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 Legend of the Bush Gang: Imperialism, War, and Propaganda
This article explores the dialectical relationship between the Bush administration’s domestic policies and its deranged “war on terrorism,” which is being waged on a number of different fronts, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and the United States. The authors argue that the Bush gang is using the external “international crisis” to override the remnants of U.S. bourgeois democracy in order to reestablish conditions of profitability. Perhaps not surprisingly, at least from a Marxist perspective, the supporting repressive (e.g., the Department of Homeland Security’s secret police) and ideological state apparatuses (e.g., schools and the corporate media) have played a profound role in building support for the Bush gang’s totalizing ambitions.
Hope and Despair in Pandora's Box: Perceiving Reproductive Reward and Risk of Genetics Technologies and Information
African American and white women (N = 39) were interviewed about reproductive rewards and risks regarding genetics information and technologies. Analysis of their talk reflected several important themes. Emergent “reward” themes included the would-be parents' reproductive decision-making, preparation, and prevention. “Risk” themes, which were more predominant than reward themes, included genetic information as stress producing, “child-designing” as a likely outcome, and the creation of a superior race as probable. Findings are discussed within a Problematic Integration Theory framework.