This paper explores the sense in which modern societies can be said to be rational. Social rationality cannot be understood on the model of an idealized image of scientific method. Neither science nor society conforms to this image. Nevertheless, critique is routinely silenced by neo-liberal and technocratic arguments that appeal to social simulacra of science. This paper develops a critical strategy for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique. Romantic rejection of reason has proven less effective than strategies that (...) conceptualize modern artefacts, systems, and organizations as rationally underdetermined. This approach first appears in Marx's analysis of capitalist economics. Although he lacks the concept of underdetermination, Marx gets around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like it in his discussion of the length of the working day. Frankfurt School Critical Theory later blended romantic elements with Marxian ones in a suggestive but ambiguous mixture. The concept of underdetermination reappears in contemporary science and technology studies, now clearly articulated and philosophically and sociologically elaborated. But somewhere along the way the critical thrust was diluted. Critical theory of technology attempts to recover that thrust. Here its approach is generalized to cover the three main forms of social rationality. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a new avenue for feminist technology studies—gender-aware research on engineers and engineering practice—on the grounds that engineers are powerful symbols of the equation between masculinity and technology and occupy significant roles in shaping new technologies. Drawing on the disparate evidence available, the author explores four themes. The first asks why the equation between masculinity and technology is so durable when there are such huge mismatches between image and practice. The second examines this mismatch in (...) the detail of engineering knowledge and practice to reveal that fractured and contradictory constructions of masculinity frequently coexist. The third theme addresses the suggestion that women and men might bring different styles to engineering. Finally, the author explores subjective experiences of engineering to argue that engineers’ shared pleasures in and identification with technology both define what it means to be an engineer and provide appealing symbols of power that act to compensate for a perceived lack of power or competence in other arenas. (shrink)

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

This article explores the ways in which predictive information technologies are used in the field of personalized medicine and the relations between this use and how patients and disease are perceived. This is examined in a qualitative case study of a personalized cancer clinical trial, where oncologists made clinical decisions for each patient based on drug matchings and efficacy predictions produced by bioinformatic technologies and algorithms. I focus on personalized practice itself, as a postgenomic phenomenon, rather than on epistemic, ethical (...) and institutional critiques. Personalized medicine aims to process molecular, clinical, environmental and social data into individually tailored decisions. In this case, however, the engagement of clinicians with data and digital artefacts that processed multiple information sources resulted in treatment choices that were paradoxically both immutable and uncertain. In contrast to the situatedness of the body in postgenomics, this practice subverted the personalized medical approach while decontextualizing both cancer and patients. (shrink)

In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political subject, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject. The psychoanalytic perspective serves to appraise the importance (...) of hiding for the subject effects of excessive exposure to the Other’s gaze. I conclude to the importance of the subject’s being able to hide, even when it has nothing to hide. By considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy. (shrink)

This article applies a critical femininities perspective to the concept of women’s leadership, interrogating the market-oriented instrumentalization of femininity. The author presents empirical research consisting of in-depth interviews conducted with young women leaders in European student organizations. These participants juggle complicity and subversion as they negotiate the divergent expectations of femininity and leadership through interpersonal interactions and sociocultural positionalities. In these narratives the themes of social responsibility, difference, femininity, culture and embodiment are interlaced. The analysis of findings complicates monolithic interpretations (...) of femininity by evidencing intra-categorical fracturing, multiplicity in locations and manifestations of femininities, conflicting attachments and affective relations to femininity, and broader geopolitical contextualization. This theoretically and practically challenges tropes of hegemonic femininity, and presents opportunities for resistance. On this basis the author argues for countering the feminist trouble of engaging with non-transgressive femininity from within strongly normative spaces in the development of critical femininity studies. (shrink)

