Drawing on the scholarship of Critical Religion, this article shows how the modern category “religion” operates through a gender code which upholds its discursive power and enables the production of religious—and therefore racial—hierarchies. Specifically, it argues that mentioning religion automatically makes gender present in discourse. Acknowledging religion as an inherently gendered category in this way gives further insight into the discursive power and functioning of the religious label. With the example of the Westphalian production of the “myth of religious violence” (...) and the employment of “religion” in colonial contexts, I demonstrate how a gender code upholds and enables the discursive power of religion. Religion is both gendered and gendering. Acknowledging the multiple ways in which religion is gendered and gendering, then, has important bearings on the analysis of religion’s racializing function which is upheld and aided by the gender code through which religion is spoken. (shrink)

What form does power take in situations of retaliation against whistleblowers? In this article, we move away from dominant perspectives that see power as a resource. In place, we propose a theory of normative power and violence in whistleblower retaliation, drawing on an in-depth empirical study. This enables a deeper understanding of power as it circulates in complex processes of whistleblowing. We offer the following contributions. First, supported by empirical findings we propose a novel theoretical framing of whistleblower retaliation and (...) the role of mental health, which draws upon poststructuralist psychoanalytic thinking. Specifically, we highlight how intra- and inter-psychic affective and ambivalent attachments to organizations influence the use of normative violence in cases of whistleblower retaliation. The second contribution is empirical and builds upon the existing literature on whistleblower retaliation by highlighting how organizations position whistleblower subjects as mentally unstable and unreliable individuals, to undermine their claims. We conclude by highlighting the implications of normative power for the outcomes of whistleblower struggles. (shrink)

Cluster headache is a notoriously painful and dramatic disorder. Unlike other pain disorders, which tend to affect women, cluster headache is thought to predominantly affect men. Drawing on ethnography, interviews with headache researchers, and an analysis of the medical literature, this article describes how this epidemiological “fact”—which recent research suggests may be overstated—has become the central clue used by researchers who study cluster headache, fundamentally shaping how they identify and talk about the disorder. Cluster headache presents an extreme case of (...) medicalized masculinity, magnifying the processes of gendering and bringing into relief features of the world whose routine operation we might otherwise overlook. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in their (...) respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the lives of women with persistent vulvar pain for what they can reveal about the enmeshment of gender, (hetero)sexuality and bodily practices. Women with vulvodynia are unable to perform the central heterogendering act of penetrative intercourse with a male partner. They describe this inability as rendering them effectively ‘genderless’, described as being ‘not a real woman’ or a ‘fake woman’. I analyse their perceptions of gender and bodily performance in relation to feminist theorizing about (...) gender and sexuality, and I argue for the centrality of the lived body to the epistemology of feminist efforts to theorize gender. This paper is based on in-person interviews with 20 women and web-based open-ended interactions with 70 women with vulvodynia. (shrink)

This project explores the political economy, logic, strategies, agents, values, and ethical implications of this latest iteration of modern capitalism, and it seeks to delineate what surveillance capitalism is and what its consequences are for human dignity and worth. Using technologies of which they are ignorant, surveillance capitalists interfere with our ability to become ourselves individually and collectively. Without consent, they invade privacy, impede moral autonomy, harm democracy, and muddle care. Surveillance capitalists also violate a number of foundational ethical principles, (...) failing the standards of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. I sketch out a broad alternative to surveillance capitalism, one where our media systems are built on decentered understandings of a care-based democracy. Reinvigorating both the press and collective self-government, the caring digital citizen has less need for surveillance, requiring good faith understanding and the moral autonomy to pursue excellence. (shrink)

This article examines a recent judgment by the European Court of Human Rights that upheld the complaint of a homosexual woman who alleged that her application for authorization to adopt a child had been refused by domestic French authorities on the grounds of her sexual orientation. I argue that the judgment constitutes an innovative and atypical legal consideration of, and challenge to, the heteronormative social relations of contemporary European societies. After exploring the evidence presented by the applicant, and the Court’s (...) interpretation of it, I argue that in order to reach its judgment it was necessary for the Court to make a significant departure from its established jurisprudence in relation to sexual orientation. An essential element of this involved the adoption of a distinctive critical approach, strongly resonant with aspects of ‘queer theory’, which focused attention on the social, cultural and political construction of normative heterosexuality. Whilst a number of commentators have assessed the importance of the judgment in terms of its evolution of ‘gay rights’ in the area of family life, I argue that the Court’s reconceptualized ‘theoretical’ understanding of, and critical approach to, heteronormativity offers the potential to expand the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights across a number of areas of social life—in marriage, public assembly, freedom of expression, as well as family life—where non-heterosexuals continue to face discrimination in contemporary Europe. (shrink)

