Can a Fat Woman Call Herself Disabled?

As an ostensibly able-bodied fat woman I discuss my experimental usage of 'disabled' to self-define, asserting that this is a problematic label. I criticise some of the mutual misconceptions fat and disabled people share, especially the role of medicalisation, and I explore some similarities and differences in our respective struggles for civil rights. I suggest that identifying as disabled is political in origin, and that disability politics offer an important precedent for fat people.     

Participatory art within,against and beyond financialization: benign pessimism,tactical parasitics and the encrypted common

This essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory spectacles and experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, an overarching paradigm and process that is reshaping economics, politics, society and culture. Critical art, I argue, can offer us a particularly insightful vantage point on these transformations. This is not, as it is usually supposed, because art has some lofty transcendental perspective above society; rather, it is precisely because art is already so deeply integrated into finance and financialization. Not coincidentally, “participation” appears as a keyword for the restructuring of both art and finance today, which I argue is key to understanding the challenges, limits and potentials of even avowedly critical participatory art, with lessons for cultural production more broadly. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from the three artworks in question, I identify each with a strategic paradigm: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. These strategies, I argue, emerge within, against and beyond financialization and can help complicate our approach to its complex cultural politics.     

Beyond the Medical Model: a reconsideration of 'feeblemindedness', citizenship, and eugenic restrictions

The rise of eugenic restrictions in early twentieth century America reshaped the relationship between intellectual disability, citizenship, and the exercise of rights. To explain the rise of rights restrictions, scholarship has largely turned to the medicalisation of 'feeblemindedness', while overlooking mainstream concepts within citizenship studies. By drawing upon an institutional and relational approach to citizenship, I argue that factors including the dominant legal narratives and infrastructure, as well as the broader relational context can be used to enhance our understanding of the development of eugenic restrictions. More broadly, an institutional and relational approach to citizenship can provide a theoretical framework by which to meaningfully include people with intellectual disabilities within citizenship studies, while recognising their unique historical experiences.     

Gender and the 'New Paradigm' of Health

This article provides a critical review of literature on the relationship between gender and the 'new paradigm' of health. An overview of the feminist critique of health is given, from the Women's Health Movement of the late 1960s and early feminist debates about medicalisation, to more recent discussions about structural inequalities between men and women, eating disorders, and AIDS. I then go on to explore the feminist response to the so-called 'new paradigm' of health (an approach that emphasises health promotion, individual responsibility for health, and body-monitoring). Arguments that health promotion initiatives target women and confirm their position as principal guardians of health within the family are considered, as well as literature on the breast cancer awareness campaign. I then explore the growing body of literature on masculinity and health, and its account of the relationship between gender and current ideas about healthiness. Finally, I offer up some suggestions for the direction a new feminist critique of health might take.     

Representing representations: the ethics of filming at Ground Zero

In this paper I analyse the ethical challenges that informed the production and filming of my documentary September Signs and Symbols. The film focuses on the material objects that commemorate the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and how this memorabilia circulates in New York City. The film explores how these objects have come to be complex signifiers containing within them the possibility for a range of meanings for people who create them, sell them, collect them, and use them and this paper reflects on the complex ethics of filming at Ground Zero – a highly charged political and cultural site. I analyse the ethics of representing a hyper‐represented space, the necessity for self‐reflexivity in the process of demystifying signifiers that have had meaning appended to them and my own complicity in the dialectic of production and consumption that informs any engagement with the objectified discourse of September 11th.     

Reading the rubbish dump as a heterotopia in Neill Blomkamp’s district 9

ABSTRACT

I read the rubbish dumps of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 in order to think about how peripheral places and communities can reframe the South African city. In the film, dumps are sites of abandonment and transformation. This doubleness exemplifies Michel Foucault’s privileged site, the heterotopia. I focus on two scenes that take up little of the film’s running time but speak to the possibilities of the dump as more than simply a space of immiseration. The scenes unsettle orthodoxies of space that define the postapartheid city and reposition the heterotopic dump at the urban centre rather than the margins.     

Oppositional Consciousness: Its Manifestation and Development. The Case of People with Disabilities*

While resource mobilization theory has advanced our understanding of social movements, two questions require further explanation: (1) How do people come to define their situation as unjust and subject to change through collective action? (2) How is such an “oppositional consciousness” empirically studied? From field research among people with disabilities, I suggest that oppositional consciousness is manifested through the collective actions, symbols, and cultural artifacts constructed by a group. I propose that strong interpersonal ties among group members may not be necessary for an oppositional consciousness to develop. To understand how a dominated group develops an oppositional consciousness, rather than analyzing the strength of its members' social ties, we must examine the context and the nature of these ties: (1) the institutions in which their social interactions typically occur; (2) the socialization process they experience within these institutions; and (3) members' contact with the oppositional ideologies of other dominated groups.     

