BackgroundRich in different kind of potent cells, embryos are used in modern regenerative medicine and research. Neurobiologists today are pushing the boundaries for what can be done with embryos existing in the transitory margins of medicine. Therefore, there is a growing need to develop conceptual frameworks for interpreting the transformative cultural, biological and technical processes involving these aborted, donated and marginal embryos. This article is a contribution to this development of frameworks.MethodsThis article examines different emotional, cognitive and discursive strategies used (...) by neurobiologists in a foetal cell transplantation trial in Parkinson’s disease research, using cells harvested from aborted embryos. Two interviews were analysed in the light of former observations in the processing laboratories, using the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of pollution behaviour and the linguist, philosopher, psychoanalyst and feminist Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abjective to explain and make sense of the findings.ResultsThe findings indicate that the labour performed by the researchers in the trial work involves transforming the foetal material practically, as well as culturally, from trash to treasure. The transformation process contains different phases, and in the interview material we observed that the foetal material or cells were considered objects, subjects or rejected as abject by the researchers handling them, depending on what phase of process or practice they referred to or had experience of. As demonstrated in the analysis, it is the human origin of the cell that makes it abjective and activates pollution discourse, when the researchers talk of their practice.ConclusionsThe marginal and ambiguous status of the embryo that emerges in the accounts turns the scientists handling foetal cells into liminal characters in modern medicine. Focusing on how practical as well as emotional and cultural strategies and rationalizations of the researchers emerge in interview accounts, this study adds insights on the rationale of practically procuring, transforming and utilizing the foetal material to the already existing studies focused on the donations. We also discuss why the use and refinement of a tissue, around which there is practical consensus but cultural ambiguity, deserves further investigation. (shrink)

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as (...) missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities. (shrink)

This paper considers a set of passages from classical Latin literature of the first century BC and first century AD that indicate awareness of the particular transformations undergone by a human body during the process of open-air cremation. Evidence for the extent of cremation throughout the Roman West is reviewed, as are indications that mourners frequently remained near the pyre throughout the lengthy transformation of the corpse into bone-remnants and ash. In addition, archaeological, ethnographic, and forensic evidence documenting the step-by-step (...) changes undergone by the burning body is introduced. Against this backdrop, numerous passages from authors such as Horace, Vergil, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Statius, and Suetonius take on new significance. Although authors occasionally cite crematory details as such, they more frequently make use of such details in non-crematory contexts in order to achieve a variety of literary and aesthetic goals, including economy of description, reflection on the circulation of substance, and clarification of the process of ekpyrosis, or cosmic conflagration. For these writers considered as a group cremation serves as an indicator of both the abject nature of the human condition and of its potential sublimity. The calculated displacement of key aspects of the crematory process onto non-crematory events and practices mirrors and extends the liminality associated with crematory rites. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore bodily changes following weight loss surgery. Our empirical material is based on individual interviews with 22 Norwegian women. To further analyze their experiences, we build primarily on the phenomenologist Drew Leder`s distinction between bodily dis-appearance and dys-appearance. Additionally, our analysis is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. Although these scholars have not directed their attention to obesity operations, they occupy a prime framework for shedding light on different dimensions of (...) bodily change. In doing so, we were able to identify two main themes: The felt “inner” body versus the visible “surface” body and the “old” body versus the “new” body. In different, though interconnected ways, these main themes encompass tensions between changes the women experienced as contributing to a more “normal” and active life, feeling more accepted, and changes that generated ambivalence. In particular, their skin became increasingly problematic because it did not “shrink” like the rest of the body. On the contrary, it became looser and looser. Moreover, badsmelling folds of skin that wobbled, sweated and chafed at the smallest movement, aprons of fat hanging in front of their stomachs, batwing arms, thick flabby thighs and sagging breasts were described as a huge contrast to the positive response they received to their changed body shape when they were out and about with their clothes on. At the same time, they expressed ambivalence with regards to removing the excess skin by means of plastic surgery. Through their own and other women`s experiences they learned removing the excess skin by means of surgery could be a double-edged sword. By illuminating the experiences of the ones undergoing such changes our article offers new insight in a scholarly debate predominated by medical research documenting the positive outcomes of weight loss surgery. (shrink)

