Productions of Subjectivity: Discursive and Relational Intimacies in Contexts of Analysis
Cathy Borck
In this paper the author draws on experiences as a researcher in a qualitative study that employed both ethnographic and interview methodologies, as well as experiences as a patient in psychotherapy, to theorize the subjective productions immanent to becoming a subject of knowledge discourses, where becoming a researcher and becoming a patient are two exemplary cases. The author demonstrates how disciplinary discourses govern logics of inquiry, which delineate what is produced in analytical contexts, arguing specifically that social science methodologies produce subjects of research, and that therapeutic practices produce psychotherapy patients. The object of the present analysis are these disciplinary discourses and the use of them for knowledge production, exposing how they govern the ways that technologies simultaneously call forth and emerge from power to produce the subject as the object of their analyses. As researcher and patient, the experiential and experimental hermeneutic juxtaposition between subject and object; seer and seen; sociologist and analysand, allows the author to shift between two sides of an analytic gaze. Drawing from experiences ‘in the field’ and ‘in session,’ the author demonstrates how disciplines (sociology and psychotherapy) produce discourses that categorize lived experience for the production of knowledge. The paper traverses between subject positions and subjective experiences, equally interpellated within knowledge discourses that claim to make sense of various social and psychic conditions. These discourses organize observational space (the field, the consulting room), produce subjects (participants and patients), and govern an episteme (social knowledge, self knowledge). In these material, discursive, and technological contexts, what are the possibilities and impossibilities? What is seen, said, and known? What is unseeable, unsayable, and unknowable? What is fixed and what is foreclosed? How are these epistemologies constituted and contained? Drawing on psychoanalytic and cultural theory, the author employs conceptualizations of unconscious, preconscious, and affective processes as an interruption to social scientific epistemological assumptions. Finally, the author considers the products of these practices, reflecting on the emergent subjective experiences produced by the therapy, and showing how the ethnographic or interview subject becomes textually represented, coded in the terms of sociological discourse. Language is a theme that runs throughout the paper – from disciplinary discourses and uses of social and diagnostic categories common to those discourses (sociological and psychoanalytic lexicons), as to uses of speech and narrative by subjects in these analytical settings (research and therapy).
Relevance, Irreverence, and Rhetoric: Reflections on the Democraticization of Sociological Knowledge
Alan Bourke
As citizen-scholars, cultivating a sense of democratic humility with a non-sociological audience is fraught with many tensions. Scholars may espouse an egalitarian affiliation with a given constituency in one context, and yet retain the aristocratic privilege of interpretative authority in another. Whilst sociological practice has variously been positioned as ‘progressive’, ‘civically engaged’, ‘critical’, ‘emancipatory’, and so on, it has also proved complicit with conservative political sentiment. As such, contestations over the degree of moral or political affiliation one should espouse in the research process have left the disciplinary autonomy of sociology on a precarious footing. Whereas one could once point toward the popularization of canonical sociological texts as being indicative of the extent to which the public recognized the utility and veracity of sociological insight regarding the exigencies of social change, the present era has been decreed the veritable ‘twilight of sociology’, and an age in which levels of public appreciation of sociology have plummeted to an all-time historical low. From the proposed queen of the academic sciences, sociology has long since been relegated to status of pawn in the knowledge economy.
Taking as its point of departure the claim that sociological knowledge is being re-positioned within the contemporary configuration of the knowledge economy, this paper argues that the pervasive manner in which various community constituencies are being capitalized upon in collaborative research encounters between sociologists and their respective publics is indicative of a growing emphasis placed upon the ‘users’ and ‘beneficiaries’ of sociological research. Whilst such democratic alignments offer great promise in regard to alleviating accusations of disciplinary irrelevance and epistemological stagnation, such alliances endorse an often uncritical espousal of such rhetorical tropes as collaboration, accountability, and relevance. Although sociologists tend to be amongst those most critical of the concept of community as well as of the institutional setting of the university, the discussion will argue that they are increasingly compelled to co-opt both in order to legitimize their disciplinary standing.
