CORPORATIONS

AS PERSONS
Week 11, G205 - Gendered Ads & Global Consumer Identity
Bose and Lyons and The Corporation

Upcoming, Week 12
Read Naomi Klein:
Ch. 16 on Tues./18 on Thurs.

No Blog #5 – Please turn in all outstanding work and extra credit by the end of next week or no
credit.
Corporations as “Natural” Persons
• In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to
contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts
entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward,
decided in 1819.
• In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S.
394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were persons for
purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• The Corporation asserts the initial legislation interpreted by the court
in 1819 was intended to apply to freed slaves. “307 law suits were
brought before the court: 19 by freed slaves and 288 by corporations.”
• Some critics of corporate personhood, such as Thom Hartmann in his book
"Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of
Human Rights," claims this history was an intentional misinterpretation of
the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis.
Bancroft Davis had previously served as president of Newburgh and New
York Railway Co.
What is a person?
• A human being • Category used to
regarded as an denote a corporation
individual; which is an artificial
• a category to denote a person.
1 Bl. Com. 123; 4 Bing. 669; C. 33
speaker (example first, Eng. C. L R. 488; Woodes. Lect. 116;
second, third person Bac. Us. 57; 1 Mod. 164.
writing)
Oxford English Dictionary
Definition of Corporation
A corporation is a legal entity created by state law to
accomplish a stated purpose.

Three Types:
1. Corporations for profit
2. Corporations not for profit
3. Government owned corporations
Privileges of Corporate Personhood
• Corporations are distinct legal entities which exist
separate from shareholders as shareholders have limited
liability.
• Corporations can engage in civil litigation.
• Corporations can own property (called “islanding” in
transnational real estate interactions, Bose and Lyons).
• Corporations are immortal.

Is this an ultimate way to escape gender?

How have we understood personhood (subjectivity) thus
far?
Ponderous
• How have we understood personhood (subjectivity) thus
far?
• Binary opposition
• Body as visible proof of difference (inherent/innate/essential)
• Sexed as male/female
• Sexed body experienced through adherence to gender norms.
• Gender is experientially different for males and females via their
various embodiment of and associations with masculinity and
femininity.
• Sex, Gender are assumed to be dimorphic and mutually
exclusive, invariant, fixed, and constant across time and
space. Heterosexuality or a sexual attraction to the
“opposite sex,” is a condition of this norm.
The Corporation (QW#6) Discussion
• What role do corporations play in your life?
• What kind of person is the corporation, according to the
filmmakers?
• Do you agree/disagree?
• Should corporations have the same rights as
individuals?
• Other questions from your worksheet?
• Other questions in general?
 Madonna’s African Charity Displaced
Villagers and Wasted $3.8 Million
March 28, 2011
Source: The Atlantic
It seemed like a wonderful plan. Madonna would build a $15 million academy for 400 impoverished girls in
Malawi. Her charity, Raising Malawi, collected $18 million and the project had the support of elite Hollywood
circles and the Jewish mysticism group Kabbalah Centre International. Unfortunately, it ended up doing
more harm than good, reports The New York Times. According to a damning audit, the manager’s of the
school project, which was abandoned in January, wasted $3.8 million on lavish purchases such as
cars, chauffeurs, golf course memberships and free housing.
“The project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, over all, a startling lack of
accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United
States,” said Trevor Neilson, a philanthropist recruited by Madonna to examine problems at the charity. “We
have yet to determine exactly what happened to all of that $3.8 million. We have not accounted for all the
funds that were used.”
• Making matters worse, The Guardian notes that the 117-acre construction site had forced
Malawian villagers from their ancestral land for what they thought would be a thriving school.
Upon learning that the project had been scrapped in January, village elders were furious and the
Malawian government summoned Madonna to explain herself.
At the time, Madonna said her plans changed because “I want to reach thousands, not hundreds of girls”
referring to a new plan to build high schools across the country. But, according to the Times, that’s not what
her adviser, Trevor Neilson, is recommending she do. “He told her that building an expensive school in
Malawi was an ineffective form of philanthropy, and suggested instead using resources to finance education
programs though existing and proven nongovernmental organizations,” writes the Times.
In response to the audit, Madonna issued the following statement:
There’s a real education crisis in Malawi. Sixty-seven percent of girls don’t go to secondary school, and this is simply unacceptable. Our team is going to work hard to address this in
every way we can…While I’m proud of these accomplishments, I’m frustrated that our education work has not moved forward in a faster way.
de Certeau
Strategies of Producers
(1) The "proper" is a triumph of place over
time.
(2) It is also a mastery of places through
sight. The division of space makes
possible a panoptic practice proceeding
from a place whence the eye can
transform foreign forces into objects that
can be observed and measured, and
thus control and "include" them within its
scope of vision. To be able to see (far
into the distance) is also to be able to
predict, to run ahead of time by reading
a space.
(3) The power of knowledge is the ability to
transform the uncertainties of history
into readable spaces.
Tactics of Users of Products
• procedures that gain validity in
relation to the pertinence they
lend to time--to the circumstances
which the precise instant of an
intervention transforms into a
favorable situation, to the rapidity
of the movements that change the
organization of a space, to the
relations among successive
moments in an action, to the
possible intersections of durations
and heterogeneous rhythms, etc.
(38)
MULTINATIONAL
& TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS
• First MNC was Dutch East India Co
(1602), granted monopoly in colonial
trade. Today, UN estimates about 62,000
MNCs with 900,000 affiliates.
Review:
• Modernity in America occurred over
several hundred years and is most often
associated with the rise of industry
(factories, urbanization, etc.) in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.
• Globalization describes an ongoing
process by which regional economies,
societies, and cultures have become
integrated through globe-spanning
networks of communication and trade;
a process whereby an increased portion
of economic or other activity is carried out
across national borders.
Discussion Questions:
• Why do nations trade goods and
services? What are gains from
specialized production?
• How economically important are
foreign direct investments of multi-
and transnational corporations? Who
benefits most from FDI (Foreign
Direct Investments)?
• Is a sinister network of interlocked
firms dominating the world economy,
using its political power to oppress?
• Who can compel MNCs to become
more accountable corporate citizens?
Where’s the Gender?
Producers Consumers
Bose and Lyons,
Critical Corporation Studies
MODERNITY & GLOBALIZATION
CITIZENSHIP
CONSUMERISM
IDENTITY
GENDER

