Military Invasion and Women's Political Representation

The bodies produced by the violent practice of suicide bombing are a source of horror and disgust. They are, in feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's concept, abject: that which defies borders and is expelled to create the self. As ‘abject bodies’, suicide bombers' bodies frustrate attempts at calculation and rational control of security risks, and, in their mutilated flesh, expose as unstable the idea of the body as a whole with clearly defined boundaries between inside and outside. Female suicide bombers, whose bodies are already considered ‘abject’, produce a politics of the body that exceeds narratives of victimhood, and whose very monstrosity symbolically threatens the foundations of the nation-state. Attempts at constructing subjects out of the mutilated bodily remains of victims and perpetrators of suicide bombings are key practices in the production of the state and gendered subjects. The practice of suicide bombing and efforts to recover and resignify bodies reveals how power molds and constitutes the border of the body and state simultaneously. The explosive body of the suicide bomber thus has destabilizing effects beyond the motivations of its perpetrators and exposes the political work necessary to maintain the illusion of secure, bounded bodies and states.     

Discarded Histories and Queer Affects in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red

This article takes up Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) as an allegory for the discarded history of queerness. The novel in verse rewrites the Greek myth of Herakles (Hercules) and the red-winged monster Geryon as a queer love story. In Carson’s rendition, Herakles is not a colonizer who murders Geryon to seize his red cattle but a lover who steals and breaks his fragile heart. Born hybrid in a modern-day context, Geryon struggles with narrating his life in words and instead takes pictures.

By asking us to pay attention to history’s queer affective traces, Carson invites us to think about how bodies become discarded social monsters and how monsters must learn to live in their bodies. She turns our attention to the traumas and their affects that render the activities of subjectivity unpredictable and undecipherable. In Autobiography of Red, “queer” is not simply sexual orientation but the abject perversions of difference, not easily nameable. Without the familiar registers of identity, we are invited to witness and to be touched by Geryon’s life through his photo-autobiography, which captures the affect of experience, otherwise lost to the foreclosures of time.     

A Different Take on the Big Bang Theory: Examining the Influence of Asperger Traits on the Perception and Attributional Confidence of a Fictional TV Character Portraying Characteristics of Asperger Syndrome

Research shows that media figures can influence the construction of one’s personal and social identity. However, there are few studies that examine representations of stigmatized groups with developmental disorders, such as those with autism spectrum disorders. This research examines the effect of a viewer’s scores on the autism quotient (AQ) and their relationship with homophily and attributional confidence towards Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, who is suspected of having Asperger’s syndrome (AS). Guided by uncertainty reduction theory the results indicated a positive relationship between the dimensions of the AQ and homophily with Sheldon, and a positive relationship between higher scores on the AQ and attributional confidence towards Sheldon. The implications of identification with fictional television characters for individuals with AS, and the application of the AQ in future research are discussed relative to the current findings.     

Falling: Jouissance or Madness

Testo Junkie’s (Preciado, 2013) far-reaching exploration of desire elides the abject, the (culturally inculcated) underbelly of sex. When speaking of desire clinical psychoanalysis and the academy use similar language regarding fragmentation and the shattering of self. But for clinicians a distinction must be made between jouissance and psychosis. The former requires a transcendence of shame; the latter is imbued with the abject. This essay argues that the burden of unmediated shame is left to the reader of Testo Junkie. A clinical vignette illustrates the juncture of desire, shame, and fragmentation and the necessity of the analyst’s understanding of the difference between jouissance and madness.     

The Classed Body in the Sociological Imagination

Class theorists of embodiment in Sociology point to and illuminate both an over‐ and an under‐exposed body and experience that ultimately mark the bodies of the poor as ideologically, discursively and materially abject. In this essay, I map out theories of the bodies of the poor, including those of Marx, Engels, Elias, Bourdieu, Foucault, Donzelot and Adair. I suggest that an understanding of the ways in which the bodies of the poor are positioned as abject can facilitate a flexible and reflexive heuristic through which we can negotiate epistemic shifts between material and discursive categories, as well as providing us with a template through which we can come to understand even the most profoundly abject bodies, those of poor women in a welfare state, as potential sites of embodied agency and resistance, all central to the ethical and holistic study of sociology.     

