How should feminists view acts of self-sacrifice performed by women? According to a long-standing critique of care ethics such acts ought to be viewed with scepticism. Care ethics, it is claimed, celebrates acts of self-sacrifice on the part of carers and in doing so encourages women to choose caring for others over their own self-development. In doing so, care ethics frustrates attempts to liberate women from the oppression of patriarchy. Care ethicists have responded to this critique by noting limits on (...) the level, form, or scope of self-sacrifice that work to restrict its role in their theories. While we do not here take issue with the initial feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, we suspect that the strategies offered by Care ethicists in response are importantly flawed. Specifically, these responses undervalue the positive roles that self-sacrifice can play in fighting patriarchal oppression. As a result, in attempting to restrict an oppressive norm, these responses risk foreclosing on valuable means of resistance. Our aim is to explore these positive roles for self-sacrifice and thereby rehabilitate its standing with feminists. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing "sex/gender arrangements". A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually "queered" academic discourses (...) by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated? (shrink)

Billy Wilder's classic film ‘Some Like It Hot’ prefigures Judith Butler's concept of performativity in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Butler introduced this in Gender Trouble , demonstrating that sex, gender and sexuality are naturalized effects of citation and repetition. In that text she explains that denaturalization is visibly demonstrated by drag. Later in Bodies that Matter she argues that drag in ‘Some Like It Hot’ does not denaturalize heterosexuality, but rather fortifies it. What then for Butler divides denaturalizing (...) drag from non-denaturalizing drag? Butler locates denaturalizing drag in the film ‘Female Trouble’ , where Divine's drag-queen persona satirizes gender in a hyperbolic performance. However, Butler misconstrues the cross-dressing performances in ‘Some Like It Hot’ as drag, which are better understood as instances of theatrical disguise. Narrative analysis reveals that all the characters in ‘Some Like It Hot’ function within a dystopian critique of heteronormativity. Because the film takes a performative view of sex, gender and sexuality, it can validate three queer couples who defy the strictures of heterosexual romance. Butler thus overlooks a discourse of critique and destabilization alternative to gay perspectives. Current developments in sexual politics, broadly conceived, track both Butlerian concepts of performativity and dystopian critiques of heteronormativity. (shrink)

Billy Wilder's classic film ‘Some Like It Hot’ prefigures Judith Butler's concept of performativity in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Butler introduced this in Gender Trouble, demonstrating that sex, gender and sexuality are naturalized effects of citation and repetition. In that text she explains that denaturalization is visibly demonstrated by drag. Later in Bodies that Matter she argues that drag in ‘Some Like It Hot’ does not denaturalize heterosexuality, but rather fortifies it. What then for Butler divides denaturalizing drag (...) from non-denaturalizing drag? Butler locates denaturalizing drag in the film ‘Female Trouble’, where Divine's drag-queen persona satirizes gender in a hyperbolic performance. However, Butler misconstrues the cross-dressing performances in ‘Some Like It Hot’ as drag, which are better understood as instances of theatrical disguise. Narrative analysis reveals that all the characters in ‘Some Like It Hot’ function within a dystopian critique of heteronormativity. Because the film takes a performative view of sex, gender and sexuality, it can validate three queer couples who defy the strictures of heterosexual romance. Butler thus overlooks a discourse of critique and destabilization alternative to gay perspectives. Current developments in sexual politics, broadly conceived, track both Butlerian concepts of performativity and dystopian critiques of heteronormativity. (shrink)

The notion of gender, introduced into France by queens and drags in the late 20th century (the glorious period of the "drag-queens") and revitalized by American "queer", follows a traditionally feminist path where homosexual and particularly male issues are once again being hidden away. Having played a big part in popularizing that first version, Patrick Cardon proposes, in order to avoid any misunderstanding and escape once for all from any attempts at reification, to use the term and the universal notion (...) of transgender, which would cover the deconstructivist notions of queer, post-colonial and cultural studies, in order to give a place intelligently to ALL diversities beyond any binarism and with a foresight of future hybridity. (shrink)

Doctoral learning entails transition from experienced student to stance-defending researcher, exposed to international critique: a disorientation and reorientation into a new identity. Arts and Hum...

