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As IS territorial dominance diminishes, what challenges lie ahead for Iraq’s Kurds?

On the ninth of June, Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi Prime Minister, arrived in Mosul to congratulate the armed forces for the liberation of the city. Mosul had been conquered by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014 and served as its Iraqi capital. This significant victory is not yet the end of ISIS in Iraq, however, both in Iraq and in Syria its territorial dominance has strongly diminished—by about 60 % since January 2015—and is likely to continue. The power vacuum emerging from this rapid decline has heated up competition between the numerous parties in the conflict—regular forces of regional states and great powers, as well as various militias often acting as their proxies—to control former ISIS territories. Thus, regional conflict structures that had been moderated by the urgent need to address the common threat represented by ISIS come again to the forefront.

The Iraqi Kurds, who have since 1991 built a markedly developed de facto state in northern Iraq, have already sensed opportunity in the aftermath of ISIS. Recently the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has announced to hold an independence referendum on 25 September in the territories it currently controls. While the complex post-ISIS situation in Iraq could, hence, constitute a unique historical opportunity to reach their long-term goal of independence, it also entails major obstacles for the Iraqi Kurds. Particularly, three challenges must be addressed to move closer to the goal of sovereign statehood: solving a paralysing domestic political crisis; finding an arrangement with Baghdad for the disputed territories located beyond the federal border of Iraqi Kurdistan, which are currently controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga forces; and gaining at least some international support for their independence.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Masoud Barzani, (who is also the President of Iraqi Kurdistan since 2005) together with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal Talabani, have been the two principal Kurdish parties in northern Iraq for the last few decades. As such their relations have often been very conflictual, marked by competition over power and resources. However, after the end of the Iraqi Kurdish Civil War (1994-1998), the two contenders transformed their relations and cooperated. This statebuilding coalition emerged and stabilized as a result of external incentives provided by outside powers, primarily the USA and Turkey. At the moment however, Iraqi Kurdistan is haunted by an internal political crisis and the Kurdish parliament has not convened since October 2015. The long-term KDP-PUK duopoly had already been weakened in the Iraqi Kurdish elections of 2013, when the PUK lost considerably and only arrived third at the ballot box, after the KDP and Gorran, a new party that split from the PUK. While the KDP initially organized a coalition government of all three parties, this cooperation deteriorated when a conflict over the extension of Barzani’s presidential term escalated and the KDP expelled Gorran from the government. In 2016 the PUK and Gorran concluded an alliance against the powerful KDP, which currently dominates the Kurdish Regional Government and controls the profitable oil exports.

President of Iraqi Kurdistan Masoud Barzani by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In view of these internal political disputes, the independence referendum is also an attempt by the KDP to move a common cause forward to iron out the differences between the competing parties, and it seems that this approach was at least partly successful. At the end of 2016, the conflict over the KRG’s oil exports was so serious that PUK circles even envisaged to divide the Kurdistan region. However, since April 2017 the PUK has met several times with the KDP to discuss a possible referendum and this could potentially reactivate the duopolistic collaboration that accounts for the emergence of Iraqi Kurdistan. However, many voices in the PUK are, like Gorran, critical of the referendum. They demand that the stalled parliament reconvenes before a referendum takes place. President Masoud Barzani, whose term expired two years ago according to his opponents, has announced his intention not to run for the next elections scheduled for November. This might contribute to solving the domestic political crises, as Iraqi Kurdish unity is paramount in a regional environment counting on disunity to turn down Kurdish claims.

Due to their successful military campaign against ISIS, the Iraqi Kurds could expand their territory by about 40%. Of key importance for Iraqi Kurdish economic independence and viability is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Now that the Iraqi Kurds de facto occupy these disputed territories they seek to keep them, and the KRG intends to include them in the independence referendum. The Kurdish argument that military efforts against ISIS should be compensated is met with little sympathy in Baghdad, particularly when it comes to a key asset such as Kirkuk. While momentum on this question lies with the Kurds as they currently control these territories, their unity is paramount to the assertion of their claims. Since the Iraqi Kurds conquered Kirkuk in 2014, controlling its oil has not only been a thorny issue between Irbil and Baghdad, but also between the KDP and the PUK.

