Al-Ahram Weekly | Focus | The other America It is this amazingly persistent set of master stories that the newly organised and mobilised American information effort (especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds) is designed by hook or crook to spread. What gets deliberately obscured in the process are the stunningly obstinate dissenting traditions -- America's unofficial counter-memory that stem in large part from the fact that this is an immigrant society -- that flourish alongside, or at the interior of this handful of narrathemes. Few commentators abroad take much notice of this forest of dissent, alas. These clumps of both the progressive or regressive kind provide and to a trained observer make visible linkages between the master narrathemes that are normally not in evidence. If one were to examine the components of the impressively strong resistance to the proposed Bush war against Iraq, for example, a very different, highly mobile picture of America emerges, one that is much more amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue and significant action.

Libertarians Join Liberals in Opposing Sodomy Law

"If the government can regulate private sexual behavior, it's hard to imagine what the government couldn't regulate," Ms. Berliner said. "That's almost so basic that it's easy to miss the forest for the trees."

The Texas case is a challenge to a law that makes it a crime for people of the same sex to engage in "deviate sexual intercourse," defined as oral or anal sex. In accepting the case, the justices agreed to consider whether to overturn a 1986 precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law that at least on its face, if not in application, also applied to heterosexuals.

Introduction to Cultural Studies, Theory and Practice (Undergraduate Course)
Program in Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
INDST 50
Professor Tyler Curtain

This class will introduce its participants to myriad texts, topics, controversies, institutions, and personalities that make up the ongoing knowledge projects that are loosely affiliated under the rubric "Cultural Studies." We will discuss the historical and political conditions under which Cultural Studies came into being and trace out the lines between those people, practices, and projects and current work in Cultural Studies. We will read recent fiction, take in visual work, including TV and movies, listen to music, and discuss issues that seem to be at the core of how we articulate various "methodologies" that constitute the investigation of cultural production as practiced by folks in a broad range of humanities (and some science) departments and Cultural Studies programs proper -- not to mention cultures at large.

You will be required to think about and articulate what it is you believe that you are doing when you think and write about novels, film, TV, comic books, music, computer programs, and the internet, to name only a few of the possible texts we will tackle.

You will be required to do reading for each class period (covering one or two essays plus a primary text). You will be required to complete a mid-term, a website/blog, and a longish research paper. Classroom participation is a must. Under the category of 'research paper' I will entertain projects such as video or DVD productions, blogs, digital photography and critical commentary, computer programming, documentary internet radio production, among other possibilities. I encourage students to be critical, analytical, and creative. I would like to foster an environment where we will not only critique, but use and build upon the work that has gone before.

An even more crucial distinction, historians, architects and psychologists say, is that the pit will challenge the idea that the past is really even past. The memorial park's western boundary, the so-called slurry wall that held back the Hudson River from flooding in after the 9/11 attack, will continue to restrain the river even as the throngs pass by. There will be, in other words, no firm demarcation of what was and what became. Where the wall was, it still is, and in such a place memory is a live event. History plays out in real time.

The one governing principle in all three is that the amount of money spent has to be the same or close to the same for both men's and women's sports. I can understand the anger and frustration of the coaches of men's swimming and wrestling teams that have to cut back or have even lost their jobs because a committee within the university has decided that their method of compliance will be to create a women's equestrian team. But they're lining up against the wrong foe. Their enemy isn't the women's sports lobby for Title IX; it's the hundreds of cash-gobbling football programs that provide athletic opportunities for relatively few students at any university.

The argument has and will continue to be made that football teams serve universities in more ways than can be measured by simply counting the number of warm bodies in uniforms. Having grown up in a college football tradition, I can testify to the truth of that. However, no one is asking the university to cut college football. What should be asked -- no, what should be demanded -- by every university in the country is that the football team stand in line to get its proper share of funds after the university has done what it's supposed to do: namely, see to the proper athletic needs of all its men and women. Any argument to the contrary is double-talk. If every university in the country wants more money for men's wrestling, swimming or any other team, let them all agree to cut 20 of the 85 scholarships from the football team.

Yes, male college students are being victimized. But don't look to women's athletics. Look to the real culprit: football and the male hierarchy that dominate America's university athletic departments.