The Crisis of Western Secularity: Secularization as a Spatial Process
John D. Boy
“What would remain of the Church if there were no churches?” —H. Lefebvre
As understood by sociologists, secularization has long been seen as bound up with temporal categories such as modernity and progress. However, in its original historical signification, secularization was something that played out in space rather than time, as it referred to the adaptation of religious buildings for nonreligious purposes. Seizing on this spatial aspect of the concept of secularization, my contribution seeks to reformulate secularization as an instance of a more general process of religious formation. To this end, I draw on social-spatial theory, psychoanalytic thought, and genealogies of religion and secularism. Once I specify my concept of religious formation, I apply it to some contemporary phenomena in hopes of gaining an improved understanding of the stakes in the current panic about the crisis of secularism in the liberal-democratic states of the western world.
Shock and Awe in Midtown: Policing as Spectacle
Marnie Brady
Throughout NYC, police motorcades perform daily “surges” involving more than a dozen officers and their vehicles in drill formations at key financial, shopping, worship, and tourist destinations. In this presentation we will examine youtube images of surge drills in midtown Manhattan and individuals’ perceptions of the policing demonstrations through analyses of anonymous comments posted online. We argue, in part, that the surge drills perform a spectacle in NYC’s post 9/11 image making, drawing from Miriam Greenberg’s (2008) analysis of the city’s branding processes. The findings show that the surge images invoked a mixed range of affective responses by online viewers denoting fear, anger, national pride, blasé, and awe. The focus of the presentation will be on methodological considerations for analyzing youtube responses. The presentation will also provide examples of visual displays of data analyses.
‘Big Children in University Chairs’: Wondering about a Sociology of Miracles
Jesse Carlson
Sociologists seem to have largely abided by Weber’s dictum, enunciated in his ‘Science as a Vocation’ lecture, that science “does not know the ‘miracle’ and the ‘revelation’” (1958: 147). What science addresses itself to, by contrast, are law-like regularities and developments, the self-expanding ‘logic of capital,’ or the circularity of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies,’ patterned causal relationships broken only by ‘unintended consequences,’ by the surprises of social action, whether characterized by instrumental rationality or ‘collective effervescence.’ Asserting the unpredictability of action simultaneously makes room for agency and lets sociologists off the hook for their failures to predict, while also maintaining the distance from ‘belief’ that Weber felt was essential to science. But is the stance of the unbeliever the social scientist’s only option?
Recent theoretical work in social and political thought (e.g., Terry Eagleton, Bonnie Honig, Hent de Vries) suggests that the social sciences could benefit from and be rejuvenated by a new engagement with religious and theological categories and conceptions. Even apart from the failure of secularization to proceed according to the classical schema, there are good reasons for continuing to think through the relevance of theological concepts for sociology’s project of understanding human life with others.
This paper focuses on one such concept, that of the miracle, and the possibility of its development as a sociological concept capable of expanding insight into social dynamics, especially those of apology and forgiveness. The paper is informed by a variety of resources, including Fuyuki Kurasawa’s recent (2007) discussion of the work of forgiveness, the critiques of sociology’s incapacity to understand action made by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, and the philosophical theology of Franz Rosenzweig. I conclude by suggesting that sociologists, without needing to become ‘big children,’ may need, in a particular sense, to learn to believe in miracles in order to adequately understand the transformative possibilities of human action.
What’s Wrong With the Torturer
Nolen Gertz
In this paper I attempt to both look beyond our general contempt for torture to investigate the processes and procedures that must be in place for torture to even occur and show how our contempt actually serves to support these processes and procedures. The idea that the torturer is not simply someone who performs a particular activity but rather someone who, through his activity, becomes something alien and nightmarish to us has become so ingrained in our understanding of torture that it is rather difficult to remember that, regardless of how we might feel about it, the torturer is still a person performing an activity. Yet if we begin to take this simple fact more seriously and try to understand how particular people came to perform these particular activities then perhaps we can achieve a more realistic depiction of torture that is not just victim versus torturer, but instead something far more complicated. By looking at what torturers have said – in interviews, testimonies, and memoirs – rather than only what has been said about them, we can find that many of the concepts that have been applied to victims of torture can be usefully applied to the perpetrators as well, thus requiring that we pay more attention to the context in which torture takes place and less attention to merely our outrage over the fact that torture does take place.