Coming Out as Queen: Jewish Identity,Queer Theory,and the Book of Esther

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) is a significant work on many levels—to Hitchcock’s career, to film history, to the horror genre. I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho’s design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the “death-mother.” A distinction between Mrs. Bates/“Mother,” on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity. I develop the concept of the death-mother from the writings of Freud, Nietzsche, and André Green and from feminist psychoanalytic theory: Barbara Creed, in her reworking of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Diane Jonte-Pace, in her analysis of Freud’s work. My analysis focuses on the relevance of the death-mother to issues of femininity and queer sexuality crucial to and enduringly controversial within Psycho.     

JUNO (JASON REITMAN, 2007): A PRACTICAL CASE STUDY OF TEENS,FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Jason Reitman's Juno (2007), the story of how a teenager handles her pregnancy, is the kind of film that leaves no one indifferent. Released at a time of conflicting discourses on sexual education, Reitman's film addressed the confusion experienced by teenagers as they came of age in a context where patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour were rapidly changing. In this essay I argue that Juno offers a complex understanding of the disorientation suffered by adolescents during the 1990s – a time when anti-sex discourses coexisted with an increasingly sexualized youth culture. This said, my intention is to move towards the film in a roundabout way by focusing, first, on why so many, supposed ‘cultural criticisms’ of films turn out to be so superficial. In this introductory section, the argument will be made for an approach in film analyses that takes full account of cinema as a visual medium. After exposing my critical stance, I shall draw nearer to the film itself by examining various of the overlapping contexts that, together, created a conducive space for its success – namely, the political scene; changing attitudes towards sex and gender; and most importantly, cinema's aesthetic dimension and the impact of genre conventions in the film-viewing experience. Once the complex diagram of differing (and sometimes contradictory) forces at work in Juno has been mapped out, my aim is to link these conjunctures to a detailed analysis of a key scene in the film as a means of demonstrating how the combination of film studies and Cultural Studies can operate as a method that eschews too easy, ideologically oriented, assumptions.     

The art museum in Africa – a utopia desired?

In this paper, I argue that museums in general are utopias, “no-places” in which categorisations of objects can be opened up for destabilisation. Following a discussion of the ways in which the categories “material culture” and “art” are reflected in museums, I argue that once the museum is transposed to Africa, its function as a space in which heritage is maintained through the conservation and preservation is thrown into disarray. I argue further that this is particularly the case with the most utopian of museums, the art museum. I argue that most African nation states do not have national art museums, and offer an argument about why they have museums of “arts and cultures” instead. I end with an analysis of the history and situation of art museums in South Africa and possibilities for alternative ways of conceiving the art museum as an inclusive rather than exclusive space.     

Fight Club,or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary” aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service‐oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter‐myth” capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post‐industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo‐Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender‐focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value‐rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience‐based counter‐Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late‐capitalist situation.     

Culture,Development, and Social Theory

The following comment was written in response to conference presentations by John Clammer and Raymond Apthorpe. In his paper, ‘Development Futures and Cultural Choices’ (in this issue as ‘Culture, Development and Social Theory’), Clammer traced recent emphases in conceptualisations of ‘culture’, in order to ask whether these better serve an integration of culture and development: (1) the idea of culture as process, (2) the rediscovery of indigenous knowledge, and (3) the integration of economy and culture. I argue that, while each of these has something good to bring, even taking account of all of them would leave us with a rather anorexic version of what is needed: systematic and sustained analysis and theorisation of social relations; and the attempt to weigh up the implications for proposed or negotiated social intervention and directional change. I exemplify issues with a discussion of the Papua New Guinea elections of 2002. Apthorpe's contribution builds on his explorations of tendencies inherent in development practice and discourse, to which I add its claims to serial progress, consistent with its technocratic tendencies.     

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.     

Austerity and Neighborhood Politics in Guadalajara, Mexico

The literature on the politics of the urban poor in Latin America is largely bifurcated into two opposing schools. One of these interprets the political behavior of the poor as clientelist, and the other finds the poor engaging in insurgent political participation. In this paper I argue that examining the political economy of place offers us a way to understand these political behaviors on a continuum, rather than recreating a false dichotomy. I examine the impact of political economy and urbanization on home ownership as a survival strategy of the poor in Guadalajara, Mexico, as well as addressing the impact of both these factors on political behavior. In so doing, I show why a neighborhood on the outskirts of Guadalajara grew increasingly supportive of opposition politics. I further suggest that examining political economy effects on urban politics offers a way to understand the politics of the urban poor in Latin America in a more nuanced fashion.     