President Barzani has also stressed that any move towards independence would be pursued within negotiations with the Iraqi government. However, he equally emphasized that whatever the result of the referendum would be implemented. As early as 2005, an unofficial independence referendum was held in Iraqi Kurdistan and 99% of about 2 million votes supported a sovereign Iraqi Kurdistan. Securing electoral support for independence is therefore not an issue, while gaining external support is. So far, neither the USA, Russia, Iraq, nor any regional state have signalled openness towards an independent Kurdistan, except for Israel. As a landlocked entity, Iraqi Kurdistan is not viable without regional support, as it would otherwise economically collapse. In the last decade Turkey has been the main economic partner of the KRG. The calculus of Barzani seems to count on Ankara for such a step, but so far there is no sign of Turkish support for independence.

Out of the three major challenges discussed, gaining international support for independence seems to be the hardest to tackle for the Iraqi Kurds. There might be a scenario, in case Iraq shows severe fragmentary tendencies, in which Ankara might prefer an Iraqi Kurdish client state as a buffer against a Shiite-dominated rump Iraq. Yet overall, an independent Iraqi Kurdistan presently seems rather unlikely. If, however, the Iraqi Kurds manage to overcome their domestic crisis and unify their claims, the current situation has potential for them. If they play their cards right the independence referendum and some of the conquered territories could be instrumental as bargaining chips to integrate at least some additional territories to the KRG area or maybe gain a confederate status within Iraq.

Featured image credit: Kurdistan by Nóra Bartóki-Gönczy. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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How well do you know Jane Austen? [quiz]

In honor of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, we have created a quiz to help you determine how well you know the beloved novelist. Austen fans are often Are you an Austen expert? Or do you need to brush up on some of her greatest works? Take the quiz to find out!

 

 

Featured image credit: “Almond Blossom” by Michael Gaida. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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Could you survive a snake bite?

With increased numbers of people travelling to exotic places, there is also an increasing awareness of tropical diseases. However, there are a number of tropical diseases, such as snake bite, which are often overlooked as major issues. Snake bite is an on-going global problem, and is often neglected as an important public health concern. Many are unprepared and uninformed when it comes to snake bites, which can have fatal consequences for humans.

In celebration of World Snake Day, where many are sharing their appreciation for snakes from the King Cobra to the Black Rat Snake, it is important to also raise awareness of snake bite as a tropical disease, as well as the preventative measures that can be taken

So, how well informed are you about snake bites, and the snakes themselves? Do you know the preventative measures? And ultimately what are your chances of survival?

Featured image credit: Photo by Alfonso Castro. CC0 public domain via Unsplash.

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Brinksmanship does little to resolve crisis in Venezuela

For over eighty days, the opposition has challenged the government of Nicolás Maduro and sought his ouster through direct street actions. Dramatic images of masked protestors violently clashing with the Venezuelan National Guard or the Bolivarian Police dominate western media reporting on the country. The mainstream US media creates the impression that the entire country is in open revolt and Maduro only holds on to power through the use of sheer repression. The reality, however, is more complex and both sides appear headed towards an agonizing stalemate.

We have seen this approach taken before. In February 2014, a group of opposition leaders called for La salida (the exit), and also sought to topple the government through unconstitutional means. I lived through this experience being in Venezuela to conduct research. In 2014, as in the current crisis, opposition forces set up barricades that prevented the free flow of traffic and people; impeded commerce; blocked freeways; and burned buses and public buildings, including schools and government ministry offices, hoping to create conditions of un-governability. In any other country these actions would have received international condemnation. Supposedly peaceful protest became a pretext to confront security forces and engage in dramatic street battles. Opposition forces and many civic leaders, then and now, engage in dog whistle politics claiming to promote peaceful protest but refuse to condemn the violence.

In my neighborhood, masked youth openly carried handguns, shields, gas masks, Molotov cocktails, huge sling shots, and improvised mortars and regularly clashed with the National Guard. On more than one occasion some protestors tried to charge residents a toll to enter or leave our neighborhood. As the protest continued we ran out of natural gas and water, food became scarce, and we faced trying conditions.

Though the current crisis bears some resemblance to the events of 2014, there are also important differences. Oil revenues are the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy, no matter who is in power. Facing a continual drop in oil revenue, the government has cut spending drastically as a percentage of the shrinking economy. Even more drastic has been the fall in imports, over 70 percent in the last five years. For a country that imports a significant portion of what it consumes, this decline in imports has dramatically exacerbated the shortages of basic food products, as well as critically needed medicines. Scarcities fuel a parallel market where goods can be obtained, but at exorbitant prices. Since the economy is dependent on imports for much of its production (including services), the steep decline in imports has contributed to a prolonged recession. And the scarcity of foreign exchange has fueled inflation of more than 500 percent annually.