Solves All Problems: Psychic Readers in New York City
Karen Gregory
In New York City, psychic shops are ubiquitous and in their ubiquity these stores not only co-author the visual text of the city, but they inform the texture and feel of life in this environment. Through photos, maps, and field notes I sketch an outline for understanding the ways in which the contemporary city dweller encounters and understands the psychic storefront. In this paper I argue that psychic shops blur the boundaries between public and private and, in doing so, create a liminal space that can simultaneously be seen and unseen. In and through their liminality, psychic shops pique our curiosity, cause us to wonder, and become the inspiration for what Elijah Anderson has called “folk ethnography” or stories about “how things are” that allow individuals to navigate uncertain terrains (Anderson 2004.) I argue, in conclusion, that the stories circulated about psychic storefronts affect our intimate behavior on the street, informing where we will walk, where we will allow our eyes to gaze, and with whom we will speak.
Power, Legitimacy and Crisis: the Question of Historical Continuity in Bourdieu and Habermas
Sebastian G. Guzman
The debate between two of the most important contemporary sociologists, Bourdieu and Habermas, has been almost inexistent. This paper aims at contributing to this debate by (1) reconstructing and comparing both authors’ theorizations of power and legitimacy in relation to the historical continuity of domination and to crisis, and (2) evaluating the main advantages and disadvantages of each model in the light of the other. I argue that Habermas’s theory may help (a) understanding the continuity and boundaries of fields in analogy to their functional characteristics—relation to environment, function and program; (b) explaining why field-specific symbolic capital is valued not only within the field, by considering both producers and consumers of the field’s output; (c) highlighting additional crisis tendencies mechanisms—systemic contradictions and various dysfunctional mechanisms—and the tensions between crisis-inducing mechanisms and counter-mechanisms; (d) considering a field that functionally provides legitimations for the relations of domination through economic capital in the social space as a whole; and (e) clarifying issues about the codification and state-backup of symbolic capital with the theory of delinguistified media. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s theory may contribute to Habermas’s with (a) some insights into the role of language in social change that should moderate Habermas’s hypothesis about crisis tendencies—these insights regard the dialectic between authorizing and authorized language, the unconscious embodiment of durable dispositions, and the legitimation through validation of exclusiveness; and (b) the reconstruction of interests, power, and the logic of struggles in systems other than the economy and politics, which also helps explaining the reproduction of all functional systems. I conclude by discussing some epistemological issues raised by these theories—notably, the tensions between the empirical and normative concepts of legitimacy and between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to domination.
Auto-deconstruction of Christianity: A Political Appraisal
Sam Han
In the past decade or so, scholars of religion and theologians have been exploring a tendency in Christianity, which Jacques Derrida and others, including Gianni Vattimo, John Caputo, and Jean-Luc Nancy, have called “auto-deconstruction.” By this, these thinkers are alluding to an immanent critique within Christian theology which seems to hit at the “end of Christianity,” a prospect that has been met with much praise among the anti-secularist Left, who have long been looking for an alternative to the racist implications of the hard-line secularism especially of the European kind. This paper will situate this intellectual trend in the context of recent debates on secularism taking place in social theory on theological as well as political grounds to raise questions about the Christo-centrism of this position.
Re-thinking Unproductive Labor in Capitalism
Jared Hanneman
Classical (sociological) economic theory has privileged the role of productive labor in modern capitalist societies at the cost of the marginalization of unproductive labor. A theoretical examination of Adam Smith and Karl Marx in conjunction with the works of functionalist, phenomenologist, structuralist and post-structuralist theorists shows that gift giving is an essential and inseparable aspect of modern capitalistic societies. A gift is any activity that is unpaid yet intrinsically necessary for the survival of an economic system. Far from being superfluous phenomena, gifts are vital to the reproduction of capitalist economic systems. Unproductive labor is functionally equivalent to the gift, and all modalities in this interrelationship benefit the capitalist class. The category of unproductive labor is not a rational category – rationality in this instance being understood as the grounds on which the economic reason is exchange. There is no exchange value in unproductive labor. If it has a pretense of rationality, it is because gift giving has a consensus that some activities remain unvalued by the capitalist classes. The economic category of unproductive labor is read into surplus labor. I examine several labor fields in the contemporary U.S. economic system to illustrate the non-rationality of unproductive labor, its functional equivalency to gifts and gift giving, and its fundamental necessity to the reproduction of the modern capitalist mode of production.
