For nearly twenty years, Anglo-American feminist theory has posed its own epistemological questions by looking at the lives and bodies of transsexuals and transvestites. This paper examines the impact of such scholarship on improving the everyday lives of the people central to such feminist argumentation. Drawing on indigenous scholarship and activisms, I conclude with a consideration of some central principles necessary to engage in feminist research and theory—to involve marginal people in the production of knowledge and to transform the knowledge-production (...) process itself. (shrink)

Technology and its interfaces with nursing care, patients and carers, and the home are many and varied. To date, healthcare services research has generally focussed on pragmatic issues such access to and the optimization of technology, while philosophical inquiry has tended to focus on the ethics of how technology makes the home more hospital like. However, the ethical implications of the ways in which technology shapes the subjectivities of patients and carers have not been explored. In order to explore this, (...) poststructural theory, in particular the work of Butler, Foucault, and Deleuze, is used to theorize the relationship between subjectivity and materiality as ethically mandated on producing rather than precluding the development of subjectivities in novel ways. This theoretical understanding is then utilized through a process of ‘plugged in’ as described by Jackson and Massie that aims to link empirical data, research, and philosophical inquiry. Through this process, it is suggested that power, which the empirical data demonstrate, is frequently exercised through medical discourses and restricts patients' and carers' ability to shape the material environment of the home as a place to live and be cared for in palliative stages of illness. Alternative discourses are suggested both from the empirical data as well as other research, which may offer patients and carers the possibility of reclaiming power over the home and their subjectivities. Finally, the dichotomy between the home and hospital, mediated via technology, is posited as being problematic. It is argued the dichotomy is false and should be moved away from in order to allow an ethical embrace of technology in palliative care. (shrink)

Teen girls’ ‘sexy selfies’ have become highly politicised over the last years, and while feminist scholars have comprehensively analysed present day discourses about this topic, research about teen girls’ own reflections is still scarce. Studies that did include girls’ voices demonstrated how girls’ navigations of sexiness are related to the performance of gender and sexuality. The present article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch young people, contributes to and extends this strand of research by exploring how girls’ navigations (...) of sexy selfies are related to the performance of not just gender and sexuality, but also other intersecting axes of social differentiation, including axes that have remained undertheorised such as smartness, maturity and popularity. Through their navigations of sexy selfies, girls perform complex, intersectional identities in interaction with dominant discourses about sexiness, the materiality of their bodies, their social position and the specific context of self-making practices. Involving this complexity in discussions about sexy selfies can create promising opportunities for interrogating social norms, stereotypes and power inequalities. (shrink)

This paper is a invitation to interaction designers across disciplines to rethink the shaping of interaction “intra-actively”. Whether in human-computer interaction design or interdisciplinary and interactive performance practices, we propose to shift the emphasis from interaction between things, towards the intra-active processes of differentiation by which such things are continually made and unmade. Expanding interaction design by engaging in processes intended to bring awareness to the value systems involved in the local production of “interaction” and “things that interact” offers an (...) opportunity to treat these values, and likewise the designers (be it engineers or choreographers or composers), as objects themselves in the design process. In the traditions of feminist, new materialist, and process philosophy we weave a narrative of appropriated perspectives in order to dismantle hegemonic accounts of correlationism and representationalism in interaction design, while investigating the concepts of boundary objects, diffraction, and critical appropriation as potential approaches to intra-active design. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that feminist legal scholars should engage directly and explicitly with the question of evil. Part I summarises key facts surrounding the prosecution and life-long imprisonment of Myra Hindley, one of a tiny number of women involved in multiple killings of children in recent British history. Part II reviews a range of commentaries on Hindley, noting in particular the repeated use of two narratives: the first of these insists that Hindley is an icon of female evil; (...) the second, less popular one, seeks to position her as a victim. In Part III, the article broadens out and we explain why we think feminist legal scholars should look at the question of evil. In large part, the emphasis is on anticipating the range of possible objections to this argument, and on trying to answer these objections by showing how a focus on evil might benefit feminist legal thinking – specifically in relation to the categories of perpetrator and victim and, more generally, in relation to laws motivated by a desire to secure women’s human rights. (shrink)

