Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
"When it comes to censorship in Hollywood, the bottom line is the
ticket line. That's the central message in Jon Lewis's provocative
and insightful investigation of the movie industry's history of
self-regulation.a]Lewis shows that Hollywood films are a triumph of
commerce over art, and that the film industry has consistently used
internal censorship and government-industrial collusion to
guarantee that its cash flow is never seriously threatened." "a]an accomplished, comprehensive, and provocative new history
of censorship and the American film industrya]And what of the
perennial tussles between politicos and the film industry? All show
business, suggests Lewis, make-believe veiling the real power
structure that has nothing to do with morals, let alone art (it
would be interesting to get his take on the recent marketing
brouhaha and its relationship to the recent threatened actors and
writers strikes). A staggering saga worthy itself of a Hollywood
movie, Hollywood v. Hardcore is film history at its most
illuminating and intense." "As provocative as his sometimes X-rated subject matter, film
scholar Lewis detects an intimate relationship between the
seemingly strange bedfellows of mainstream Hollywood cinema and
hardcore pornography. From postal inspector Anthony Comstock to
virtue maven William Bennett, from the Hays Office that monitored
the golden age of Hollywood to the alphabet ratings system that
labels the motion pictures in today's multiplex malls, Lewis's wry,
informative, and always insightful study of American film
censorship demonstrates that the most effective media surveillance
happens before yousee the movie. Hollywood v. Hard Core is highly
recommended for audiences of all ages." "Jon Lewis weaves a compelling narrative of how box office
needs-rather than moral strictures-have dictated the history of
film regulation. Telling the complex and fascinating story of how
Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and developed the ratings
system and then telling the even more compelling story of how the X
rating became a desirable marketing device when hard core
pornography became popular, Hollywood v. Hard Core reveals a great
deal about the true business of censorship." "This is a fascinating account, both entertaining and
scholarly." In 1972, "The Godfather" and "Deep Throat" were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance." Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together. Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films werefaltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films--from foreign art house film "Last Tango in Paris" to hard-core pornography like "Behind the Green Door"--that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.
Jacoby provides a comprehensive social history of the abortion abolition campaign from its beginnings following "Roe v. Wade" through the 1996 elections. She explores the abortion abolition effort historically, sociologically, theologically, and politically, arguing for a deepened understanding of American abortion opponents. The history of the abortion abolition effort in America is examined through three different approaches to the understanding of collective behavior. Beginning with the immediate post-"Roe" period, the movement is explored as a Catholic moral crusade, and Jacoby analyzes why Catholic Americans were particularly prone to such activity as well as why otherwise theologically compatible Protestants were not. She then examines the effort as a major social movement beginning around 1980. Finally, the late-1980s development of direct action activity, most notably in the form of Operation Rescue, is viewed in light of its connection to the theology and expectations of religious revivalism. In her conclusions, Jacoby provides a new model for understanding faith-based political action. Students, teachers, and the general public will find this book a thorough, comprehensive, and accessible examination of the movement.
Through a series of interview with prominent Romanian literary figures and a selection of their writings, Lidia Vianu asks how, under Communism, did Romanian writers cope with constant ideological shifts and, in turn, respond to the censorship that so often accompanied such changes? Now that Romania has emerged from almost 50 years of Communist rule, what is the current status of censorship? Censorship in Romania offers a series of subversive writings that not only indicted Communism but were also widely embraced by the Romanian public.
This book departs from conventional bioethics approaches to consider the different moral and political economies involved in the donation and transformation of human organs, gametes, stem cells and breastmilk. Collectively, the authors draw attention to the different values associated with research and therapy on body part and tissue exchange through an examination of altruism, gift and commodity relations. They expertly discuss issues such as the bioethical conundrums around the circulation and use of human biological materials and services as well as their legal and regulatory limits, the economic benefits and health values attributed to various body parts and products, and the matter of immaterial labour and affective relations between donors, recipients and others involved in tissue provision. Based on new empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection of original and timely essays will be of interest to students and researchers in gender and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as medical professionals with an interest in health and reproduction.