The 2010 Quinnipiac cheerleading case raises interesting questions about the nature of both cheerleading and sport, as well as about the moral character of each. In this paper we explore some of those questions, and argue that no form of college cheerleading currently in existence deserves, from a moral point of view, to be recognized as a sport for Title IX purposes. To reach that conclusion, we evaluate cheerleading using a quasi-legal argument based on the NCAA’s definition of sport and (...) conclude that cheerleading fails to qualify as a legitimate sport. A philosophical argument leads to the same conclusion, primarily because of the essential entertainment-aspect of cheerleading. We then examine a consequentialist moral case for making cheerleading an intercollegiate sport and argue that the balance of moral reasons is against doing so. Finally, we look at cheerleading’s newest offspring – Acrobatics and Tumbling, and STUNT – and express our moral reservations about their current claims to be worthy of Title IX recognition. While we would not claim that any single one of our arguments is decisive, we are convinced that the cumulative weight of the arguments against granting intercollegiate sport status to any of the forms of cheerleading or its derivatives is, at present, irresistible. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose an existentialist-phenomenological model that conceives of mental illness through the terminology of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In particular, the concepts of existentiality, disturbance and the relation between ‘being-with’ and ‘the one’, will be implemented in order to reconstruct the experience of mental illness. The proposed model understands mental illness as a disturbance of a person’s existentiality. More precisely, mental illness is conceptualized as the disturbance of a person’s existential structure, the process of which leads to (...) a becoming explicit of the otherwise implicit dynamical structure that constitutes a person’s experience. In particular, the existential component of ‘being-with’ comes to play a central role in the disturbance of existentiality, thus, I will claim, that it enables a person’s structure of experience to be ‘open for normativity’. By adopting a pragmatist stance on Heideggerian phenomenology, the suggested model proves compatible with naturalist and normativist theories of mental illness while still offering a phenomenological description of the phenomenon. (shrink)

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist (...) killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education research as well as anecdotal evidence, relating these experiences to the theories. It thus aims to tie together theoretical insights, higher education scholarship, and ordinary real-life experiences of gendered social relations in conference activities. (shrink)

This article analyzes the structure of the “we relation” drawing on Alfred Schütz's theoretical framework. It argues for a flexibilization of the initial framework in order to capture not only the tension, but also the variations in the relation between the lived experience of the other in lived duration and the reflection upon the other, through which meaning is constructed. In order to do so, it revisits Schütz’s claims about immersion into togetherness as part of the experience of copresence and (...) it bridges them with the apparently opposite Sartrian view of the other as either objectifying or being objectified. This leads to certain shifts in the distinction between consociates and contemporaries and sheds light upon the ways in which the process of constructing the other as meaningful is not an added layer, but a co-constitutive element in the vivid experience of copresence and of absence. (shrink)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

This essay argues that the material conditions of capitalist patriarchal societies are more integrally linked to institutionalized heterosexuality than they are to gender. Building on the critical strategies of early feminist sociology through the articulation of a materialist feminist theoretical framework, the author provides a critique of contemporary sex-gender theory. She argues that the heterosexual imaginary in feminist sociological theories of gender conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing (...) institution.... every sociological concept and thesis, as well as the overall patterning of these concepts and theses, is potentially open for reconsideration... With the emergence of feminist sociological theory, the critical emphases in sociology are strengthened by an insistence that sociological work be critical and change-oriented... in an intensely reflexive way towards sociology itself (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1990:318). We must produce a political transformation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts which are strategic for us (Wittig 1992:30). (shrink)