Review from first eight weeks (A. Berger, Peiss, Rooks)

Gender
Personhood Citizenship

• Peiss and gendered • “way of life” or

spaces: women at home, ”lifestyle”=class status=
men = work, then respectability =consumer
shopping = Woman as citizenship (p1, Peiss)
consumer = Leisure • Corporate Citizens?
(feminized, docile, not
work)

• Women as a mass
Racialized Spaces / Gendered Spaces (Lutz &
Collins)
First world Third World
• “Real” people • Space of “fantasy”

• Machine usage • Ritual practices

• Passive
• White
• Colorism by activity (dark
• Active
skin=more labor, poor,
infantile)
• Women represent
“women of the world”
• Women signify “Universal
Human powers”
Corporation for President?
• On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court overturned a
20-year-old ruling that had previously prohibited
corporations and unions from using money from their
general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign
ads.
The Corporation
Board notes
• Modernity – Industry
• Productivity - Capitalism
• 1st v. 3rd World
• Democracy ?
“a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise
of power, typically through elected representatives.” (OED)

• Subjectivity/Citizenship
• How do we understand economics as a gendering or gendered
process?
Gender
• Established psychological, social, and representational
differences between men and women.
• The socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and
attributes that a given society considers appropriate for
men and women, often approached through masculinity
and femininity. 
• Gender is far more than a synonym or euphemism for the
biological distinction between the sexes. It is a
fundamental framework for how we view, know, and
categorize the world in general.

Citizenship
• “Way of life”=class
status=respectability=femi
nine identity through
leisure=consumer
citizenship (Kathy Peiss)
• Peiss argues that women
held up respectability as
a part of their identity
through class status,
however, she fails to note
the ways in which racial
constructs are constitutive
of that “respectability.”
Rooks & Racial Uplift
• Black elites' response and challenge to white
supremacy.  It was a seemingly contradictory
position as both an aspiring social class and a
racially subordinated caste denied all political
rights and protections, struggling to define
themselves within a society founded on white
dominance.
• accompanied by a practical methodology of self-
help.  Self-help sought to refute the view that
African Americans were biologically inferior and
unassimilable by incorporating "the race" into
ostensibly universal but deeply racialized
ideological categories of Western progress and
civilization.
• black elites claimed class distinctions -- indeed,
the very existence of a "better class" of blacks
served as evidence of what they called race
progress.  They believed that the improvement
of African Americans' material and moral
condition through self-help would diminish white
racism.
Citizenship
• a native or naturalized member of a state or Citizenship
other political community
• the status of a citizen with rights and duties & Citizens
conduct as a citizen; "award for good citizenship"

Citizen
• A person that is a legally recognized as a
member of a state, with associated rights and
obligations;

• A member of a state that is not a monarchy;

used as antonym to subject;

• A person that is a legally recognized resident of

a city or town; A resident of any particular place
to which the subject; a native or naturalized
member of a state or other political community
Consumer and Consume
• What is a consumer?
• –noun
• 1. a person or thing that consumes.
• 2. Economics . a person or organization that uses a commodity or service.
• 3. Ecology . an organism, usually an animal, that feeds on plants or other animals.
• 
• To consume:
• –verb (used with object)
• 1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.
• 2. to eat or drink up; devour.
• 3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumed the forest.
• 4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.
• 5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity.
• –verb (used without object)
• 6. to undergo destruction; waste away.
• 7. to use or use up consumer goods.
White House aims to 'install' democracy in Libya

The White House is shifting toward the more aggressive goal in Libya of ousting President
Moammar Gadhafi and "installing a democratic system," actions that fall outside the United
Nations Security Council resolution under which an international coalition is now acting,
according to a conversation between President Obama and Turkey's prime minister.

Obama and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke late Monday and "underscored their
shared commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to
transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people's will,"
according to a White House report on the phone call. 
The rhetoric matches Obama's reiteration on Monday that it is still U.S. policy that "Gadhafi
needs to go.“

But it is a marked contrast to the U.S.-led military mission as defined by the U.N. resolution.

"There's not a U.N. Security Council resolution mandating regime change in Libya that we're
acting to enforce," national security aide Ben Rhodes said Monday. "We're acting to enforce a
resolution that has the immediate goal of protecting civilians."
 
http://washingtonexaminer.com/print/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/03/white-house-aims-install-democracy-libya
By Hayley Peterson
Created Mar 22 2011 - 11:32am
Published on Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.com)