Mariana: A MS Patient in My Office

Theory appears variously in these clinical vignettes. Sometimes it is addressed as such, in the cases of Hartman, Lobban, and Guralnik. In other instances, it is seamlessly woven in, as in Sheehy's account or in the deftly written narrative by Olga Pugachevsky, a therapist in private practice. She recounts her work with Mariana, a patient who, precociously accommodating and accomplished in projective identification, had acquired a chronic and progressive illness readily interpellatable by others—including the analyst—such that the patient is rendered an invalid, a subjectivity that both compels and repels her.     

The Bad Enough Mother

ABSTRACT

This is a [de]-composed conversation between the author and a few feminist writers about how a mother’s resistance to interpellating gender is an echoed call to resistance against society’s interpellation of mother. Alongside the words of a few selected 20th- and 21st-century writers, as well as a brief personal and a clinical vignette, the author illustrates ways in which the bad enough mother survives the relentless scrutiny of society—starting with experts like doctors, sociologists, politicians, and psychoanalysts. In turn, she teaches her children survival of the very interpellative tenants of culture that tried to funnel her into a binary-gendered social order.     

Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies,affective ties,transformative community

ABSTRACT

This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of color make to the field of affect studies are often overlooked. Our introduction and this special issue more broadly examine how this solipsism shapes projects invested in critical knowledge production, as well as the stakes of centering a queer woman of color genealogy. For instance, we argue for the importance of retaining U.S. third-world feminist concepts—like interpellation, oppositional consciousness, and the generative force of negative affects—even as they fall out of favor within affect studies. