The paper argues that the act of looking, as defined between the story of Gyges, Candaules, and the offended queen and the story of Solon's visit to Lydia, functions in the first book of Herodotus, and perhaps also elsewhere throughout the Inquiry, as a metaphor for the relation of the histôr to the object of his investigation. Further, by a careful comparison of the Gyges story in Herodotus with the queen's own narration in the enigmatic "Gyges Tragedy" , we can (...) define a Herodotean psychology of spectation that bears a striking resemblance to the specifically tragic psychology manifest in the fragment. Herodotus positions his readers, the paper argues, in the place of Gyges, forcing them to look-in their imaginations-on what does not belong to them, just as the theatai in the Theater of Dionysus must look in imagination on the scene described by the queen. While the tragic audience is protected from the fate of Candaules and of Gyges' descendant Croesus by the constitutive blindness of tragedy that prevents the spectators from seeing what happens in the mukhos, Herodotus' audience must seek some other reassurance that they will not face the voyeur's penalty. This paper finally argues that Solon's theôria, with its crucial purpose of establishing the nomoi of Athens and its crucial ethic of looking not at the object of desire but at the end, installs in Herodotus' historiê the psychology of tragedy: to look desiringly is to lose, but to look inquiringly is to learn. (shrink)

Let us begin with a fundamental realization: No amount of thinking and no amount of public policy have brought us any closer to understanding and solving the problem of crime. The more we have reacted to crime, the farther we have removed ourselves from any understanding and any reduction of the problem. In recent years, we have floundered desperately in reformulating the law, punishing the offender, and quantifying our knowledge. Yet this country remains one of the most crime-ridden nations. In (...) spite of all its wealth, economic development, and scientific advances, this country has one of the worst crime records in the world.With such realization, we return once again—as if starting anew—to the subject of crime, a subject that remains one of our most critical indicators of the state of our personal and collective being. If what is to be said seems outrageous and heretical, it is only because it is necessarily outside the conventional wisdom both of our understanding of the problem and of our attempt to solve it. (shrink)

Recent discussions have connected Nietzsche’s philosophy of masculinity to the return of authoritarian politics. Neoconservative debates about masculinity, and right-wing extremism, explicitly refer back to Nietzsche’s philosophy and often present democratization, a feminization of society, and political correctness as responsible for a weakening of masculinity. One example for this reception of Nietzsche’s writings is Jordan Peterson’s psychological diagnosis of a presumed crisis of masculinity. This article undertakes a comparison of Nietzsche’s philosophy of masculinities with Peterson’s neo-Jungian psychology of masculinity in (...) the context of recent conceptualizations of patriarchy, misogyny, and gendered forms of ressentiment. This comparison will highlight that Nietzsche’s conception of masculinity is more complex, and has philosophically more to offer, than neoconservative ideas about masculinity that onesidedly foreground male strength. Finally it will be pointed out how a Jungian analysis discloses aspects of the Dionysian that are of relevance to contemporary gender studies of Nietzsche’s philosophy. (shrink)

While communities engaged in liberatory struggles have valued group loyalty and condemned betrayal, loyalty itself may be problematic, because remaining loyal to a community may require that one refrain from deconstructing the group identity on which the community is based. This essay investigates what loyalty is and whether loyalty is a virtue, and considers why, if loyalty is indeed a virtue, it may be one that is difficult to maintain in a context of oppression.

This paper traces how the concern with political transformation is central both to arguments for and against essentialism. But while pro‐essential argumentation is concerned with identity, as a condition of change, anti‐essentialist reasoning sees change as dependent on the historical mutability of identity. Using Freud, this paper attempts to reconcile these positions through focusing first, on identification rather than identity; and second, on an unorthodox concept of essence, stressing its energetic commonality between beings.

When assumed by positions of dominance, the impersonal, analytical perspectives of scholar- narrators may serve to flatten, simplify, or render invisible the differences of constructed Others. Strategies of resistance necessarily correspond to where narrator-subjects enter relations of power. Without the presence of Others' narrations, dominance can neither value newly visible subjective agency nor confront the complicity in its own subjectivity. Intersubjectivity suggests a dialogical process that utilizes differences in lived experience to reconceive relationality.

