Monstrous Crimes, Framing, and the Preventive State: The Moral Failure of Forensic Psychiatry
Monsters and predators frighten, entertain, and disgust us. The idea of a creature that is a volatile mixture of human and animal parts (the monster) triggers our visual and visceral imagination perhaps more than any other image. The fear of predation – literally, eating another’s flesh – disgusts and repels, but like rubberneckers who slow down to witness accidents, our voyeurism seems unconstrained by shame. The monster and the predator threaten us by threatening to rend the social fabric and bring about a state of nature in which, as Hobbes famously wrote, we are engaged in a war of all against all, and life is nasty, brutish and short. We demand that the government and its legal process protect us from the monsters and predators in our midst, which has resulted in a quest for security at the expense of the protection of the rights of citizens that runs parallel with the quest for protection from “terrorists,” as reflected in the epigram to this book. The referent of the “terrorist,” however, is often simply somebody who looks, acts, or talks in a way that is vaguely Middle-Eastern. Similarly, people who look, act, or talk like our vaguely sketched stereotype of what constitutes a sex offender, an image that has come to constitute a monstrous predator, trigger a panic as well (Lancaster 2011a, b).
Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination
This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential power of the pregnant subject.
The Motor Rewind Issue-A New Look
Motor users have always been concerned about how long a rewound motor would last but never knew what to do about it. As power costs become higher and higher, a new and related question is cost. What happens to the efficiency and operating cost of a motor that is rewound two to three tithes during, its lifetime? The answers will depend upon how the motor is repaired. How motor losses can be changed during the rewind process is reviewed, along with what precautions should be taken to prevent an increase in operating costs and a decrease in motor life. The positive steps the motor user can take to protect his motor investment will also be explored.