Crisis or Opportunity? The Rise of Personal Finance in Times of Crisis in Brazil
Elaine da Silveira Leite
This paper will identify the roots of personal finance, the principal institutions and agents, commonly known as “Gurus”, and their role in the development of personal finance in Brazil. I argue that this cadre has grown and is becoming an important agent in the production and diffusion of social values. They are “moral entrepreneurs” of finance, educating on ways to invest honestly to achieve economic security, if not profits, even during times of crisis. By capitalizing on instability and uncertainty, they educate, supporting by the self-help practice, how instability can be the best time for the development of financial skills and economic character. Yet these institutions and agents also renew themselves and expand their market. It is conceivable that they manufacture crises and thus secure their own dynamic by creating “new” speculative manias. Whether Brazil is unique in its affinity for personal finance and manias will be examined as this study proceeds.
Experiences and Productions of Ethnicity: from Ethnicities that Sell to Ethnictities that Stick
Laura Lovin
This main goal of the paper is to theorize the concept of ethnicity within the context of practices of urban development through tourism. The paper surveys theories of ethnicity and shows how ethnic identifications are troubled by the remapping of the European space as a result of the European Union (EU) enlargement eastward. The paper sets in dialogue institutional aspects of the EU’s program “European Capital of Culture” with a documentary film presented within the 2007 Astra Film Festival in Sibiu.
STAM– We are staying (2006) is an ethnographic documentary film directed by Anne Schiltz and Charlotte Gregoire. The film introduces us to Ruth and Natalia, two young women who grew up together in the Transyvanian village of Malancrav, Romania. One of them is Saxon and immigrated to Germany, and the other is Roma and dreams of being able to work in Spain. The film explores questions of ethnic belonging, migration, and the economic opportunities and limitations within the transnational space of the European Union.
I argue that the representational work of most of its visual elements convey an emphasis on persistence, resilience and survival in the definition of ethnic identity. The film reifies ethnicity and renders it as a frozen in time “an independent variable”, which is, intriguingly, part of the nation state vocabulary as well as of the new vocabulary of multiculturalism and commodified ethnic subjectivities of the European Union. I critique these representations through an analytical lens informed by Jaspir Puar’s explorations of modalities of belonging and connectivity that bypass the logic of the nation and Roger Brubaker’s analyses of ethnicity without groups.
The Critical Aesthetics of Disorder: The Crisis of Size in Buenos Aires
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
Foucault insightfully posited the body as the object and target of power. Consequently, that which dresses the body, manifests the powerful relationship an individual can have over it and because of it. Taking this assertion, we can explore the sociological ramifications of size laws in the City of Buenos Aires and explicate the power dress size has over the body.
In an article written by Kelly Hearn for the Christian Science Monitor, she asked a question in relation to Fashion-Savvy Argentina, which I wish to use as a point of departure, “Which came first, thin women or tiny sizes?” Argentina has the second highest rate of Anorexia in the World (after Japan.) The Argentine fashion industry has been blamed for this reality. Tiny dress sizes can be found in abundance in shops and boutiques, however, in a beauty-conscious Argentina, curves exclude women from wearing the latest fashions.
Ivanna Villanucci, in Kelly’s article states, that, “When you go into a store and find an extra large, you know that it is really the equivalent of a medium or even a small based on European or American standards.” Women, who do not fit into the “tiny size,” as a result of the fashion’s industry’s desire to thin the standard of beauty, feel marginalized, ugly and frustrated. Moreover, as a result of this sentiment, they then assert the power they hold over their body through any means necessary, in order to physically and metaphorically, “fit in.”