Sociology,Psychoanalysis, and Marginalization: Unconscious Defenses and Disciplinary Interests

American sociology as a field tends to marginalize psychoanalytic perspectives despite scholars Cavalletto and Silver showing that this was not the case during Talcott Parson's intellectual heyday in the 1940s. From the 1970s on, though, constructionists emphasized the conservative rather than liberatory side of the Freudian tradition and symbolic interactionism took the place of psychoanalysis as the legitimized framework for understanding individuals. Marginalization has occurred for at least three reasons: (1) the legacies of positivism created a bias toward empirically observable rather than relatively unmeasurable concepts like the Freudian unconscious; (2) psychoanalysis uses internal data whereas sociologists look externally rather than inward; (3) because psychoanalysis focuses on individuals and sociology on groups, it is argued that the two are incommensurate. Nevertheless, even in the face of marginalization, some scholars have combined psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives in myriad ways conceiving of multi dimensional rather than rationalistic individuals within social and cultural settings; exploring interactional dynamics that are at once psychic‐and‐social; and, as in the work of Wilfred Bion, studying the psychoanalytic mechanisms of groups themselves. I posit that the ongoing marginalization of psychoanalysis deprives the discipline of an innovative tool of analysis, an especially salient one at times when the emotional and psychological dimensions of social life are glaringly evident.     

From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work

In the closing weeks of 2002, video games were featured in various popular American news publications and media outlets such as Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek and Time Magazine. It is becoming increasingly apparent that video games are no longer child's play, but rather that they are poised to become a major entertainment form for the twenty-first century. Social analysts and media scholars must begin to formulate an understanding of this emerging mass-consumer phenomenon because it will increasingly impact social and economic structures of post-industrial societies. Part of the tremendous value generated by the American video-game industry is tied into broad global economic shifts that have created a space where services and ephemeral products, such as software, can be created and cheaply distributed. The predominance of " high-tech' production, the rise of the Internet, and the cultural capital associated with computerization all have contributed to the rise of hobbyist software developers that currently tinker with commercial video games and freely add to them increasing levels of sophistication. This paper sees video-game programmer hobbyists as a source of some of the significant value that the video-game industry generates, and understands the role of the programmer hobbyists through the lens of theories on post-industrial work. My analysis situates the work of hobbyists on the Internet within the context of post-Fordism and explores some of the motivations for this unwaged work. In the sections that follow, I will analyse the potential value of the work hobbyist do as well as analyse its transition to paid work as some commercial software developers experiment with incorporating these fan bases into the game design process.     

Of Monkeys,Men and Menstruation: Gendered Dualisms and the Absent Referent in Mid‐Twentieth Century British Menstrual Science

In this paper, I analyse the historical constructions of menstruation in mid‐twentieth century Britain. I examine the complex intertwining relations between the female human body and the female nonhuman body. My argument is twofold: firstly, I argue that endocrinological experiments on nonhuman animals' reproductive cycles were mobilised towards affirming a binary division of female/male, animal/human. This facilitated the perpetuation of patriarchal ideologies in British biomedical research. Secondly, I argue that as a result of these dualistic conceptualisations, the female nonhuman body intersected with the female human body in scientific discourses. These bodily transmutations in scientific research contributed towards a form of social control over women, strategically rendering them as ‘Other’ with nonhuman animals. I illustrate this using Carol J Adams' (2015) concept of the absent referent.     

Beyond the antinomies of structure: Levi-Strauss,Giddens, Bourdieu,and Sewell

In this article, I attempt to address some enduring problems in formulation and practical use of the notion of structure in contemporary social science. I begin by revisiting the question of the fidelity of Anthony Giddens’ appropriation of the idea of structure with respect to Levi-Strauss. This requires a reconsideration of Levi-Strauss’ original conceptualization of “social structure” which I argue is a sort of “methodological structuralism” that stands sharply opposed to Giddens’ ontological reconceptualization of the notion. I go on to show that Bourdieu’s contemporaneous critique of Levi-Strauss is best understood as an attempt to recover rather than reject the central implication of Levi-Strauss’ methodological structuralism, which puts Bourdieu and Giddens on clearly distinct camps in terms of their approach toward the idea of structure. To demonstrate the—insurmountable—conceptual difficulties inherent in the ontological approach, I proceed by critically examining what I consider to be the most influential attempt to resolve the ambiguities in Giddens structuration theory: Sewell’s argument for the “duality of structure.” I show that by retaining Giddens’ ontological focus, Sewell ends up with a notion of structure that is at its very core “anti-structuralist” or only structuralist in a weak sense. I close by considering the implications of the analysis for the possibility of developing the rather neglected “methodological structuralist” legacy in contemporary social analysis.     

Sustaining edges: CSR,postmodern play,and SMEs

Globalization challenges organizations to make sustainable connections between enterprise, equity, ethnicity, and the environment. This article contends that to date, the main responses cluster round corporate social responsibility (CSR). It further claims that CSR often results from adverse publicity (and so has been defensive in nature, and reactive rather than proactive); and that its emphasis on corporations marginalizes small to medium enterprises (SMEs), who form a huge part of the world economy. The article illustrates how one SME, Dawnraid Entertainment, from the socio-cultural and geographical edge of Aoteoroa/New Zealand, responds by pioneering community-embedded enterprises.