: Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires, retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Masculinities: Liberation through PhotographyBarbican Art Gallery, 20 February–17 May 2020.

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. Interrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscribes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding Jacques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the (...) Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism. (shrink)

This article challenges the idea that individual and collective agency require centred, fixed identities to be efficacious and meaningful. In post-foundational political thought, this idea frequently underpins an understanding of the subject as something temporarily consolidated through constitutive exclusions and a claim that political and ethical thought must negotiate the necessity for and inevitable failure of these exclusions. Against this thesis, the article presents a reading of Nietzsche’s analysis of the drives and their relation to the ego, holding that for (...) Nietzsche drives are synthesized into a complex but still dispersed assemblage that generates the illusion of unity in the form of an ego or ‘I’. For Nietzsche, the article argues, concrete agency is located in this assemblage of differences, the semblance of a centre being important in the coordination of these differences, but having no causal efficacy itself. The article concludes by examining whether Nietzsche falls into a variant of the ‘homunculus problem’ before turning to the doctrine of eternal return and showing how Nietzsche links his ethics to using the semblance of identity in order to overcome the need to link subjectivity to identity. (shrink)

This essay is a fictocritical meditation upon the contemporary transformation of temporal experience as we find ourselves embarked upon an accelerating process of climate change and species extinction, including possibly that of the human species. The essay offers an extended reading of a recent villanelle published in John Kinsella’s Book of Villanelles that in turn responds to a controversial project by the Adani mining consortium to begin extracting coal over a large swathe of Wangan and Jagalingou country in the Central (...) Queensland Galilee Basin. The essay is an extract from a collaborative work in progress by John Kinsella and myself, Per Se: On the Imperatives of Place II, that will appear in early 2021 with Narr, building upon ˈtεmprərɪnəs: On the Imperatives of Place. (shrink)

: This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's "feminist pragmatist standpoint theory" as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism (...) and universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a "transactional model" of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the "terrible truths" of violence and oppression. (shrink)

This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's “feminist pragmatist standpoint theory” as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism and (...) universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a “transactional model” of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the “terrible truths” of violence and oppression. (shrink)

A critical application of Ruddick's model of maternal thinking is the best way to grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by sex- selective abortion which I view as a "moral mistake." Chief among these is the need to be sensitive to local cultural practices in countries where sex- selective abortion is prevalent, while simultaneously developing consistent international standards to deal with the dangers posed by the use of sex- selective abortion to eliminate female fetuses.

This paper will interpret Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and materialization as a theory of identity, and so put it into dialogue with a phenomenological account of habit formation. The goal is to argue that identity is developed already at a bodily level and that this takes place via the processes of habit formation. The constitution of subjectivity, in other words, requires at the most basic level some kind of bodily performativity. What follows intends to draw out the concept of (...) ‘the body’ in Butler’s work, the role of which is surprisingly meagre given her clear favour of language signification in the elaboration of her theory of performativity. Alternatively, this paper will provide a phenomenology of habit formation that re-introduces the body not as thematic materiality, but as lived materiality. The body will therefore be conceived as something which is already skilful and creative, sensitive and vulnerable, and ultimately, as Butler anticipates, responsive to the intertwinement of individual and social aspects of identity formation. In this regard, I will argue for a performative theory of (bodily) habitual identity. (shrink)

The `sexual citizen' is a new phenomenon in the erotic world, and a new player in the political and cultural arena, a product of the new primacy of sexual subjectivity in contemporary societies. Living at the fateful juncture of private claims to space, self-determination and pleasure, and public claims to rights, justice and recognition, the sexual citizen is a hybrid being, who tells us a great deal about the pace and scale of cultural transformation and new possibilities of the self (...) and identity. Consideration of the sexual citizen also offers a new angle on recent debates about citizenship in all its complex dimensions, bringing to the fore issues that have often been occluded in these debates. The article explores these issues through the prism of three significant social developments: the democratization of relationships; the emergence of new subjectivities; and the proliferation of new `stories' about the body, the erotic and intimate life which both signal and encourage the growth of social and cultural capital, and in turn lead to new demands on the institutions of political life. (shrink)

“Interpretive social science” includes a variety of differing epistemological, methodological, and political commitments. It is to the credit of Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely’s Interpretive Social S...