I do not pretend to give a comprehensive review on the vast work on anorexia in Buenos Aires or on the Argentine fashion industry. Instead, this paper seeks to address theoretically the intersection between power, engendered fashion and the body in Buenos Aires. Further, I wish to discuss the steps Buenos Aires has taken, as a collective body, to address the social by products of “tiny sizes.” I seek to pose the possibility—instead of arguing the fact—that the fashion industry’s power over women in this particular city is having catastrophic effects on their ability to live healthy and confident lives. Using Buenos Aires as a case study can open up a dialogue on the outlined relationships and accentuate the need for the fashion industry to internationally standardize sizes, while inclusively promoting beauty.
From Community to Communism
Francesca Manning
At this moment, “community” is being critiqued from all sides — as exclusionary, or counter-revolutionary, essentialist, identitarian, fascist, or boring. Yet, despite this, community is an inescapable term – either in its positive or negative form – in conversations about the world we live in and the way we want to change it. In this paper, I will explore those things that are indicated by the term “community” when used in a revolutionary context — that is, what is the “community” we are thinking of when we consider it as something necessary or important for revolution (or for life in general)? I will mainly approach this question by looking at the problem of the “subject” or the “individual” as one produced historically that precipitates the problem of the community which is, in fact, the problem of the semi-unreality of subjecthood. Marx and Lacan are the fulcrums of this study.
I will also look at some of the most virulent critiques of “community”, for instance in the recently published “The Coming Insurrection”, and the previously distributed “call”, as well as critiques launched from within the academy, particularly that of Miranda Joseph. This will, I hope, strengthen the insights gained from the exploration of the elements of the notion of “community” we might want to affirm.
I will treat these two discussions together as an entry point to the question of communism, which has increased slightly in popularity over the last year or so. This discussion of community can, I think, open the possibility of understanding communism’s real positive and negative content, rather than leaving it an open void or treating only “post-capitalism” as some kind of remainder that is left once capital is subtracted.
I hope to integrate here a discussion of this moment of “crisis” of the system, (which it is important to distinguish from the everyday crisis-filled life in capitalism) as a sharp reminder that there must be a significantly better way to organize sociality other than around profit, and that the scarcity that is supposed to drive this system is more of a myth every day. The actual inner workings of capitalist crisis are, then, relevant, but only insofar as they confirm the same insights to which our adoration and suspicion of “community” also give rise.
The Hear & Now: Deafness, Biotechnology and the Family
Laura Mauldin
Deaf infants born to hearing parents are the fastest growing demographic of cochlear implant (CI) recipients. But, there is controversy over using this surgically implanted technology to treat and potentially “cure” deafness, including debates over the ethical implications of pediatric CIs as the Deaf community questions parent and physician motives and the categorization of deafness as a medical problem. As the development of biotechnologies challenge our ideas of what human traits are desirable, the social and ethical implications of this new technology and the way it is being used must be examined. This study claims that in order to do so, the CI clinical environment, its affiliated agencies/services, and the experiences of CI recipient parents need to be investigated. The Hear & Now is as an ethnographic study in a cochlear implant (CI) clinic. Through participant-observation and in-depth interviews, the structural and cultural “matrix” within which the parents of implantees (implanted < 6 years of age) and the audiologists working with them are situated is examined. Observations of clinical interactions between parents and audiologists/clinicians are being conducted for one year. A series of in-depth interviews with parents (N=50) are also being conducted outside of the clinic. Preliminary results indicate that 1) the clinical decision to implant the child is not just the result of social processes regarding normativity and proper “care”, but also a well-orchestrated series of actions and “follow ups” originating in the institutional structures of the clinic, and 2) implantation is the starting point for entry into a much larger “CI culture” that produces a unique, technology-bound community that is highly organized and connected.
