Ginna Husting Copyright (c) 2013 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting Recent documents in Ginna Husting en-us Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:42:58 PDT 3600 The Flayed, Exquisite Self of Tourists: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/14 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/14 Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:36:50 PDT Ginna Husting Once More, With Feeling: Conspiracy Theories, Contempt, and Affective Governmentality (forthcoming) http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/13 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/13 Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:31:27 PDT Ginna Husting Neutralizing Protest: The Construction of War, Chaos, and National Identity through US Television News on Abortion-Related Protest, 1991 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/12 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/12 Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:05:19 PDT Ginna Husting Governing with Feeling: Conspiracy Theory Discourse, Hannah Arendt and Affective Cultural Politics http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/11 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/11 Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:59:30 PDT Ginna Husting Wolves, Monstrosity, Hybridity: Delisting and its Discontents in the Intermountain West http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/10 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/10 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:46 PDT Ginna Husting et al. Nurturing and Occluding Wonder in News Discourse http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/8 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/8 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:43 PDT Ginna Husting The Cowboy and the Wolf: Actualizing Mythic Western Masculinity Through the Wolf Deregulation Debate http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/7 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/7 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:42 PDT The current wolf deregulation debate taking place in the American West is crafted through gender. Masculinity in particular becomes the voice of the historic American West. Wolf supporters, federal government agencies, environmentalists, urban easterners, and scientists act as a feminized opposition to the honorable, pragmatic cowboy steward of the Western territory. Western cowboy identity uses masculinity as a source of cultural stability. This essay tracks the spring 2007 media debate over wolf delisting, focusing on identity work being done through the news media and associated blogs to create and re-create the Western cowboy ideal, recognizing the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity as it is constructed and re-constructed through the media. Nostalgia for the Western male who can protect and manage the wild, his ranch, and his community emerges as a necessary and vital part of the dialogue. Wolf delisting becomes a repository for the enactment of the mythic American Cowboy.

]]> Mary F. Casper et al. Up By Her Garter Straps: Deconstructing <em>Working Girl</em> http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/6 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/6 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:40 PDT Ginna Husting Neutralizing Protest: The Construction of War, Chaos, and National Identity through US Television News on Abortion-Related Protest, 1991 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/5 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/5 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:39 PDT This paper examines how US TV news on abortion-related protest forecloses possibilities for democracy and political action. Representing abortion-related activism as a battle, news segments portray activists, correspondents, and viewers as villains, witnesses, and victims in a tale of a nation decimated by civil war. While activists describe their work militaristically, the news's war is not the war that activists describe. News discourse represents activists as threatening the American family/community/nation. Applying Hannah Arendt's and Mary Douglas's work shows how the news eclipses public spheres by mapping a pollution narrative onto those who threaten myths of national homogeneity and proper citizenship.

]]> Ginna Husting Anti-Abortion Activism in the U.S. and France: Comparing Opportunity Environments of Rescue Tactics http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/4 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/4 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:38 PDT We explore how opportunity environments, conceptualized to include political-legal and cultural components, help explain the trajectories of movement tactics and frames employed in differing contexts. Using data from interviews, newspaper accounts, and web sites, we document how opportunity environments affected the trajectory of "rescue" tactics and frames. When abortion opponents in France attempted to block access to abortion providers in order to "rescue unborn children, " the tactic and associated frames met with a different fate than in the U.S. The legal context under which abortion was available in each nation affected the use of specific direct action tactics. Also, how abortion was culturally constructed and embedded—its "cultural opportunity structure"—affected responses to rescue by pro-life activists, the media, and the countermovement.

]]> Leslie King et al. Dangerous Machinery: "Conspiracy Theorist" as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/3 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/3 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:36 PDT In a culture of fear, we should expect the rise of new mechanisms of social control to deflect distrust, anxiety, and threat. Relying on the analysis of popular and academic texts, we examine one such mechanism, the label conspiracy theory, and explore how it works in public discourse to "go meta" by sidestepping the examination of evidence. Our findings suggest that authors use the conspiracy theorist label as (1) a routinized strategy of exclusion; (2) a reframing mechanism that deflects questions or concerns about power, corruption, and motive; and (3) an attack upon the personhood and competence of the questioner. This label becomes dangerous machinery at the transpersonal levels of media and academic discourse, symbolically stripping the claimant of the status of reasonable interlocutor—often to avoid the need to account for one's own action or speech. We argue that this and similar mechanisms simultaneously control the flow of information and symbolically demobilize certain voices and issues in public discourse.

]]> Ginna Husting et al. When a War is not a War: Abortion, Desert Storm, and Representations of Protest in American TV News http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/2 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/2 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:35 PDT In this article I juxtapose American media coverage of the Gulf war and the war on abortion in 1991 to trace the meanings and possibilities for identity and activism mobilized by both. While the two wars seem unrelated, I examine the techniques through which the news coverage of both marginalized social protest and women's place within the national imaginary. In the news, protesters and women were positioned outside the sphere of normal politics and reasonable opinion. In this way, the news created a mythic community of “people like us” in opposition to women and activists. Through this marginalization of protest, broadcast news contained the threat of activism to the national imaginary of the United States in both conflicts.

]]> Ginna Husting Francophobia, Anti-Americanism: Narratives of the Trans-Atlantic Other in French and U.S. News on Abortion-Related Issues http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/1 http://works.bepress.com/ginna_husting/1 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:33 PDT

This article examines the interplay of abortion and nationalism in French and U.S. print news discussions of abortion-related issues. U.S. news stories on RU-486 and French news stories on prolife direct action protesters are rife with qualifiers designating each issue as a foreign one. In American media, RU-486 is the French pill; in French media, protesters are American inspired/mobilized. Together, these cases constitute a site for the recurrent construction of the relation between nationhood, national identity, and moral goodness. In each case, media narratives of abortion-related issues reveal that more is at stake than reproductive rights issues. The authors argue that discourses on abortion are grounded in politics of nationalism that shore up the boundaries of the homeland and anchor the distinction between public and private spheres through a discourse of opposition to foreign cultural invaders. The articulation of moral conflict over abortion and myths of foreign origins situate the national collectivity as a good, innocent victim of corrupt outside influence.

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