: This paper responds to the sense of "crisis" or "trouble" that dominates contemporary feminist debate about the categories of sex and gender. It argues that this perception of crisis has emerged from a fundamental confusion of theoretical and political issues concerning the implications of the sex/gender debate for political representation and agency. It explores the sense in which this confusion is manifest in a debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.

This paper responds to the sense of “crisis” or “trouble” that dominates contemporary feminist debate about the categories of sex and gender. It argues that this perception of crisis has emerged from a fundamental confusion of theoretical and political issues concerning the implications of the sex/gender debate for political representation and agency. It explores the sense in which this confusion is manifest in a debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.

In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. (...) In this paper I reconstruct Butler’s response to this challenge, arguing that there is an interesting and plausible path from ontology to politics. I draw on Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction to elucidate the central concepts of Butler’s ontology: vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependency. I argue that one of Butler’s central attempts to derive an ethic of nonviolence from ontology is unpersuasive, resting on a conflation of the ontological and ontic senses of ‘interdependency’. Nonetheless, I contend that Butler is right that genuinely acknowledging our vulnerability is likely to make us more responsive to the claims of others, loosening the grip of ideals of invulnerability and sovereign independence. These ideals and the violence they encourage amount to a disavowal of our ontological condition, while commitment to nonviolence is a way of acknowledgingshrink)

: The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), (...) to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of language (...) can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning, to show how philosophy of language can (...) contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

This paper traces the history of uses of the word “gender”. It suggests that though “gender” has been recuperated and become commonplace, many issues persist around the way “women” and “men”, and the power relations between them, are defined and are evolving. Provided it still allows us to question the meanings attached to the sexes, how they are established and in what contexts, gender remains a useful, because critical, analytical category.

This article contributes to the revision of the concept of system in social theory using complexity theory. The old concept of social system is widely discredited; a new concept of social system can more adequately constitute an explanatory framework. Complexity theory offers the toolkit needed for this paradigm shift in social theory. The route taken is not via Luhmann, but rather the insights of complexity theorists in the sciences are applied to the tradition of social theory inspired by Marx, Weber, (...) and Simmel. The article contributes to the theorization of intersectionality in social theory as well as to the philosophy of social science. It addresses the challenge of theorizing the intersection of multiple complex social inequalities, exploring the various alternative approaches, before rethinking the concept of social system. It investigates and applies, for the first time, the implications of complexity theory for the analysis of multiple intersecting social inequalities. Key Words: complexity theory • inequality • intersectionality • social theory. (shrink)

This article pursues the hypothesis that there is a structural affinity between the case study as a genre of writing and the question of gendered subjectivity. With John Forrester’s chapter ‘Inventing Gender Identity: The Case of Agnes’ as my starting point, I ask how the case of ‘Agnes’ continues to inform our understanding of different disciplinary approaches to theorizing gender. I establish a conversation between distinct, psychoanalytically informed feminisms to move from the mid-20th century to contemporary cultural debate.

Beginning with a rumination on the AIDS-inspired poetry of Thom Gunn, this article by the guest editors introduces the special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities titled “Queer in the Clinic.” After providing an overview of the historical legacy and contemporary dilemmas of LGBTQ persons in biomedical practice, the authors describe the rationale of the issue and the contributions included.

This paper explores the commodification of animals, beginning with Marx’s description of how value arises within a system of exchange. Drawing from Irigaray, I observe that value in animals is both arrived at through the use value of the animal as a commodity for human consumption and as a form of currency which serves a function in reproducing the value of the “human” itself. Extending this further, I reflect on Derrida’s discussion of the metaphor as a way to understand the (...) removal of the skin of the animal in order to produce value. As I argue, we find here a convergence of material and symbolic violence which produces value in a way which is distinct from other commodities, and participates in generating the “mirage” of human sovereignty over other animals. (shrink)

