"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival.

This major new book offers a highly original account of ethical and political subjectivity in contemporary culture. It makes a strong case for a non-unitary or nomadic conception of the subject, in opposition to the claims of ideologies such as conservatism, liberal individualism and techno-capitalism. Braidotti takes a bold stand against moral universalism, while offering a vigorous defence of nomadic ethics against the charges of relativism and nihilism. She calls for a new form of ethical accountability that takes "Life" as (...) the subject, not the object, of enquiry. This ethics is presented as a fundamental reconfiguration of our being in the world and it calls for more conceptual creativity in the production of worldviews that can better enable us to behave ethically in a technologically and globally mediated world. The nomadic ethical subject negotiates successfully the complex tension between the multiplicity of political forces on the one hand and the sustained commitment to emancipatory politics on the other. _Transpositions_ provides an intellectually rich guide to the leading critical debates of our time and will be of great interest to scholars and students throughout the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

A critical examination of the figure of Oedipus in psychoanalysis and Western culture as it relates to the history of society and capitalism.

This is the first book to use complexity theory to open up the 'geophilosophy' developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?.

This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.

Deleuzian Encounters brings together sixteen accessible, thought-provoking essays that examine the practical and ethical implications of Deleuze's philosophy for different contemporary social issues. Topics explored include: the environment, terrorism, refugees, indigenous reconciliation, gender, suicide, intellectual disability, injecting drug use, classroom teaching and global activism. Each contribution provides practical examples of how to make use of Deleuze's thought in social research, and offers fresh insights into the creative and innovative potentials Deleuze's philosophy holds for social thought and action.

The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. In this paper I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore what happens to the drug using body when it is rethought as a machinic assemblage. Following an exploration of how the body of the drug user is put together and (...) stratified as a subject, and a careful manoeuvre through the bleak conception of the ‘drugged body’ provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I begin to map out some ethical alternatives. I argue that a body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do (rather than what is essentially ‘is’), and that assemblages should be assessed in relation to their enabling, or blocking, of a body’s potential to become other. (shrink)

A study of love and hate in learning and an argument for why educators might begin with consideration of these psychical dynamics when interpreting the conflictive dreams of education.

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also (...) reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work.

Welcome to the first launch issue of Subjectivity, previously the International Journal of Critical Psychology. Subjectivity is an international, transdisciplinary journal that will explore the social, cultural, historical and material processes, dynamics and structures of human experience. As topic, problem and resource, notions of subjectivity are relevant to many disciplines, including cultural studies, sociology, social theory, science and technology studies, geography, anthropology, gender and feminist studies and psychology. The journal will bring together scholars from across the social sciences and the (...) humanities in a collaborative project to identify the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake our social worlds. Our aim, then, is a re-prioritization of subjectivity as a primary category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the relation between Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, with reference to women. It argues that Deleuze's "methods" reveal an intensive dyanamic in Kant obscured by readings which concentrate on the molar structures in his thought and that this dynamic is implicated with the deployment by Deleuze (and Guattari) of becoming-woman as a middle line which escapes the rational tribunal. It insists that a philosophy of difference function as a positive elimination of relations to unity, to the subject (...) and to other figures of power in philosophical thought and that Deleuze's oeuvre is a critical and creative engagement with the transformation of philosophical problems and the relation of thinking to history which emerge from this. The other theme, that of women, is addressed through Luce Irigaray's reading of Kant and Rosi Braidotti's reading of becoming-woman. I argue that whilst the former's critique of an uncritically assumed symmetry in Kant's work is effective and well-directed, she becomes caught in her own methodology of jamming, but that there are nonetheless strong and productive directions in her thought, many of which are parallel and/or connected to those of Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman. Against Braidotti's interpretation of becoming-woman, I argue that it adopts a molar political strategy and as such does not connect with the force behind this thought. Lastly, this thesis is an argument against bilateral sexual difference, in favour of distributive or 'n-sexes': the title, Breeding Demons connects the theme of demons in Deleuze's writing to the cycles which effect such distributions. (shrink)