Manhattanism Now and Then: A Comparative Analysis of Congestion in Midtown between the 1940s and Today
Tsedale M. Melaku
The present paper is two-fold: (1) It explores the question of modern congestion by looking at sociological and statistical patterns of pedestrian and vehicular accidents on the 34th Street and Fifth Avenue intersection of Midtown Manhattan, and (2) analyses what congestion meant in the 1940s in comparison to today. The presentation will focus on the visual aspect of the paper, illustrating congestion at different periods in the 20th century through photographs of the 34th Street and Fifth Avenue Midtown area. Additionally, the paper will explore these issues through the theoretical lenses of Rem Koolhaas, William H. Whyte and Erving Goffman.
The Neoliberalization of Everyday Life: Decomposition, Reintegration and Accumulation Through Finance Capital’s Debt-Bondage
Justin Myers
In my presentation, I argue that the key distinctive feature of neoliberalism in the U.S. and its main strategy of reproduction since the 1990s is the imposition of debt-bondage on the general population. I explain that, when seen in relation to the “great refusal” (GR) of the 1960s and 1970s and its rejection of the Keynesian paradigm, neoliberalism’s move towards debt-bondage can be understood as a key mechanism for: (1) reintegrating living labor into the capital-relation; (2) intensifying and extensifying work via the commodity-form; (3) facilitating a new “regime” of accumulation; and (4) decomposing future-refusal via the conversion of home and university into debtors’ prisons. Particular emphasis is placed on the connection between the attempted universalization of debt-bondage and the different dynamics – logics and tools – around which neoliberalism (contra Keynesianism) operates. Of note, I contend that the practice of debt-bondage, neoliberal style, should be seen as neoliberalism’s inversion of the logic of the GR: debt-bondage is a toxic mimic of the GR’s demands for increased access to social wealth decoupled from work. In conclusion, I suggest several ways to think about an anti-debt movement, particularly ways to revitalize the self-reduction in price movement in relation to housing and education.
When is Enlightenment?: Kant and Foucault on the Subject and Society
Michael D. Phillips
Near the end of his life, Foucault attempted to recuperate the primacy of the subject position in an essay on Kant’s famous essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?” In this paper, I perform a close reading of both essays in the interest of examining the question of the existence of the modern autonomous subject. What is at stake in both of these works is the relationship between the scholar and society, a relationship largely characterized by its awkwardness. Both writers also seem less preoccupied with the question of what enlightenment is than when it is. In separating an enlightened, scholarly “public” from a pragmatic, political “private” (which are also framed as masculine and feminine, respectively), Kant negates the possibility of scholarship affecting the political realm, except in some constantly postponed future. While Foucault’s program of enlightenment is more concerned with political action, he too encounters great difficulties in relating theory to praxis. For him, enlightenment is an event that already happened, a process that is continually occurring, and a goal that is always indefinitely postponed. Through this paper I hope to raise questions about whether a more rational future is possible or even desirable, and about the nature and possibility of scholarly engagement with the public.
Waiting in Uncertainty
Lilia Raileanu
My presentation will open a discussion on the use and experience of time in modernity. In the foreground I place the phenomena of Waiting. The argument is that management of migration, multiplicity of choices and extreme dynamism in modernity create a specific relation between people’s use and experience of time and state institutions. Several multiple context examples which contrast long and short term waiting as well as waiting as primary and non-primary activity will support the argument.
The initial data suggest that there are patterns of experiencing waiting in multiple contexts. Waiting seems to be intentionally used by some institutions for surveillance purposes. The most negative impact has the Waiting which compels its’ subjects to wait for prolonged and unknown time. Such Waiting immobilizes the “waiters” by channeling their thoughts and behavior, as well as affecting negatively their emotional and cognitive spheres.
Further research should answer the following questions. What are the coping mechanisms of those who wait? What needs and motives lie behind people’s wish to manage time and acquire certainty about what /whom to wait and for how long? How institutional policies should be reshaped to diminish the negative impact of waiting on people?