The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.     

Memento Mori: The Book as a Cut

Despite Testo Junkie’s overt criticisms of psychoanalysis, this essay attempts to read the formal aspect of the work—as a process of mourning, a body-essay, an experimental protocol of intoxication—through the lens of the everyday practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Looking at the way soma erupts in the consulting room, the conundrums of agency and identity, Preciado’s (2013) work on the biopolitics of the psychopharamacopornographic era is shown to be critical to any unraveling of a symptom. On a more personal scale, Preciado’s own stated intention that the writing of the book should function as a cut, as a Memento Mori, is read in this essay as a depiction of the extreme limits one must traverse to locate an experience of desire, beneath or beyond the apparatuses of the state—something that Preciado shows as penetrating further into our lives and bodies than many of us are prepared to acknowledge.     

Bodies of work: skilling at the bottom of the global nursing care chain

ABSTRACT

In the midst of a growing global market for migrant care work, there is a need to investigate not only how such labour is consumed but how ‘ideal’ care workers are also produced. This paper investigates how schools within migrant-sending countries produce nurse labour through body work or the testing and honing of hospital procedures on patients’ bodies. Focusing on the case of the Philippines, this paper shows how the education of nurses for export creates a paradoxical impact on care work within local healthcare institutions. Aspiring nurse migrants provide much-needed manpower to understaffed public hospitals yet, treat poor patients as docile bodies to enhance their skills for future foreign employers. This practice creates an inherent inequality in the actual skilling of aspiring nurse migrants, where the poorest bodies allow nurse migrants to provide better care to more privileged bodies in wealthier nations.     

FIXING FAMILIES THROUGH TELEVISION?

Television has played a central role as a tool through which to imagine and re-imagine the South African nation, family and selfhood, and to ‘fix’ these same categories. From the apartheid state's blacking out of healthy everyday life images of black families, through the efforts of founding a ‘new’ nation using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to modern day therapeutic talk shows, television has progressively placed less salience on the ‘nation’ and more on family and interpersonal relationships within this social unit. Self-disclosure on television, especially through a talk show significantly called Relate, ironically reveals and occludes legacies of class and racial differentiations with their attendant socio-economic imbalances. Talking about personal affect to ‘fix’ one's problems on national television emerges as an instrumental undertaking that appears to benefit guests to the show but perhaps not as much as it does the production company and South African Broadcasting Corporation, suggesting that the participants are being exploited. Be that as it may, Relate emerges as an exercise in the interiorization of control, as well as an invitation to undertake serious dialogue about interpersonal intimacy.     

The representation of street art on Flickr. Studying reception with visual content analysis

Street art is public art; it’s accessible; it’s of the people; it’s an urban voice; it’s on public view; it’s on-the-street. Nonetheless, the World Wide Web has been party responsible for street art becoming both recognised and popular. As a result, this study is investigating how street art is represented on the open photo-sharing platform, Flickr. It is a social network site offering a large portfolio of photographs showing a wide range of images, which have been categorised and classified using ‘tags’. By using a visual content analysis based on theoretically determined categories to examine the uploaded photographs, this investigation will shed light on what a selection of Flickr users recognise as street art and how they record and index it.     

