Reviews for American politics

The average rating for American politics based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-01 00:00:00 Kevin A Heins Essentially an interesting read, if only a slightly outdated nowadays. My favourite part of the book was the chapter called "Japanese Mothers and Obentōs: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus" which, in my opinion, offered a solidly believable image on the foundation of the Japanese society. Quite many things clicked into place and made sense about the Japanese society after reading that particular chapter. Even though informative and helpful to my own research, the book received only a two star rating from me, because its theoretical base was mostly psychoanalysis and other Freudian theories, which made it a pain for me to read. Even though the author herself agreed in the intro chapter that these theories are perhaps not the most suitable ones to analyze Japanese society with, the book was still loaded with them. This however seems to be the general problem with books dealing with similar subject matter in Japanese studies. The author did try, to which I am really thankful for, to offer other balancing or slightly different theories alongside psychoanalysis, but unfortunately these got lost in the general "dance around the penis-pole" mess.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-28 00:00:00 Vanessa Wyatt -I read this primarily for the chapter on ecchi manga/anime directed at teenage boys, which is unfortunately the least illuminating portion of the book. Allison's thesis that the clockwork incidents of accidental exposure and the resulting male paralysis/nosebleed/mid-air suspension are intended to prime the reader for a lifetime of commodity fetishism seems a little tenuous, and I feel like something is missing. I (guiltily) consume this stuff and have always wanted someone to convincingly situate the astoundingly repetitive and formulaic nature of this genre within a cultural context, so I guess I'll have to keep looking, or at least re-read that section. Still, a fascinating look at some of Japan's more infamous cultural exports and the context in which they are produced.