Meet the Muslims: Ambivalent Tolerance in Post-9/11 Muslim Community Profiles in the New York Times
Mitra Rastegar
While U.S. orientalism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism much predate the September 11, 2001 attacks, the crisis following this event made visible the underlying assumptions of these modes of thought and produced changes in Western discourses about Muslims and Arabs. Although fearful and suspicious portrayals of Muslims and Arabs predominated in the post-9/11 period, there were also many calls for tolerance of Muslim Americans. Indeed, President Bush made statements describing Muslim Americans as hardworking and patriotic and a number of media outlets devoted unprecedented coverage to Muslim and Arab American communities and individuals, often eliciting sympathy for their experiences.
This paper analyzes a strand of this post-9/11 “discourse of tolerance” in New York Times articles that offer profiles of Muslim communities in the New York metro area. It demonstrates the delineation of an unstable and shifting boundary between the “tolerable” and “intolerable” in these pieces. Specifically, I examine the initial articulations of tolerance and sympathy in the immediate post-9/11 period and trace their transformation over time, based on data from 2001 to 2007. Through close textual analysis of representative pieces, I describe how sympathy or tolerance are expressed in different time periods and when ambivalence or ambiguity are present. Next, I “map” the articulations of tolerance and sympathy in relation to various geographies, given that many of the communities are presented as having complicated, and perhaps conflicting, relations to the “here” (the New York metro area) and the “there” (Muslim-majority countries) to which they are said to have ties. I consider whether and how sympathy and tolerance move across these geographies. In conclusion, I consider the relation between changing political and military priorities in the War on Terror and the shifting constructions of differently positioned “tolerable Muslims.”
Telling Truth and Telling Lies: Questions of Methodology
Erin Siodmak
“To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, once has started down the road of seeing more – and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize… after repeated exposure to images [the event] also becomes less real.” (Sontag, On Photography, 20)
what is truth? do lies contain truths? do facts always tell the truth? and how are various art forms or media held to different standards of truth telling?
The form information takes – or how it’s delivered – can mask beliefs, prejudices, and ideologies behind a facade of truth or objectivity, in a way similar to how the use of politically correct language can mask those same things. The assumptions of honesty, integrity, or reality are problematic presuppositions for anything that involves an acting subject. But what I’m also interested in thinking about is how much correcting a false image or story impacts the initial reception of it. And does the correction of a false image or story change its meaning or importance? Has it already served its purpose once it has been “put out there”? When a jury is told to disregard a comment made by an attorney, or when something is stricken from the record, does that lessen its impact? Once the image has been seen, does it matter much to correct what is false? And more significantly, was it ever really false?
Many truths are told without the use of fact, and there are falsehoods which appear objective and true based on the form they take. History books, for example, are seen as true and fact-based, but are always told from a perspective or position. But unlike a novel, a history book carries a certain credibility or validity. However, a first-person account of history carries a different affective capacity than does an omniscient or third-person telling, as in a Victorian novel or history book. There are reasons for telling different types of histories through different modes of telling, just as there are different visual modes for telling and showing.
(Un)Queering Identity: The Biosocial Production of Intersex/DSD
Alyson K. Spurgas
This paper examines intersex as a site of biosocial contestation, primarily through a genealogy of recent discursive constitutions of intersexuality. In the early stages of the movement, intersex activists in North America and Europe were eager to align with LGBT and queer communities and take on their radical politics around sex, gender and sexuality. In the early 1990s, many of these activists advocated complete demedicalization of the intersex body and a transgressive challenging of the sex/gender binary. As the efforts of intersex activists changed to a ‘pragmatic’ or ‘harm reduction’ approach to medicalization, the movement distanced itself from LGBT communities and queer identity politics. The introduction of ‘disorders of sex development (DSD)’ as a proposed replacement for ‘intersex’ heralds the beginning of a new era of biosociality. The (inter)sexed body has become a battleground upon which those who view intersexuality as a challenge to the sex/gender binary and desire a renewed alliance with queer politics and activist groups vie with those who prefer to provide intersex individuals access to biomedical citizenship and thus align strategically with Western medicine. I examine this contestation and its wide-ranging bioethical implications, primarily through an analysis of blogs and web-based discussions among intersex individuals, their activist allies, and clinicians, surgeons, psychologists/psychiatrists, neurologists and geneticists who are invested in the ontological politics of intersex/DSD. I also draw from current medical literature regarding treatment of intersex, particularly from experimental and clinical psychology. I focus on how ever-expanding and continuously-specializing medicine and technoscience produce new modes of association and identity around the body. Theories of embodiment are used simultaneously by multiple players in these arenas, and I analyze how these rhetorics produce competing technologies of self-care, self-regulation and self-management. A critique of these competing discourses is pertinent when considering the global proliferation of Western medicine and, more specifically, the recent medicalization of intersex outside of North America.
