The love bug and the melancholic drag queen or a reflection on the cultural/political “grounds” of subjects as sexual

The notion of the subject and its formation has long been at the centre of discussion in critical theory. Identity discourse constructed a passive subject made up of qualities such us gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and age. Poststructuralist thought on the other hand invested its critical mind in producing a mobile subject, one that is both the product and the producer of practices, power and processes. While identity discourse put qualities such as “sex” at the centre of its analysis of subject formation and produced a sexual subject, poststructuralist thought emphasised “bodies and pleasure” and produced the subject as sexual. This article addresses the formation of the subject as sexual through an everyday practice that forms a dominant part of our contemporary computerised era, namely that of the opening of an e‐mail. It reads the effects of the “Love Bug”, the e‐mail that infected millions of computer systems on the 4th of May 2000, so as to assess the extent it produces a different subject sexual than the one already promoted in poststructuralist thought. Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” (a dominant concept in relation to the subject as sexual) and her allegory of the melancholic drag queen are evaluated through ?i?ek’s critique and the example of the “Love Bug” e‐mail. This produces a different reading of the subject as sexual: one that understands sexual pleasure as being at the foundations of subject formation.     

From Play to Art—From Experience to Insight

This article investigates the role of play and playlike activities (imagination, art) in developing and using symbolic tools. We understand processes of development of symbolic tools as coordination between two types of relationships: the subject–object relationships and the subject–subject relationships. This coordination begins when a new, playlike frame of activity is introduced in the interaction. The imaginary frame of activity changes relationships between the participants. Furthermore, the imaginary activity frame may enter into interaction with the out-of-play activity frames (“reality” frames). Structures and relationships built within the imaginary frames are then used to shape the actual understanding of the world (subject–object relationship) as well as the interpersonal relationships and identities of the participants.

Introduction and further development of imaginary frames is a recursive process that takes place on different but related time scales: from microdevelopment through ontogenetic development to cultural development. Our project was designed to demonstrate some of the key moments that occur in the symbolic construction, in an “untangled” manner. To that effect, we designed a drama workshop to outline and illustrate processes that take place at the point of introduction of a new, imaginary frame and at the point when this imaginary frame begins to interact with the out-of-play frames. The aim of the workshop was to magnify each stage in construction of semiotic tools by “walking” professional researchers through a series of playlike activities.     

The legal framework and taxation of Scandinavian non-profit organisations

The Scandinavian countries are part of the same legal tradition. No Scandinavian country has any written statute on non-profit associations. Their association law is flexible, common-sensical and easy to comply with. To obtain subsidies, the associations may have to submit to regulations regarding organisational structures (open membership and one person, one vote). The law on foundations is more formalised, and the foundations are subject to considerably more control and scrutiny. Scandinavian NPOs are usually exempt from income tax, but do not to any great extent benefit from deductibility for donations. They are subject to payroll tax, and usually to value added tax. The Scandinavian taxation policies may make the NPOs economically dependent upon the government, and subject to regulation through ‘subsidy law’.     

Talk,Research Technology,and the Achievement of Human Subject “Status Passage”

This article draws on field notes and interviews collected during an ethnographic study of the informed‐consent process in HIV/AIDS clinical trials to examine the movement of individuals from the status designation of patient to that of human subject of research. Its theoretical starting points are Glaser and Strauss's (1971) observation of the centrality of interaction to status passage and their conceptualization of status passage as social accomplishment. Insights from conversation and technology studies are applied to show that human subject status passage is facilitated through (1) the enlistment efforts of research professionals and patients, (2) the talk of participants on informed consent and protocol‐related matters, and (3) the placement of signatures on informed‐consent documents. The analysis reveals that human subject status passage is indeterminate, negotiated, and unmarked by ceremony and cultural symbols. The implications of these findings for future studies on status passage and informed consent in human research are considered.     

