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In The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are undercover operatives for the Soviet Union. In that capacity, they are responsible for crimes including murder and espionage. Yet they also pose as a law-abiding family, running a small business, raising children, and making friends with their neighbours. By ‘practicing’ American life, Philip becomes more American, forging an identity more receptive to American values and attitudes. This chapter draws on concepts from the literature on legal consciousness to examine the relationship between identity and hegemony. Studies of legal consciousness emphasise that consciousness is not simply legal attitudes or even ideology; rather legal consciousness is reflected in the way that people enact their legal beliefs and values. Those enactments help individuals form identities, but those identities are constrained by the hegemonic ideologies that are prevalent in the culture. Law and legal consciousness are important to both processes.

While extensive knowledge on branding and communication has focused on business-to-consumer context, despite the nourishment of the importance of strategic alliances between businesses in terms of co-branding has become discernible, a little attention has been given to business-to-business (B2B) context. This chapter tries to take attention to dual marketing communication, where they are trying to market their products and services to both individuals and businesses. More specifically, this chapter aims to emphasise ingredient branding as a form of co-branding considered as one of the revolutionary dual marketing communication strategies. Notably, the importance of ingredient branding is highlighted for industries and companies who have to design a strategic multi-channel communication plan not just for their customers but also for retaining the competitive advantage, increasing the brand strength for both sides and stimulating the sales. Further, this chapter elaborates the subject with prominent examples of ingredient branding, as well as explains how a communication strategy became an asset for manufacturers and suppliers who are in downturn and lead them to have a growth opportunity with maximising their brand values.

The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

Reading the political and the familial in The Americans illuminates central features of the New Right. In particular, The Americans provides an opportunity to reconsider the significance of the ‘pro-family’ label to New Right organising, the importance of mothering to the ‘pro-family’ narrative offered by the New Right, and the relationship between this account of mothering and democratic citizenship more broadly. This paper argues: first, the ‘pro-family’ label served to weaponise American families against equality and egalitarian public institutions; second, that this weaponisation of the family was accomplished through a rhetorical and real elevation of the moralised work of mothers in the home; and third, this account of mothering is incompatible with democratic citizenship not only because it reproduces inequality but also because it presents families, particularly mothers, as surrounded by enemies. Surrounded by enemies, their children appear endangered or dangerous should they become products of enemy forces. The pro-family rhetoric of the New Right – with its emphasis on the labour of women, particularly mothers – concealed an insurgent factional bid for power just as the Jennings family concealed an insurgent operation inside the United States. The displacement of law in The Americans mirrors the displacement of law in American conservative politics in the 1980s and law’s replacement by the ideal of sanctified families that the guard republic. The Americans both recognises this reversal in American conservative politics and parodies the reversal of the idea that law protects the family.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the increased acceptance of biopolitical research by mainstream political science and examines the potential causes. It demonstrates that the changing status of biopolitics is part of a more general pattern in academia, where biological explanations of social phenomena are increasingly viewed as acceptable and even necessary.

Design/methodology/approach – A brief review of the history of the literature of biopolitics with a content analysis of the three leading general-readership journals of political science and other measures of activity in biopolitics.

Findings – Political scientists until recently have not been receptive to the arguments advanced by proponents of biopolitics, but this resistance is weakening. This case for a more biologically oriented political science is more tenable now in part because of the groundwork done by the early generation of biopolitics scholars but mainly because of changing circumstances.