This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" involved (...) a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. (...) In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of the scientia sexualis/ars erotica distinction, which Foucault first advances in History of Sexuality Vol. 1, and which has been employed by many scholars to do a variety of analytical work. Though Foucault has expressed his doubts regarding his conceptualization of the differences between Western and Eastern discourses of desire, he never entirely disowns the distinction. In fact, Foucault remains convinced that China must have an ars erotica. I will explore Foucault’s sources of authority. (...) To this end, I introduce the work of famous Dutch sinologist Robert Hans van Gulik, who published the tremendously influential Sexual Life in Ancient China in 1961, and also explore Joseph Needham’s view on Chinese sex. I argue that, Foucault, in his fierce polemic against the “Repressive Hypothesis”, himself imagined a utopian Other where pleasure and desire were organised differently. I end on a discuss on Orientalism and the project of “Sinography” of comparative literature scholars Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot and others. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

Sociological studies of women's experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders women's complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape “compliance.” This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as religious conduct and religiosity as a constructed status. Drawing on a study that examined how orthodox Jewish Israeli women (...) observe, negotiate, and make sense of regulations of marital sexuality, this paper explains religious women's agency as religious conduct, or the “doing” of religion. I demonstrate that doing religion is associated with a search for authentic religious subjecthood and that religiosity is shaped in accordance with the logics of one's religion, and in the context of controlling messages about threatened symbolic boundaries and cultural Others. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Foucault's concept of illegalism and explores its significance for his genealogies of modern punishment and racial formation. The concept of illegalism, as distinct from illegality, plays a double role. It allows Foucault to describe a ruling class tactic for managing inequalities and also to characterize an important vein of resistant subjugated knowledges. The political project of the prison is linked to a new crime policy that does not so much aim to repress illegalisms as to manage them (...) differentially. This practice of differential management, which arises in the 18th century, produces a primary split along class lines between two types of illegalism—an insight that has a certain resonance with Edwin's Sutherland's concept of “white collar crime.” Foucault's investigation of a third category of “infralegal illegalism” sheds light not only on the genealogy of the category of delinquency but also on his genealogy of racial categorization. Finally, Foucault argues that a genuinely radical critique of modern society must address the “need” organized political power has for the illegalisms from which it purportedly seeks to protect society. Against this practice of differentially managing illegalisms, Foucault seeks to reactivate a subjugated problematic that might open up questions about the transformative possibilities of illegalism today. (shrink)

Critical food scholars have long noted that much of local food discourse in the US is underwritten by a deeply regressive agrarian imaginary that valorizes “small family farms” while erasing historical legacies of racism. In this paper, I examine one influential expression of the agrarian imaginary that I call the fantasy of “real food,” and illustrate how that discourse contributes to ongoing exclusions in farmers markets. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I explain how the fantasy of real food positions white middle-class (...) consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a romantic narrative of loss and recovery, in which their enlightened consumption practices precipitate the return of authentic social relations and connections to nature. I then trace the influence of this fantasy through a reading of selected popular media, and illustrate how the racist, classist, and patriarchal antipathies of the agrarian imaginary find legitimate expression in an alternate form as affectively charged moral and aesthetic commitments. Finally, I show how this fantasy logic makes both the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of farmers appear not only reasonable but morally righteous. I conclude by arguing that we cannot rely on the reflexivity of the privileged to deliver justice, no matter how well-meaning they may be, and suggest that we need new imaginaries and new narratives to guide our politics of consumption. (shrink)