A Marxist Critique of Marx's Theory of History: Beyond the Dichotomy Between Scientific and Critical Marxism

This article argues that an application of Marxism to itself can help us transcend Gouldner's (1980) dichotomy between scientific and critical Marxism. After demonstrating that the paradigmatic document of scientific marxism, Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, turns the structural logic of capitalist economy into the basis for a transhistorical theory of social-economic development, this article explores the limitations of critical Marxism's response to scientific Marxism and concludes that a viable, not class-centered, reformulation of the emancipatory project is possible through an analysis of capitalism's "dialectic of scarcity." The task of the emancipatory project, it is argued, is to turn humanity, and not the working class, from a political subject in itself to a political subject in and for itself.     

Constructing Unfinalizability: A Subject Positioning Analysis of a Couple's Therapy Session Hosted by Tom Andersen

The notion of subject positions is a useful tool in thinking through therapeutic interactions. In this article, I discuss positioning as an everyday phenomenon, and highlight the relational and social power dynamics that shape the subject positions persons may inhabit. Analysis is presented of the positional dynamics that play out in the couple's therapy session facilitated by Tom Andersen. Analysis suggests that Andersen adopts a not‐knowing, uncertain, and curious position, while constructing the couple as competent, unfinalizable persons able to negotiate the choice‐points that arise in front of them. However, if subject positions are grounded in social power dynamics, the session leaves a particular question unanswered: How will these emergent positions take hold outside of the consulting room?     

The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects

This paper argues existing scholarship on Asian American communities is limited by an assumption that incorporation into the US can productively address racial and economic precarity. As an alternative, we offer “Extinguishing Asian (American) Insurgency”, a theoretical framework that incorporates histories of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics of incorporation into contemporary sociological analyses of Asian subject formation. Applying Du Boisian sociology alongside Frantz Fanon and Joy James, the framework adopts a global, relational analysis of Asian Americans and the US state. We demonstrate the framework's utility through two case studies: anti-colonial Sikh diasporic politics through the Gadar Party and US state efforts to tie diasporic South Vietnamese identity to an anti-communist politic. As such, we encourage the study of alternative possibilities of Asian subject formation that are extinguished by state incorporation, particularly through imperialism and military serivce. Specifically, we address sociologists who extinguish the insurgent Asian American subject in their scholarship by assuming incorporation and pro-state politics as a natural end goal of migration, or those who simply do not name the US as the institutional force extinguishing possibilities of Asian Americans' insurgency.     

Advancing Treatment Strategies for Pathological Gambling

Experiences from treatment trials are described. The use of structured instruments for subject characterization and symptom change assessment is discussed and the challenges of treating specific groups (e.g., those with co-occurring alcohol use disorders) explored. Treatment for pathological gambling might be advanced most rapidly through collaborative multi-center efforts.     

Beyond performative talk: critical observations on the radical critique of reading interview data

ABSTRACT

We centrally consider the question of what interview data can be used to ‘say’ through a dialogue with advocates of the ‘radical critique’ of interview studies. We propose that while the critique has considerable utility in drawing to ‘the social life of interviews’ and the pervasiveness of notions of the ‘romantic subject’, it simultaneously goes too far in its reduction of interviews to narrative performance, and not far enough in its own critical departure from core characteristics of the romantic subject. We show how the critique leaves intact imagery of a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the experienced and the expressed, and involves a related conflation of what can be said at interview with what interviews can be used to say. We explore how the radical critique might productively be built upon via more ‘synthetic’ forms of research engagement, outlining alternative modes of apprehending interview data through a further critical departure from the romantic subject. Accordingly, we advance a move beyond a sole engagement with questions of how data are constructed and produced and towards how such data might otherwise be used to speak about the social world beyond the social nexus that constitutes an interview encounter.     