Recent years have seen the advent of two feminist judgment-writing projects, the Women’s Court of Canada, and the Feminist Judgments Project in England. This article analyses these projects in light of Carol Smart’s feminist critique of law and legal reform and her proposed feminist strategies in Feminism and the Power of Law (1989). At the same time, it reflects on Smart’s arguments 20 years after their first publication and considers the extent to which feminist judgment-writing projects may reinforce or trouble (...) her conclusions. It argues that both of these results are discernible—that while some of Smart’s contentions have proved to be unsustainable, others remain salient and have both inspired and hold important cautions for feminist judgment-writing projects. (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)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - particularly the work of Luce (...) Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (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 part anger plays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This article critically assesses approaches to emotions that emphasize managing anger in accordance with ‘feeling rules’. It reflects on the utility of Marxist notions of conflict as the engine of change for the understanding of how anger operates in political life. This involves understanding the ambivalence of anger and its operation (...) within particular power relations. Shifting sets of conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Western nations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. But clearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politically. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second wave’ are taken as illustrative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced in dealing with anger. These difficulties were due to trying to juggle social conventions about femininity, the political ideal of sisterhood, and the realities of dealing with other women in often new and experimental political processes. Anger could be personalized and hurtful, but in certain cases its expression was constructive in producing more respectful relations. Exploring these cases makes it clear how anger produces, and is produced by, relations with others. (shrink)

This article examines three key aetiological theories of autism, which emerged within cognitive psychology in the latter half of the 1980s. Drawing upon Foucault’s notion of ‘forms of possible knowledge’, and in particular his concept of savoir or depth knowledge, two key claims are made. First, it is argued that a particular production of autism became available to questions of truth and falsity following a radical reconstruction of ‘the social’ in which human sociality was taken both to exclusively concern interpersonal (...) interaction and to be continuous with non-social cognition. Second, it is suggested that this reconstruction of the social has affected the contemporary cultural experience of autism, shifting attention towards previously unacknowledged cognitive aspects of the condition. The article concludes by situating these claims in relation to other historical accounts of the emergence of autism and ongoing debates surrounding changing articulations of social action in the psy disciplines. (shrink)

Given that care duties are central to the definition of motherhood across contexts, an extended separation from the woman’s family due to migration presents a major threat to her social identity as a mother and wife. Drawing on West and Zimmerman’s notion of “doing gender” and ethnographic research on Vietnamese low-waged contract workers in Taiwan, I provide vital insights into the discursive processes and everyday practices that underlie migrant women’s negotiations of motherhood and femininity. Specifically, I examine the various ways (...) migrant women perform and negotiate meanings of hy sinh and chịu đựng that are core values of Vietnamese womanhood. Combating the stigma of bad motherhood and failed femininity, I emphasize, is not just about reasserting one’s sense of gendered self but also about reassuring her access to the future support and care of the family. The study emphasizes intentionality and pragmatism in women’s social doings of gender and highlights moral dilemmas in gender politics. (shrink)

The fast development of synthetic media, commonly known as deepfakes, has cast new light on an old problem, namely—to what extent do people have a moral claim to their likeness, including personally distinguishing features such as their voice or face? That people have at least some such claim seems uncontroversial. In fact, several jurisdictions already combat deepfakes by appealing to a “right to identity.” Yet, an individual’s disapproval of appearing in a piece of synthetic media is sensible only insofar as (...) the replication is successful. There has to be some form of identity between the content and the natural person. The question, therefore, is how this identity can be established. How can we know whether the face or voice featured in a piece of synthetic content belongs to a person who makes claim to it? On a trivial level, this may seem an easy task—the person in the video is A insofar as he or she is recognised as being A. Providing more rigorous criteria, however, poses a serious challenge. In this paper, I draw on Turing’s imitation game, and Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction, to propose a heuristic to this end. I call it the identification game. Using this heuristic, I show that identity cannot be established independently of the purpose of the inquiry. More specifically, I argue that whether a person has a moral claim to content that allegedly uses their identity depends on the type of harm under consideration. (shrink)

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model (...) emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity. (shrink)

This article identifies and analyses the dominant stories that academics tell about the development of Western second wave feminist theory. Through an examination of recent production of interdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journals, I suggest that despite a rhetorical insistence on multiple feminisms, Western feminist trajectories emerge as startlingly singular. In particular, I am critical of an insistent narrative that sees the development of feminist thought as a relentless march of progress or loss. This dominant approach oversimplifies the complex history (...) of Western feminisms, fixes writers and perspectives within a particular decade, and repeatedly (and erroneously) positions poststructuralist feminists as ‘the first’ to challenge the category ‘woman’ as the subject and object of feminist knowledge. Rather than provide a corrective history of Western feminist theory, the article interrogates the techniques through which this dominant story is secured, despite the fact that we (feminist theorists) know better. My focus, therefore, is on citation patterns, discursive framings and some of their textual, theoretical and political effects. As an alternative, I suggest a realignment of key theorists purported to provide a critical break in feminist theory with their feminist citational traces, to force a concomitant re-imagining of our historical legacy and our place within it. (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)

