Marketing Militarism to Moms
This essay fuses a feminist analysis of news media with political economy and branding research to examine a case study of how a group of mothers – “Security Moms” – became branded and pressed into profitable service for the Republican Party and a “peace through strength” think tank. I argue that constructed identities like this one, which come in and out of vogue in mainstream news media, tell important stories about the media's relationship to feminism. Since the 1990s, news stories in the United States have popularized groups of women and men supposedly cohering around particular practices: “Soccer Moms” and “NASCAR Dads,” for example. Such identities not only prove to be profitable for corporations, they also politicize identities and reinforce both neoliberalism and self-surveilling governance. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
news media; 
branding; 
Security; 
Moms; 
militarism; 
feminism
The Myth of "Security Moms" and "NASCAR Dads": Parenthood, Political Stereotypes, and the 2004 Election
The objective of this article is to explore the impact of being a parent on political views and to test the accuracy of the "Security Mom" and "NASCAR Dad" labels that were pervasively applied in the context of the 2004 presidential election. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.