Although medical providers rely on similar tools to “treat” intersex and trans individuals, their enactment of medicalization practices varies. To deconstruct these complexities, we employ a comparative analysis of providers who specialize in intersex and trans medicine. While both sets of providers tend to hold essentialist ideologies about sex, gender, and sexuality, we argue they medicalize intersex and trans embodiments in different ways. Providers for intersex people are inclined to approach intersex as an emergency that necessitates medical attention, whereas providers (...) for trans people attempt to slow down their patients’ urgent requests for transitioning services. Building on conceptualizations of “giving gender,” we contend both sets of providers “give gender” by “giving sex.” In both cases too, providers shift their own responsibility for their medicalization practices onto others: parents in the case of intersex, or adult recipients of care in the case of trans. According to the accounts of most providers, successful medical interventions are achieved when a person adheres to heteronormative gender practices. (shrink)

: Today's personable, sanitized images of human embryos and fetuses require an audience that is literally and metaphorically distanced from dead specimens. Yet scientists must handle dead specimens to produce embryological knowledge, which only then can be transformed into beautiful photographs and talking fetuses. I begin with an account of Gertrude Stein's experience making a model of a fetal brain. Her tactile encounter is contrasted to the avant-garde artistic tradition that later came to dominate embryo imagery. This essay shows the (...) embryo visualizations portrayed in a contemporary coffee-table book about gestational development to be a remarkable political achievement predicated, in part, on keeping hidden the unsavory details of anatomical technique that transform dead specimens into icons of life. (shrink)

This article argues that emotions can be a medium of social power. Using qualitative interview material from American Jews discussing anti-Semitism and its relationship to contemporary politics, it engages recent scholarship on emotions and political contention and shows how emotions make effective the various forms of symbolic exclusion by which group members exercise what Bourdieu calls symbolic power. It also explores the emotional connections to group membership by which some “excluded” members can engage in symbolic struggle over “the principles of (...) vision and division” Bourdieu (Sociological Theory 7(1), 14–25, 1989) that define the group. Finally, it shows how emotions work to incite discipline in some group members, inspiring them to conform to dominant definitions of group membership so as to avoid both symbolic struggle and exclusion. (shrink)

This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that (...) it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write. (shrink)

As theories of performativity struggle to disentangle and reconfigure the relationships between act and identity, a heterowoman who relishes the performance of femininity is still aware that she can be read as reactionary. Her choice of sexual partners seems to undermine the efficacy of similar strategies constructed by femme lesbians. One queer option for a heterosexual woman is to ‘act’ like a gay man. As more than one cultural commentator has pointed out, it appears that only a male drag queen (...) can be a ‘lady’ these days. This particular woman does not want to change her biological sex to ‘be’ a gay man. She has learned how to be a ‘lady’ from the ‘feminized fags’ who may have learned from her mother. Their ironic distancing, camp connoiseurship, and parodic appropriation of the notion of a stable gender identity came as part of the package. As a result of this transaction, she acts as if she has balls under her dress. Such mimetic masquerades can be most easily recognized as resistant when performativity is ‘bound’ into a formalized performance. It is implicit that this artifice is not sustainable, nor is this desirable. ‘Doing’ queer means possessing the agency to defy and destabilize gendered behaviours, sexes, and sexualities through continuing and conscious decisions. This article explores the efficacy of heterosexual femme performances that attempt to challenge and subvert ideological normativities through their transactions with gay men. (shrink)