网络文化提升城市认同的路径探析

城市认同感体现着城市对于主体的凝聚力、感召力和吸引力,是城市文化和城市软实力建设的重要维度。网络媒介作为一种强势崛起的新的文化范式和传播范式,在城市认同感的构建中具有不可忽视的重要地位。要加强对于网络文化提升城市认同的路径和机制的研究,充分发挥网络文化在时间、空间、符号、仪式、共同体等维度对于城市认同的构建作用,促进网络所形构的城市记忆、城市地方感、城市符号、城市媒介仪式、城市共同体想象,增强网络主体与城市之间的情感、记忆和审美等纽带联结,使网络媒介成为构建城市认同、增进城市文化魅力和文化软实力影响效果的有效途径和方式。     

Framing the Muslim subject,contesting the secular citizen: Tablighi Jamaat and the (trans)nationalization of Islam in Singapore

This paper explores how the (trans)nationalization of Islam can lead to differential understandings of the Muslim subject and secular citizen in Singapore. (Trans)nationalization problematizes the state-led regulation of religion by revealing the complexities that emerge when religious subject positions are indexed to citizenship status. Islamic expression is closely regulated in Singapore, meaning the Singaporean Muslim subject is framed by the state in secular-first terms. Complicating this framing is the presence of Bangladeshi migrant workers, who, by virtue of their visa and residency statuses, are viewed as transient members of society and denied access to citizenship. Non-citizenship causes a variety of Islamic expressions to become viable pathways to religious subject formation, including those associated with Islamic missionary movement, Tablighi Jamaat. By claiming these subject positions, Bangladeshi Tablighis become vectors through which Singapore's Muslim spaces are exposed to transnational Islamic influences, causing the mosque to be imbued with divergent, and sometimes contested, meanings and attributions of value.     

Dancing Ourselves to Death: The Subject of Emma Goldman's Nietzschean Anarchism

Abstract

This article draws together two lively and provocative radical theorists, Emma Goldman and Friedrich Nietzsche, and suggests that a reading at their intersections can inspire political thought, action, and resistance in particular ways. The argument is framed through and productive of a particular archetype which emerges from a reading of these thinkers, that of The Dancer. Both Goldman and Nietzsche have been noted for their affect-laden reflections on dance, as an image of the subject which evades capture within the frameworks of discipline, morality, and ressentiment and which instead commits to a ceaseless and creative insurrection of- and- against the self. Here, I argue that through this image of The Dancer we can conceptualise a form of critical or anarchic subjectivity which can provocatively interpret and inspire radical political action. In the article I look at some of the ways in which dance has formed an important component of radical politics. However I also argue that dance as understood in the terms established through Goldman and Nietzsche moves beyond corporeal performance, indicating a more general ethos of the subject, one of perpetual movement, creativity, and auto-insurrection. I also reflect on the difficulties involved in the idea of ‘self-creation’; as we can see from the more problematic dimensions of Goldman's thought, creation is an ethically and ontologically ambiguous concept which, when affirmed too easily, can serve to mask the subtleties by which relations of domination persist. With this in mind, the article goes on to discuss what it might mean to ‘dance to death’, to negotiate the burden of transvaluation, limitless responsibility, and perpetual struggle which these two thinkers evoke, in the service of a creative and limitless radical political praxis.     

Critical reflections on emancipatory partnerships in transition research: discerning perspectives of New Zealand Students on the autism spectrum

Transition from school involves different perspectives. Those most silenced in the process are transitioning students with significant disability, and similarly, they are alienated from the conduct of research. In this empirical project, three young men with complex autism conditions in Aotearoa New Zealand reclaimed their position as experts on their own transitions, and moreover, their contributions to research on the subject. Over a six-month ethnography, unique methodological adaptions were used to access personal insights and capabilities through emancipatory partnerships. The research forged collaborations that have the potential to be mirrored in future practices applicable to a transition with dignity.     

The Cronus complex

This paper studies a buried dynamic in psychopathology as it arises in family process: the child's loss of self through caring before being cared for. This role reversal which places childhood at the disposal of family need is conceptualized, and the related material, integrated, in terms of the myth of Cronus, who swallowed his children. Some tentative clinical probings of this subject are discussed as well as the resistive sources which have placed this subject, for the most part, beyond reach of research and education.     