This article proposes the ideas of stochastic resonance and noise as devices with which to think of the body or self as plural and porous. Boundaries and surfaces are proposed as indefinite; cell switching and narratives of the self are discussed in relation to external forces, via Arendt’s inter-subjectivity and La Celca’s colonization as infection. The sonic artwork Ghost, which uses models of spiking neurons to materialize endogenous and exogenous composition in relation to noise and sonic memory is presented as (...) an exploration of the boundary or limit of the notion of self. This paper, which serves as a cogitatum rather than cognitio, articulates the human body as a complex and open system that steers towards chaos by adapting and accepting further complexity as, and within, constantly adaptive networks of creativity. We suggest that by focusing on the porosity of boundaries and the mechanisms that underlie their permeability, problems around identity and subjectivity might be seen in a new light. (shrink)

Ugliness is largely considered an aesthetic, cultural construct and, though infrequently defined, is often seen as the opposite of existing conceptions of beauty. This definition of ugliness, however, provides little understanding of the lived experience of encountering it, particularly when that ugliness is found upon the face of another. This article explores the questions: what is ugliness? And what does it mean to experience another person as ugly? Through describing the experience of encountering an ugly face, ugliness is explored as (...) a highly embodied, interpersonal experience that implicates the person who sees and recognizes another’s ugliness as much as it involves the ugly person, him- or herself. (shrink)

Women have been marginalized in different contexts and situations. Religion, and to be more specific Catholicism, is a tradition that has divided men and women but more importantly women themselves as they represent the dichotomy of good and evil. Michèle Roberts's heroines are inspired through biblical characters who will replace the binary system of being for dualities and pluralities in the same woman as part of their identities. This paper considers the feminist procedure of Adrienne Rich's re-visioning, re-imagining and re-writing, (...) Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection plus a touch of Bakhtinian `open bodies' in the light of Catholic myths. The conclusion of this essay aims to present and celebrate Roberts's heroines in relation to their sexuality and religion. (shrink)

This article offers a critical reading of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘woman’s primary homosexuality’ and discusses homophobia in Kristeva’s work. If we are to draw conclusions on the merits and limitations of Kristeva’s theories of sexuality, homophobia needs to be assessed within the aesthetic and ethical contexts that typify Kristeva’s overall oeuvre. The article shows that we can apply Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic model of signification to sexuality and argues for the construction of ‘primary homosexuality’ as the manifestation of resistance to authorized (...) sexual identity. The article also shows why the political demands to recognize lesbianism as a valid form of sexuality and especially as an intelligible lifestyle go against Kristeva’s understanding of what resistance entails. (shrink)

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in the crime. (...) However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the public's understanding of the individual crime and widen the community's dialogue about its significance. (shrink)

This article combines in-depth interviews and Karen Barad's work on materiality to think about the ways in which the materiality of blood might be understood in relation to sociality and blood-borne virus prevention among BDSM (bondage and domination, dominance and submission and sadomasochism) body modification practitioners in Sydney, Australia. In doing so, it confronts questions of how the materiality of blood can be theorized in ways that neither presume a fixed, a priori ontological status or essence, nor exclude it from (...) an active role in the production of realities. In taking account of both its co-constitutive role in practice, and its figurative power (as flow) in understanding the mind/body, discourse/materiality conjunctions at work in BDSM body modification practice, we aim to illuminate further the imbrication of materiality and meaning, and generate a more complex and fruitful account of blood for the purposes of blood-borne virus prevention and education. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to flesh out gender by drawing connections between the experience of pain and the experience of womanhood. The article builds upon two themes in feminist work (the constitution of woman through her effacement, and the inscription of gender on the body) and proposes to analyse `effacement' in terms of an embodied sense of being `gutted out', or made `immaterial'. I use this imagery of `gutting out' to suggest that effacement is experienced through the body, (...) and in terms of the presence of pain rather than merely in terms of lack or absence (of voice or subjectivity). Thus I share the view that gender is performed through inscriptions on the body, but I argue that this work of gendering involves hurting and injuring women's bodies; and it is this pain that I attend to in the article. I draw upon Scarry's analysis of the body in pain as a symbolic framework to discuss the pain of womanhood in terms of the annihilation of the self as it is engulfed in a mass of hurting flesh. (shrink)

The idea of a human-animal divide as reflective of both differences in kind and in evolutionary progress, has retained its power to produce and maintain racial and other forms of cultural difference. During the colonial period, representations of similarity were used to link subaltern groups to animals and thereby racialize and dehumanize them. In the postcolonial present, however, animal practices of subdominant groups are typically used for this purpose. Using data on cultural conflicts surrounding animal practices collected from media sources, (...) we show that such practices have become a key aspect of the human-animal boundary due to the radically changing time-space relations of postmodernity. Drawing on Spivak's notion of "wild practice, " we propose a radical democracy that includes animals as well as subaltern peoples, and argue for the rejection of dehumanization as a basis for cultural critique, given its role in perpetuating racialization and violence toward both human and non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper examines cancer through the lens of abjection. While cancer can be understood as an abject lifeform, we explore what we name the abject ontologies created through both cancer detection technologies/practices and cancer treatment, specifically the drug combination Adriamycin and Cytoxan. We ask: what are the abject ontologies produced through living with and living on from cancer diagnosis and treatment? Our concern is to map how cancer undoes our supposedly stable categories inherited from modernist logic, challenges our very ideas (...) of what it means to be human, and demands an ethical reorientation of public cancer discourse. (shrink)

