal catastrophes are a necessary part of queer history, as traumatizing as that history can be. Love moves bravely backwards to that murky time, the “queer life before Stonewall,” and then crosses the modernist line backwards to feel what has been lost. In doing so she has made a profoundly imaginative and powerful contribution to queer history, and yet her book remains reasonably accessible to those with some background in queer theory and literature.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 1st 2009

Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:16:00 +0000

By Robert Paarlberg

Harvard University Press

As a mom who does what I can to buy organic food for my family, I completely understand the general distaste most of us have for genetically modified (GM) foods. The very thought of vegetables altered by scientists in labs seems creepy and somehow inherently wrong, doesn’t it? But when I read Starved for Science, I quickly realized that such a romanticized and emotional standpoint in such a critical debate as starvation is not only uninformed, it is just plain irresponsible. I also realized that, whether we like it or not, most of us are already eating GM foods on a daily basis.

In plain language and with plentiful sources to back up his positions, Paarlberg describes how in first world countries, where food is plentiful and obesity more of a problem than starvation, people can afford to pine for the days of small neighborhood farms - and can turn up their noses at the agribusiness and subsequent science that has allowed us to take for granted having not only enough to eat, but a wide choice in what and where we get our food. In Europe, the negative public opinion toward genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) has led to labeling and bans on imports suspected to be “contaminated” by genetically altered seeds. Greenpeace and many NGO’s are working actively to keep African farmers on small plots of land using techniques that date back thousands of years, but to the detriment and hardship of those very farmers.

Paarlberg describes how rich countries have come to fear and dislike GMO’s, stopping funding and support easily where food is in no shortage, and yet when it is convenient, still continue to fund their use in the pharmaceutical industry where a longevity benefit can be gained. And governments in African countries situated in urban areas that are highly influenced by European bias, both in cultural influence and monetary flow, follow suit. Therefore, they are not developing their own programs to find strains of seeds that could resist drought, and it isn’t worth enough money to anyone else to do so for them.

The majority of small farms in Africa are currently run by women, as men often leave to find other jobs in mines or more urban areas to supplement family incomes. Children stay out of school to help with the farming, and they do it all with wooden tools and poorly fed animal labor. Green movements in China and India have brought these countries to a position where starvation in no longer such a pressing issue; however, in Africa the problem is worse than ever.

Paarlberg admits to having kept his research a bit under wraps until now, knowing the reaction he would get from his own circle of friends and colleagues. It could be said that being ‘socially conscious’ has taken on certain assumptions (and presumptions) among the wealthier strata of our urban world with a borg-like uniformity, and in the case of poverty in Africa, maintaining a position of being purely organic could easily be likened to saying “let them eat cake.”

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, June 13th 2008