Mothers who care too much

Here's a good read for all those lovers of debates about feminism: Nancy J. Hirschmann - Mothers who care too much (Boston Review July/August 2010)

You can read this as a nice summary of what's going on in feminism and gender debates in the US. Normative ideas of gender equality are much less broadly accepted there, having large portions of the youth aspiring to get married young. The idolization of women as primary care-givers plays a huge role here (interestingly and not quite coincidentally, this role is particularly idolized for army wives). This should be particularly interesting for all those fans of Judith Butler's deconstructivism.

On this note, compare "the personal is political" to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Can there be self-actualization by choosing the role of the care-giver, without overt political participation?

New Institutionalism

This is a must-read for all our fans of Luhmann's systems theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_institutionalism

Personally, I'd like to stress the idea that actors within an institution act in certain ways because they cannot perceive of any alternative. Think priests within the catholic church who have sinned and cover it up, and now the question of assigning guilt to them, to their superiors, to the church as a whole, and the ramifications for how one should deal with all of them. Mix in path dependency from church history, theological constraints, and in priests' careers, and you got the whole fabulous spectrum of debates from psych tests for priests to abolishing the catholic church altogether.