Edited volume of contributions from Bolivian, American, and British political scientists, development sociologists, anthropologists, and historians examines impacts of the coca/cocaine economy on Bolivian society and politics, and on the US, in recent years. Together these works constitute the most complete, updated collection of analyses about this controversial public policy issue affecting US/Bolivian relations"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.
What is our goal: equal opportunity or equality of result? The debate rages on. The November 5, 1996 decision by voters in California to eliminate most forms of state sanctioned affirmative action ignited a civil rights debate that sent shock waves across the country. The vote had critics celebrating the dawn of a new era of equal rights, while opponents warned of school and workplace discrimination without the protective blanket of affirmative action. The question of racial equality has inspired new debate today, reminiscent of the conflicts of the 1960s. Again we ask ourselves: Is affirmative action necessary to maintain equal labor practices, school desegregation plans, and broad social standards of racial equality? Does affirmative action or laws to roll it back go against the idea of equality itself? Should race play an important role in college admissions and corporate hiring? Is affirmative action a poison instead of a cure? For some, it depends on how the term is defined. These and other questions are debated in this highly charged collection of essays by a distinguished group of politicians, philosophers, educators, and others including Tom Beauchamp, Ward Connerly, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Fish, Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas LeMann, Louis Pojman, George Sher, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Richard Wasserstrom, Cornell West, and Steven Yates. Included also are important legal decisions bearing on affirmative action.
By placing its professional expertise in the service of maintaining the democratic values of free expression and pluralism, American librarianship not only defended its professional autonomy in the area of book selection, but also developed an ideology of intellectual freedom and claimed its defense as a central jurisdiction. This volume charts the library profession's journey from the adoption of the 1939 Library's Bill of Rights to the 1969 development of the Freedom to Read Foundation. It identifies external events that posed threats to intellectual freedom and traces the ALA's response to those threats, particularly librarians' activities and discourse, and the motives and effectiveness of leaders responsible for forging the ALA's response. Much of the data is drawn from the three most widely circulated library periodicals - "American Library Association Bulletin," "Wilson Library Bulletin," and "Library Journal" - that chronicle the debates that took place during the period. More importantly, the study makes extensive use of primary archival sources, state library journals, library school bulletins, and interviews. These sources reveal that by setting its professional expertise in the service of the democratic values of free expression and pluralism, American librarianship embarked on an odyssey of self-definition, through which it has carved out and defended its professional jurisdiction.
The study of censorship is important not because we are shocked by the contents of a book or because a complaint about a work offends our sensibilities, but rather because this conflict between powerful opposing forces in society can threaten its foundations and ideals. Conflict exists because reasonable individuals in our society disagree as to what defines the limitations of creativity and expression, and who should decide when those boundaries ahve been overstepped. These issues are addressed in detail in this important and timely new survey.
Exiting Prostitution provides a critical re-examination of the growing body of literature on exiting and desistance. Moving beyond accounts which are mainly centred on men desisting from crime, this book focuses on female desistance, particularly in relation to prostitution and the exiting process.With interviews from over one hundred women involved in prostitution, the authors uniquely examine the exiting process considering not only the barriers and obstacles that women face when trying to leave prostitution, but also their individual strengths, capacities and aspirations. In this way, this book aims to present an approach that is more positive and progressive. It also provides a guide to best practice through an examination of the types of support that are currently available to those women involved in both on-street and off-street prostitution, and develops an outline model of support.Written by a highly experienced team of experts in the field, this book provides useful guidelines for practitioners and policymakers on types of intervention and ways in which to further develop exiting programmes.
The globalization of trade, investment, and finance continues apace. Many have benefited from this, but deep inequalities persist. This book argues that the interconnections established by globalization make possible a critique of its inequality. For those who take seriously human dignity, equality is a basic presumption of social institutions.
