Agnès Varda is a very important and individual voice in the modern French cinema. This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the previous chapters of this book. Varda's career pre-dates the start of the Nouvelle Vague, and La Pointe Courte shows several of the characteristics which would make that movement famous, five years before its officially recognised start. Her œuvre is exceedingly varied, comprising documentaries and fiction films, short films and features, and also a large number which lie between the two. Together they form a body of work which has considerable formal and thematic coherence. Her films show a deep awareness of the signifying power of every element of the. Even in her most straightforward fictions, she is never concerned simply to tell a story, but always to reflect on the implications of events through the way in which they are presented.

In both his fiction and nonfiction, Edmund White often repeats life events he refers to as “radioactive,” autobiographical moments full of meaning for him and for his readers. At least one critic has seen in these repetitions White’s reluctance to speak in monologue as a singular gay voice. This chapter argues, however, that White uses the repetition of such “radioactive” moments to create an authoritative voice that explores emerging histories and sociologies of gay life in the United States and Europe over the past sixty years. White doesn’t dissolve the distinction between fiction and nonfiction; rather, he uses both in their different contexts to analyze the conditions that have made (at least white, middle-class) gay meaning possible. He repeats his own life experiences to help articulate and legitimize new and emerging discourses of gay living, to help explain for himself, other gay men, and the general population how gay life and thought in the United States constitutes a continuum of social meaning.

Domestic tragedy, on the face of it the simplest and most unpretentious of tragic forms, is in fact potentially one of the most ambiguous. Domestic is set at home, both in the sense of taking place in England rather than being set abroad and also in that it is located in one or more private houses rather than in the public space of the court. At the same time as the genre foregrounds the private house, though, it calls into question how private it truly is: the plays constantly remind us how many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture construed the domestic situation as a mirroring in miniature of the hierarchical ordering of the state as a whole. Moreover many domestic tragedies have two plots, whose respective endings are often of very different tonalities. In Yarington’s(?) Two Lamentable Tragedies one plot is set in Italy and the other in England, but they mirror each other in so many ways that we are in effect asked not only what difference there is between the two countries, but to what extent Italy may generally serve in Renaissance drama as a transparent proxy for England.

Paediatric heart surgery missions define an emergent, high-tech form of medical humanitarianism characterized by their focus not on populations in crisis, but on broken body parts – in this case, damaged paediatric hearts. Comprised of specialists from the world’s most elite medical centres, mission teams make visits to poor countries to perform highly specialized and otherwise prohibitively expensive surgical procedures on children with few alternatives for survival. A team’s success is measured in terms of patient volume, surgical complexity and the probability of the patient being well enough to leave the hospital within thirty days. This chapter explores the forms of bioprecarity that both precede and follow mission visits and that inadvertently affect the very patients whose surgeries are publicly billed as ‘successes’. As much as surgical missions aim to repair paediatric bodies in distress, they, too, produce new anxieties, uncertainties and biological vulnerabilities for patients and their families that are often visible only long after missions depart from the host country. These findings emerged from thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Honduras, where I carried out observations and interviews in public hospitals before, during, and after visits by paediatric heart surgery missions and in the homes of surgical patients.

In this Introduction, I sketch out the rise of a transnational ethic of access to treatments for ill-health, and how it configures and is configured by mental healthcare in the UK. The instantiation of this ethic has resulted in policy and clinical attention to enhancing access to psychological therapy (often cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, specifically). I introduce the importance of clinical psychology within this context and chart its consolidation as a profession, alongside a discussion of the role of CBT within the UK. I also discuss the wider entanglements of psychological praxis and societies, and the theoretical perspectives that propel the analysis presented in this book. I conclude with outlining the various chapters that follow.

After Belfast became the capital of a politically separate Northern Ireland, civic ritual became more explicitly Protestant and unionist, echoing to some degree the theatre state favoured by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in inter-war Europe. The Special Powers Act was used to restrict demonstrations and parades both by nationalists and by socialist and Labour movements. Attitudes became more relaxed after 1945, particularly following the collapse of a renewed IRA campaign of violence. In 1966 the government tolerated extensive celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, though at the price of dividing Protestant and unionist opinion.

The introduction provides an overview of the analysis of the dialogue.

This chapter elaborates the notion of bioprecarity as it is utilized in this volume by drawing on three theoretical concepts that have not been ‘thought together’ before. They are intimate labour, as discussed in Boris and Salazar Parreñas’ (2010) work; bios, as understood in Michel Foucault’s (2008) writings; and precarity, as originally developed in France in the 1970s, then taken up by Judith Butler (2004) in the context of war, terrorism, survival and ‘grievable’ lives and popularized in the relation to new forms of labour by Guy Standing (2011). The chapter develops these three concepts in the context of bodily interventions prompted by opportunities for bodily labour, meaning labour on and with the body, in order to investigate bioprecarity, a new form of vulnerability that is associated with providing and seeking intimate bodily labour in cross-cultural contexts.