The subject of this article is Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game. Released in 1992, it was widely received as a film that challenged stereotypes in relation to both the IRA and questions of race, sexuality and desire. This article calls into question such a radical reading by analysing the way in which Jude the IRA woman is represented. Through a feminist deconstruction, the article proposes that the character of Jude can be seen to represent both national and international anxieties (...) concerning contemporary masculine and feminine subject positions. The article plots this by investigating how the film deals with the specifics of gender and Irish nationalism. It then moves on to consider how these specifics can be seen to articulate international postmodern concerns about contemporary gender identities. (shrink)

This article relates two forms of political and cultural marginality and emancipation to a third one, which, in traditional patriarchal cultures, is the embodiment of marginality par excellence: that of the female self. It explores their similar positioning in the spatial and temporal economy of power relations in a detailed analysis of Irina Grigorescu Pana's novel Melbourne Sundays, a fictionallyrical account of the Romanian author's 11-year exile in Australia, read as a narrative counterpart of her critical approach to exile in (...) The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. These two works describe an experience happening at the intersection between the author's national background – that of Romania – and the postcolonial one of her country of adoption – Australia – as they become relevant from her personal and professional experience as a woman writer. Exile is thus reflected in language, being spatially constructed by means of metaphors such as book, theatre, carnival, garden, which are also relevant for the process of identity formation. The argument mainly relies on Kristeva's theories, an approach motivated by Pana's own choice of the Kristevan discourse of love/hate in relation to the theme of exile in her fictional and critical works, since, as she remarks, exiles and lovers share a marginal, though at the same time essential, position in postcolonial cultures. (shrink)

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing (...) and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded. (shrink)

The placenta has played an important role in feminist theories of subjectivity; however, the placenta of feminist theory has been the fully functional placenta of what is considered a successful full-term pregnancy. Pregnancy loss, a topic that has been generally overlooked within feminist scholarship, is absent from feminist theories of the placenta. This article uses early placental development, particularly development that takes place before the placenta becomes fully functional as an organ for hormone production and interchange, as a space through (...) which to consider theorising subjectivity, reproduction and relation through pregnancy loss. In so doing, I argue that turning our attention to the placenta’s early development, regardless of outcomes, allows us to reimagine the role of process for feminist theories of subjectivity while also making room for a wider array of pregnancy outcomes, reinvigorating our ability to think about relations and models of hospitality that do not end as we might imagine. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, (...) this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy. (shrink)

In this thesis, I explore themes and concerns that have arisen in my art practice, namely the relationship between landscape, monstrosity, and subjectivity. The tropes scar and form refer to features analogous in the subject and in the land which take on different specific meanings throughout the project, but in general terms, I relate them to trauma as a defining force. I suggest that monsters can be understood as embodying attitudes to time (a cause of trauma): those being fixity, which (...) is resistant to temporality; and flux, which embraces temporality. Consequently, I define these categories and their opposition, presenting arguments for both monsters of fixity and flux monsters. I examine the construction of false universals of ‘England’ (categories of fixity) in representations of landscape and how they come to dominate the picturing of Britain more generally, alongside a mode I refer to as dynamic-fatalism, which examines the polemics and aesthetics of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). In this regard, I look at Lewis’s monstrous Tyro and its role in eliciting dehumanisation as a defining value in conceptions of a stratified society. Emphasis on creative practices and representations related to England serve to dissolve ‘proto-fascistic’ fantasies of a heroic, mono-cultural, and pure base for nation, dependent on categories of fixity. I suggest these values are instead understood as patrician, sexist, class-based, and racially biased. Given that landscape constructions are constitutive of our engagement with landscape, I conclude with a proposal for better ‘analogues’ of nature in the form of virescent space (a category of flux). I argue that virescent space is a phenomenon that sees the monster take on a specific role concerning the subject, one I define in relation to a wilderness destination in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1370). (shrink)