This article draws attention to the production and circulation of genetic knowledge among three constituencies—laboratory researchers, clinicians, and health advocates— all of whom have a stake in research on a heritable connective tissue condition known as Marfan syndrome. National and international conferences provide a context that brings members of these groups together. Such meetings are performance settings, which include the display of visual images depicting various aspects of Marfan syndrome and of the bodies and lived experience of those who have (...) it. The article examines how these images are interpreted, appropriated, and exchanged and how their circulation is both grounded in local knowledge and the grounds for transformative translocal practice. (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)

This article brings into conversation two important literatures in contemporary political theory that have, for the most part, failed to engage one another: work spanning more than two decades on multiculturalism and identity politics, and neo-republican work on nondomination. The authors take as their starting-point two widely endorsed claims: that identities are constructs and that state actors play a crucial role in their construction. Their question is how democratic states should shape identity, and their central claim is that states should (...) do so in ways that promote what they call democratic nondomination. This ideal, they stress, is multifaceted. It has both an action-level and a system-level component. In addition, it has both an inter-agentive and an impersonal dimension. Attending to democratic nondomination in its complexity is crucial to the project of evaluating alternative possible forms of state identity construction. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a framework for re-imagining gender-based violence not as an outgrowth of patriarchy but as a response to the threat of gender integration and the inversion of the gendered hierarchy. I argue that this reconceptualization is critical to re-envisioning not just research but also prevention and intervention strategies. I begin by identifying two reasons for the stalled revolution in reducing rates of gender-based violence: the focus on intimate partner violence and sexual violence as distinct rather than (...) as similar tools that are simply deployed in different spaces, and the de-centering of Black feminist voices and the obscuring of the similarities between gender-based violence and racialized violence. Finally, I conclude with recommendations to transform policies and hegemonic ideologies that limit the impact of gender-based violence—including by holding perpetrators accountable—and render it socially unacceptable, thus creating the foundation for building social institutions that are diverse, inclusive, and equitable. (shrink)

Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently “natural” bodily process. Yet, how menstruation is defined or what “counts” as menstruation is rarely questioned. Examining menstruation alongside technologies that alter it highlights these definitional questions. In this article, I examine menstrual suppression through an analysis of medical journal articles and FDA advisory committee transcripts, paired with websites used to market menstrual suppression to consumers. Across these contexts, new definitions of menstruation converged (...) on a distinction between bleeding that occurs when women are taking hormonal birth control and when they are not. The case of menstrual suppression birth control pills provides an opportunity to study the work of redefining a biological process understood as quintessentially natural and deeply significant for gendered embodiment, as well as a challenge to consider both the social and material construction of gendered bodies. (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)

In this essay I explore the economic, social, environmental and cultural changes taking place in Bolsena, Italy, where agricultural livelihoods have rapidly diminished in the last two decades. I examine how gender dynamics have shifted with the changing values and livelihoods of Bolsena through three women’s narratives detailing their gendered experiences of environment, community and self. I reflect on these changes with Sabrina, who is engaged in a feminist community-based organization; Anna, who is running an alternative wine bar; and Isabella, (...) a jeweler, who is engaged in ecofeminist practices. My analysis is based on concepts developed by feminist political ecology: specifically, the theory of rooted networks from Dianne Rocheleau, Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures (and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham on new economic imaginaries emerging from the politics of place. I aim to think with, reflect upon and provoke from the “otherwise”, taking into account the lived relations entwining nature and gender. My article looks at the interconnections of gender, environment and livelihoods, attentive to the daily needs, embodied interactions and labours of these three women as part of a reappropriation, reconstruction and reinvention of Bolsena’s lifeworld. By listening to the stories of their everyday lives and struggles, I show the dynamic potential of the politics of place and the efforts to build diverse economies and more ethical economic and ecological relationships based on gender-aware subjectivities and values. (shrink)

In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from a women's floor in a university residence hall to examine how some heterosexual women's gender strategies contribute to their homophobia. The author describes a prevailing heterosexual erotic market on campus—the Greek party scene—and the status hierarchy linked to it. Within this hierarchy, heterosexual women assign lesbians low rank because of their assumed disinterest in the erotic market and perceived inability to acquire men's erotic attention. Active partiers invest more in (...) this social world and prefer higher levels of social distance from lesbians than do others. These women also engage in same-sex eroticism primarily designated for a male audience. They define their behaviors as heterosexual, reducing the spaces in which lesbians can be comfortable. Finally, the author concludes by discussing the unique nature of women's homophobia and the links between sexism and heterosexism. (shrink)