Aunque la obra de Foucault haya influido en el pensamiento poscolonial y decolonial, a menudo se acusó al francés de eurocentrismo, renunciando, en algunos casos, a un diálogo enriquecedor entre su obra y estas corrientes de estudio. Teniendo como interés específico el tema del racismo, en este trabajo analizaremos primero el curso de Foucault Defender la sociedad y luego las contribuciones de pensadores y pensadoras decoloniales, de Frantz Fanon y Achille Mbembe. La consulta del archivo colonial ofrece posibles cronologías acerca (...) de la aparición del racismo de Estado que difieren con la de Foucault y sobre todo permite distinguir cómo este actúa en los distintos mecanismos de la analítica del poder. De este modo sostenemos que el racismo puede entenderse no solo como un dispositivo biopolítico, sino también como una dimensión fundamental del dominio que actúa al mismo tiempo como tecnología disciplinaria sobre el cuerpo del sujeto racializado y en el poder de muerte del soberano. (shrink)

Las narrativas que han afirmado la relación de la modernidad con lo Occidental, así como aquellas que han tratado de descentralizar el centro de lo moderno coinciden en un aspecto primordial: ver la modernidad como un producto de Occidente. Lo que está en cuestión, entonces, es pensar si se puede hallar una manera de teorizar la cuestión de la modernidad que la relocalice en un contexto mundial, y al mismo tiempo, permita a ese contexto complejizar, en lugar de simplemente revertir, (...) la lógica narrativa de la modernización. En este sentido, una de las cuestiones que se proponen revisar es la manera en la que se da la interacción entre Occidente y el no-Occidente para poder asumir la escenificación que define lo moderno en la diferencia constitutiva de su espacialidad y su representación. (shrink)

There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site (...) and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment. (shrink)

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

The story of Sara Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the erotic-exotic freak ‘Hottentot Venus’, is arguably the most famous case study of the scientific validation of (gendered) racism. Her scientific examination and post-mortem dissection by Georges Cuvier, who looked for an alleged connection between the Khoisan and the orangutan, have been the object of famous critical works (Gilman, 1985; Haraway, 1989; Fausto-Sterling, 1995), but also exposed her to the unpalatable fate of becoming the (...) ‘quintessential’ figure of intersecting gender and racial oppressions. This paper deals with Abdellatif Kechiche's film Venus Noire (2010), which interestingly rearticulates the (in)famous narrative in unexpected ways. Shot by a male director who is also a postcolonial subject, the film exposes the performativity not only of gender and racial identities, but also of science theorisation, while at the same time raising the issue of whether exposing a violent male colonial gaze on a heavily exhibited woman can contribute to a counter-knowledge of her experience or rather risks reiterating the historical violence. The startling dynamic between the portrayed abuse and Kechiche's peculiar filmic strategies is the crucial focus of this paper. While Sara's body is continually exposed and violated, Venus Noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987 [1980]) account of the close up, I explore how Kechiche's take on Sara's face builds a strong connection with the spectator's extra-filmic dimension. As a case of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘reflective face’, such close ups invest the viewer with the ethical responsibility of being complicit in the othering practices of (post)colonial times. Vénus Noire thus manages to engage the spectator's own corporeal awareness of violence, and calls attention to the persisting exploitation of sexual and racial colonial tropes in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This paper describes the results of our study of folk theories of Americans and Indians, using a brain transplant paradigm. We found significant cultural differences between Americans and Indians. The majority of Americans believed that a brain transplant would result in change in gender behavior whereas the majority of Indians, particularly Brahmin males, believed that a brain transplant would change only the gender behavior of men not women. Qualitative analysis of open-ended responses found that American men believed in the computational (...) model of identity, whereas American women believed in the distributed notion of identity. Among Indians, Brahmin males believed in the biological notion of identity more than any other group. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Although the birth and early life of an infant is similar throughout the world, meanings ascribed to infants differ according to cultural values and beliefs. This essay describes how scholars and healers have come to see the infant as distinct from other types of people, and what implications this distinction carries for how health care is practiced. The first portion of this essay explores how understanding of the infant, particularly the well-accepted notion of “normal” infant growth and development, came to (...) prominence. Drawing from the history of medicine, philosophical thought and colonial practice, this essay demonstrates that the roots of thinking about the infant in terms of his growth are deep and well-defined in North American and European ideologies. The second portion of this essay describes the practical applications and political implications of beliefs about the “normal” infant. In the arena of applied health, policy makers measure infant growth in light of assumptions about the “normal.” A case study of indigenous populations in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, shows that these measurements are highly political. Here government health officials create and manipulate statistics to ensure that indigenous infant health is represented as being below “normal.” The “normal” infant can thus be understood as a subtle and effective construct which, in Irian Jaya, at the least, is used to assimilate indigenous people into the nation-state. (shrink)