By questioning the attribution of a primary role to the eyes as bearers of identity within traditional Western culture, this paper will problematize the agentivity performed by the lower mereology of the face, identified with the mouth-nose assemblage. In particular, the study will focus on the manipulation of such facial spatiality through the intervention of three “lower face” artifacts: the grill, the ball gag and the gas mask. This piece of work will examine their plastic and figurative dimensions in the (...) technological interaction with the facial organs. Furthermore, we will take into consideration the sociocultural context of wearability performed by the different bearers with the aim of grasping the identity shift that the artifacts trigger. The study, therefore, will organize the corpus as a sequence that starts inside the oral cavity where the grill is worn; then moves to a progressive exteriority with the ball gag that emerges from the mouth through the straps fastened around the head; eventually dealing with the exterior projection operated by the gas mask which by means of its filters portends beyond the anatomical face. Ultimately the three artifacts are presented as a threefold articulation of a liminal agency towards an expanded form of humanity including animality embedded within and without the space of meaning represented by the face. (shrink)

This article explores subversion as a practice of resistance and draws on the example of subversive radio for illustration. Radio became an important site of power struggles in the twentieth century, often placed in the service of both resistance and oppression. An examination of subversive acts in radio broadcasting, I argue, helps shift the focus away from the myths of heroic resistance, directing attention to the uncertainties encountered by the subversive actor. To make this argument, I build on Frantz Fanon’s (...) influential work on the resistant potential of radio and engage with literature on subversion and everyday resistance. The article illustrates the ambiguity of subversion on the case study of Radio Bantu, a broadcaster of ethnic-specific radio programmes established by the South African apartheid regime. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the possibility of conceiving a form of social critique that has its locus in the human body. Therefore I engage in a close reading of the work of Butler which can be analysed as an elaboration of a Foucaldian critical ‘virtue’. In order to elaborate and to refine my ideas I go deeper into the criticisms McNay has uttered regarding the very impossibility of taking any distance from a given social or political order within a (...) Foucaldian–Butlerian framework. I show that there is no need to have recourse to a phenomenological perspective, as McNay claims, in order to achieve ‘critical distance’. On the contrary, I argue that it is imperative to explore a register of bodily experience that entails self-expropriation and which is linked to an attitude or ‘ethos’ that renounces any judgemental perspective. (shrink)

It has become almost commonplace to recognise that teaching is an embodied practice. Most analyses of teaching as embodied practice focus on the embodied nature of the teacher as subject. Here, we use Butler's concept of performativity to analyse the reiterated acts that are intelligible as—performatively constitute—teaching, rather of the teacher as subject. We suggest that this simultaneously helps explain the persistence of teaching as a narrow repertoire of actions recognisable as ‘teaching’, and the policing of conformity to teaching thus (...) embodied. However, like performatively accomplished subjectivity, this repertoire is unstable and ambiguous, and thus open to change and disruption. Moreover, teacher subjectivities may lead them to mobilise these possibilities of disruption. (shrink)

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis-"woman," "femininity," etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A "discursive" approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we model an alternative to it? It proposes that a notion of the mimetically inclined subject is required, one that thickens Cavarero’s affirmative account of inclination by way of a new philosophical understanding of mimesis that includes habit and disciplinarity. Following Cavarero, the mother is positioned as a key figure to place nurturing and love at the centre of subject-making. However, they are shown to be a (...) necessary but not sufficient step for the process of re-evaluation. An account of disciplinary mimesis which draws on a Nietzschean legacy in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as a situation, demonstrate the pitfalls of idealizing the mother. I argue that to challenge the particularized universalism of the European subject with an affirmative account of mimetic inclination, other figures which embrace Cavarero’s notion of relational vulnerability alongside the mother are required. The agonistic friend who practices an open, feminist curiosity is proposed as one such exemplar and, in closing remarks, I gesture to other necessary models in feminist and Indigenous thought that are key to remaking the androcentric subject of European philosophy. (shrink)

: This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights (...) and that making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect how audiences and (...) SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity, bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate. (shrink)

