This article addresses the issue of femme gaze and desire in relation to a range of heterosexual fashion advertisements from the British edition of the mainstream fashion magazine Vogue. It considers the lasting legacy of heterosexual feminist and lesbian feminist constructions of the gazing subject, particularly in terms of masculinity, trans-sex identification and masquerading. Both of these fields of knowledge have failed to recognize feminine and femme-inine viewing subjects and to include them in the field of visibility independently, without recourse (...) to masculinity. The article considers possibilities for resistant femme visibility, identification, and desire. It argues through the analysis of fashion images that the concepts of femme-nity and femme-nine are useful in criticizing prevailing regulatory norms of perception and normative expectations on gender, as well as in denaturalizing the assumed relationship between the gaze, gender, sexuality, and desire. (shrink)

This article explores how issues of ‘not quite human-ness’ expose the conditions of possibility of being considered human; of human ontology. I refer to these dynamics for identifying sameness and difference as ontological politics of recognition. Tracing the genealogies of passing, I situate passing and Othering socio-political regulation and ideological frameworks for conceptualising ontology. I am particularly concerned with how the notion of ontology is bound up in questions of race and gender, and with the entanglements of technology and biology (...) that can destabilise apparently fixed boundaries between the (natural/normative) human and its (constructed/abnormal) Others. I identify three trajectories of passing as human in the histories of science fiction. The first trajectory discusses ontological mimicry: the ways in which the non-human attempts to be like the human. The second trajectory addresses how passing as human relies on a Butlerian performativity: doing human-ness by complying with the regulatory frames for appearances and practices. The final trajectory discusses what is at stake in contemporary ontological politics of recognition: a renegotiation of human supremacy through an emphasis on collectivity and collaboration rather that singularity and boundedness. (shrink)

The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2007 brought about a resurgence of feminist scholarship on his work. But in all recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists focus on Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In this article I argue that a theory of seduction facilitates the unveiling of a hitherto unnoticed strain of feminist writing that proposes an ongoing challenge to masculine power (...) and politics. This strategy of seduction is one that can be traced through a history of modern feminism, from Joan Rivière’s concept of ‘womanliness’ in ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ to Virginia Woolf’s ‘mulberry tree’ in Three Guineas. (shrink)

The disciplines of western philosophy and theology are linked by their development of concepts of the ‘other’, figured as what lies outside the ‘discourses of man. The relations between the two discourses of the other deserves the attention of feminists, given their ongoing debate of Simone de Beauvoir s claim that woman is the ‘absolute other in these discourses. While the theology of God s otherness responds to the particularity which is God, the logic that underlies this theology is of (...) general application, and so may be borrowed to theorize the anomalous status of other figures of the other. French philosopher Luce Irigaray, for example, exploits the relations between philosophy and theology in claiming that the other may be represented as at once feminine and divine. (shrink)

Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of (...) self-interpretation that introduce more active dimensions into understandings of subject formation and agency. Furthermore, an unqualified notion of indeterminacy does not unpick the imbrication of relations of time and power that overdetermine agency. Ultimately, structural accounts of subject formation need to be integrated more closely with hermeneutic perspectives of the self in order to understand better the complexities of agency in a post-traditional society. (shrink)

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the (...) articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship. (shrink)

This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and ‘female nature’ are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled with social constructions of beauty, race and female reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic (...) fieldwork conducted in Brazil, I focus on plastic surgery, but also analyse how this specialty is linked to Ob-Gyn and endocrinology. I argue that medical procedures instantiate a biologised model of beauty I call ‘bare sex’ (Edmonds, 2010) that is defined in terms of racial traits, anatomy, reproductive processes, hormones and ‘secondary sexual traits’. While this is a historically specific model, it is also one that is inscribed on patients, altering anatomy and physiological processes. It thus has the potential to create a biological self-awareness that cannot fully be accounted for by a social constructionist analysis. (shrink)

Since the late 1980s, intersex adults and activists have critiqued the clinical recommendations defined in the 1950s to treat children born with ‘ambiguous genitalia’ with normalising medicine. While their struggles continue, in particular to halt the practice of genital surgery in early infancy, some European surgeons travel to African countries to transfer standards of care that have become highly controversial in the North, including in the medical community. Simple disapproval of these tours as ‘surgical safaris’ forecloses the possibility of analysing (...) more complex situations in which the so-called transfer of competence involves surgeons who promote ‘less cutting and more talking’. Such is the case – and the interest – of the surgical missions in West Africa in which I conducted recent fieldwork, accompanying a team of paediatric surgeons from a European university hospital collaborating with a renowned international NGO. This article analyses the ways in which a variation of sex development called hypospadias is framed and managed in this context through what I call a surgical script for hypospadias. I examine the conditions of (im-)possibility for Northern surgeons to operationalise, and sometimes revise, this script at the missions (but also closer to home). I discuss what the surgeons do in practice to reflect critically on the normative work of the surgical script for hypospadias as a social script on morphological ideals of sex, gender and reproductive heterosexuality. I consider in what sense genital surgery can be said to (re-)construct ‘normal’-looking genitalia, but also, fundamentally, the very idea of genitalia. (shrink)