This essay explores Foucault’s conception of the historical a priori through the lens of an archival ethics of eros. Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the historical a priori as both constitutive and contingent, it harnesses the temporal dynamism of experiences of the untimely as erotic. Drawing on the work of Anne Carson, the essay brings out the strangeness of eros as an ancient Greek word that remains unintelligible to us. That strangeness signals an ethics of dissonant attunement to the untimeliness (...) of the historical a priori. Such an ethics of eros names those experiences of connection and rupture that both bind and unbind us in relation to a biopolitical present that is radically unstable. Reading eros as strange thus ultimately allows us to find resources for an ethics of self-transformation in Foucault’s reflections on the temporal instability that the historical a priori names. (shrink)

This article investigates the embodied identities of Hong Kong gay men in two different `sites of desire', namely London and Hong Kong. In London, Hong Kong gay men have constantly encountered the intertwining relationships between race and sexuality in the constellation of the Western construction of body/desire/masculinity. By contrast, Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong tend to place more emphasis on issues of family and culture. The main site of struggle for Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong is (...) the family-oriented and community-based environment. They adopt not a confrontational politics in a constitutional sense but rather derive tactics of microscopic resistance against societal and familial domination. By comparing 34 Hong Kong gay men living in London and Hong Kong, I argue the divergent constructions of being gay in these two contexts. Through the `voices' of these gay men, I criticize the `Western' construction of identity/the body and offer new insights into the discussion of gay identities. (shrink)

Increasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that culture refers to a kind of social form that is entity-like, territorialized, marked by a high degree of shared beliefs and coalescing into patterns of key values (...) that animate a broad range of cultural performances and representations. Ironically, anthropologists and other scholars in cultural studies have overwhelmingly come to reject this view of culture. Arguably, then, the move in psychology to attend to cultural environments has paradoxically further distanced it from the fields most concerned with cultural forms. This essay reviews this state of affairs and offers a proposal how a more nuanced appreciation of cultural life can be articulated with theories and methods familiar and available to psychologists. (shrink)

James Tully's Strange Multiplicity uses the example of indigenous minorities in the white settler colonies of North America to develop a remarkably powerful critique of liberal constitutionalism's rule of uniformity. In proclaiming the identity of all persons before the law, he insists, liberal constitutional arrangements commonly discriminate against indigenous and other minorities. While the force of this critique is undeniable, it nevertheless takes at face value one of the central claims of liberal consitutionalism, namely, its claim to be based on (...) the rule of uniformity. Examination of liberal reflections on the government of subject peoples, most of whom were regarded as being, in Mill's words, “not sufficiently advanced for representative government“, suggests a rather different picture. In place of the rule of uniformity we find a variety of alternatives but, most commonly, an insistence, first, that the government of such peoples should focus on their welfare and eventual improvement rather than on their liberty and, second, that they should be governed as far as possible through their own institutions and structures of authority. The result was a highly differentiated form of rule in which what were believed to be indigenous arrangements were adapted to the joint requirements of improvement and administrative convenience. Thus, what seems to be a powerful commitment to individual liberty on the part of liberal political reason should be seen as simply one element in a broader liberal perspective on the government of populations. At least as important in this perspective as the rule of uniformity is the presumption that some cultures are more advanced than others and a corresponding view of many cultural differences in historical and developmental terms. (shrink)

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests (...) that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution. (shrink)

