As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency (e.g. Judith Butler), Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib and Maria Pia Lara) propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the (...) attempt to reconcile a narrative concept of the self within a theory of communicative ethics results in a limited understanding of identity and agency in the context of the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities. (shrink)

Chandra Mohanty, in introducing the phrase “feminism without borders,” acknowledges that she is influenced by the image of “doctors without borders” and wants to highlight the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints within the feminist coalition. So the question of agency assumes primary significance here. But answering the question of agency becomes harder once we try to accommodate this multiplicity. Take, for example, the practice of veiling among certain Muslim women. As many third-world feminists have pointed out, although veiling can't simply (...) be perceived as an expression of women's oppression, it can't be perceived as an expression of “free agency” either since what is required for true feminist agency is women's ability to “formulate choices” and not simply to make choices. In this paper I argue that this ability includes two related abilities: first, to develop a perspective of self that acknowledges and accepts its own grounding in its given intersectionalities; second, to realize that its interdependencies and interconnectivities enable a sense of continuity and solidarity that works collaboratively toward consensus without sacrificing or stifling all differences. My main argument is that feminist self-consciousness informed by Buddhist mindfulness gives us opportunities to articulate clearly and to cultivate both of these abilities. (shrink)

Producing and interpreting functional brain data is part of the negotiation we imagine our brain. To take a closer look at the idea of brain imaging as a form of visual knowledge, it is necessary to put the research of today into a historical context. In my article I will point to a specific approach of functional imaging which depends on historical shifts entangled with the visual aspect of producing pictures of the brain. I will bring out the interaction of (...) issues like techniques, models and historical assumptions of the brain and link them with the way the brain images are presented. The aesthetic dimensions (Rancière) in the pictures are also questions of ethics and normativity. (shrink)

Political agency is vital to the formulation of a feminist politics so feminists have attempted to create a subject that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while at the same time retaining agency. This paper examines some of the principal feminist attempts to reconstitute the subject along these lines. It assesses the success of these attempts in light of the question of whether the subject is a necessary component of feminist theory and practice.

This essay addresses the troubling and uncanny figure of Mother in feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and real life. Readings of feminist literary criticism and the films Alien and Aliens explore the liminality of Mother and the consequences for feminist thought and practice of the persistent narrative modes (the sentimental and the gothic) locatable in all of these discourses on/of Motherhood.

Terrance Malick's film _The Thin Red Line is notable for its inexorable tendency to undermine the ontological status of the very times, places, and people it portrays. The film consists in an unrelenting questioning of cinematic reality. Such questioning does not lead to definitive truth or thematic resolution but only to more questions, more incredulousness at the continual disclosure and withdrawal of difference and multiplicity in their own accord. The film thus adopts what one might call a Heideggerian posture of (...) questionableness without the expectation of answer. Far from striving to depict a truth, meaning, or moral that allows it to achieve a verisimilitude with some reassuring dimension of reality, _The Thin Red Line labors to intricately destructure the ontological ground of every such unifying principle, and thus every correspondence with an external reality. In doing so, it meticulously questions the material status of every filmic pretense to coherent and natural representation, thereby striving to affirm in cinematic space the irreducible difference and multiplicity that conventional cinematic productions typically negate. (shrink)

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Many have pointed to Blade Runner's humanization of its 'replicants' as a compelling statement against exploitation and domination. I argue, however, that the film has another kind of agenda: a Rousseauvian concern about the dangers of representation, about confusing the imitation with the real and confusing the consumption of images with political action. Rather than humanizing the other, Blade Runner's central concern is to humanize our own social and political relationships, which are in danger of (...) falling into the same trap Rousseau outlined in his Letter to D'Alembert. To do so, we must learn to appreciate the difference between mutual surveillance and mutual regard. To live freely in any regime, we must understand the dangers of representation, even if, in a large state, we must continue to make use of it. (shrink)

This essay focuses on how we embody the language we speak: how an audience "reads" the body of a speaker as it both constructs the positionality of that speaking subject and construes that subject's discursive authority. Building on the work of Linda Brodkey and Michelle Fine, I explore what is at stake when university students harass a faculty member by accusing that teacher of not embodying authority in the proper form (body).

The treatment of eye brightness in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin is read to reveal a centuries-old Western eye code of love. This eye code is then used as a test of interaction theories essayed by Mead and by Goffman and of subjectivities left faceless by Foucault, Mulvey, Sartre and Lacan. The implications of Tolstoy's eye code are followed through to the conclusion that a woman in love (such as Anna Karenin) is a Nazi in the image of Hitler.

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Many have pointed to Blade Runner's humanization of its 'replicants' as a compelling statement against exploitation and domination. I argue, however, that the film has another kind of agenda: a Rousseauvian concern about the dangers of representation, about confusing the imitation with the real and confusing the consumption of images with political action. Rather than humanizing the other, Blade Runner's central concern is to humanize our own social and political relationships, which are in danger of (...) falling into the same trap Rousseau outlined in his Letter to D'Alembert. To do so, we must learn to appreciate the difference between mutual surveillance and mutual regard. To live freely in any regime, we must understand the dangers of representation, even if, in a large state, we must continue to make use of it. (shrink)

This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual (...) culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family. (shrink)