The article discusses Berlin’s Poor Relief Policy from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, posing the question: how can premises of theoretical and political feminist discussion be put into practice? In analysing the shift in poor relief, I have taken up three essential aspects: (1) power relations must be examined in a context that cannot be reduced simply to the opposition between ruler and subject or men and women; (2) when does gender become a principle of social order?; (...) and (3) gender as a construct and women’s way of action need to be linked. I show how a method that combines the different statements made by the texts as conflicts and discourse is useful, in that it facilitates working out the diversity of poor relief politics and historicizing the term ‘poor women’. At the same time it can show how social change in everyday life was structured and established. (shrink)

Consumer economies of late capitalist societies have come to be dominated by a powerful cultural narrative of the successful life. Success has increasingly been defined in terms of material attainment, the achievement of status and what might be described, in popular language, as the pursuit of the ‘snazzy life’. This model of what constitutes ‘the good life’ avoids recognizing the shadow that haunts such narratives; namely the possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed a failure. (...) This paper suggests that engaging with the often neglected theme of failure enables a contemporary feminist theology of loss to emerge; a theology that helps, moreover, to shape richer understandings of what it might mean to live a ‘good’ life. (shrink)

This article traces the ubiquitous geopolitical metaphors used by researchers in the field of pregnancy-related microchimerism. In this research domain, immunologists and medical geneticists locate ‘non-self’ cells in women by marking Y chromosomes in cells derived from their sons. In the course of this research trajectory, experiments have yielded a number of surprises, beginning with the very presence of these cells in women decades after pregnancy. This finding confounded the expectations predicted by classical immunology, which posits the destruction of such (...) ‘foreign’ entities. Once they were known to be present, fetal cells were implicated in pathological and destructive activity. In a series of reorientations in which metaphor, theory and practice are entangled with matter, the characterization of these cells has shifted from invaders to insurgent foreigners to assimilated productive immigrants. The article reflects on this rich domain of material-semiotic practice to demonstrate that the case of fetomaternal cell trafficking contributes to a growing uneasiness with dominant ontologies of bodies as bounded, defended, pure collectives of homogeneous inhabitants. (shrink)

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material (...) effects of pro-sexuality. (shrink)

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed (...) with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed. (shrink)

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship ties to Palestinians on (...) the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

This essay discusses the work of two female theatre-makers, and their strategic use of nudity on stage. The author appropriates signs of indignation in this work in order to re-visit the ‘problem’ of the female form being traditionally associated with bodily immanence rather than transcendence. Both Nic Green's Trilogy (2009–2010) and Ursula Martinez’ My Stories, Your Emails (2010) use the naked female form to proffer statements about the experience of being a woman in the 2000s. Their use of nudity breaks (...) with feminist theories popular in the 1990s, which argued that because the female form could never escape the symbolic logic of phallocentrism, it could never escape sexual objectification, and thus should operate on the margins of mainstream culture, cultivate agency by appropriating the means of production and be removed from view (radical negativity). By identifying as ‘artists’ and by insisting on their right to put their experience centre stage, Green and Martinez break with the anti-humanist theories of the 1990s and proffer a more individualistic strain of feminist performance. The author celebrates this work as a break away from the deadlock offered by theories of radical negativity. (shrink)

This paper explores the changing feminine subject of feminism by investigating women's sexual daydreams. Described by Rosi Braidotti following Luce Irigaray as the ‘virtual feminine’, and by Teresa de Lauretis as the ‘space-off, the feminist subject is a mutating configuration embodying that which is not colonised from phallogocentric representations. Following Frigga Haug's work on daydreams, the paper is informed by a study that draws on responses from nineteen women in a university setting to an anonymous online survey that asked them (...) to write a daydream about how they would like to express their sexualities in an ideal world. The data reveal that these women of the new millennium imagine spaces of gender/sexual equity, characterised by a spirit of sexual adventure and ethical and emotionally intimate sex. I argue that these sexual imaginings are more progressive than earlier ones, filling in some of the details omitted from contemporary hegemonic representations of feminine sexuality. Arguably providing a snapshot of the feminist subject in its ongoing historical metamorphosis, the paper considers the meaning of these transformations. (shrink)