: As Val Plumwood argues, the Christian otherworldly is ecologically problematic. In relation to time, space, being and agency, this article considers the tendency to dualism in Christian appeals to the otherworldly. In the context of Plumwood's critique of nature-skepticism, I ask whether we should also critique an otherworldly skepticism. I then set out five possibilities for understanding the Christian otherworldly in relation to nature and culture. I argue that the otherworldly can be understood not only as a problematic cultural (...) notion that participates in the devaluation of nature, but as a way of understanding the otherness of nature, as having purposes and agencies beyond the cultural construction of earth as world. An understanding of nature as other-worldly presents challenges for both Christian theologies and environmental ethics. (shrink)

StyleLikeU is a hugely successful online social media platform that presents itself as a social justice movement related to body acceptance. Presenting moving personal stories, it offers a site for what it calls ‘diverse individuals’ to share their experiences as part of promoting individual self-acceptance in the face of a world that prioritizes one kind of body over another, which take the form of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sizeism and prejudice against disfigurement. Drawing out the discursive script carried (...) across the platform, we show how, beneath the rhetoric of progressiveness, social justice becomes a kind of personal therapy, related to empowerment and transformation, which erases actual differences in personal circumstances and the very forces of injustice. We place StyleLikeU into broader scholarly concerns about the neoliberal colonization of identity politics, diversity and intersectionality in institutions and in branding, drawing attention to how this can form one part of what are now presented as social justice movements. (shrink)

This article is based on interviews with a small number of cohabitants who are critical of conventional marriage. It examines some of the ways in which the distinction between heterosexual cohabitation and marriage is rendered in the New Zealand context. Culturally available distinctions, like that between cohabitation and marriage, are used in the production of resistant counterdiscourses. However, difference can be rewritten as deviance and in this form is central to the exercise of disciplinary power. Contextual shifts in the assertion (...) of a cohabitational self and a marital self contribute to the blurring of the distinction, further exposing the dilemmas of resistance based on difference. (shrink)

This article examines the role of mainstream political participation in the quest for gender equitable citizenship as a measure of the attainment of democracy. Citizenship stands here as the appropriate measure for the implementation of women's rights as human rights. The article examines citizenship status through the prism of representation in mainstream politics in the context of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to European Union accession negotiations, gender was marginal on the political agenda in most countries in the (...) region. Indeed, what counts as 'political' had been narrowed to denote formal party and legislative politics alone. The contradiction between this definition and the discursive validation of civil society involvement is explored, both within the region and by international donor agencies and supranational governments such as the European Union. Some empirical evidence of the barriers hindering women's access to the public sphere of the polity is presented. Finally, strategies such as the introduction of quotas that are designed to overcome the factors curtailing women's capacity to become active citizens in the public sphere of politics are discussed. (shrink)

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

This article is concerned with the construction of feminist literary studies in the last twenty years and points out how we have created a literary history which is both selective and schematic. It suggests that we should be more critically aware of what we are constructing, how we are constructing it and of the political consequences of those constructs. It stresses three critical modes which might help us to complicate our history: a greater awareness of institutional contexts, a concern with (...) empirical detail, and an ongoing analysis of the cultural and political significance of feminist literary practice. This article briefly applies these critical modes in a survey of eleven introductions to feminist literary studies – introductions which feature frequently and influentially in the teaching situation. The final section focuses on the key problem of inclusion and exclusion. Considering arguments from Third World feminism and postmodernist feminism, the study concludes that white, academic feminists should confront the privilege of their own inclusion as a necessary spur to political action. (shrink)

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in (...) Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive. (shrink)

Susanne K. Langer contributed an exhaustive account of aesthetics, Feeling and Form, in which she articulated her schema of the virtual and wove together the aesthetic elements of music, visual arts, dance, and literature/theater. This analysis of her work centers on two key concepts within her philosophy: the virtual as the aesthetic effect of the work and the perception of the work through intuition. In this paper, I re-read Langers philosophy through a perspective built on intersections between phenomenology, pragmatism, and (...) post-structuralist theory in order to reveal the relevance of her work to current understandings of how the dancing body produces and conveys meaning. I endeavor to show how her work provides a practical, conceptual system for understanding dance as an a-linguistic form of meaning-making, bodily experience, and knowledge. (shrink)

Due to its problematic political and social position between two opposed sexual cultures, bisexuality has often been ignored by feminist and lesbian theorists both as a concept and a realm of experiences. The essay argues that bisexuality, precisely because it transgresses bipolar notions of fixed gendered and sexed identities, is usefully explored by lesbian and feminist theorists, enhancing our effort to devise an ethics of difference and to develop nonoppressive ways of responding to alterity.