In this article we examine the hundreds of videos that were posted to YouTube in response to the fierce anti-Islam video Fitna. We use this case to analyse whether and how the participatory opportunities of the digital technologies invite performances of citizenship, especially with respect to the articulation of religious and/or political identity. The sheer numbers of YouTube activities demonstrated that this was not at all a marginal phenomenon within the wider Fitna and Wilders controversy, making the question as to (...) what these videos mean, or – to be more precise – for which contexts the posters make them meaningful, all the more pressing. We used the concepts of ‘voice’, ‘performance’ and ‘citizenship’ to approach this issue and found that the video genres unique to visual digital culture each invited their own kinds of political and religious performances, and assumed particular traits and interests of their audience. The most common YouTube reaction for Muslims was to upload copies of videos that expressed their own understanding of Islam as a peaceful religion in contrast to the picture drawn by Wilders. The jamming videos saying sorry were unique digital means of activism, enabling a particular participation in the controversy around Fitna that assumed a global audience open to apology. The cut-and-mix videos appeared to be especially welcome means for satire and parody, and appealing to audience emotions, but also for the deconstruction of Fitna, which addressed audience cognitive competence. Vlogging about Fitna was often part of a more regular practice of video production that was individually or institutionally maintained. We conclude that the particular articulations of religious and political identities, with different modes of audience address assume a connectedness between dispersed people in which new forms of citizenship emerge. (shrink)

For over a decade the Hawaiian crow, or ‘alalā, has been extinct in the wild, the only remaining birds living their lives in captivity. As the time for possible release approaches, questions of species identity – in particular focused on how birds have been changed by captivity – have become increasingly pressing. This article explores how identity is imagined and managed in this programme to produce ‘authentic’ crows. In particular, it asks what possibilities might be opened up by a move (...) beyond relatively static notions of how these birds ought to be, towards more performative understandings of species identity. This shift in focus prompts us to ask how we might take up the task of learning to be part of these birds’ own experiments in emergent forms of ‘crow-ness’, so that we might begin to craft vital new forms of ‘polite’ conservation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss. (shrink)

This article seeks to identify the political and ideological dimensions of the contemporary presence of information technology or infotech. This presence is experienced as the progressive unfolding of technology as the logic of the social itself. Rather than approaching these dimensions through their reduction to a ground, a symbolic totality or a specific interest, and argument is constructed from Laclau and Mouffe's concept of `antagonism' in conjunction with Claude Lefort's notion of `invisible ideology'. This gives the argument the advantage of (...) relating the constitution of ideology to a historically specific political formation, instead of positing a timeless relation to the constitution of an abstract subject as the ground of an explanation. The argument is that insofar as information technology appears as a substance that absorbs the dynamic of community, which I call autotechnopoiesis, then ideology constructs the identity of this space with itself. The political is understood as the failure of this self-presence. In conclusion, these issues are located in terms of the governmentality of the `performative state' which seeks the recruitment of subjects to the `promotion of the social' through an investment in the banality of communication. (shrink)

This article develops a comparative and recursive approach to political ontology by drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology. It claims that if ontological commitments define reality, then the use of ontology by recent pluralist political theorists must undercut pluralism. By charting contemporary anthropology’s rereading of structuralism as part of a plural understanding of ontology, it will be shown that any political ontology places limits on the political, and thus cannot exhaust political experience. This position will be established through an (...) analysis of the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and a comparison with the political ontology represented by perspectivism and potential affinity. Anthropology’s lesson for political theory is that ontology cannot simply be revised and treated in the singular, but that political ontologies must be analysed comparatively to reveal the shortcomings of, and recursively alter, one’s own political frame of reference. (shrink)

This paper offers a reading of Todd Solondz Happiness (1998) in relation to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference. It argues that both the film and theorist present a ‘logic’ of sexuality and sexual difference which seems to owe much to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic but that in the end owes more to Kojève’s (mis)reading than to Hegel himself. It outlines the usefulness of an expanded notion of the dialectic to understand sexual difference through the inclusion of the Hegelian figures of the (...) stoic, the sceptic and the unhappy consciousness. It also suggest that the priority of identity and non-identity to dialectic logic has been obscured by this focus on the master-slave relationship and that an analysis of the role of the autoerotic develops modes of sexual similarity and difference that cuts across heteronormative gender lines. The anxiety both Lacan and the film seem to suffer with regard to autoerotic is then used to critique their sexual conservatism and their prescriptive rather than descriptive representation of sexual relationships. (shrink)

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life.