Extant research notes a tendency to propound the idea that female managers are secondary to men. Gender differences constitute an ethical issue and the discursive constructions of gender management are central to research in business ethics. Drawing on evidence gathered from a time–space intersection that has been widely neglected by research in this area, we address whether female business leaders develop gender-stereotypic management styles as well as their propensity to adopt masculine management patterns such as making risky decisions and implementing (...) formal management systems. Our findings suggest that gender-stereotypic management styles are chosen strategically and target-driven, which implies a selective use of masculine and feminine management styles. Furthermore, as part of the masculine approach, female business owners adopt risk-taking decisions and implement formal management systems. Our results provide support for the argument that gender is context dependent and, hence, the findings of this study may be useful for contemporary jurisdictions featuring male-dominated societies and a strong intervention by the State in the economy. (shrink)

This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, pragmatic competence injustice, (...) testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering. Section 1 introduces the phenomenon by portraying it as an ensemble of epistemic injustices. Section 2 elucidates the variety of HI at the core of BGL by examining the case of mainstream Spanish, and section 3 reveals it as producing the primary harm of HI. Section 4 studies the relationship between grammar, ideology, and language use, calling attention to the fact that grammatical lacunae are performatively reenacted in daily speech acts. Section 5 explores the agential dimension of BGL, examining responsibilities. In addition to addressing some of the forms of epistemic injustice that might intertwine in BGL besides HI, I portray non-marginalized users of binary grammar when addressing non-binary people as hermeneutical misfirers. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...) *adult human female*. -/- In the first part, a number of arguments are given for the view that women are adult human females; the second part turns to rebutting the main objections. Finally, a couple of morals are briefly noted: one for activist sloganeering, and one for ameliorative projects that seek to change the meaning of ‘woman’. (shrink)

This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women's existence (...) and subordination. Accordingly, I argue that Beauvoir does not see “woman” as a mere becoming, as that which unfolds in time, but instead understands becoming a woman to be realized as lived time. As such, Beauvoir's account shows that gender and temporality are deeply entangled, and thus she challenges the classic phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence. More specifically, I argue that her account shows how a particular experience of time is an underlying structure of sexual objectification, a claim that expands on the feminist phenomenological claim that a particular relation to space becomes a way in which women take up and negotiate their own subordination and objectification. (shrink)

This paper revisits Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood – primarily as mobilized by the ‘Look, a Negro!’ scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man’s sense of alienation from his own body and his inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child (...) to reconsider Fanon’s ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan and some aspects of Lacanian theory opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon’s writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful. (shrink)

This article concentrates on what historians have borrowed and adapted from neighbouring disciplines in the last few decades, rather than what they have lent (much more rarely). It discusses the ‘social turn’ of the 1960s, the movements for historical anthropology and ‘psychohistory (drawing on psychoanalysis) in the 1970s, the literary turn of the 1980s (ranging from the poetics of history to the analysis of ‘fiction in the archives’), the history of ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ memory, the rise of the history of (...) gender, and the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s. In those forty years, historians were often in dialogue with social scientists and with other scholars in the humanities. In the 21st century, by contrast, there has been a rapprochement with experimental psychology and neuroscience (in the case of studies of memory and emotion) and with biology, culminating – so far – in a ‘bio-history’ concerned with the co-evolution of humans and animals. The famous opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is melting away. (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 article, identity politics is understood as a form of politics stressing collective but malleable group identities as the basis of political action. This notion of identity politics also allows thinking of identity as intersectional. The focus of this article, and a problem related to identity politics, is that when discussed in the context of the neoliberal order, identity politics has a tendency to become harnessed by the ethos of vulnerability. Some implications of the ‘vulnerabilizisation’ are considered in the (...) field of education, which is a field currently thoroughly affected by neoliberalism. Therefore, it is also important to look closer at the relationship between identity politics and the ethos of vulnerability. In addition, we re-consider poststructuralist thinking as a theoretical and political approach to see what it can offer in terms of re-thinking identity politics and in analyzing the ethos of vulnerability. When categories of vulnerability keep expanding into various psycho-emotional vulnerabilities defining subjects that can be known and spoken about, it is crucial to ask whether we regard these changes as educationally and politically progressive. The article discusses some problematic policies in educational environments and the phenomenon of trigger warnings. (shrink)