Media advocates,Latino citizens and niche cable The limits of ‘no limits’ TV

In Shot in America, Chon Noriega calls for the study of media activism’s work ‘within the system’ of state institutions and for analysis of the relationships between media activism, the television industry and government policies. This article uses a cultural policy studies focus to answer this call and map the deregulated terrain upon which media advocacy groups must now operate. Liberal governance demands that media advocates find means other than state-directed appeals to advance their agendas. As such, this essay examines the efforts of several Latino advocacy groups to garner viewer support for a Latino-themed cable television show, Resurrection Boulevard, and to use the series as a vehicle for increased Latino participation in the television industry. This article focuses on the issue of access for Latinos to professional positions that affect television programming, and it presents tools for advocacy efforts within political spheres to achieve more socially equitable access to media technologies. First, the paper traces the regulatory history of the broadcasting and cable television industries to show how the federal government narrowly conceives of ‘the public interest’ as a specifically consumerist one. The article then analyses the structures that led to cable television’s ‘narrowcasting’ format, such as Showtime’s ‘No Limits’ programming, and argues that liberalism has created a context wherein several media advocates normalise the ‘citizen-consumer’ model. Having established this groundwork, the author then conducts a case study of the economic and social forces that shape Resurrection Boulevard, which is written, produced and acted by Latinos. Through this study, the author maintains that advocacy groups’ consumer-based appeals to Latinos as ‘citizen-consumers’ fail to serve as effective instruments for achieving increased minority representation in the television industry.     

Abjection and self‐identity: towards a revised account of purity and impurity

Kristeva describes abjection as ‘the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck’. Her account of the ‘abject’ has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror … picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic. This article will begin by exploring the central line of criticism that has been made of Kristeva's concept of abjection, before then considering an attempt by Goodnow to address these concerns through a re‐reading of Kristeva. Goodnow's re‐reading of Kristeva, together with some conceptual clarifications from Hegel, will point the way towards a more precise account of purity and impurity. I shall contend that Kristeva's work on social abjection sometimes hits upon a pattern, which greater conceptual precision will be able to revise into a new social theory of when and why themes of purity and impurity are invoked in Western societies. It will be argued that impure phenomena are those in which heterogeneity is seen to disturb a qualitative homogeneity, taken to be basic; pure phenomena are those understood to be all‐of‐a‐piece and as a result identical with their essence.     

Somewhere to be permanent for a minute: Time and space perceptions of older adult men experiencing chronic homelessness in Detroit

Within the landscape of postwar era Detroit, space is vast, but places are hard to find. As people tumble down the side of Maslow’s pyramid into abject homelessness, they attempt to anchor themselves in locations that suspend the otherwise situational free fall. This article analyzes how time and space are perceived by people experiencing chronic homelessness and how those individual perceptions are informed by the objective time and space urban environment. We conducted our community-based participatory research into the experiences of chronic homelessness both from perspectives of chronically homeless older adult men and from front-line service providers. Themes that emerged are as follows: (1) temporary permanence, (2) permanent temporariness, and (3) lostness. The article concludes with policy implications regarding the procedures for measuring the extent of homelessness and the needs of those who live it.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.     

Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis

What can actor-network theory’s approach to analyzing objects offer to cultural sociology? To answer this question we ask a more specific one: How does materiality affect people’s experience of art in a museum exhibition? Research at two museums suggests that non-human agents—object and words—interact with human bodies to choreograph the art encounter. This process works through interactions between two processes of emplacement: physical position and cognitive location. Position guides location in the process of meaning-making, a relationship mediated by three mechanisms: distance, legibility, and orientation.     

Sensational signs,authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change

The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes that are central to the ideologies of settler colonialism: land (and its feared loss), and (white) bodies (and their feared disappearance). Following Sarah Ahmed (2004a,b), emotionally charged signs can be seen as actions (akin to words in speech act theory). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere as an idealized place of rational debate, the article argues that a combination of affect‐emotion‐feeling and the performance of ‘reason’—what Aristotelian rhetoric refers to as pathos and ethos—are integral for understanding public‐political discourses of whiteness at a time when white privilege has been called out globally (and locally), and white dominance has lost its stronghold.     