“Oil revenues are the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy, no matter who is in power.”

Shortages have generated discontent across the political spectrum. A new government program, CLAP, is providing food to millions of families, but they have also been inadequate and haphazard, and many areas never received allocations. The government has also refused to decisively tackle an irrational exchange rate, allowing currency speculators to create havoc in the economy and profit handsomely from the plight of those seeking dollars. They have not addressed corruption, the stifling price controls, or subsidies that they can ill afford to maintain. The tragedy, however, is that to date, neither the government nor the opposition has offered a concrete plan to address Venezuela’s serious economic issues. The government suggests staying the course, hoping the price of oil will increase; and the opposition argues that by simply replacing Maduro conditions will improve.

On the political front, both sides are engaged in the politics of brinksmanship. Fully cognizant that it would have no standing, in January 2017 the opposition-controlled national assembly declared the president to have “abandoned” his office. When confronted with a presidential recall, which the electoral institute initially approved, pro-government supporters waited until late in the process to file complaints about signature gathering in five states. Though the complaint may have had merit, waiting to the last minute fueled opposition charges that the government manipulated the procedure. Subsequently, there was foot dragging in setting the date for local and regional elections (they have now been set). The most egregious act, (since rescinded) involved the decision of the Supreme Court that the National Assembly was in desacato, (swearing in assemblymen that had previously been ruled invalid) and therefore the Supreme Court could assume their duties (also since rescinded). Adding fuel to the fire, the government declared that opposition leader Henrique Capriles could not run for office since he had accepted funds from a foreign government for a project in his state.

In this tense climate, on 1 May, President Maduro proposed activating a provision of the Venezuelan constitution that allows him to convene a Constituent Assembly. The 1999 constitution allows different political entities to call for a Constituent Assembly, including the president, so Maduro has the authority to initiate the process. The real issue, however, is that his action represents a continuing top down effort to alter the balance of power in the country. Critics on the left see it as an abusive bureaucratic maneuver that subverts popular participation and breaks from the practice adopted in 1999. Those on the right see as it as a ploy by Maduro, who faces a potential electoral defeat and now proposes to utilize the supra powers granted to a constituent assembly to subvert the existing institutions. What is clear is that the Constituyente under its present formulation exacerbates contradictions and lessens the likelihood of dialogue between the government, the opposition, and a growing sector of Venezuelan society that increasingly does not identify with either side. As importantly, the Constituyente offers no practical solution to the serious economic crisis facing the country.

Venezuela faces a complex reality; there are no simple solutions, and there is no going back to 1998 when Chávez was elected. The current politics of brinkmanship will not resolve the crisis in Venezuela. Viewing the nation as the exclusive domain of one group or another increases the social and political divide. Foreign meddling, or worse saber rattling, only exacerbates matters. Appealing to the military to overthrow the government undermines democracy. Going forward, however, there must be guarantees for all sides; the electoral process and the popular will must be respected. Violence, threats, and recrimination must stop, and there must be recognition that only through concerted dialogue will Venezuelans deescalate the current political crisis, address the serious issues the country faces and avoid a crippling stalemate.

Featured image credit: “Venezuela” by alexandersr. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Should we still care about the War of 1812?

This summer marks 205 years since the United States declared war on the British Empire, a brief, but critical, conflict that became known as the War of 1812. This is a good opportunity to pause and take stock of its historical significance and relevance today.

The explosion in historical studies prompted by the bicentennial rehabilitated the War of 1812 from a widely disregarded conflict studied by a handful of specialists into the mainstream. The War of 1812 has received a modern makeover: scholars probed the conflict from every angle, considering the roles of race, gender, religion, technology, sectionalism, public opinion, nationalism, Atlantic and global contexts, and more. Included in these studies is some of the best historical scholarship of our young century, and historians and their students unquestionably have a better understanding of the complexities and significance of the war and the era as a whole than ever.

But will the War of 1812 slip back into historical irrelevance in the decades to come?

It might, but it should not. For starters, the War of 1812 provides useful lessons about the relationships between military power, public opinion, and wars’ outcomes. Britain was unquestionably the superior power in 1812, yet it failed to achieve a decisive victory primarily due to the constraints of domestic politics and public opinion. Even tied down by ongoing wars with Napoleonic France, the British had enough capable officers, well-trained men, and equipment to easily defeat a series of American invasions of Canada. In fact, in the opening salvos of the war, the American forces invading Upper Canada were pushed so far back that they ended up surrendering Michigan Territory. The difference between the two navies was even greater. While the Americans famously (shockingly for contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic) bested British ships in some one-on-one actions at the war’s start, the Royal Navy held supremacy throughout the war, blockading the U.S. coastline and ravaging coastal towns, including Washington, D.C. Yet in late 1814, the British offered surprisingly generous peace terms despite having amassed a large invasion force of veteran troops in Canada, naval supremacy in the Atlantic, an opponent that was effectively bankrupt, and an open secessionist movement in New England.

Why did Britain quit while it was ahead? The reigning Liverpool ministry in Britain held a loose grip on power and feared the war-weary, tax-exhausted public. The War of 1812 had never been popular, particularly in the central and northern manufacturing regions of England, who relied heavily on American markets. Following peace with France, the government feared the true cost of the war with America would be exposed. So the British abandoned their initially harsh terms (which included massive forfeiture of land to Canada and the American Indians) in favor of a quick peace.

The War of 1812 also debunks long-held suppositions that freely elected governments and economic partners do not go to war against each other. The United States and Britain were both governed by elected governments (with the very large caveat that women, slaves, and the poor were excluded from formal participation) that were acutely sensitive to public opinion. The British colonies that would become Canada also enjoyed elected colonial assemblies—some of whose members opted to fight on the side of the United States! They were tied by a common culture and kinship, with the vast majority of Americans tracing their roots to the British Isles and many of Canada’s inhabitants tracing their roots to the United States, and tightly bound economically. The United States was Britain’s overseas market and breadbasket, acting as the main supplier of grain for Britain’s forces in European and West Indian slave colonies, even after the War of 1812 started. Meanwhile, Canada was an economic satellite of the U.S. The bulk of Upper Canada’s (now Ontario’s) settler population were ‘late loyalists’—Americans seeking economic opportunities who emigrated in the decades following American independence. Such ties partly led to the widespread assumption of an easy conquest, or what Thomas Jefferson boasted would be ‘a mere matter of marching’.

Perhaps most importantly, the War of 1812 is a poignant reminder that the subjectivity of ‘facts’ has a long history. Then, as now, public perception could trump reality. The war’s conclusion and immediate legacy is a clear example. The Treaty of Ghent, which brought peace between the U.S. and the British Empire, declared no formal winner and called for a reinstatement of borders to their prewar status. Technically, this meant British victory, because the U.S. failed to achieve the aims listed in its declaration of war. Contemporaries, however, saw it otherwise. Few in Britain declared the war a success, with the London Times, the most popular newspaper of the day, reflected popular sentiment in a long series of editorials that bitterly lamented Britain’s defeat. In Canada, savvy colonists sought to boost their standing by propagating the false notion that Canada’s survival was owed to the inhabitants’ loyalty, unity, and stoic endurance of great hardships—forging the heart of Canadian founding mythology. In reality, many Canadians fought alongside the Americans, militia turnout was abysmal, and colonists often resented British forces, whose presence disrupted trade and resulted in forced requisitioning of food from hard-pressed farmers, as much as the American ‘invaders’.

In the U.S., President Madison and his supporters declared victory with celebrations that embraced the War of 1812 as a second war of independence. The interpretation of the war as an American success had significant consequences. The hero of these victory legends became Andrew Jackson. A popular Boston broadside exclaimed at the news of peace by calling Jackson “a second Washington”. Populist Andrew Jackson personified many qualities of the new American spirit; President Trump, eager to draw similarities between his paradigm-shifting agenda and America’s past, has recently embraced Jackson as a kindred spirit. To Jackson’s supporters and perhaps to himself, he was a no-nonsense, messiah-like outsider who would cleanse the capitol of corruption and lead the U.S. to its ‘manifest destiny’ to dominate North America. To Jackson’s opponents and victims, he was a crass bully who violently doled out his beliefs on his political opponents, African Americans, American Indians, and Spanish colonists who he insulted, enslaved, killed, and dispossessed both during the War of 1812 and afterwards as the seventh President of the United States. Unlike Trump, Jackson’s victory of the popular vote, left the opposition in tatters and his own party supplicant, enabling him to easily secure a second term and lasting legacy.