In this article I take the US television series Mad Men as an exemplary ‘approximation’, a term I adopt to signal the way in which certain texts construct a changeable, fluid ‘truth’ resulting from collisions, exchange and dialectical argument. Approximations are layered, their formal layerings mirroring a layered, multifaceted argument. Mad Men integrates and represents real historical events within a fictional setting, and act that suggests that an event or action can never be finished, fixed and not open to reassessment. (...) Specifically, this article examines ‘The Grown Ups’, Episode 12 of Season 3, which charts the events of 22 November 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated. Although we might be able to bring to mind the images and conspiracy theories that have been made available since, these images were not available at the time. Mad Men as a series always strives to represent its historical milieu as authentically as possible, so the characters re-enact 22 November 1963 as authentically as possible by watching only what was on television that day. The contemporary backdrop to these events, including the resonances of ‘9/11’ through Mad Men, inform and collide with the authenticity on the screen. (shrink)

This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868—1935), an early campaigner for ‘gay rights’ avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897—1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. When researching Hirschfeld’s biography (published in English in 1986) Wolff met a librarian and gay activist, Manfred Herzer, who would eventually be a cofounder of the Gay Museum in (...) Berlin and publish (in German, in 1992) the other major Hirschfeld biography currently available. Using, inter alia, the correspondence between Wolff and Herzer, the article aims to explore and interrogate the boundaries and possibilities of ‘biography’ as a form of ‘doing history’. (shrink)

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

Sex reassignment surgery is a therapy for gender dysphoria standardly provided only upon a psychiatric authorization. Transgender scholars criticize this practice as unjustified medicalization and stigmatization of transsexual people. By demanding that sex reassignment surgery is not classified as therapy, they imply it should be classified as some kind of a biomedical enhancement. It is argued in this article that this reclassification is empirically and morally implausible because sex reassignment surgery is incompatible with two major views of enhancement. It is (...) incompatible with the nontherapeutic view because it does not improve or augment, above average, any physical or mental trait or function. It is incompatible with the welfarist view because this view, contrary to the transgender scholars’s demands, is compelled to retain the standard practice of providing sex reassignment surgery in order to ensure the optimal balance between its availability, beneficence, and possible harmfulness. (shrink)

This paper details the ways that gender structures our senses of agency on an enactive framework. While it is common to discuss how gender influences higher, narrative levels of cognition, as with the formulation of goals and in considerations about our identities, it is less clear how gender structures our more immediate, embodied processes, such as the minimal sense of agency. While enactivists often acknowledge that gender and other aspects of our socio-cultural situatedness shape our cognitive processes, there is little (...) work on how this shaping takes place. In order to provide such an account, I will first look at the minimal and narrative senses of agency (Gallagher 2012), a distinction that draws from work on minimal and narrative selves (Zahavi 2010). Next I will explain the influence of the narrative sense of agency on the minimal sense of agency through work on intention-formation (Pacherie 2007). After a discussion of the role of gender in the narrative sense of agency, I’ll expand on work by Haslanger (2012) and Young (1980) to offer three ways in which gender influences the minimal sense of agency, showing the effect that gender has on how we perceive our possibilities for interaction in a phenomenologically immediate, pre-reflective manner. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a rethinking of the gendered body as both lived and historically constituted. These two dimensions are sometimes seen as irreconcilable, especially by some proponents of p...

Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial (...) arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Norway is considered to be one of the most gender equal countries in the world, the proportion of women in philosophy is still low. In this article, we reflect on women's presence in Norwegian philosophy, partly based on interviews with Norwegian women philosophers from different universities. -/- We discuss the low proportion of women among students and staff in the field, investigate whether gender perspectives and feminist philosophy are present in the study of philosophy today. We (...) also identify some characteristics of the Norwegian postwar philosophy, such as diversity and openness, power struggles and gender blindness. Our material also shows that measures to improve gender balance in philosophy, has met fierce resistance. We discuss how the features of Norwegian postwar philosophy, together with direct and indirect stereotypes on gender, rationality and natural properties, has contributed to the fact that women still are a minority in Norwegian philosophy. -/- We also argue that the study of feminist philosophy and the integration of gender perspective is necessary in order to achieve gender equality in the discipline, to pave way for a new development in Norwegian philosophy, and to ensure the quality of higher education. (shrink)