Balls Enough: Manliness and Legitimated Violence in Hell's Kitchen

This article presents one example of how masculinity and hierarchy are exercised through violence in organizations. It draws on the empirical data of 15 episodes from the US reality television series Hell's Kitchen, in which 15 cooks compete for the job of Chef in one of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's restaurants. Ramsay's task is to lead the cooks towards a hegemonic masculinity valid in the restaurant context. An important feature is the contestant's ability to deal with Ramsay's fiery temper and fits of rage. The winner is the person who succeeds in approaching Ramsay's standards in terms of culinary art and leadership qualities, which in his terminology is referred to as manliness. Ramsay's aggressive style of management is possible to recognize, explain and to a certain extent justify as a way of running a restaurant. But what if his tongue‐lashings are to be understood, not as a possible way to train skilled chefs, but instead are called violence? Gender‐oriented organizational studies stress the importance of paying attention to acts of violence in organizations rather than disregarding it as organizational culture or tradition. Using concepts and perspectives from masculinity theory and feminist studies on men's violence against women, the purpose of this article is to analyse the micro practices of how masculinity and hierarchy are exercised through violence in the restaurant environment. As will be argued, reality television can be understood, not so much as a reflection but rather as an exaggeration of real life. It can be seen as a distorting mirror that enlarges and at the same time perverts the micro practices of reality. The aim is dual; to investigate the link between masculinity and legitimated violence in organizations and to give prominence to the potential of reality television visualizing the normalization of violence in organizations.     

Imagination laboratory: making sense of bio‐objects in contemporary genetic art

Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio‐technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an ‘imagination laboratory’, a space through which un‐framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, enabling sense‐making and offering fantastic connections otherwise not articulated. In this article, the framework of ‘bio‐objectification’ is enriched with Bennett's (2001) notion of enchantment and the importance of wonder and openness to the unusual, in order to highlight alternative matters of concern than articulated through conventional politico‐moral discourse. Drawing on a cultural sociological analysis of Eduardo Kac's Edunia, Lucy Glendinning's Feather Child, Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells and Heather Dewey‐Hagborg's Stranger Visions, we discuss how the intermingling of art, science, critics, art historians, science fiction, internet, and physical space, produce a variety of attachments that this article will unpack. The article demonstrates that while some modern boundaries and rationalities are highlighted and challenged through the ‘imagination laboratory’ of the art process, others are left untouched.     

DisPovertyPorn: Benefits Street and the dis/ability paradox

In this article, we offer a timely socio-cultural analysis, informed by a critical disability perspective, of UK Channel 4’s reality television series Benefits Street. Drawing on the work of Allen, Tyler, and De Benedictus and Jensen on ‘poverty porn’, we broaden their analysis to ask how dis/ability disrupts the ‘poverty porn’ narrative. We pay attention to the dis/appearance of dis/ability on Benefits Street and, in doing so, we also extend an analysis of how impairment labels function in people’s lives as socio-cultural categories that place limits on what labelled people can do and can be. We suggest that both the articulation and erasure of dis/ability are used as a form of narrative prosthesis to support the overarching story line that people on benefits are unworthy ‘scroungers’.     

Feeling Northern: ‘heroic women’ in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014—)

This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 50s, early 60s: they have themes of escape, they use location to say something about their characters and they take viewers on an emotional journey that is related to the social conditions they inhabit. And yet, she is also putting women, who were often on the periphery of social drama, in the centre. Wainwright takes her viewers on a journey that begins with the anger and injustice resonant with the male protagonists of social realism, but as women, this anger and injustice is worked through in terms of the family and eventually leads to a greater sense of commitment to community and the place she comes from, which, in Wainwright’s work, is the North. In so doing, she expands the genre and gives it a female voice. She offers us a sense of what ‘feeling’ Northern is to women, as well as men. Additionally, she is a screenwriter who is speaking from the position of the working-class North; she is intimate to these communities, not a ‘detached observer.’ And yet, despite these inroads, her work has only recently received praise from the British television Industry.