Search results

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to trace the history of the cultural myth that children, especially boys, experience an abrupt heterosexual awakening during pubescence, from its origin during the 1950s to the present, with particular attention to a decrease in the age posited for such an awakening, from fourteen or fifteen to eight or nine or even earlier, until finally children are presented as heterosexually desiring from birth.

Methodology – The methodology is a content analysis of a sample of mass media texts starring or featuring prepubescent or pubescent boys, including films, television programs, comic books, comic strips, and juvenile novels, appearing in the United States between 1950 and 2007.

Findings – The rapid decrease in the age is correlated with an increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adolescents, leading to the conclusion that it results from an attempt to privilege heterosexuality by making it appear a natural, inevitable outcome of biological maturation that is absent until puberty, whereas at the same time addressing homophobic insistence that no juvenile character be presented as gay by ensuring all characters, regardless of age, express heterosexual desire.

Research limitations/implications – The study is limited to a single causal factor, but it illustrates a complex cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way childhood is constructed, so there are doubtless other factors that should be explored. It is also necessary to explore why the change from presumed pubescent heterosexual awakening to presumed constitutional heterosexuality occurred at different rates depending on the race and social class of the character and the medium presented.

This issue of Research in Law and Economics covers several areas of important research by a variety of international scholars. It contains theoretical papers on privacy, the protection of personal data, the use of regulatory monitoring under legal standards vs. rules, a study of the properties of market efficiency in securities fraud litigation, as well as an analysis of nonexclusionary price floors. It also contains an empirical paper on the relationship between uncertainty of patent approval of artificial intelligence applications and the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. Finally, Volume 30 contains a law-and-economics assessment of the Chinese financial system within the context of the trade-off between centralized control and rapid growth.