: In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

The practice of terminating a pregnancy following the diagnosis of a fetal abnormality raises questions about notions of bodily normality and the ways these shape ethical decision-making. This is particularly the case with terminations done on the basis of ostensibly minor morphological anomalies, such as cleft lip and isolated malformations of the limbs or digits. In this paper, I examine a recent case of selective termination after a morphology ultrasound scan revealed the fetus to be missing a hand . Using (...) the work of Georges Canguilhem, I show that a person with acheiria could be considered normal. Further, I show that this case reveals a kind of “undecidability” in the significance of fetal sex/gender and disability in termination. From this, I consider the conceptual interaction of disability with sex/gender, to argue that the ethics of disability termination are not as distinct from those of sex/gender selection as is commonly supposed. (shrink)

In spite of the growing public awareness of those who would identify as transgender, very little has changed in attitudes that would accord such people full approbation. The author takes the reader on a 40‐year journey of discovery that has led her to an abiding interest in and dedication to the issues faced by people who do not fit within the gender binary of Western society. As well as describing a personal experience with someone who identifies as transsexual, the author (...) relates two troubling experiences from her nursing career. Included in the discussion are linguistics, sexuality, and vocabulary. A personal epistemology is explored that incorporates unknowing, intuition, and embodiment, and the difference this view can make to the care of those who identify as gender‐diverse. (shrink)

This essay argues that a new, politicized mestiza is emerging within the cultural borderlands of the Mexico-U.S. divide. She works in the upper ranks of the multinational maquiladoras and raises many challenges for a feminist theorization of a new border politics. Through a presentation of research in one maquiladora, the essay demonstrates how understanding the dynamic between metaphorical and material space is vital for imagining a feminist politics in the cultural borderlands.

This paper offers a new interpretation of Austin (the New Austin) that overcomes the Austin-Derrida debate by dissolving the dichotomy between construction and deconstruction and focusing on the notion of performative reconstruction. The essay also contains a discussion of the normative distinction between felicity and infelicity and how it affects the identity of speakers and agents. This discussion draws on recent Gender and Queer Theory and builds a bridge between the literature on identity and Speech Act Theory. The central argument (...) in this paper proposes a negotiating model of performativity and a robust notion of discursive responsibility that underscores the intimate and unavoidable links between the semantic and the socio-political. (shrink)

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to (...) critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. (shrink)

The concept of non-discrimination has been central in the feminist challenge to gendered violence within international human rights law. This article critically explores non-discrimination and the challenge it seeks to pose to gendered violence through the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s critique of heteronormative sex/gender, the article utilises an understanding of gendered violence as effected by the restrictive scripts of sex/gender within heteronormativity to illustrate how the development of non-discrimination within international human rights law renders it ineffective to (...) challenge gendered violence due to its own commitments to binarised and asymmetrical sex/gender. However, the article also seeks to encourage a reworking of non-discrimination beyond the heteronormative sex binary through employing Butler’s concept of cultural translation. Analysis via the lens of cultural translation reveals the fluidity of non-discrimination as a universal concept and offers new possibilities for feminist engagement with universal human rights. (shrink)

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized (...) fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia). (shrink)

While the differences between pragmatist and poststructural views may often appear insurmountable, I argue here that putting the two in dialogue offers solutions to particular problems within each tradition, especially as they relate to agency. I describe John Dewey and Judith Butler's theories of agency and analyze the political acts and educational implications to which each account gives rise. I show how each theory rescues the other from pitfalls and, when read together, a more robust vision of agency and political (...) change relative to education is formed. I conclude by depicting how this agency can be cultivated in classrooms. (shrink)

: This response seeks to pick up on the key questions and concerns raised by Nancy C. M. Hartsock and Karen Houle in their critiques of The Spectacle of Violence. I mold my response around two emotions that are never far from the question of violence: fear and hope. Is it fear of ambiguity that stops us from delicately blending the experiential with the discursive, the nodal with the circular, the corporeal with the epistemic, or the oppressive with the constitutive? (...) If so, we can only hope that the power of such ambivalence lies in its ability to unsettle these treasured lines of force. (shrink)