At the present historical moment, the modernization of the Greek nation is at the forefront of discussion in the Greek public sphere. In the shadow of this discussion, the official public sphere has also been grappling with a very low national birth rate - approximately 100,000 per population of 11 million. This statistical phenomenon is coupled with a high frequency of abortion, between 150,000 and 200,000 in 2001, and is referred to in the media and policy discussions as `the demografiko', (...) Greece's `No. 1 or No. 2 national problem'. This article examines popular Greek perceptions of the problem of the national birth rate and the contestation between meanings of nationhood that the resulting discourses both illuminate and, as the author shows, sometimes incite. The focus is on what women living in Athens say about the demografiko. These are voices not currently being heard in the public sphere. The author argues that the demografiko's articulation of `Greece' is a window through which one witnesses the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, just as they are also being played out at the site of gender and reproduction elsewhere in Europe and Asia. (shrink)

The Roman arena is often described as an exotic or peripheral institution. Alternatively, it has been seen as a culturally central institution. In this case one traditionally assumes either that the arena is used to pacify the lower classes or that it expresses themes of violence at the heart of Roman society. In the first view the arena's politics are cynical; in the second they are often described as decadent or full of despair. While none of these readings should be (...) neglected, this essay argues that the arena can be examined as a productive institution which helps in the maintenance of Roman social relations from the top to the bottom and from the violent to the banal. When viewed in the light of Louis Althusser's idea of the ideological state apparatus, the arena can be read as political and psychological without recourse to notions of cunning calculation or psychic crisis. The arena is not only normal, but it participates in the production of normativity. This study pays particular attention to the ways in which the arena enables a specific kind of vision of the Roman world. In this vision the Roman nobiles in general and, later, the emperor in particular are reaffirmed as legitimate authorities: the rulers perhaps need the arena more than does the mob. The arena is also a locus at which the relations of domination which subsist between Rome and its subjects and between the sexes are reproduced in both the social and theatrical senses: the arena stages culturally vital spectacles. Indeed the export of the arena into the Roman provinces also entails the exportation of the Roman social structures which the arena serves. The Romanness of the arena is in fact so pervasive that even many of the hostile appraisals of the arena which come to us from antiquity reproduce the hierarchical social vision which the arena enables even as the institution itself is repudiated. Accordingly all representations of the arena need to be read within the logic of the arena itself. The ideology of the arena has no outside. (shrink)

In this article the extent to which stories and personal narratives can and should be used to inform education policy is examined. A range of studies describable as story or personal narrative is investigated. They include life-studies, life-writing, life history, narrative analysis, and the representation of lives. We use 'auto/biography' as a convenient way of grouping this range under one term. It points to the many and varied ways that accounts of self interrelate and intertwine with accounts of others. That (...) is, auto/biography illuminates the social context of individual lives. At the same time it allows room for unique, personal stories to be told. We do not explicitly discuss all the different forms of auto/biography. Rather, we investigate the epistemology underlying the personal story in the context of social action. We discuss the circumstances in which a story may validly be used by educational policy makers and give some examples of how they have done so in the past. (shrink)

Within the digital workforce, women are disappearing. While there are many factors that could be ‘blamed’ for this phenomenon, this article takes issue with the sexist and patriarchal discourses that are deployed within the digital workforce. In many ways, sexist discourses are taken for granted within the digital workplace; and in that way, the discourses themselves are rendered invisible through a lack of concerted uncovering of the ways that these sexist discourses produce—and reproduce—women as sexual objects and outsiders in this (...) field of work. The sexist and patriarchal discourses I address in this article validate the gender binary even as there is gendered play. It is this ‘play’ that also makes counter-hegemonic discourse and discursive acts productive, as I argue toward the end of the paper. Schools are a place where counter-hegemonic discourses and acts can be nurtured and, hopefully, affect and counteract the disappearance of women in digital fields. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which narratives speak to issues of national identity - its production, reproduction, and contextual performance. Drawing first upon literature in history education, the paper explores the multivoiced nature of the historical narratives which structure American national identity projects. The paper next employs phenomenological methodology in order to explore the narratives produced by students in speaking about school experiences, which they found to have a national component. In this section, there is a particular focus on (...) the teacher as a powerful text as read by students - a curriculum of its own right. The paper concludes by moving to theorize, using phenomenological and post-structural analyses, the relationship between the personal and the national, lived and historical experiences - while maintaining a focus on the civic and pedagogical implications of the data analysis. (shrink)