Featured Image credit:  Action between U.S. Frigate Constitution and HMS Java , 29 December 1812, Painting in oils by Charles Robert Patterson. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Obscene intentions and corrupting effects

The 1868 decision in R. v Hicklin created a formula for evaluating obscene works that British and American courts would use for nearly a century. Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn, in a succinct phrase that numerous courts would quote, explained that “the test of obscenity is … whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Hicklin is often taken as inaugurating a new era in obscenity law, shifting attention away from the author’s intentions, and towards a vague and subjective evaluation of the work’s effects. In fact, obscenity law had always been concerned with effect rather than intention; Hicklin’s real significance relates to the way it describes the power of that effect. Perhaps Cockburn’s language merely summarizes an understanding that was already widely shared, but in speaking of the work’s “tendency … to deprave and corrupt” he traced a direct path of influence that, for judges and vice crusaders alike, beautifully explained the efficacy of the obscene work.

Cockburn emphasized the “tendency of the matter charged” because Hicklin was a forfeiture proceeding against Benjamin Hicklin for possessing and distributing obscene books. “The matter charged” was a book called The Confessional Unmasked (an exposé of Roman Catholicism), and the case arose out of an 1857 statute that conferred new powers on the police for seizing and destroying obscene books, leaving any criminal prosecution to the discretion of other authorities.

Indeed, one of the ironies in this historical sequence is that the best-known definition of obscenity stems not from a criminal prosecution against an author or publisher—as many commentators assume—but from a quasi-criminal proceeding against a distributor, with seizure and destruction (rather than penal sanction) as the aim. In a forthcoming book, Modernism and the Law, Robert Spoo discusses the significance of the statute’s forfeiture provisions, which took the texts themselves as the object of the law’s attention, and which seemingly involved a lower standard of proof than would apply in criminal law.

The effects of the work had been the focus of legal attention ever since the earliest prosecutions against obscene works in Britain, in the last decades of the seventeenth century. (Until then, works that were suppressed also included a dose of blasphemy or sedition, and those allegations were generally treated as the more serious ones.) Because of changes in the respective jurisdictions of the church courts and the courts of common law, publications started to be prosecuted solely on grounds of obscenity in the 1680s, and a notable feature of these prosecutions involves their concern for the young persons who might be harmed. The need to protect the young person was an intermittent but pervasive theme of obscenity prosecutions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Hicklin invented neither this figure nor the worry about the effects of corrupting works—but the decision gave succinct expression to that worry, furnishing judges with a pithy formula that summed up the harm.

The final decades of the nineteenth century, as Katherine Mullin has observed, marked a rise in obscenity prosecutions in England, and the defence that the work had “artistic merit”—a defence that the courts had never expressly recognized—was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. In the late 1880s, Henry Vizetelly was tried twice for publishing English translations of Zola’s novels; after the second prosecution he was imprisoned for three months (when he was nearly seventy). Havelock Ellis voiced the irritations of many writers when, in an 1896 essay on Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, he imagined a crew of finger-wagging censors warning, “Remember the Young Person.”

This was the climate in which Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, and revised for book publication in 1891. The novel frequently ridicules the idea that fiction may have corrupting effects; for instance, Lord Henry Wotton remarks that “the books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame,” and Wilde asserts, in the preface he wrote for the book, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But Wilde’s criticisms of the logic of obscenity law went beyond these statements about the sterility of the work of art. According to Hicklin’s conception of influence, the work operates directly on those “whose minds are open to [its] immoral influences,” and at various junctures, the plot of Dorian Gray imagines how this process might occur—and ironizes it. Lord Henry shares his hedonistic philosophy of life (“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”), and Dorian immediately finds himself entranced by the “subtle magic” that makes him apprehend “things in his boyhood that he had not understood.” Lord Henry loans him a French novel, and Dorian is rapidly “absorbed” in it, finding it impossible to “free himself from the influence of this book.” With each new corrupt act that he performs, the portrait itself instantaneously registers a change that, according to the novel’s driving conceit, would otherwise have been discernible on Dorian’s body. In each instance, the novel ironizes the idea that these effects might occur in such a rapid and unmediated fashion, rather than in the subtle and circuitous mode that Wilde discusses elsewhere in the novel, and in many of his writings on aesthetics.

Hicklin’s importance lies not in its specification of the work’s effects as the object of the law’s analysis, but in its ability to provide a concise formula (“tendency … to deprave and corrupt”) to express the operation of those effects. In a climate that saw an escalating use of the law to monitor the morality of literature generally, this is precisely the logic that Wilde sought to subvert.