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. The (...) paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice. (shrink)

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that (...) it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained. (shrink)

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards (...) the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence — or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says — to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’. (shrink)

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If (...) and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies. (shrink)

This article is an offshoot of a research project on lesbian and gay self-organization in the UK's public sector union UNISON. The site upon which lesbians and gay men ‘work together’ is a complex and contradictory one, located at the juncture of several pathways – women's and men's movements, gendered politics and sexual politics, purist ghettos and queer rainbows. The UNISON group furnishes an ideal site for a case-study of sexual and gendered dynamics in lesbian-and-gay politics by dint of institutional (...) arrangements whereby separate spaces for lesbians and gay men respectively encourage reflexivity in working through these hyphens. While reflections from the lesbian feminist mirror have been active ingredients in the ongoing resocialization of gay men, it is argued that reflections from a gay male mirror will also be necessary if we are to nurture greater wisdom and justice in gender relations. Since the lesbian and gay group co-exists with other self-organized groups for women, black people and disabled people within a broader pro-socialist movement, the potential for working across other sets of differences is also noteworthy. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that a sustained coalition between lesbians and gay men is not sufficient in bringing about coalitions with other oppressed minorities or majorities, and may even be at loggerheads with them. (shrink)

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and (...) perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women's performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures. (shrink)

This article identifies and analyses links between conceptualisations of trans-gender and trans-national, and aims for a critical redefinition of political agency. Through an examination of theories on transing, passing and performativity in queer-, trans- and transnational feminist knowledge production—illustrated by discursive examples from transgender communities and Romanian migrant communities—I call for a conceptualisation of entangled power relations that does not rely on fixed, pre-established categories, but defines subjectivity through risk in political struggle. I suggest that ‘transing’ the nation and ‘transing’ (...) gender could be thought as critical moves for a radical deconstruction of gendered and national belonging. Rather than provide a static definition of the term ‘transnationalism’, the article explores potentials and limits of going beyond ‘the national’ and ‘gender’, and intervenes in forms of minority nationalism that reproduce racism, sexism, heteronormativity and gender binary as the norm of Western national belonging. In particular, building on Jasbir Puar's (2007) conceptualisation of homonationalism, the article shows how forms of nationalism in Western transgender and migrant communities rely on a combination of heteronormative binary gendering and the exertion of racism. While a conventionalised approach to transnationalism defines the term as a political strategy based on transnational politics, I play with suggesting different dimensions of transnationalism: it could mean ‘transgender nationalism’; the ‘assimilation of transgendered persons to the Western nation’; or ‘cross-border-nationalism’, a form of nationalism often established in migrant communities that constructs the diaspora as a nationalist extension of the homeland. My focus, therefore, is on analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging. Overall, and as an alternative to romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders, I suggest a power-sensitive epistemological and methodological shift in thinking entangled power relations, belonging and subjectivity in transnational feminist knowledge productions. (shrink)

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects (...) for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed. However, through induced lactation, adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people have begun breastfeeding with greater frequency. Although breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, it actually exposes the instability of binary categories of sex. Luce Irigaray insists that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always (...) keeping open the possibility of transformation and change. This article extends Irigaray’s work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer. (shrink)

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies (...) within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship. (shrink)

This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, (...) class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects. (shrink)

Many non-heteronormative Malaysian men find themselves on the receiving end of political, socio-cultural, and religious condemnations of their sexual identifyings and expressions. Their lived realities are often considered invalid, including from religious and theological perspectives. This article is a queer socio-theological project that examines the lived realities of six non-heteronormative Malaysian men who speak up and talk back on their sexualities and spiritual sensibilities. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology, and aided by the theological musings of Marcella Althaus-Reid and a (...) document of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences as analytical frameworks, this article analyzes and theologizes the complex processes of transcendent/desire, or negotiations of the “Profoundly More” and sexuality in the narratives of these men. This article suggests that transcendent/desire can be imaginatively assembled in three interrelated forms: as embodied connections with the transcendent; as a vocation; and as an imperative to flourish. (shrink)