The article examines the development of anthropological discourse in British travel accounts of modern Greece, and the Greek response. The study has several aims. First, it argues that in British travel accounts ethnographic remarks are encountered which point to a genealogy of the British discipline of anthropology. These remarks on the modern Greek character formulated problÈmatiquesin which history and ethnography, as well as Romanticism and Enlightenment ideas, merged. Second, the article examines Greek peasantreaction to British observation and ‘intrusion’, as a (...) rational product of the Anglo-Greek exchange. Third, it maintains that such peasant responses, which are in accordance with counter-hegemonic, Neohellenic ‘high-brow’ attitudes, were notthe product of the latter, but their genealogical counterpart. From this it follows that in British encounters with Greek peasants, historians can trace the development of Greek folklore as a nationalist product which defied European hegemonic narratives of modern Greek identity. (shrink)

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality (...) to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation. (shrink)

This paper offers a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, elucidating certain racist and nationalist formations that are implicit in the historical valorization and enforcement of heterosexual monogamy. It tracks the white supremacist and heteronormative logic that conditions the widespread disdain toward polygamy, and that renders it fundamentally different from familial configurations that are associated with national identity. Relating political and philosophical doctrines to the archival documentation and insights of contemporary legal and cultural historians of anti-polygamy sentiment, it elucidates (...) the racial Anglo-Saxonism of Hegel's ruminations on marriage and on the state, and highlights its reverberation within the political philosophy that justified the criminalization of polygamy and its supporting institutions in the nineteenth century and in contemporary immigration policy and same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada and the United States. (shrink)

This essay provides an analytic review of Jasbir Puar’s book, Terrorist Assemblages (2007), situating her discussion and analysis of “homonationalism” within the context of recent developments in queer theory in the USA, and specifically, critiques of queer liberalism and gay imperialism; racial analyses of hetero- and homo-normative formations; and challenges to identity politics and representational frameworks that dominate LGBT studies. It takes up Puar’s interest in finding new methods and ‘reading’ practices to track certain shifts in LGBT politics and to (...) account for alignments between (white) queerness and normative, nationalist and imperial interests. Engaging with and expanding on her analysis, this paper discusses the challenge that Terrorist Assemblage poses to the identity categories that undergird human rights campaigns, and addresses the racist and nationalist sentiments that she locates within them. (shrink)

The instability of colonial representational economies, identities and tropes is the subject of analysis in this paper. I take as my starting point the anxieties that were generated during the late 19th century in relation to what I nominate the fictitiousness of settler subjects in colonial Australia. In order to examine these historical concerns and their explicitly gendered representations, I consider in detail one text, Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902). This text was published (...) in 1902 and was one of a number of romance novels this author produced for readerships in both colonial Australia and England. This adventure romance features the trope of the Australian Girl and also engages in varying degrees with discourses of colonial ethnography that, to my knowledge, have not been examined in relation to the ideological production and effects of this figure. (shrink)