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

The horror genre (in film, literature etc.) has, for its seemingly paradoxical aesthetic appeal, been the subject of much debate in contemporary, analytic philosophy of art. At the same time, however, the nature of horror as an affective phenomenon has been largely neglected by both aestheticians and philosophers of mind. The standard view of the affective nature of horror in contemporary philosophy follows Noël Carroll in holding that horror in art (or “art-horror”) is an emotion resulting from the combination of (...) disgust and fear. The view is also often accompanied by the view that horror in art is a distinct affect from horror in real life. This raises the question of what the relationship between horror in art and in real life might be. By looking within and outside art and the horror genre, and using a combination of historical, philosophical and empirical arguments, I argue for a departure from such standard views on the affective nature of horror. In alternative, I outline a novel view, on which horror is common to both real life and art and is primarily, typically individuated by a set of (output) affective reactions. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I engage in a political history of waste; in particular I look at modern philosophers from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the way that waste functions alongside narratives of civilization, progress, and perfection. I analyze the political, pedagogical, and other theories of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. I use Julia Kristevaâs concept of abjection to trace the legacies of these philosophers to the continued and continuing practices of wasting life their work (...) supports and maintains. Social contract theory must have its others, those wasted and abjected to limn the boundary of the âclean and properâ civilized order. Locke abjects waste in his theory of property and I link the use of his term âwastelandâ to the wastelanding of Native Americans. As Kristeva says the forgetting, repressing, or disavowal of abjection leads to the return of its repressed in the form of our âapocalypses.â I discuss Rousseauâs treatment of waste and the way it is ambivalently embraced, which I think is a more appropriate treatment of waste. I also compare Emile and Sophieâs education and argue that his education of women makes waste of their lives. Last, I discuss Kantâs theory of waste and race together, arguing that he redeems all waste and that he makes waste of all races except the white race. He assents to the use of people of color as means for the white raceâs ends, rather than treating them as ends in themselves. Thus, I conclude that social contract theories are wasteful of life and lives and that contract theory should be garbaged for a new political principle: to not make waste of life or lives. (shrink)

This article aims to conceptualize the interplay between sarcasm, scatology and writing in Darija (Moroccan Arabic or Al-Maghribia) on the web in a post-uprising era. It focuses on the new Darijophone prose that emerged after 20 February 2011 protests in Goud and The Newزحيليكر‎ (The New Bumpkin). Originating with absurdist February 20 movement founder member, Mohammed Sokrat, this writing genre is realist, vulgar, profane, taboo-breaking, and borrows from the toilet space to poke fun at the schizophrenia, herd mentality and populism (...) that attend a modernizing society under a neoliberal regime. A vocabulary of trash, waste, filthy social types and risqué gags has informed a unique online minoritarian prose that is unpopular, yet widely read. This article studies the virtual politics and poetics of dirt and laughter in written Darija. Writing at the interstices of commitment and co-optation, this subcultural mode of knowledge production reveals Moroccan youth's heretofore suppressed yet incessant longing for change in a post-uprising context of disillusionment. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and (...) Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

This thesis offers a systematic analysis of the ideological structure in the Islamic Republic of Iran through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of ideology. The Lacanian emphasis on the libidinal constitution of ideology changes the object of analysis from social reality in its empirical aspects to the unconscious or disavowed conditions sustaining social reality in the Islamic Republic. The overall analysis of this thesis is divided into three interrelated research domains: the first domain of political subjectivity examines how subjectivity (...) in Iran is embedded in the ideological order, as well as how that order was constructed through the 1979 Islamic revolution by tapping into the unconscious agency of political subjectivity; the second theologico-political domain inquires into the form of ideology materialised in the socio-political framework of the Islamic Republic and analyses its libidinal sustainability; the third domain explores the political economy in Iran by conflating its historical and ontological inquiry. The analysis of the three domains helps me to discern the inherent contradictions of the ideological structure in contemporary Iran and the peculiar way these contradictions are mediated. Their mediation conversely ensures the reproduction of ideology on an unconscious level. This thesis therefore explores how ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran enables a consistent experience of social reality and how subjectivity sustains the ideological order through libidinal investments. (shrink)

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the (...) perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries. (shrink)

This thesis offers a comparison of documentary case studies to explore how moments from reality are recorded and how future representations of them can offer or instigate a parallax to create a new or different way of understanding the occurrence of such moments and how they have been remembered. I postulate that this shift in perspective offers an interaction with reality through a reconfiguration of the Real of these moments. The study will consider this assertion in relation to Žižek’s and (...) Baudrillard’s reflections on the Real as being an excessive moment unable to be assimilated and the veiled encapsulation of what lies beyond the Image-Event. After exploring the use of images from reality, my thesis will go on to consider the processes of recollecting and communicating past occurrences to highlight the potential that documenting and revisiting past memories – re-collecting them – can actively impact and evolve the trajectory of personal histories. Utilising LaCapra’s notion of the working through traumatic memories enables my investigation to plot a course which considers the memory narratives of my case studies as subject to a, ‘continual process of retranslation’ and, as such, explores the subjectivity of the Real of occurrences. (shrink)