AbstractMichel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other (...) animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault's failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault's work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault's writings to consider how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault's accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human–nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article delineates a process through which members of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles unintentionally delegate boundary work and membership-identification to anonymous others in everyday life. Living in the midst of a non-Jewish world, orthodox men are often approached by others, both Jews and non-Jews, who categorize them as “religious Jews” based on external marks such as the yarmulke and attire. These interactions, varying from mundane interactions to anti-Semitic incidents, are then tacitly (...) anticipated by members even when they are not attending to their “Jewishness”—when being a “Jew” is interactionally invisible. Through this case, I argue that, in addition to conceptualizing boundaries and identifications as either emerging in performance or institutionally given and stable, the study of boundaries should also chart the sites in which members anticipate categorization and the way these anticipations play out in everyday life. (shrink)

While the subject of women’s activity in historical and contemporary punk scenes has attracted significant attention, the presence of trans women in punk has received comparatively little research, in spite of their increasing visibility and long history in punk. This article examines the conditions for trans women’s entrance in punk and the challenges and opportunities that it offers for their self-assertion. By linking Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia with the way trans women in punk do their gender, an attempt is (...) made at showing how the embodied experience of a trans woman making herself heard from the punk stage can serve as a site of ‘gender pluralism’. (shrink)

What is social construction? This essay offers a survey of the various ways in which something could be socially constructed and then addresses briefly the questions whether social constructionism involves an untenable anti-realism and what, if anything, unifies all social construction claims.

The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of language. Although he has dedicated a significant part of his work to the study of language and even though his analysis of language has been extensively discussed in the literature, almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions, that is, on a set of universal assumptions about the very nature of language. (...) This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a detailed overview of 10 key features which, from a Bourdieusian point of view, can be regarded as inherent in language. On the basis of this enquiry, the study seeks to demonstrate that—contrary to common belief—there is not only a Bourdieusian sociology of language but also a Bourdieusian philosophy of language, which provides a useful theoretical framework for examining the unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on the flaws and limitations of Bourdieu’s approach to language. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that recent leftist criticisms of "identity politics" do not address problems of inequality and interaction that are central in thinking about contemporary democratic politics. I turn instead to a set of feminist thinkers who share these critics' vision of politics, but who critically mobilize identity in a way that provides a conception of democratic citizenship for our inegalitarian and diverse polity.

: My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer (feminist) analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

: This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, I provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct.

This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, 1 provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct.

In 1994 Elizabeth Stuart addressed the situation of the lesbian and gay community with regard to its relationship with Church, Community and with Feminism. Since writing the 1994 paper she has engaged in more reflection on the nature of desire in the light of the tragedy of human relating. If desire cannot have its telos, its fulfilment in human relating which is fragile and mortal and yet can enable us temporarily to create room in ourselves for others, then it must (...) point beyond itself and have its end beyond us in God. (shrink)

I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

: I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

: Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, "resignifying" disability involves a "democratizing contestation" of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die (upon which mutuality is based), are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others, that is wonderfully possible.

Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, “resig-nifying” disability involves a “democratizing contestation” of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die, are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others that is wonderfully possible.

This paper re-examines debates surrounding Irigaray’s ‘essentialism’, arguing that these debates have generated a widespread assumption that realist essentialism is philosophically untenable and that Irigaray must therefore be read as a non-realist, merely ‘political’, essentialist. I suggest that this assumption is unhelpful, as Irigaray’s work shows increasing commitment to a realist form of essentialism. Moreover, I argue that political essentialism is internally unstable because it aims to revalue femininity and the body as symbolized, thereby reinforcing the traditional conceptual hierarchy of (...) the symbolic over the corporeal. I reinterpret Irigaray’s own work as moving away from her earlier political essentialist project of revaluing symbolic femininity, towards the realism of her recent thought, which urges us to revalue and transfigure real, sexually differentiated, bodies by pursuing their cultural expression and enhancement. I aim to show that Irigaray’s recent work is philosophically coherent and sophisticated, and that it opens up the possibility of a radical and transformative kind of realist essentialism. (shrink)

This article examines a fundamental theoretical aspect of the discourse on ‘intersectionality’ in feminist and anti-racist social theory, namely, the question whether intersecting social divisions including those of sex, gender, race, class and sexuality are interacting but independent entities with autonomous ontological bases or whether they are different dimensions of the same social system that lack separate social ontologies and constitute each other. Based on a historical reconstruction of its genesis, the article frames this as a dispute between system-theoretical and (...) dialectical, ‘Critical Theory’-related approaches and argues that the latter better capture the dynamics of contemporary society, including the perspective of its transcendence. (shrink)

Until now post-structuralism and phenomenology are widely regarded as opposites. Contrary to this opinion, I am arguing that they have a lot in common. In order to make my argument, I concentrate on Judith Butler’s poststructuralist concept of performativity to confront it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of expressivity. While Butler claims that phenomenological theories of expression are in danger of essentialism and thus must be replaced by non-essentialist theories of performativity, I hold that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expressivity must strictly (...) be understood in anti-essentialist terms. Following this line of interpretation, “expressivity” and “performativity”—as well as phenomenology and post-structuralism—are not opposites but partners in the search for an anti-essentialist gender concept. Consequently, feminist phenomenology turns out to be a non-essentialist approach that combines phenomenological and post-structural insights. (shrink)