Several decades ago, feminists differentiated between the biologically given basis of sex identity (sex) and the socially constructed cultural practices anchored by sex identity (gender). In recent years, many feminists have challenged that distinction, arguing that biological sex is as much a social construct as are the practices comprising gender. I survey two examples from biological studies of sex identity that, by contrast (I maintain), warrant saving the concept of biologically given sex identity. The result is not antithetical to feminism, (...) however, since these studies also suggest that sex identity proliferates beyond the rigid female/male dichotomy. If articulated carefully, this view can avoid metaphysically essentialist baggage while enriching feminist conceptions of sex identity. (shrink)

Recently, the study of gender has focused on processes by which gender is brought into social relations through interaction. This article explores implications of a two-sided dynamic—gendering practices and practicing of gender—for understanding gendering processes in formal organizations. Using stories from interviews and participant observation in multinational corporations, the author explores the practicing of gender at work. She defines practicing gender as a moving phenomenon that is done quickly, directionally, and nonreflexively; is informed by liminal awareness; and is in concert (...) with others. She notes how other conceptions of gender dynamics and practice inform the analysis and argues that adequate conceptualization of harmful aspects of gendering practices/practicing will require attention to agency, intentionality, awareness, and reflexivity; positions, power, and experience; and choice, accountability, and audience. She calls for incorporating the “sayings and doings” of gender into organization theory and research. (shrink)

: Hospitals have adopted a rhetoric of family-centered maternity care, and one of the ways in which they show their commitment to it is through the integration of the husband-as-coach model of childbirth (the Bradley method) into delivery practices. I argue that this model's widespread popularity testifies less to the culture's endorsement of a woman-centered approach than to healthcare's appropriation of "natural" childbirth as a site for the production and reproduction of patriarchal and capitalist power.

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.

: For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturalize the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

: Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

Current models for individuation in academe exacerbate generational tensions between second and third wave feminists. Feminist pedagogues must be wary of getting caught in the "vicious circle of contempt," where students are expected to compensate for a teacher's past narcissistic wounds. Instead, we must be willing to mourn the wounds we have received at the hands of a contemptuous culture and to acknowledge same-gender attachments that are disavowed in dialectical models of subject production.

The Platonic chora, as the third, intermediating term, has been left in a state of virtual dereliction in the West. Its ternary logic transmutes oppositional logics of binarity, including the oppositions of interior and exterior, psyche and cosmos, human and divine. In this article I analyse the mytho-philosophical trajectory of the chora from Plato’s Timaeus, and Diotimaic love found in Plato’s Symposium. I argue that both the disruptive force of Diotimaic love, and the subversive chora with its ‘bastard reasoning’1 are (...) indicative of Plato’s efforts to resolve an internalized conflict which mirrored a larger conflict found in his cultural epoch, a time in which abstracted self-consciousness was on the horizon and chthonic-participatory consciousness was receding. In membering the chora I find a fecund space-time, an enabling field, for human participatory becoming-with the cosmos. (shrink)

What does it mean to be human? This question has plagued the thoughts of people over centuries and will continue to do so. Margaret Archer attempts to grapple with the nature of our humanity in Being Human, the third volume in her ambitious five volume series theorising agency, culture and structure within a realist framework. I choose to focus on this book because it lays the foundations of agency and what it means to be human, which allows Archer's subsequent empirical (...) and theoretical investigation of the ‘internal conversation’. This essay reviews her undertaking to theorise humanity and to re-establish human causal powers in social theory in the face of postmodernity's ‘death of the subject’. I critique the power of Archer's theory from an eclectically informed position, including gender studies, poststructuralism and embodiment theories. Archer's authoritative position is somewhat destabilised by making visible her lack of consideration of intersubjectivity, language and the complex nature of power in her endeavour to retain a human-istic subject. (shrink)

