This book chronicles five decades of struggle to introduce family planning into one of the largest, most complex countries in sub-Saharan Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
...Interweaving details of major political, social, and economic events into the history of family planning in DRC (formerly Zaïre), the book analyses the achievements and setbacks of five decades of programmatic work. President Mobutu's 1972 discourse on Naissances Désirables (desirable births) opened the door to organized family planning programs, which gained considerable momentum in the 1980s despite societal norms favoring large families. Two pillages and armed conflict paralyzed development work during the decade of the 1990s, and family planning was one of multiple public health programs that struggled to regain lost ground in the 2000s. With new donor funding and implementing agencies, the 2010s witnessed rapid programmatic expansion and improved strategies. By 2018, family planning was operating as a well-oiled machine. But progress is fragile. The book ends by tracing the deleterious effects of the colonial period to contemporary programming and individual contraceptive use. It asks hard questions about donor financing. And it details the six conditions needed to accelerate family planning progress in the DRC, in pursuit of providing millions of Congolese women and men with the means of controlling their own fertility.
The book will be of interest to development and public health researchers and practitioners, as well as to historians of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This essay focuses on the brief moment in early seventies filmmaking when the porn industry made narrative-based films such as Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). This attempt to ...fuse porn with mainstream culture has come back into vogue in the present, when we see a new legitimization of porn. One might say that recent representations of sex on the screen have attempted to go back to the early seventies to restart a trajectory that was never able to complete itself. The essay begins with a consideration of the origins of porn films in nineteenth-century European art before moving on to the discussion of the seventies porn films and the complex way in which European art cinema influenced mainstream porn. Related to this topic are how cultural differences within countries influence the approach to sex that is expressed on the screen. In the US, the seventies full-length porn films legitimized certain sexual acts for their audiences and centered some of the pleasure on the screen on female desire as a way to expand the audience for porn. The essay concludes with a coda on the gay male cinematic equivalents of straight seventies porn films.
The law of July 10, 1964, voted under Pompidou’s government with the goal of reorganizing the Paris region, led to the creation of seven departments (Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, ...Val-de-Marne, Essonne, Yvelines and Val-d’Oise) and the disappearance of the Seine and Seine-et-Oise. This was followed by the choice of principal cities and the construction of their new prefectures, including those in the inner suburbs of Bobigny, Créteil and Nanterre... This article studies the capacity of these projects to express the power of the state and their ability to create an adequate framework for local public services, by taking into account the interpretation of the programs made by the architects (respectively M. Folliasson and J. Binoux; D. Badani and P. Roux-Dorlut; A. Wogenscky), the architectural means of the time and other factors that can have an impact on the perception of the buildings. This article will look at, on the one hand the will of the project owner, the nature of the programs, the choice of sites and the quality of the urban environments and on the other, the changes undergone by the buildings and their maintenance. These analyses will finally be confronted with the reception of the public today (agents, users, residents).
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