Teacher identity is defined in its relations, on the one hand, to curriculum and, on the other, to students: to be identified as a teacher is to be taken by the latter as a bearer of the former. In this essay I consider some variations on theorising teacher identity within these relational terms. Beginning with the educational task of cultivating student subjects within the often impersonal aims of curriculum, I reject a correspondingly personalised production of teacher identity that would humanise (...) education through the teacher's personality. Turning instead to the idea of a teaching role defined by institutional authority, I look at two perspectives from which the teacher's identity can be theorised as a matter of performing that role. Jane Gallop's performative definition of teaching highlights the teacher as a pre-existing role but is fundamentally concerned with the teacher's self-understanding, this fails, however the relational requirements of teaching. Ultimately, bringing performativity into the context of the transferential relation between teacher and student provided by Plato's Symposium , I argue that student desire produces teacher identity in response to the teacher's performed relation to truth. (shrink)

Using the turn of the century blackface performer Bert Williams as a case study, this essay explores how we might think about black male performativity in the New World as a historical formation, one that extends both over the time of modernity and across the space of diaspora. I draw from contemporary theories of circum-atlantic performance and black feminist studies of the impact of slavery on black racial and gendered identities, to argue that performance affords a unique window into how (...) blackness is constructed in a space between the black male performer and his equally racialized New World audience. The essay theorizes a notion of key black male performances as ‘signature acts’, then explores discussions of minstrelsy by other black American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and the black British writer Caryl Phillips. Using Fanon's notions of triple-consciousness in tandem with Brechtian and Freudian theories of alienated performances and jokes, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the gendered significations in lyrics from Bert Williams’ first musical comedy and then also in a novel about the performer by Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

If we presume an organizational ontology of complex, dynamic change, then what role remains for strategic intent? If managerial action is said to consist of adaptive responsiveness, then what are the foundations of value on the basis of which strategic decisions can be made? In this essay, we respond to these questions and extend the existing strategy process literature by turning to the Aristotelian concept of prudence, or practical wisdom. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom involves the virtuous capacity to make (...) decisions and take actions that promote the "good life" for the "polis". We explore contemporary interpretations of this concept in literature streams adjacent to strategy and determine that practical wisdom can be developed by engaging in interpretative dialogue and aesthetically-rich experience. With these elements in view, we re-frame strategy processes as occasions to develop the human capacity for practical wisdom. (shrink)

This article contributes to recent existentialist interventions in critical criminology (see Lippens and Crewe 2009) and offers the existential concept of ‘event’ as a guiding image for critical victimology. Whereas existential criminologists have examined crime and wrongdoing, very little attention has been given to victimization. I utilize the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano to offer a critique of existing approaches to victimization within mainstream criminology and develop an evential analytic to understand the event of victimization. This paper (...) brings together existential philosophy and victimology to offer an alternative approach to victimization. I engage with the ‘problem of number’ in conventional victimology and offer a critique of quantitative approaches to victimization based on the unsubstitutability and singularity of existence. Through a discussion of selfhood and embodiment from an evential standpoint, this paper moves beyond existing victimological approaches to identity. I also consider the relationship between victimization and trauma. In the final section of the paper I carve out an alternative research agenda through a discussion of bearing witness and events of victimization. (shrink)

: In this essay, Solis contemplates how queercrip—both homosexual and disabled—readings of four editions of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" might be used to destabilize "normative" sexual identities. His goal is to argue against secrecy and for disclosure; thus, a main question guides the analysis: How might we (for example, parents, teachers, counselors) use picture books to reevaluate human sexuality in all its varied manifestations to avoid condemning to the closet all those who do not approximate a prescribed "norm"?

This article examines fashion models as gender myths and cultural iconsthrough a cultural history of modelling. It reveals the construction of models’ personas by the successive addition of meaningful signs:physique, manner, attitude, nationality, class, race, salary, chameleonism, slenderness and so on. On the basis of empirical material on models’ experiences gathered from interviews, secondary oral sources and autobiographical material, the author approaches models’ bodies, identities and public personas as artefacts performed through the reiteration of collectively defined gender standards and practices. (...) This approach overcomes the contrast cast in fashion discourse between visibility/invisibility, private/public, real/unreal while disclosing the hegemonic beauty standards as fiction. (shrink)

In an examination of the psychological aspect of passing, this essay challenges Sandy Stone's conceptualization and subsequent request for transsexuals to forego the act. Employing an auto-ethnographical approach, this essay contends that considering the “psychic” dimensions of passing requires different, and more hopeful, articulations about transsexual bodies, such that gendered and racialized transsexual bodies are produced not simply in terms of social reading and physical embodiment, but also through psychic affirmation and disavowal.