This article tells the story of the 2003 resignation of Peter Hollingworth as Governor-General as part of an ongoing hyper-anxiety in Australia about the state and status of ‘the child’. The sexually abused child sits at the centre of this story and carries a heavy burden with respect to the past and future of the white Australian nation. The recuperation of that child to a state of innocence, repeatedly, as stories of its abuse keep returning to our front pages and (...) political agendas, is necessary for the reproduction of the white nation. This article shows that the Hollingworth drama is entwined with the current politics of motherhood and fatherhood and the carriage of national feeling and temporality through the performances of these always racialised identities. Attending to the politics of the historical construction of the child, and the idealised parents who abuse or protect it, thus becomes a part of the project of accountability to the past which has also occupied public life in Australia over recent years. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘the sovereign’, ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ have been used by political theorists, particularly since the declaration of the Global War on Terror and during the more recent age of wars of humanitarian intervention, to conceptualize the sovereignty exercised by security states. These state processes have been mirrored by absolutization within some branches of political theory, conflating Foucauldian concepts of biopolitical sovereignty and circulatory governmentality with notions of absolutist rule, and narrowing optics for interpreting popular (...) mobilizations around gendered ‘human security’ projects, emergency regimes and moralizing repression. Suggesting more productive directions for theory, this article generates a close reading of female activists working in an unexpected industry in Egypt who have struggled to invert and subvert absolutist and moralizing framings and have generated their own theory through practice. The ‘Natashas of Cairo’ – well organized and transnationally linked belly dancers – successfully promoted gendered popular sovereignty in remarkable campaigns between 2002 and 2006, utilizing personal-rights litigation to create frameworks to render the absolutist state more accountable; establish labor solidarities that crossed international boundaries as well as class boundaries; and articulate an alternative moral regime for dance work that rejected both ‘pornification’ and the ‘respectability politics’ of professionalization. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der Deutschschweizer massenmedialen Debatte zur Weigerung zweier Schüler in der Gemeinde Therwil, ihrer Lehrerin die Hand zu schütteln, wird häufig der Kulturbegriff verwendet. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert, wie „Kultur“ als wissensstrukturierende Kategorie in der Konstituierung der Gruppenzugehörigkeiten zur Schweizer Mehrheitsgesellschaft und zur muslimischen Minderheit zum Tragen gekommen ist. Basierend auf dem Konzept der „Kulturalisierung“ untersucht die qualitative Medienanalyse die verschiedenen „Spielarten der Kulturalisierung“ (Teczan 2011), die in der Debatte um den Fall Therwil verwendet wurden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass „Kultur“ (...) in Beziehung zu geografischer Herkunft, religiöser Zugehörigkeit und spezifischen Wertvorstellungen gesetzt wurde. Gleichzeitig kann die Verknüpfung dieser Ideen mit Vorstellungen „kulturspezifischer“ Geschlechterverhältnisse und angenommenen Einstellungen zur Geschlechtergerechtigkeit und sexuellen Liberalisierung beobachtet werden. (shrink)

Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges (...) the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body. (shrink)

This article identifies and analyses links between conceptualisations of trans-gender and trans-national, and aims for a critical redefinition of political agency. Through an examination of theories on transing, passing and performativity in queer-, trans- and transnational feminist knowledge production—illustrated by discursive examples from transgender communities and Romanian migrant communities—I call for a conceptualisation of entangled power relations that does not rely on fixed, pre-established categories, but defines subjectivity through risk in political struggle. I suggest that ‘transing’ the nation and ‘transing’ (...) gender could be thought as critical moves for a radical deconstruction of gendered and national belonging. Rather than provide a static definition of the term ‘transnationalism’, the article explores potentials and limits of going beyond ‘the national’ and ‘gender’, and intervenes in forms of minority nationalism that reproduce racism, sexism, heteronormativity and gender binary as the norm of Western national belonging. In particular, building on Jasbir Puar's (2007) conceptualisation of homonationalism, the article shows how forms of nationalism in Western transgender and migrant communities rely on a combination of heteronormative binary gendering and the exertion of racism. While a conventionalised approach to transnationalism defines the term as a political strategy based on transnational politics, I play with suggesting different dimensions of transnationalism: it could mean ‘transgender nationalism’; the ‘assimilation of transgendered persons to the Western nation’; or ‘cross-border-nationalism’, a form of nationalism often established in migrant communities that constructs the diaspora as a nationalist extension of the homeland. My focus, therefore, is on analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging. Overall, and as an alternative to romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders, I suggest a power-sensitive epistemological and methodological shift in thinking entangled power relations, belonging and subjectivity in transnational feminist knowledge productions. (shrink)