The question of whether a young woman should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy without her parents' knowledge has been one of the most contentious issues of the post Roe v. Wade era. Parental involvement laws reach to the core of the parent-teen relationship in the highly contested realm of adolescent sexuality. This is the first book to examine in thorough detail the decision-making experiences of teens considering abortion. Shoshanna Ehrlich evaluates the Supreme Court's efforts to reconcile the historically based understanding of teens as dependent persons in need of protection with a more contemporary understanding of them as autonomous individuals with adult-like claims to constitutional recognition. Arriving at a compromise, the Court has made clear that, like adult women, teens have a protected right of choice, but that states may impose a parental involvement requirement. However, so that parents are not vested with veto power over their daughters' decisions, young women must be allowed to seek a waiver of the requirement. Integrating a wealth of social science literature, including in-depth interviews with 26 young women from Massachusetts who obtained court authorization for an abortion, the book raises important questions about the logic of a legal approach that requires young women to involve adults when they seek to terminate a pregnancy, but that allows them to make a decision to become mothers on their own.
In this study of Bernard Mandeville's A Modest Defence of Publick Stews , Irwin Primer breaks new ground by arguing that in addition to being an advocation for the establishment of state-regulated houses of prostitution, Mandeville's writing is also a highly polished work of literature.
Should parents aim to make their children as normal as possible to increase their chances to "fit in"? Are neurological and mental health conditions a part of children's identity and if so, should parents aim to remove or treat these? Should they aim to instill self-control in their children? Should prospective parents take steps to insure that, of all the children they could have, they choose the ones with the best likely start in life? This volume explores all of these questions and more. Against the background of recent findings and expected advances in neuroscience and genetics, the extent and limits of parental responsibility are increasingly unclear. Awareness of the effects of parental choices on children's wellbeing, as well as evolving norms about the moral status of children, have further increased expectations from (prospective) parents to take up and act on their changing responsibilities. The contributors discuss conceptual issues such as the meaning and sources of moral responsibility, normality, treatment, and identity. They also explore more practical issues such as how responsibility for children is practiced in Yoruba culture in Nigeria or how parents and health professionals in Belgium perceive the dilemmas generated by prenatal diagnosis.
This book describes specific, well-know controversies in the genetic modification debate and connects them to deeper philosophical issues in philosophy of technology. It contributes to the current, far-reaching deliberations about the future of food, agriculture and society. Controversies over so-called Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) regularly appear in the press. The biotechnology debate has settled into a long-term philosophical dispute. The discussion goes much deeper than the initial empirical questions about whether or not GM food and crops are safe for human consumption or pose environmental harms that dominated news reports. In fact, the implications of this debate extend beyond the sphere of food and agriculture to encompass the general role of science and technology in society. The GM controversy provides an occasion to explore important issues in philosophy of technology. Researchers, teachers and students interested in agricultural biotechnology, philosophy of technology and the future of food and agriculture will find this exploration timely and thought provoking.
"Animals and Social Work" represents a pioneering contribution to the literature of social work ethics and moral philosophy. It advances cogent and detailed arguments for the inclusion of animals within social work's moral framework, arguments that have profound theoretical and practical implications for the discipline and its practitioners.
This collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the various factors at work in genocidal processes and their aftermath. The strong emphasis on legal norms, legal concepts and legal measures in other studies fails to consider further significant issues in relation to genocide. This book aims to redress this balance exploring social dynamics and human behaviour as well as the interplay of various psychological, political, sociological, anthropological and historical factors at work in genocidal processes.With contributions from top international scholars, this volume provides an integrated perspective on risk and resilience, acknowledging the importance of mitigating factors in understanding and preventing genocide. It explores a range of issues including the conceptual definition of genocide, the notion of intent, preventive measures, transitional justice, the importance of property, the role of memory, self or national interest and principles of social existence.Genocide, Risk and Resilience aims to cross conceptual, disciplinary and temporal boundaries and in doing so, provides rich insights for scholars from across political science, history, law, philosophy, anthropology and theology.