This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in (...) lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field. (shrink)

Cyberspace, the internet and vituality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or antiessentialist expectations that when identity is separated from physical bodies it is experienced as self-evidently performative: we might therefore expect that new kinds of identities will be enacted on-line, and that participants will frame these identities as performances rather than judging them in terms of their truth or authenticity. This article uses a long-term ethnographic engagement with one internet social setting - the `sexpics' trade on Internet Relay (...) Chat (IRC) - to argue that neither of these expectations is met there. First, the sexual act and identities performed tend to be conventional in relation to off-line heterosexual norms and (pornographic) representations. Second, authenticity is a fundamental criterion by which participants understand and manage their on-line experiences: they veer between complete cynicism (their inability to authenticate the other meant according the relationship and the other no weight or commitment) and a desire for involvement that depended on pursuing startegies for authenticating the other, for being able to treat the other's performances as real rather than merely realistic. Significantly, these strategies of authentication were attempts to fix the other in a body or body-like presence, one which persists over time and is locatable in space, and which is therefore ethically accountable and trustworthy. (shrink)

In recent years educational policy on gender and achievement has concentrated on boys' underachievement, frequently comparing it with the academic success of girls. This has encouraged a perception of girls as the ?winners? of the educational stakes and assumes that they no longer experience the kinds of gender inequalities identified in earlier studies. However, trying to balance academic achievement with being seen as a ?proper girl? presents girls with difficult challenges, particularly in terms of being accepted and approved of by (...) classmates and securing the attention of teachers. This paper explores the views of a group of high achieving 12? to 13?year?old girls who indicate that being regarded as ?clever? continues to be negotiated within acceptable frameworks of femininity. (shrink)

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in (...) controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice. (shrink)

I analyse scientific articles on human pheromones from a critical feminist perspective, using new materialist feminist theories, in particular, the work of Judith Butler, Karen Barad and Annemarie Mol. Pheromones were defined by Karlson and Lüscher in 1959 as ‘substances which are secreted to the outside by an individual and received by a second individual of the same species, in which they release a specific reaction – for example, a definite behavior or a developmental process’. In humans, it remains unclear (...) whether substances act as pheromones. With reference to Butler, I show how heteronormativity as a discourse influences research on two potential human pheromones, androstadienone and estratetraenol. I argue that experiments on these two substances have been set up to combine sex-specificity, heterosexuality and reproduction. In these experiments, only the inconsistent effects of androstadienone and estratetraenol were demonstrated. With reference to Barad, I interpret this inconsistency as an indicator of ‘resistant matter’. I argue that in order to experimentally show ‘heteronormative pheromones’ materialities (pheromones) have to merge with discourse (heteronormativity). Androstadienone and estratetraenol partly refuse this collaboration. Finally, I refer to Mol's concept of multiple realities and discuss whether alternative, non-heteronormative effects of pheromones occur instead. (shrink)

Although ‘new fatherhood’ promises a reconstruction of the domesticity paradigm that positions fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caretakers, it maintains the notion that families are self-supporting entities and thereby neglects the extensive interdependence involved in raising children. As a result, it cannot successfully overturn this paradigm and hampers our ability to reimagine relationships along lines that would better serve parents' and children's wellbeing. This article raises these issues through an exploration of ‘daddy-daughter dances’, which manifest new fatherhood discourse as (...) expressed in public schooling. Although the dances are in some ways peculiarly American, they exemplify tensions and inconsistencies around father's involvement in child-raising that nag most contemporary Western societies. These tensions, the article contends, concern the distribution of public resources among families as well as within them. Drawing on Kittay's theorization of dependence and interdependence, the article argues that contemporary social reconfigurations demand a new reimagination of relationships that starts with the recognition of interdependencies. (shrink)

In this response to Kathleen Martindale and Martha Saunders's "Realizing Love and Justice: Lesbian Ethics in the Upper and Lower Case," which appeared in Hypatia 7(4), I argue that a worldly separatism depends upon taking attention from those in positions of dominance and redirecting it to members of nondominant groups, as a political, worldly act of resistance.

An examination of animate from reveals corporeal archetypes that underlie both human sexual behavior and the reigning Western biological paradigm of human sexuality that reworks the archetypes to enforce female oppression. Viewed within the framework of present-day social constructionist theory and Western biology, I show how both social constructionist feminists who disavow biology and biologists who reduce human biology to anatomy forget evolution and thereby forego understandings essential to the political liberation of women.

Conceptualizing and investigating the interarticulation of disparate registers of value expression, this article treats, specifically, the imbrication of anxieties about sexual ambiguity and counterfeit money. The expressions of such anxieties and the metaphoric slippage between them are shown in a variety of venues and cultural texts, but the main come from a reading of William Friedkin's film, To Live and Die in LA.