This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that ‘the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image’ by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilises digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity, and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it (...) to concrete and ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, this project focuses specifically on a genre of post popularised by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that oppose imperfectly ‘real’ material bodies to unrealistically ‘perfect’ media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on quotidian practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final dataset of eighty-nine posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analogue body and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in everyday practices, and affirming female Instagram users as theorists of their cyborg selves. (shrink)

In this essay, the author joins a conversation started by Martin regarding gender and education seeking to extend the conversation to address sexuality. To do so, the author brings a reading of the Marquis de Sade to challenge the emphasis on reproduction in education as it relates to gendered and sexual norms. The author, following Martin’s approach in Reclaiming the Conversation, reads one particular text of Sade’s—Philosophy in the Bedroom—to argue for queer possibilities that Sade brings to the conversation around (...) gender and sexuality within twenty-first century education. The Marquis de Sade may viscerally seem an inappropriate choice to return to and use to join the conversation, but his novelic imagination incites complications in the conversation. Following in the footsteps of Martin’s re-reading of historic philosophical texts the author offers not only another layer of thinking about “female education,” but also opens up space for engaging gender and sexuality in the history and philosophy of education. As issues around gender and sexed bodies become ever more present and contested in educational discourses, does Sade continue the conversation in ways that corrupt the reproductive aims of education? (shrink)

Much has been written on Michel Foucault's reluctance to clearly delineate a research method, particularly with respect to genealogy (Harwood, 2000; Meadmore, Hatcher & McWilliam, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). Foucault (1994, p. 288) himself disliked prescription stating, ‘I take care not to dictate how things should be’ and wrote provocatively to disrupt equilibrium and certainty, so that ‘all those who speak for others or to others’ no longer know what to do. It is doubtful, however, that Foucault ever intended for researchers (...) to be stricken by that malaise to the point of being unwilling to make an intellectual commitment to methodological possibilities. Taking criticism of ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis as a convenient point of departure to discuss the objectives of poststructural analyses of language, this paper develops what might be called a discursive analytic; a methodological plan to approach the analysis of discourses through the location of statements that function with constitutive effects. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to construct a critique of some works by the French artist Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun, who was active between 1910 and 1950. A writer and photographer, Cahun was at first very close to symbolist positions; later she was closer to the surrealist movement. Her work and her life, continually suspended between genders, and between ‘normality’ and ‘deviance’, have so far been analysed mainly through gender studies. This article attempts to restore the (...) inherent complexity of her poetic work and aesthetic. It tries to widen the field of study to deal with the representation of alterity, through reversing the stereotypical representation. (shrink)

This article takes the role of provocateur to ‘queer(y)’ the rules of intelligibility surrounding new schooling accountabilities. Butler’s work is seldom used outside the arena of gender and sexualities research. A ‘queer(y)ing’ methodology is subsequently applied in a context very different to where it is frequently associated. Empirical data from a case study secondary school in Australia are used to contextualise the use of queer theory in thinking differently about new schooling accountabilities and how they can unfold in ways that (...) are unforeseen and unexpected. By applying Butlerian theory in a manner very different to what is commonly expected, the author also destabilises the use of queer theory as well. (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 article examines the historically embedded relations of three 19th-century phenomena in which the non-consuming body is constituted as a spectacle of admiration. These three phenomena, known as Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists, all emerged and disappeared in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the emergence and disappearance of the three phenomena as embedded in the historical crossroads of pre-modern and modern ethics, the article argues that each of these phenomena corresponds differently to the clash between (...) modern `rationality' and the pre-modern celebration of `miracles'. The article maintains that while Fasting Women epitomized that clash by becoming (a highly contested) spectacle of `the miraculous', the Living Skeletons transcended the clash by portraying a spectacle of liminal corporeality (the `living dead') and the Hunger Artists announced the dissolution of that very clash by performing a spectacle of `the controlled self'. Through a focus on the spectacle of fasting (i.e. the appeared, performed, `gazed at' act of fasting), a phenomenological typology of the three phenomena is outlined. I suggest that while Fasting Women and Living Skeletons embodied a spectacle of a lean body, which does not require suffering, the Hunger Artists embodied a spectacle of hunger centred on suffering and pain. The phenomenological `mapping' of these phenomena is then considered in the context of `performativity theory' and proposed as a frame of reference for a sociological study of anorexia nervosa. (shrink)