Malone Dies marks the point where Samuel Beckett foremost turns to “metaphysical destruction” of “untrue self,” and Derrida’s critique of the notion of “self-presence” of the subject. In this article, I examine Beckett’s literary absurdities to his readers’ concerns of “abuse” through them. For this investigation Malone Dies posits a stream of conflicting “linguistic nihilism” to the concerns of deconstructing “untrue self,” arguably, which will reflect how abuse of Beckettian readers is stimulated. In this context, abuse is specific forms of (...) emotional tensions aroused by the readers encounter with the Beckettian intersubjectivity. In particular, the existential model of abuse will be analysed as a part of beyond “self-deconstruction” autonomy. (shrink)

In this thesis I examine the notion of ethical subjectivity as characterized by an original relationship to alterity. Drawing upon Derrida, Levinas and psychoanalytic theory, I give a picture of a subject who is fundamentally responsive and inexorably bound to others, and I discuss the ethical and political implications of this condition. I extend the discussion of 'others' to include technology, suggesting that our ethical responsibility to alterity has been radicalized through deconstruction.

Within art therapy discourses there is a dearth of scholarly literature related to the dilemmas of voicing lesbianism and picturing lesbians. This is the result of sustained discrimination and censorship worldwide. In order to address this issue, a research study was designed to investigate this topic and its relationship to informing art therapy. There were two research methods and two research processes used in the project. Autobiography and art based research were the methods, and intertextuality and reflexivity were the research (...) processes. The methodology that underpinned the project was postmodern-feminism. Autobiographical material created through an art-based research method was reflexively viewed. The newly created visual texts stimulated intertextual links to past visual and written texts. These texts were used to map and track deeply held assumptions found embedded in essentialist, dualistic and modernist paradigms. By the use of postmodernfeminism deconstruction and reconstruction the investigation exposed and interrogated paradigm shifts resulting in subsequent personal transformations. The study revealed how past personal experiences of homophobia, lesbian invisibility and mental health treatment were deeply embedded in gender/sexuality norms, visual art discourse and social stigmatisation. These experiences impacted significantly on the ability to verbally and visually reveal both lesbian and lesbianism, and as such impacted on perceptual shaping of multiple selves within self. The study further demonstrated how the postmodern-feminist investigation destabilised dominant paradigms and subverted their location in “truth”, allowing for reconstruction of selves to be explicitly pictured. The significance of the findings for art therapy is three fold. Firstly, by offering a postmodern-feminist perspective through a lesbian lens, embedded modernist paradigms central to art therapy discourse are challenged. Secondly, the creative process of image making, within a postmodern-feminist frame is showcased. Within such a process change can be mobilised and self perceptions can be transformed. Thirdly, the study has advanced art therapy towards a more contemporary and critically informed discipline, one that can reflect on possible dilemmas encountered by lesbian clientele when verbally or visually self representing. The implications of the study have several intersections for the broader arts and health care sectors. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)

Real Fit: Identity, Society, and Viewer Investment in Reality TV is first and foremost a philosophical experiment in how to articulate the space between viewer and screen. Its driven by a methodological investment in bringing theories of normativity into an experiential terrain typically dominated by media studies. What does it mean to study an audience? And how does this knowledge speak to, or challenge our existing models? Its an investigation into the political dimension of seemingly innocuous entertainment, and a deep (...) consideration of how this comes to bear on invested viewers. Staying within the confines of the virtual, my dissertation studies the ways that TV exploits affect to reinforce current personalized narratives of obesity as a problem that can be managed by self-discipline. (shrink)

European Enlightenment thought was the privileged model upon which intellectuals built a Chinese modernity since the decline of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. Aesthetically, a turn towards literary realism was successfully implemented. These Western legacies dominated the literary field until they lost their persuasive power in the 1990s. Beyond cultural production, the entanglements of a nation in transition with Eurocentric ideological paradigms influenced statecraft and nationalistic thought to our days. In his novel Frogs Mo Yan revisits the (...) heritage of May Fourth modernism to expose its transmogrification into the dehumanizing reality effects accompanying birth control from Mao to the Deng regime and thereafter. Employing images that suggest recent, science-based governance to have triggered local regimes of cosmic un-creation, the novel focuses on a global modernization that is perceived as socially as well as environmentally destructive. (shrink)