Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article examines the persistence of the handshake in business circles despite its implication in the spread of communicable disease in contemporary pandemic culture. An examination of business etiquette discourse suggests that even during disease outbreaks or flu season, the business handshake remains an important visual and haptic legal gesture. While it may no longer produce a binding legal contract, it stages the parties as contractable subjects, as claiming the status of autonomous individuals committed to defining their intersubjective relationship through the norms of contract. The business handshake thus operates as a cultural site for the complex interaction of bodies and law, and the production of masculine, haptic-legal subjectivity.

How to govern in the face of radical diversity and seemingly intractable conflict? A key question after 9/11, it is also central to dark fantasy literature.The literary answer is a return to legal rational authority, specifically bureaucracy. We examine the novel, Benighted (Kit Whitfield), where the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity must manage relations between the dominant lycanthropes and the despised underclass of humans. Developing other attempts to theorize the monster in relation to bureaucracy, we suggest that within the novel bureaucrats and the bureau function as ''hopeful monsters,'' sites for the ongoing negotiation of morality.