The Revolution Will Not Be Narrativized: Union Competition and Rank-and-File Power
Abe Walker
In the midst of the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s, the labor movement is wracked by internal divisions to an extent unsurpassed since the 1950s. Four years ago, in an unprecedented move, five major unions broke with the AFL-CIO to form their own rival labor federation (Change to Win). Today, that federation has itself split into at least two factions, each with competing goals and interests, and several important unions have elected to abandon the federation structure entirely, effectively going it alone. What initially manifest itself as a petty disagreement soon morphed into a much broader (and deeper-reaching) debate over the future of the labor movement itself. While movement partisans and their allies in the academy have been quick to lament the “splintering” of the movement, few have examined the actual impact of union competition (“raiding”) on worker power. The conventional wisdom states that when unions compete for members, the labor movement suffers, but it is unclear whether this is borne out by empirical research. Indeed, the 22-year period of AFL/CIO rivalry resulted in tremendous membership growth, the largest strike wave in American history, and an increase in union density across nearly every industry. The more recent spate of competition has had dramatically different results. This paper will trace out a social history of “raiding”, drawing upon social theories of competition, psychoanalytic theory (especially Freud’s Oedipus), and Nietzsche’s concepts of ressentiment and the will to power. Additionally, I will engage with scholars who have suggested that the turn toward affective labor has rendered the traditional labor movement meaningless. Finally, I will suggest what a successful politics might look like in a newly divided labor movement.
Foucault and Freudo-Marxism
Aaron Weeks
This paper attempts to contextualize Foucault’s lectures of 1978-9 by situating them within a broader shift in Foucault’s thought. It will be argued that this text, along with others from this period, represents an attempt on Foucault’s part to challenge the prevailing theoretical framework of the post-war period: Freudian-Marxism. This challenge comes in the form of a historical critique of discourses which, for Foucault, have lost touch with contemporary relations of force, failing to ‘pay the price of reality’ along their way to becoming ‘totalitarian theories’. Foucault’s distinction between an ‘analytics of truth’ and a ‘critical ontology of the present’ can serve as a starting point for understanding how Foucault’s methodology leads him to part ways with popular theories of the day, most notably those of Deleuze and Guattari. It will be argued that The Birth of Biopolitics should be read as part of Foucault’s more general critique of a theory of power as repression, itself a thin veil of the theory of sovereignty. More specifically, it should be read as part of an engagement with an historical reality whose horizon is no longer that of Oedipus—Fascism but Neo-liberalism.
Cultural Hybridity: Reimagining the Collective
Haj Yazdiha
History has shown that the notion of hybridity has existed far before it was popularized in postcolonial theory. However, in this time after imperialism, globalization has both expanded the reach of Western culture, and has allowed a process by which the West constantly interacts with the East. This hybridity is evident in every snapshot of society, from trends in “fusion” cuisine to the adoption of Caribbean rhythms in popular music. Ethnic Americans are marked with hyphenated identities: “Indian-American,” “Asian-American,” illuminating the lived experience of ties to a dominant culture coinciding with the cultural codes of a third world culture. This paper explores how hybridity counters essentialism and offers the opportunity for a counter-narrative, a means by which the subordinated can take part in the practice of representation and claim shared ownership of a culture that relies upon them for meaning. Examining hybridity in terms of race, language, and nation will show how the deconstruction of cultural boundaries can be seen as a means of transforming accepted ideas of identity and formulating a new form of collective politics. Ultimately, this demonstration of boundaries will illustrate the value of dissecting the words and images we accept as truths in order to expose the fallacies that pit collectives against one another and perpetuate social inequality.