This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...) and time and that can be answered by help of the sciences. While this book defends a sharp distinction between these approaches, it also argues that the insights gained by the distinct approaches can be fruitfully integrated into a comprehensive picture.The comprehensive picture promoted in this book, based on both philosophical analysis and resources from psychology and cognitive science, is a picture of reasons as items in a collective archive of mind – reconfiguring the “domain of reasons” as a collectively established and socially cultivated fund of considerations with normative weight. The developed Collective Archive View combines Reasons Fundamentalism as an answer to the conceptual question, with a social ontological proposal, similar to Haslanger’s critical realism, as an answer to the material question.Thereby, it introduces central ideas from the field of social metaphysics into metaethics. At the same time, it offers a way of settling some controversies within metaethics, going on between proponents of Reasons Fundamentalism and Constitutivism, realism and constructivism, as well as proponents of mind-dependence and mind-independence of normative facts. Finally, the proposal enables us to envision and conceptualize genuine normative change within a metaethical theory. (shrink)

Body image research focuses almost exclusively on women or overweight and obesity or both. Yet, body image concerns among thin men are common and can result, at least in part, from mixed messages in society around how men qua men should dress and behave in order to look good and feel good. Stand-alone interventions to meet these different messages tend to provide men with little therapeutic relief. This conceptual paper draws on literature from the medical humanities; gender and body image (...) studies; the social psychology of clothing; and the author’s own lived experience to address this contemporary problem. The paper embraces visual culture as a resource that can frame discussion of how two sets of ‘performativity’ might reduce male anxiety about thinness. First, thin men could choose repeatedly to wear masculine-looking clothing, which could create their masculinity as a personal aesthetic that strengthens the confidence to harness masculine traits in healthy ways. Secondly, health and allied health service providers could promote and reinforce such dress behavior by offering advice that integrates aesthetic and functional aspects of clothing. Empirical studies are needed to test this dual model of performativity. (shrink)

In this paper, I highlight and discuss two significant limitations of Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory. Although I focus on Zagzebski’s theory, I argue that these limitations are not unique to her approach but also feature in previous versions of moral exemplarism. The first limitation I identify is inspired by MacIntyre’s understanding of the concept of virtue and stems from the realization that the emotion of admiration, through which agents identify exemplars, should not be examined in vacuo. Scholars working on moral (...) exemplarism have failed to note that admiration is substantially influenced by prevailing socio-cultural norms and values. I show that ‘the admirable’ varies across cultures and time; and the employment of one’s own emotion of admiration in order to derive the meaning of terms such as virtue and duty would only result in a culture-specific understanding of morality. The second limitation, inspired by Butler’s social constructivist understanding of gender, rests on the realization that several features and characteristics of the agent influence their perception of moral excellence. I focus on the issue of gender and highlight that exemplarist theories justify a counter-intuitive gender-specific understanding of morality. (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)

Although same-sex couples and their offspring have been legitimised in many European countries, heteronormativity is still embedded in institutions and practices, thereby continuing to affect the daily lives of LGBT individuals. Italy represents a clear example of the hegemonic power of heteronormativity because of the fierce opposition to recognising lesbian and gay parenthood among many parts of society. This paper focuses on the peculiarities of the Italian scenario with the aim of highlighting how heteronormativity works in contemporary neoliberal contexts. By (...) drawing on queer and feminist perspectives, the article also analyses how LGBT equal rights demands can contribute, to some extent, to reinforcing heteronormativity. Implications concerning strategies for challenging the regime of normality and queering kinship are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative method of “autohistoría” in concert with theoretical analysis to reflect on my experiences as a queer teacher in the heteronormative United States schooling system. These reflections are aimed at unpacking the ways in which racialization, sexual orientation and coloniality are inseparably tied to living out one’s gender. It is this phenomenon of “Gender-as-Lived” that I urge become a focus of identity development research in education studies and is my central concern in this (...) post-intentional phenomenological study. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the liminal zone of “nepantla” as an embodied and in-between space of resistance offers to transform the practice of teaching into a vocation of healing. (shrink)

This article traces the various forms and roles of intellectuals and intellectualism in the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 while simultaneously serving as an introduction to the movement. It shows how the movement was formed by a range of intellectual ideas, both in terms of the political questions it posed and the tactics it employed. It also shows how Occupy affected the intellectual and political climate insofar as it became a phenomenon that (...) everyone with an interest in public debate had to take a stand on. The article argues that Occupy, with its experiment in alternative social and democratic structures, was an exercise in a form of organic and collective intelligence that attempted to guide American society in a more democratic and equal direction. By way of conclusion, the article discusses the aftermath of the protest camp and the effects of the movement. (shrink)

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the (...) perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries. (shrink)