Women’s status in the Western world has improved enormously, but the revolution that would make women and men truly equal has not yet occurred. I argue that the reason is that gender divisions still deeply bifurcate the structure of modern society. Feminists want women and men to be equal, but few talk about doing away with gender divisions altogether. From a social constructionist structural gender perspective, it is the ubiquitous division of people into two unequally valued categories that undergirds the (...) continually reappearing instances of gender inequality. I argue that it is this gendering that needs to be challenged by feminists, with the long-term goal of doing away with binary gender divisions altogether. To this end, I call for a feminist degendering movement. (shrink)

This paper will examine the violence of heteronormativity: the violence that constitutes and regulates bodies according to normative notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. This violence, I will argue, requires more than a focus on gendered or sexualized physical harms of the kinds normally examined when studying violence against sexual minorities or women. Rather, it necessitates focusing on the multiple modalities through which heteronormativity performs its violence on, through, and against bodies and persons, including through the production of certain bodies (...) and persons as inciting violence in their very being. To establish my argument, I explore the killing in 2002 of trans woman Gwen Araujo and the violence of the legal strategy (the trans panic defense) used in the legal trials that followed her killing. Both forms of violence, I suggest, operate in a similar way, albeit through different mechanisms, to maintain and extend the system of binary morphology that itself entails the perpetual violent materialization of sexed bodies. (shrink)

According to C. S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, for example, the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To (...) what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings andthe impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with uniqueresources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and metaphor as aprerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs. (shrink)

This article argues that while ethical leadership in mainstream theorising is assumed to be a cognitive exercise, leaders’ bodies in fact play a significant role in the social construction of ethical leadership. Their bodies become particularly potent when leaders are depicted via the interplay between visual and verbal modes in the media. In order to extend current understandings of ethical leadership, this study employs a discourse analytic approach to examine how visual and verbal devices convey ethical leadership for two of (...) Australia’s major bank chief executive officers—John Stewart and Ralph Norris—before and during the global financial crisis. Based on the analysis, this article demonstrates that ethical leadership is constructed through the confluence of elite and working class masculinities that is multimodally embodied and disembodied. The article suggests that what it means to be an ethical leader is invariably informed by class-based patriarchal norms that can serve to reinforce the masculinisation of ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do so by (...) figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Jeanette Winterson's use and reworking of post-modern concepts of the body in her novel Written on the Body. Feminist appropriations of those concepts can be problematic: they tend to focus on the way in which a coherent body image is constructed and then imposed on the body parts, whereas many feminist theorists continue to emphasize the wholeness and integrity of the female body. Written on the Body offers constructive ways of theorizing the female body within (...) a postmodern framework, because it is shaped by concepts of wholeness and fragmentation at the same time. Winterson develops a critique of androcentric science and medicine that strives to know the female body by dissecting it, analogous to the way modern society compartmentalizes human lives into neat manageable units. Against this, a concept of wholeness is strategically employed. Likewise, Winterson criticizes the equation of the female body with a penetrable surface. The androcentric concept of sexuality that associates penetration with the exploration of hidden depths and the achievement of power and knowledge is unmasked as necrophiliac. However, by constructing a lover/narrator whose gender remains undeclared, Winterson manages to unsettle perceptions of gendered difference. The text produces different meanings depending on whether the narrator is read as a man or a woman, and sexuality requires a basic human sameness from which a host of differences emerge that may or may not be gendered. In Written on the Body, Winterson disturbs fixed boundaries and rigidly gendered identities that objectify the body in order to build up a concept of the body that is fluid and leaves room for changes and mergings with other bodies, where bodies are held together not by a stable body image and a gendered identity, but by forces of connection and interaction between parts of the body. (shrink)

The new reproductive technologies affect several of our conceptual distinctions, and most basically the one between nature and culture. This includes the understanding of reproduction as natural, biological processes and of the body as a product of nature. Nature and culture has been a basic conceptual distinction in western culture and it is paralleled in the division between sex, understood as nature, and gender, understood as culture. The process of reproduction is central to the understanding of sexual difference, in the (...) sense that the abilities to conceive and give birth to children are generally considered to be features that distinguish woman from man. Therefore changes in this process provide us with empirical material for exploring changes in people's understanding of sex and gender. The article explores reproductive technology as a provider of new cultural models for understanding the relationship between nature and culture and thereby the distinction of sex/nature and gender/culture. (shrink)