Its critics call it ‘feminism-as-crime-control’, or ‘Governance Feminism’, diagnosing it as a pernicious form of identity politics. Its advocates call it taking sexual violence seriously – by which they mean wielding the power of the state to ‘punish perpetrators’ and ‘protect vulnerable women’. Both sides agree that this approach follows from the radical feminist analysis of sexual violence most strikingly formulated by Catharine MacKinnon. The aim of this paper is to rethink the Governance Feminism debate by questioning this common presupposition. (...) I ask whether taking MacKinnon’s analysis of sexual violence seriously might, in fact, itself give us reason to be critical of political strategies that embrace the punitive state. By raising this question, I hope to persuade radical feminists to listen to critics of carceral politics rather than dismissing them as rape apologists, and critics of carceral politics to listen to radical feminists rather than dismissing them as state apologists. (shrink)

Historians have linked the emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities to the development of capitalism. A materialist approach should also look atdifferentforms of sexual identity, and their connections with specific phases of capitalist development. Marxist long-wave theory can help us understand how the decline of Fordism contributed to shifts in LGBT identities, speeding the consolidation of gay identity while fostering the rise of alternative sexual identities. These alternative identities, sometimes defined as ‘queer’, characterised by sexual practices that are still stigmatised, by (...) explicit power-differentials and above all by gender-nonconformity, are particularly common among young and disadvantaged working-class strata. The growing diversity of identities is a challenge to any gay universalism that neglects class, gender, sexual, racial/ethnic and other differences, to the currently dominant forms of lesbian/gay organising, and ultimately to the prevailing division of human beings into gay and straight.1. (shrink)

Embodied interface agents are designed to ease the use of technology. Furthermore, they present one possible solution for future interaction scenarios beyond the desktop metaphor. Trust and believability play an important role in the relationship between user and the virtual counterpart. In order to reach this goal, a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance and behavior of the artifact is pursued. According to the notion of the Uncanny Valley, however, this actually may have quite the opposite effect. This article provides (...) an analysis of the Uncanny Valley effect from a cultural and gender studies perspective. It invites readers to take a closer look at the narratives that influence the production of anthropomorphic artifacts. The article starts with a short introduction of the idea of the Uncanny Valley and gives a brief overview of current artifacts. Following this, a semiotic view on computer science is proposed, which in a further step serves as an epistemological grounding for a gender-critical rereading of the Turing test. This perspective will be supported by analyzing a classic story of user and artifact—E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narration of Olimpia. Finally, the special character of anthropomorphic artifacts is discussed by taking Freud’s concept of “Das Unheimliche”, as well as theories of identity formation into consideration, closing with a plea for a more diverse artifact production. (shrink)

In this article, I extend the feminist use of Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting to consider the contemporary externalization of memory foregrounded by transgender experience. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals argues that memory is “burnt in” to the forgetful body as a necessary part of subject-formation and the requirements of a social order. Feminist philosophers have employed Nietzsche’s account to illuminate how gender, as memory, becomes embodied. While the account of the “burnt in” repetitions of gender allows (...) us to theorize processes of embodied identity on an individual level, analyzing gender today requires also accounting for how gender is externalized. I take up this question through the specific examples of identity documents and sex-segregated bathrooms. Returning to Nietzsche’s call to practice a resistant forgetting, I conclude by exploring the distinct strategies required to disrupt externalized memory. These strategies include contesting the use of past gender assignments in data collection and rewriting architectural reminders of gender. (shrink)