Oral history makes a critical contribution in articulating the perspectives of people often overlooked in histories written from the standpoint of dominating class, gender, ethnic or professional groups. Using three interrelated approaches — life stories, oral history, and narrative analysis — this paper analyzes family responses to psychiatric care and mental illness in oral history interviews with family members who experienced mental illness themselves or within their family between 1930 and 1975. Interviews with three family members in Alberta, Canada are (...) the primary focus. These stories provide an important avenue to understand the meaning and transformations of mental health‐care from the point of view of families. Family members’ stories reveal contradictory responses to the dominant cultural discourse. Using a performative framework of interpretation, the narratives reveal a complex interplay between medical, social and cultural conceptions of mental illness, deepening our understanding of its meaning. The history of mental health‐care can be substantially enriched by the analysis of family members’ stories, not only revealing the constructed nature of mental illness, but also illustrating the family as a mediating context in which the meaning of mental illness is negotiated. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure in Bracha Ettinger’s discussion on the “matrixial borderspace”: the structure of the experience of “the womb,” both from a “mother-pole” and a “fetus-pole”. Ettinger describes this borderspace as a place of differentiation-in-co-emergence, separation-in-jointness, and distance-in-proximity. The question this article poses is what kind of logic this experience is an expression of, as there seems to be a discrepancy in relation to the classical Aristotelian logic of identity. As an alternative to classical Aristotelian logic, (...) Nicholas of Cusa’s logic of the non-aliud is explored as a paradigm more in line with Ettinger’s description of pregnancy specifically and more generally, to an understanding of life as a co-poietic emergence of structures of pactivity and permeability. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory has been an incredibly powerful tool for understanding and improving organisations, and their relationship with other actors in society. That these critical ideas are now accepted within mainstream business is due in no small part to the influence of stakeholder theory. However, improvements to stakeholder engagement through stakeholder theory have tended to help stakeholders who are already somewhat powerful within organisational settings, while those who are less powerful continue to be marginalised and routinely ignored. In this paper, we (...) argue that one possible obstacle preventing less powerful stakeholders from speaking up and/or being heard by organisations is found at the ontological level, where we have identified an ‘essentialist self’ underpinning the stakeholder concept. By deconstructing the stakeholder concept through how it is defined, discussed and debated, and linking this back to the practical consequences of the theory for the least powerful stakeholders, we are able to make three contributions. One, through our deconstruction, it is clear that at an ontological level, stakeholder theory is underpinned by an implicit, and problematic, assumption of the ‘essentialist self’, where the organisation is treated as the ‘natural, universal self’, and anyone not closely resembling this narrow (and unrealistic) view of self is treated as ‘other’. Two, we build on the work of authors such as Wicks et al. (Bus Ethics Q 4(4):475–497, 1994), who highlight the need for consideration of the self within stakeholder theory. We thus take our findings from contribution one and begin to build a more holistic view of the self within the stakeholder concept, where each self is encouraged to recognise common selves outside and inside the corporation. Third, we link the theoretical discussion to the practical by discussing some imperfect ways in which a more holistic, enriched stakeholder concept might begin to help mitigate marginalisation for some stakeholders. (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)

This article revisits Arendt’s and Foucault’s converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben’s influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt’s and Foucault’s own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence (...) upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben’s assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt’s than it is to Foucault’s and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed (...) political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming. Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification. (shrink)

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this "denaturalization" of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be "renaturalized" so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

The literature on autonomous language learning reveals both, scholars’ great enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of learner autonomy as well as pessimism for its continual depoliticization within higher education. Similar to how ‘learner autonomy’ is still today an unfinished construct that raises considerable confusion among scholars, the critical theory of learner autonomy in the field of language learning remains largely unexplored; and thus, yet to be fully articulated. Building on the relevant literature, this article attempts to provide a coherent and (...) nuanced theoretical framework for the critical practice of learner autonomy in higher education. Results show how the field of language learning is dominated by uncritical and apolitical approaches that render learner autonomy a politically impotent practice. Critical autonomous language learning must be both critically aware—so it can raise students’ awareness of the structural and discursive constraints on their autonomy—and politically active—so it may lead to education reform and social change—, while also aiming at reaching the highest levels of institutional material support and student control possible. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores gender and mental health with particular reference to the emerging philosophical field of critical realism. This philosophy suggests a shared ontology and epistemology for the natural and social sciences. Until recently, most of the debate surrounding gender and mental health has been guided either implicitly or explicitly within a positivist or constructivist philosophy. With this in mind, key areas of critical realism are explored in relation to gender and mental health, and contrasted with the positions of (...) positivism and constructivism. It is argued that critical realism offers an alternative philosophical framework for the exploration of gender issues within mental health care. (shrink)

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowledge. In some versions of confessional feminism, the insertion of "I" is reflective, the product of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic discourse a personal truth. In contrast to reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a questioning mode that imposes self-vigilance on the process of self positioning.

