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Abstracts - 2001. No.45-46. Replika Monologue: Let's have a real sex! The actual Replika-monologue is the edited version of an interview in which Laura, a Buddhist Hungarian prostitute, identifying herself as courtier in classical sense, tells her life-story. She develops interesting ideas on men and masculinities and questions several widespread stereotypes concerning her ancient profession. EU Empire József Böröcz: Introduction: Empire, Coloniality and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union Considers how the concepts of empire and coloniality are applicable to the "eastern enlargement" of the European Union. Provides a comparative-historical definition for both and suggests that detached empire is relevant as a historical memory; contiguous empire and colonial representations of otherness are directly observable in European state-remaking today. Salvatore Engel-diMauro: The Enduring National State: NATO-EU Relations, EU-Enlargement, and the Reapportionment of the Balkans The EU-NATO relationship reveals unresolved tensions among five major powers regarding the colonial partitioning of eastern Europe. These recurring tensions may determine the extent of the region's differentiation within the EU or differential subsumption under the major powers and may also explain the EU's limited success in state-formation. Melinda Kovács and Peter Kabachnik: Shedding Light on the Quantitative Other: The EU's Discourse in the Commission Opinions of 1997 The 1997 Country Opinions, issued by the EU Commission, reinscribe the Enlightenment's dichotomy on eastern and western Europe by constructing the eastern applicants as inferior to the EU and the civilization it is made to stand for. The paper reviews the discursive patterns through which the construction takes place. Melinda Kovács: Putting Down and Putting Off: The EU's Discursive Strategies in the 1998 and 1999 Follow-Up Reports Under the scrutiny of qualitative discourse analysis, the 1998 and 1999 reports by the EU on the eastern applicants reveal the two main discursive strategies of the EU towards these countries: inferiorizing them and postponing their admission. These strategies foreclose inclusion of eastern European countries as anything other than second class members of the Union. Anna Sher: A Di-vision of Europe: The European Union Enlarged A discourse analysis of public speeches delivered by top EU officials in the year 2000 shows that imperialist discursive means serve to recreate a hierarchical di-vision of Europe. In the context of the European Union's "eastern enlargement", these discursive tactics shield and solidify the power imbalance between the EU and the applicant countries. Katalin Dancsi: The Austrian Freedom Party's Colonial Discourse in the Context of EU-Enlargement This study shows how the Austrian Freedom Party's program represents and constructs itself as opposed to the outside world consisting of immigrants and political opponents. After outlining the major challenges of Austrian history since the end of the Cold War with a special focus on the eastern enlargement of the European Union, it documents that the FPÖ's perception of itself and the immigrants and political opponents reveals colonial tropes. Language and gender In this section first Andrea Ágnes Reményi summarises some basic lines of research, in the past forty years, of the interconnections between language and gender, including variationist sociolinguistics, naming and representation, and the analysis of interaction. Susan Gal's influential article is a critical summary of earlier, pre-1990 research, arguing that the links between silence, gender, and power are culturally constructed, and that the diverse genres of linguistic practices are often the sites of struggle over their definition. Introducing the framework of the community of practice, Mary Bucholtz evaluates it in comparison with the concept of the speech community. The framework is employed in the analysis of the nerd social identity, illustrating how a community of nerd girls negotiate their identity through practice, including their gender identity. Finally, Deborah Cameron analyses how and why a style (resembling the popular notion about "women's language") is prescribed to call-centre operators in Britain. The valorisation of the "feminine" communication style in the service sector is seen as a consequence of economic globalisation. Sándor Klára: "The last bastion of overt social discrimination": the use of language Linguistic discrimination, contrary to other forms of discrimination, is socially widely accepted. Most people find that they are discriminated linguistically because of their own "deficiencies". The paper examines how normative ideas are built in different cultural layers in Hungarian folk knowledge, from popularised ideas of the national past to a kind of platonic prescriptivism characteristic of folk linguistic ideas. E-way Margaret Wertheim: Is Cyberspace a Spiritual Space? Many cyber-enthiusiasts have techno-religious yearnings and are convinced that cyberspace is a new kind a spiritual space. In her book, "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet", Margaret Wertheim traces the history of western notions of space and how these have been informed by cultural, and particularly religious, concerns. From Dante's Inferno to today's Internet, there's a connection in the dualistic Western conception where body and soul are seen as two distinct spheres. Within this tradition, the immaterial has always been equated with with the spiritual. Such a confusion is not without dangers, Wertheim argues. The essay published here is a shortened and excerpted version of chapter seven of her book.
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