Featured Image Credit: Oscar Wilde by WikiImages.  Public domain via Pixabay.

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The United States in World War I podcast series

2017 marks the centennial of the United States joining World War I. To commemorate this historic occasion, Oxford University Press put together a podcast series discussing various aspects of America’s involvement in the war. Each episode is hosted by Thomas Zeiler, editor of Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War, and features a wide variety of Oxford authors including Christopher Capozzola, David Ekbladh, Dr. Andrew Huebner, David M. Kennedy, Susan R. Grayzel, Pellom McDaniels III, Tammy Proctor, Benjamin Coates, Dr. Julia F. Irwin, Charlie Laderman, Erez Manela, and Michael Neiberg. We look forward to sharing these discussions with you.

Episode One: Domestic Politics and WWI

Episode Two: Gender and Race in WWI

Episode Three: U.S. Involvement Overseas During WWI

Headline image credit: RMS Lusitania coming into port, possibly in New York, 1907-13 by George Grantham Bain. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Ethnicity in France: representing diversity

Metropolitan France lies at the crossroads of Western Europe. Thanks to its long and rich history of welcoming migrants, it’s one of the most cosmopolitan European nations. Across that continent, it’s also where the largest Jewish and Muslim population reside. So when you watch a French film or TV series, you’d expect to see that diversity on screen, right? Wrong. Despite some high-profile minority ethnic figures, French society’s ethnic diversity still struggles to be widely represented across contemporary French visual culture. How can we explain this? We need to look at the chief political philosophy that underpins French society–French republican universalism–to understand why representing ethnic diversity proves so problematic.

In many ways, the French Constitution’s first article couldn’t be clearer. It states that France is an “indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It ensures the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion.” The French Republic’s founding principle of universalism therefore guarantees egalitarianism by not differentiating between citizens. While a laudable ideal for many, history has shown it to be more an aspiration than reality. Not least because in a society where whiteness is still the dominant norm, it follows that some citizens are seen as more “universal” than others. And when to distinguish according to ethnicity is seen as discrimination rather than affirmation, state-sanctioned color blindness risks becoming a real blind spot. Such perceptions have concrete, material consequences–and how contemporary French visual culture represents ethnic diversity is a compelling example.

Take television, for instance. Given the importance of state regulation across the French broadcasting sector, and prominence of public channels, it should provide the perfect canvas to paint a representative picture of the Republic. But in practice, due to universalist ideology, institutional inertia characterizes much programming. Annual diversity statistics stubbornly show a dearth of roles for minority ethnic groups on screen, with frequent pigeonholing of talent at best–and stereotyping at worst. The chances of programs exploring the contours of intersectionality that actually shape French daily life remain slim.

You might think that French cinema offers greater possibilities to explore such experience, especially as France enjoys the largest film industry in Europe. Yet here too, curiously, ethnic diversity can seem conspicuous by its absence.

Remarks by Houda Benyamina, the French director of Moroccan heritage who won the Caméra d’or for her début feature-length film Divines (2016) at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, bear this out. Declaring simply that “cinema is white, bourgeois and racist. That’s clear”, her comments provide a timely reminder of how unusual her success is within French cinema–where naming any women filmmakers of minority ethnic heritage would stump most moviegoers–and also of the institutional impediments that make it so hard for voices like hers to be heard.

Acknowledging the importance of ethnicity within France is clearly complex and difficult. While French republican ideology and government policies can neither determine all visual practice nor entirely regulate discourses configuring ethnicity, creative sectors and cultural industries aren’t isolated from the political realm. Moreover, due to the overwhelming support for universalism among French society, media and politicians, you underestimate its power at your peril.

As French society further diversifies in the years ahead, and its profound intersectionality increases accordingly, a defining challenge for practitioners across French visual culture will be this: how do you expand the parameters of representation within a country where the prevailing political ideology still prefers to elide ethnicity–rather than recognize it?

Featured image credit: “French Election: Celebrations at The Louvre, Paris” by Lorie Shaull, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Does pregnancy affect how food tastes?

You’ve probably heard that women’s taste changes during pregnancy, but is it actually true? If given a blank check, an elegant study to answer this question would be a prospective longitudinal study evaluating taste perception and sensitivity in women before, during, and after their pregnancy. Realistically speaking, this would be very difficult to execute; however, a study like this would be ideal because studying the same women provides the least inherent variability and fewer potential sources of bias, or confounders (versus a retrospective study/self-report). Interestingly enough, less than a dozen publications have come close to this study design over the last century.