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowledge. In some versions of confessional feminism, the insertion of “I” is reflective, the product of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic discourse apersonal truth. In contrast to reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a questioning mode that imposes self-vigilance on the process of self positioning.

This short piece introduces the Special Issue, giving both a general sense of the terms `belonging' and `performativity', and discussing key related concepts that unite the articles of the issue: difference and their differences; the politics of visuality; embodiment; and the idea of routes. The predominant themes as they appear in the different articles are discussed under these headings.

In this interview, Judith Butler speaks about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech, in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, she addresses both possible critiques of her work, expecially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and responds to questions around certain related themes such as: just what is the possibility of using the (...) same analytical framework to talk both about racializing and gendering processes? How useful is the concept of melancholia? How are textuality and visuality interconnected? (shrink)

In recent years, the debate on emotions has been influenced by postconstructionist research, particularly the use of performativity as a key concept. According to Judith Butler (1993, 1997) the construction of emotions is a process open to constant change and redefinition. The final result of emotionlanguage “natural” development is what is known as technoscience. New ways of naming emotions have emerged within technoscience. In our research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by cyber-café and call shop users, (...) we came to understand how these technologies are significant in those users’ daily life. The emphasis will be on analyzing emotions related to the use of ICT in the aforementioned settings. Using the concept of performance (Butler, 1990), we will explore how narratives create a need for particular emotions, which did not exist before they were performed. To understand this performance, we use an ad hoc tool called Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) as it is used by the Manchester School. Analysis has revealed the existence of a membership category in which velocity is salient as performance. This ‘velocity’ seems to follow the evolution of technoscience in the social sciences. We will observe velocity in the context created by two concepts, Donna Haraway’s (1990) cyborg and Alessandro Baricco’s (2007) mutant. (shrink)

Focusing on Judith Butler's highly influential work on gender, this article draws attention to a certain feminist inheritance of an emphasis on mimesis and imitation that resonates with the ways in which theoreticians responded to the calamitous events of essentialist politics and versions of belonging that were central to the political vision of Hitler's National Socialism and to the events of the Second World War. The intention is to point to this trajectory, to give Butler's work a genealogy that traces (...) the notion of mimesis back into work which employed the concept within socio-theoretical responses to anti-Semitism, in order to initiate a discussion of mimesis in a new contemporary agenda. The question of mimesis in this new agenda is significant in its reutilization of the concept in a way that moves the focus away from assumptions of the repressed natural process that underpinned Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis, and towards the complex manoeuvres of continued performances and continued `tradition', away from judgements of authenticity and towards the reasons why people maintain certain embodied subjectivities. Such a perspective raises the questions of generational relations, of foreclosed possibilities and of affective attachments to identity that reach beyond the Nietzschean sense of a wounded attachment. A focus on the responsibilities and pressures of `cultural survival' seems fruitful as a guiding concept in this exploration of the connections between identification, affiliation and the power contexts within which mimesis, as a form of repetition or `citation', occurs. (shrink)

Neuroaesthetics is the study of the brain’s response to artistic stimuli. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran contends that art is primarily “caricature” or “exaggeration.” Exaggerated forms hyperactivate neurons in viewers’ brains, which in turn produce specific, “universal” responses. Ramachandran identifies a precursor for his theory in the concept of rasa (literally “juice”) from classical Hindu aesthetics, which he associates with “exaggeration.” The canonical Sanskrit texts of Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra and Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabharati, however, do not support Ramachandran’s conclusions. They present audiences (...) as dynamic co-creators, not passive recipients. I believe we could more accurately model the neurology of Hindu aesthetic experiences if we took indigenous rasa theory more seriously as qualitative data that could inform future research. (shrink)