With the hope of somehow contributing to the ongoing discussion on the topic, this paper is loosely based on the debate that emerged from Rob Sparrow's article “Should human beings have sex? Sexual dimorphism and human enhancement”. Building on some of his arguments, my claim is that we should not refer to gender when discussing not-yet-born agents. More broadly still, my intention is to provide a further analysis of the intersection of the concepts of gender and autonomy. I will begin (...) by briefly highlighting Sparrow's article and critiques, with special emphasis on the poststructuralist attack. In doing so, I will consider the differences between structuralism and poststructuralism in relation to this debate. Subsequently, I will draw a parallel between Judith Butler's notion of the performativity of gender, sex and Ronald Dworkin's distinction between zoe and bios. The next move will then be to re-divert attention to the crucial role that health plays in the discussion, suggesting that one of the substantial differences between human enhancers and non-enhancers is the ranking that health has in their corresponding scale of values. Setting the bar for how an organism functions “normally” will be the last step necessary to create the basis for my main claim: building on Butler's description of the singular agent in relation to others, I will suggest Jürgen Habermas and Onora O'Neill as credible and valuable expansions of a position willing to reconcile individual and relational autonomy, supporting this final claim with the words of Immanuel Kant. If we aim to use genetic engineering and preimplantation genetic diagnosis to prevent unhealthy children from being born – as I shall state we should – we can use this notion of normality in a way that will be accepted also by those who are historically critical of such a way of conceptualising a human being, only if we understand the parallel need for society to shift to a more inclusive and shared definition of autonomy. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for the debilitating motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, clinicians and commentators have noted that DBS recipients have not necessarily experienced the improvements in quality of life that would be expected, due in large part to what have been described as the ‘psychosocial’ impacts of DBS. The premise of this paper is that, in order to realise the full potential of DBS and similar interventions, clinical services need to (...) be arranged in such a way that these psychosocial dimensions are recognised and managed. Our starting point is that the psychosocial effects of DBS ‘in the field’ present us with analytically-useful disruptions: they disturb and foreground deeply held assumptions relating to the individual, health and its treatment, and which in a crude form manifest as the myth of technological solutionism within health care. Drawing on scholarship in medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS), we argue that DBS brings to the fore the relational dimensions of personhood, and demonstrates the emotional and social turmoil that can result if the relational dimensions of personhood are ignored by clinical services. In light of this, we argue that DBS should be implemented within a regime of care. Drawing on ethnographic research of a paediatric DBS clinical service, we provide an example of a regime of care, and conclude by reflecting on what other DBS services might learn from this paediatric service. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, I demonstrate how Louise Bourgeois used her artworks not only to better understand herself but also to cultivate a self capable of taking control of and reshaping the material of her past. Exploring her artworks in the context of Michel Foucault's understanding of technologies of the self, I both contribute to the appreciation of Bourgeois’ work and show how visual artworks can be used to understand, cultivate, and transform aspects of the self. Foucault's understanding of our subjectivity, (...) as formed and deployed by power tactics, suggests the need for the formation of new subjectivities as a tactic of resistance. While his view of subjectivity as contingently created allows for the possibility that it could be different, his understanding of the conditions of its creation in terms of power tactics seems to constrain the possibilities for alternative subjectivities. I argue that artworks can help us understand the contingency of our subjectivity and illustrate how something new can be created out of existing conditions, in ways that may disrupt those very conditions. Further, in addition to bringing us to an awareness of the possibility of creating new subjectivities, artworks can directly contribute to this process for both artists and audience members. Turning to Foucault's own understanding of Stoic writing practices as a means of knowing and controlling the self, I use Bourgeois’ work to illustrate how artworks can operate as technologies of the self, which work directly on the self, extending Foucault's understanding of the role of writing to consider the particular contribution that visual artworks can make. I explore how the visual form, sculptural medium, and materials of Louise Bourgeois’ works contribute to their operation as technologies of the self which can allow one to relate to oneself differently. (shrink)

Texts are language excerpts produced from specific points of view; they communicate specific worldviews and values. This implies that social science research on power in texts can benefit from an analysis of the perspective from which a story is presented. Nevertheless, discussion of concrete tools for doing this at the level of practical analysis is less common. This article describes a set of tools for analyzing positioning at two different levels: the level of enunciation – which focuses on narrator and (...) audience positions – and the level of utterance – which focuses on positions in stories. Moreover, addressing readers less familiar with discourse analysis and students new to discourse analysis, the article argues that combining tools for analyzing positioning with more general tools for analyzing meaning is advantageous because this allows for more detailed analysis of social power in texts and for more detailed description of the analytical process. (shrink)