Anecdotally, people report that taste returns to normal after pregnancy, which leads one to believe that any variation is temporary and likely caused by an elevation in hormone levels, for instance estrogen and progesterone, that return to baseline after delivery. However, this is speculative in nature, and it should be noted that pregnancy is also accompanied by a host of physiological changes and adaptations to support fetal development and growth beyond just these two hormones. In addition to the endocrine system, maternal changes include increased weight gain, increased blood volume, and adjustments to immune tolerance. Interestingly, over the last few decades, these very same factors have all been implicated in altering taste.

Thus, we set out to review the existing studies of human pregnancy and taste to catalog the trends occurring across pregnancy, to see how we may leverage what we are beginning to understand about taste modulation from human and non-human research. This may help to generate hypotheses for future investigations to ultimately question the long held assumption that these changes in taste are solely driven by hormone fluctuations.

A limited number of longitudinal studies have been carried out, with even fewer examining women prior to pregnancy and then continuing to follow their taste changes during pregnancy and on through the postpartum period. Generally, the overall findings show a little inconsistency, possibly due to a lack of agreement on experimental design.

Sweet tastes

Dark-chocolate by Alexander Stein. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

The most studied in correlation with pregnancy, most studies either report no change in sweet tastes or a mild decrease in the ability to taste sweetness – usually specific to the first trimester.

Sour tastes

Again, sour taste function has been found to either be unaffected by pregnancy, or to decrease – again specifically in the first trimester.

Salty tastes

Findings vary regarding pregnant women’s response to salty foods. One study suggested that as citric acid becomes less unpleasant during the second and third trimesters, this promotes increased electrolyte ingestion, and therefore increases cravings for salty foods such as pickles. Several studies have also shown that pregnant women have a higher tolerance for salty tastes, suggesting that salt taste function is altered during pregnancy.

Bitter tastes

Of the four basic tastes, bitterness shows the least consensus across studies. Some propose that pregnant women perceive bitterness more intensely, and suggest that this could be in order to help avoid toxins during critical phases of fetal development. Other studies have found that bitterness is perceived less intensely during pregnancy, and continues into the postpartum period.

Additionally, recent findings show that taste can be modulated in healthy non-pregnant adults, through mechanisms such as the endocrine system beyond estrogen and progesterone, and via the growing number of inflammatory factors noted to impact taste. Researchers should consider these other paradigms to explain modulation of the taste system in pregnancy.

A better understanding of changes to taste in health and disease could contribute to understanding the cause and effect of gestational obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and hyperemesis gravidarum. Furthermore, we may be able to begin to tease apart the changes in taste occurring during pregnancy to promote a healthy pregnancy, and whether deviations from the norm could be an indicator of negative health consequences to come for mother or offspring.

Featured image credit: Pregnant mother. CC0 Public Domain via Pexels.

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Pride 2017: a reading list

Happy Pride Month from the OUP Philosophy team! To celebrate the LGBT Pride 2017 happening in cities across the world, including the New York City and London Prides this summer, OUP Philosophy is shining a spotlight on books that explore issues in LGBTQ rights and culture. Our selection is diverse and multidisciplinary, covering philosophy, politics, history, biography, linguistics, and cultural studies as it is important to highlight different titles to all audiences.

Philosophy, Politics and History

Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination


John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sheriff Girgis

Can religious liberty justify the right to discriminate against others? How can society strike a balance between achieving a positive and fair society while respecting conscience and beliefs?   The point-counterpoint book brings together the leading voices of John Corvino, a longtime LGBT-rights advocate, opposite Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis, prominent young defenders of the traditional view of marriage. It provides thus an overview of the main issues in cases concerning religious liberty, for example, many of the debate concerns the question of same sex marriage: a county clerk who refuses to authorise same-sex marriage, or bakers, photographers, printers who refuse to provide same sex wedding services? Moving beyond the LGBT rights debate, it also addresses the wider questions over religious beliefs such as the value of religion, the role of government and the challenges of living in a diverse and free society.  Should these people be exempted from discrimination? To what extent can religious liberty be unlawful?