An American Dilemma examines the issue of capital punishment in the United States as it conflicts with the nation's obligations under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In a number of high profile cases, foreign nationals have been executed after being denied their rights under the Vienna Convention. The International Court of Justice has ruled against the United States, but individual states have chosen to defy international law. The Supreme Court has not resolved the question of legal remedies for such breaches.
In June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and called for Muslims around the world to migrate there. Over the next five years, around 150 women left the UK to heed this invitation, and the so- called 'jihadi brides' were rarely out of the news. This book traces the media fascination with those who joined the 'caliphate', including Sally Jones, Aqsa Mahmood and Shamima Begum. Through an analysis of the media that presented the 'brides' for public consumption, Leonie B. Jackson reveals the gendered dualistic construction of IS women as either monstrous or vulnerable. Just as the monstrous woman was sensationalised as irredeemably evil, the vulnerable girl was represented as groomed and naive. Both subjects were constructed in such a way that women's involvement in jihadism was detached from men's, scrutinised more closely, and explained through gender stereotypes that both erased the agency of female extremists and neglected their stated motivations. As Jackson demonstrates, these media representations also contributed to the development of new norms for dealing with the 'brides', including targeted killing and the revocation of citizenship. While the vulnerable girl was potentially redeemable, the monstrous woman was increasingly considered expendable.
The policing of pornography remains the subject of widespread and ongoing controversy. This book provides a history of this policing which is geared towards understanding the current debate. The authors demonstrate that obscenity law cannot be understood negatively as censorship and must instead be seen as part of the positive administration of a particular practice of sexuality. They also argue that pornography itself should be described negatively as a mere representation of real sex but positively as a real practice of sex using representations. This history indicates that obscenity law is not, as liberals claim, a mistaken attempt to police moral ideas, but rather forms part of the legitimate governmental regulation of a problematic social conduct. At the same time it asks whether feminists might not be mistaken in attributing this conduct to the nature of the male imagination.
Decisions about life-sustaining treatment are often ethically challenging for patients, surrogate decision-makers, and health care professionals. Providing safe, effective, and compassionate care near the end of life is a priority for health care organizations. In times of uncertainty, crisis, or reflection, and in efforts to improve health care for seriously ill patients, guidelines can help. This is the first updated, expanded edition of The Hastings Center's 1987 Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care of the Dying, which shaped the ethical and legal framework for decision-making on treatment and end-of-life care in the United States. The new edition, the product of an authoritative consensus process, incorporates 25 years of research, innovation, and developments in law and policy. It summarizes the current framework for making good decisions about treatment and care and identifies educational and organizational goals for health care systems. It covers care planning, decision-making for adults and for children, care transitions, the determination of death, and the policies and processes that support good care at the bedside. It also addresses the psychological and social dimensions of care near the end of life, with attention to effective communication with patients and loved ones and among team members. This book is written for physicians, nurses, and other clinicians in hospitals, nursing homes, home care, and hospice. It is structured for ease of reference during difficult clinical situations and includes extensive practical recommendations supported by print and online resources. This book is also essential reading for clinical ethicists, ethics committee members, health lawyers, and medical and nursing directors. As the U.S. confronts the challenges of health care reform, an aging population, increasing technological capacity to extend life, and serious cost implications, The Hastings Center Guidelines are invaluable to educators, scholars, and policymakers. |
You may like...
Advanced Introduction to Platform…
Robin Mansell, W. E. Steinmueller
Paperback
R636
Discovery Miles 6 360
Debating Climate Ethics
Stephen M. Gardiner, David A. Weisbach
Hardcover
R3,696
Discovery Miles 36 960
The Code - The Power Of "I Will"
Shaun Tomson, Patrick Moser
Paperback
(2)
|