This article reports on ethnographic research into the practical and ethical consequences of the implementation and use of telecare devices for older people living at home in Spain and the United Kingdom. Telecare services are said to allow the maintenance of their users’ autonomy through connectedness, relieving the isolation from which many older people suffer amid rising demands for care. However, engaging with Science and Technology Studies literature on “user configuration” and implementation processes, we argue here that neither services nor (...) users preexist the installation of the service: they are better described as produced along with it. Moving beyond design and appropriation practices, our contribution stresses the importance of installations as specific moments where such emplacements take place. Using Etienne Souriau’s concept of instauration, we describe the ways in which, through installation work, telecare services “bring into existence” their very infrastructure of usership. Hence, both services and telecare users are effects of fulfilling the “felicity conditions” of an achieved installation. (shrink)

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.

This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscribed" begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential (...) criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. (shrink)

Phenomenological, process-based and post-Marxist approaches have stressed the immanent nature of the ontogenesis of our world. The concept of performativity epitomizes these temporal, spatial and material views. Reality is always in movement itself: it is constantly materially and socially ‘performed’. Other views lead to a pre-defined world that would be mostly revealed through sensations. These transcendental stances assume that a subject, although pre-existing experience, is the absolute condition of possibility of it. In this paper, we develop another view of performativity, (...) one that re-introduces transcendence in the analysis but sees in it something dialogical to the process itself. We draw from the notions of visibility-invisibility and continuity-discontinuity in order to show how everyday activity both performs and makes visible the world. From that perspective, modes of visibility appear as conditions of possibility of performativity itself. We draw some implications for the conceptualization of management practices. (shrink)

'Transgender’ is often described either as an identity, or else as the full spectrum of gender nonconformity. In this essay, I suggest that these descriptions do not align with the conceptual labor that we often ask ‘transgender’ to do: highlighting people who engage in forms of self-directed gender nonconformity that are heavily penalized.

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and ofers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic (...) developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reifcation and dehumanisation of such developments. (shrink)

Austin's theory of performatives has recently inspired much literature on political correctness, based on the idea that they can be essential for the individuals' identity construction, but also for oppression and offence. In this paper I intend to analyze the power but also the limitations of performatives: we should refrain from attributing them magical efficacy, insofar as their power is actually constrained by objective conditions. This invites a revision of post-modern theories according to which any speech creates its own «regime (...) of truth», without any chance for an objective analysis of ideology. (shrink)

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists 1571 as the year of the first recorded use of the English word ‘masculinity’; the Ancient Greek ανδρεια (andreia), usually translated as ‘courage’, was also used to refer to manliness. The notion of manliness or masculinity is undoubtedly older still. Yet, despite this seeming familiarity, not only is the notion proving to be highly elusive, its understanding by the society being in a constant flux, but also one which is at the root of bitter (...) division and confrontation, and which has tangible and far-reaching real-world effects. At the same time, while masculinity has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in academia, the large body of published work seldom goes to the very foundations of the issue, failing to explicitly and with clarity reach a consensus as to how masculinity ought to be understood. Herein I critique the leading contemporary thought, showing it to be poorly conceived and confounded, and often lacking in substance which would raise it to the level of the actionable and constructive. Hence, I propose an alternative view which is void of the observed deficiencies, and discuss how its adoption would facilitate a conciliation between the currently warring factions, focusing everybody’s efforts on addressing the actual ethical, deconfounded of specious distractions. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination between (...) Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

Ordinary discourse is filled with discussions about ‘sexual orientation’. This discourse might suggest a common understanding of what sexual orientation is. But even a cursory search turns up vastly differing, conflicting, and sometimes ethically troubling characterizations of sexual orientation. The conceptual jumble surrounding sexual orientation suggests that the topic is overripe for philosophical exploration. This paper lays the groundwork for such an exploration. In it, I offer an account of sexual orientation – called ‘Bidimensional Dispositionalism’ – according to which sexual (...) orientation concerns what sex[es] and gender[s] of persons one is disposed to sexually engage, and makes no reference to one’s own sex and gender. (shrink)