La teoría feminista necesita tanto momentos de diagnóstico explicativo como de utopía anticipatoria con el fin de ser realmente crítica y verdaderamente feminista. Sin embargo, la tarea de diagnóstico explicativo en el análisis del funcionamiento de las relaciones de poder basadas en el género en toda su complejidad parece cortar la posibilidad misma de emancipación, de la cual depende la tarea de una utopía anticipatoria. En este artículo, considero esta inminente paradoja como una invitación a repensar nuestro entendimiento de la (...) emancipación y su relación con las dimensiones de utopía anticipatoria de la crítica; asimismo, cuestiono cuál es la concepción de emancipación compatible con un análisis de diagnóstico explicativo sobre la dominación de género, en la medida en que se encuentra ligada e involucrada con la raza, clase, sexualidad e imperio. Siguiendo a Michel Foucault, sostengo que una concepción negativista de la emancipación ofrece el mejor camino para que la teoría feminista transforme la paradoja de poder y emancipación en una tensión productiva que pueda alimentar a la crítica. (shrink)

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically (...) mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism. (shrink)

While Michel Foucault’s writings have been taken up extensively to explore gender and sexuality, until recently there was little work drawing on Foucault’s writings to discuss race. In part, this was because Foucault seemed to have said almost nothing about race, aside from some comments on Nazism and eugenics in the final pages of Part V of The History of Sexuality, volume 1. With the 1997 and 1999 publication of two series of lectures that Foucault delivered at the Collège de (...) France between 1974 and 1976, Abnormal and “Society Must Be Defended” (both appearing in English translation in 2003), Foucault scholars have, however, become aware that he made more extensive and provocative observations about race than had previously been believed. Both of these lecture series gives a genealogical account of the ways in which modern, biological forms of racism emerged at a certain point in history, stressing the contingency of this emergence and its enmeshment in power struggles and modern forms of power. This paper provides an account of what Foucault argues about race and racism in the Collège de France lectures, and, more briefly, presents two of the most extended treatments of race coming from Foucauldian perspectives that have appeared in the wake of these texts. (shrink)

Asylum law functions through a dichotomy between an idealized notion of Europe as a site characterized by human rights, and non-European countries as sites of oppression. In most social sciences and humanities literature, this dichotomy is seen as legitimizing European dominance and exclusion of non-Europeans. However, it is the same dichotomy which is used by asylum seekers to claim inclusion through the grant of asylum. Focusing on the inclusive potential of this exclusive dichotomy allows us to explore the ambiguities inherent (...) in the dichotomy. In asylum claims based on persecution on account of gender and sexuality, it becomes evident that not all human rights are considered equally fundamental. In many cases, asylum seekers are required to renounce human rights in order to prevent persecution, for example by complying with patriarchal family norms. Even where this requirement is rejected, asylum law illustrates the ambiguous relation between Europe and human rights. (shrink)

This essay investigates the political economy of sexuality through an interpretation of sex shows for foreigners in Bangkok, Thailand. Reading these performances as both symptoms of, and analytical commentaries on, Western consumer desire, the essay suggests the ‘pussy shows’ parody the mass production that was a hallmark of Western masculine identity under Fordism. This reading makes a case for the erotic generativity of capitalism, illuminating how Western, post-Fordist political economy of the post-1970s generated demand for these erotic services in Asia (...) and how Western, heterosexual masculine desire is integrated into global capitalist circuits. (shrink)

Este estudio revisa el desarrollo del análisis propuesto por Michel Foucault sobre el poder político en términos de gubernamentalidad, y esboza sus características principales. Se examina el despliegue de esta perspectiva, centrándose particularmente en cómo este enfoque genealógico del análisis de la conducta de todos y cada uno ha sido acogido y desarrollado en el mundo angloparlante. Se evalúan algunas de las críticas fundamentales que han sido planteadas a la analítica de la gubernamentalidad, y se arguye en favor de la (...) productividad continua y la creatividad de estas maneras de analizar la emergencia, naturaleza y consecuencias de las artes de gobierno. (shrink)