Debating Same-Sex Marriage


John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher

The book is concerned with the ever important and contentious issue of same sex marriage and takes a form of debate between John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher; John Corvino, a philosopher and a writer well-known for his writing on LGBT equality sets forth his arguments eloquently and persuasively that allowing same sex marriage is good for both the couples and as a society at large because we have an interest in supporting a loving and committed relationship marriage equality for all its citizens. Marriage needs not to be exclusively between man and woman. Maggie Gallagher, on the other hand, takes the traditional view that marriage is the union between a husband and wife, ensuring that natural link between father-mother and children.

Listen, We Need To Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights?


Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson

This book explains how support for same sex marriage has grown sharply from 11% to   60% majority of American population from 1988 and 2016. The authors show that by priming common social identities or focussing on similarities of interests, opponents who hold strong views against contentious issue such as same sex marriage can be more receptive to listen and change their attitude.

 

Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History


Nan Alamilla Boyd, Horacio N. Roque Ramlrez

This book provides an insight into the methodological practices of queer oral historians and examines themes such as desire, sexuality and gender, sexual self-disclosure and voyeurism in documenting LGBTQ lives and experience. It gives raw transcribed interviews followed by commentaries and analysis.  It also takes a look at the historiography 1950s and ’60s lesbian bar culture; social life after the Cuban revolution; the organization of transvestite social clubs in the U.S. midwest in the 1960s; Australian gay liberation activism in the 1970s; San Francisco electoral politics and the career of Harvey Milk; Asian American community organizing in pre-AIDS Los Angeles; lesbian feminist “sex war ” cultural politics; 1980s and ’90s Latina/o transgender community memory and activism in San Francisco; and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity


Edited by Laurie J. Shrage

This is part of the OUP Studies in Feminist Philosophy. It looks at the transgender experience from philosophical and conceptual perspectives and asks questions such as whether we do have a true sex and whether sex and gender is an alterable characteristic? Does the old self disappears when a person’s sex assignment changes? A rich and thoughtful collection of essays exploring the issue of personal identity from various standpoints: queer theory, gender and sexuality, feminism, disability and science studies

Biography

Jane Crow


Rosalind Rosenberg

Rosalind Rosenberg does justice to the key figure in the civil rights and women’s movements in this sensitive and thoughtful biography. She was a remarkable woman who overcame various obstacles and fought valiantly against prejudices throughout her life; coming from an unhappy family, Murray earned a college degree in New York city and was rejected for graduate studies at the University of North Carolina because of her mixed –race heritage. After graduating with a first class degree from Howard Law school, she was rejected by Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, she went on, however, to carve out a successful career in law, in particular her work on anti-discrimination which abolished the segregation of schools and other landmark cases influencing government to provide the constitutional rights for women and other minority groups from discrimination.  Murray often considered herself as queer in terms of sexuality and believed that she was a male by birth. In today term she would be identified as transgender .

 

Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age


Jack Copeland

A fascinating biography of a mathematician genius and WWII codebreaker, Alan Turing was prosecuted for being gay and chemically castrated. A must read for anyone interested in life of one of the most accomplished scientist of the twentieth century.

Charity and Sylvia: A Same Sex Marriage in Early America


Rachel Hope Cleves

Through primary sources such as diaries, letters and poetry, Rachel Hope Cleves told a compelling and extraordinary history of two women who were in love with each other and took the role of husband and wife in 19th century Vermont during the civil war, overturning society conventions. They were also philanthropists and revered by their local community. As the book reveals, same sex marriage was not a 21st century innovation  and originate in America much earlier than we imagine.

Cultural Studies:

From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures


Rusty Barrett

For anyone interested in linguistic and cultural studies, this very insightful title examines the use of language in various gay male subcultures: drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, barebackers, and leathermen as a way to construct gay male sexual identities and desires, for example, the word ‘bear’ in the gay culture in the late 1980s to classify certain types of gay men (heavyset and hairy men) is an appropriation of linguistic stereotypes of Southern masculinity, or the term ‘leathermen’ signifies militaristic masculinity, patriotism and BDSM sexual practice.

Gender and Rock


Mary Celeste Kearney

How does rock culture with its music, performance, fashion and imagery provide the platforms for artists and consumers to experiment with gender and alternative identities? This brings together different perspectives from queer and feminist studies, performance studies, and cultural studies to linguistics.

Queer Dance


Clare Croft

The author asks important questions how queer dance shifts choreographic practice, challenges gender binaries and normative conventions as well as exploring how it relates to gender, identity, the body, the realm of affect and touch.

Featured image credit: Gay Pride by naeimasgary. CC0 via Pixabay.

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