The present paper seeks to view language through the prism of gender as social practice as delineated by Judith Butler. Following up on the notion of gender as an entity distinguished from biological sex, she tends to base the notion on a set of normalizing practices that determine gender identity. For so doing, she believes that gender is discursively made or constructed performatively. In her view, the social discourse aligns economic power with a manly power structure where women are dismissed (...) altogether. On the other hand, social and linguistic structures are closely inter-related and serve to perpetuate the dominance and imposed gender identity the latter one of which is actualized through imitated performativity. The article also explores dimensions of gendered practice regarding subjectivity and repression. Butler’s views, though quite intriguing for post-structuralists and postmodern scholars, have been criticized on the grounds that it fails to empower women, follow a political agenda, promise any moral basis. (shrink)

This essay aims to elucidate how multiple voices and traditions should interact with one another in the practice of ethics. First, it explores some of the major ways in which questions of bodily autonomy function in secular feminist and Jewish bioethical discourses. It then uses case studies to illuminate ways each discourse's concepts of bodily autonomy can be deeply problematic, and argues that the strengths in each discourse can serve as important correctives for the weaknesses in the other. It suggests (...) that some formal features of rabbinic texts can serve as a model for a discourse of constant and animated mutual correction. Finally, it examines two case studies in light of this model. (shrink)

In many fields within the social sciences and the humanities, the ‘material turn’ has inspired fresh debates about human-nature relationships, ecology and the meaning of the social. However, the new materialism also poses some theoretical-political problems. These problems relate to the questions of ontology, epistemology and anthropology, as I argue in the first part of this article. In the second part, I argue that some theoretical-political problems that characterize the ‘new’ materialism have also been debated within the tradition of historical (...) materialism. By recapitulating different versions of historical materialism, I argue that an important distinction can be drawn between ontological and praxeological forms of materialism. I argue in conclusion that from the perspective of critical social theory, the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ materialism does not hold, and that for political as well as epistemological reasons a critical materialism should renounce any ontological turn to matter itself. (shrink)

In this paper I distil a concept of the imaginary with which to make good the claim that our mode of embodied subjectivity is an imaginary embodiment in an imaginary world. The concept of the imaginary employed is not one in which imaginary worlds are contrasted with the real, but one in which imagination is a condition of there being a real for us. The images and forms in terms of which our imagined bodies and worlds are constituted carry, in (...) an interdependent way, cognition and affects. Imagined configurations have a resilience which makes their displacement more than a matter of appealing to considerations of truth or falsity. It involves encounters with alternative imagined configurations which can be recognized as making both cognitive and affective sense. (shrink)

This essay examines the capacity of language (‘word’) to convey what there is (‘world’). It draws on philosophical thought, which it seeks to apply to law while making specific reference to comparative legal studies, that is, to the investigation of law that is foreign to its interpreter.

This essay is about Houdini’s escapes and ethnomethodology’s studies.1 By accomplishing what appears to be impossible, Houdini leaves his audience considering not only how did he manage to do that, but also just what is it that we consider to be possible. Magicians and escapologists warn us off an interest in the mechanics of their tricks that might spoil the thrill of what they dramatically present to us: a sense of the limits to whatwe can apprehend as an audience. While (...) marking out the differences in their projects, this essay brings out the sharedurge of escapologists and ethnomethodologists to question our senses, openmembers to particular phenomena, and awaken us tothe wonder of the world.In reflecting on what happens when magicians reveal the devices that constitute their tricks, I ask whether the purpose of studying methodologies canonlyreside in revealing how they are practically produced as intelligibleactions. What more might ethnomethodology’s invitation be? (shrink)