A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users

After describing objects as networks, we attempt to describe 'subject-networks'. Instead of focusing on capacities inherent in a subject, we attend instead to the tactics and techniques which make possible the emergence of a subject as it enters a 'dispositif'. Opting for an optimistic analysis of Foucault, we consider 'dispositifs' and their constraints to be generative: they do not simply reduce but also reveal and multiply. The generative power of 'dispositifs' depends upon their capacity to create and make use of new capacities in the persons who pass through them. Drawing upon a diverse body of literature and upon fieldwork among drug addicts and music amateurs, we show how this point of entry into the question of the subject immediately and irredeemably undoes traditional dichotomies of sociology. It becomes impossible to continue to set up oppositions like those of agent/structure, subject/object, active/passive, free/determined. We also have to look beyond studies of 'action' and describe 'events'. Through the words and trials of the music and drug lovers, it becomes clear that the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints. These actors describe necessary yet tentative techniques of preparation to produce this 'active passion', this form of 'attachment' which we attempt to describe as that which allows the subject to emerge—never alone, never a pristine individual, but rather always entangled with and generously gifted by a collective, by objects, techniques, constraints.     

Life Course Malleability: Biographical Work and Deprivatization

The traditional view of the life course as the patterned progression of individual experience through time has been challenged on several fronts. The emerging view is that patterned progression is subject to diverse social, historical, and cultural influences. This article extends the challenge by considering the way ordinary biographical work situationally and discursively shapes life course patterning in relation to local cultural and organizational usage. Ethnographic and narrative data from a variety of settings illustrate a social constructionist approach. Concluding comments address the link between the malleability of the life course and the increasing deprivatization of contemporary experience.     

An immense and unexpected field of action: Webcams,surveillance and everyday life

The essay uses a quotation from Walter Benjamin to ask what ‘immense and unexpected field of action’ is revealed through the numerous web-cameras connected to the internet. The essay considers the subject of the webcam gaze to be that of everyday life in a society of surveillance and control. Drawing on Mark Andrejevic’s concept of digital enclosures and Michael H. Goldhaber’s argument that the Internet is an attention economy, the essay considers webcams and other means of online expression in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a society of control. In the end, the essay considers the webcam to reveal aspects of everyday life through senses of thisness, durée, awareness, embodiment and care, as everyday life is caught up in and constituted by intertwined networks of care and control.     

“In the good old days”: Insidious nostalgia and the constitution of old age identity

In this paper older people are studied through qualitative in-depth interviews regarding the constitution of identity. This is based on their participation in specific projects where they take part in schoolwork. The point of departure is that these more or less organised projects provide older people with a physical as well as a social space in which such a constitution can take place. Specific attention is not only directed toward the productive use of nostalgia, but also at the rhetorical use of already established subject positions drawn from the fields of production and reproduction, and from discourses on productive ageing and participation. The intersection of these discourses was not only found to be normative and excluding, but also liberating and a necessity.     

我国职业技术培训现状及对策研究

我国近年来出现了"用工荒"和大学生"就业难"并存的问题,该问题的解决需要从劳动力的"质"上去突破,要通过职业技术培训来改善我国的人才结构。但是我国目前的"学校-企业-培训机构"三位一体的职业技术培训体系还存在诸多不足,文章将从主体资格、培养方式两个方面提出解决对策。     

State of the art in U.S. multicultural social work practice: Client expectations and provider challenges

ABSTRACT

To obtain a comprehensive view of the level of knowledge and development achieved in multicultural social work practice, I conducted a scoping review of U.S. empirical literature for the 10-year period from 2007 through 2016. The review revealed that across the board racial and ethnic minority clients continue to experience marginalization and report low satisfaction with services. Conversely, providers are subject to some tensions and biases toward multicultural practice exacerbated by employers’ lack of emphasis on cultural competence. The problematic findings from the review suggest that our current approaches to cultural competence may need to be reexamined.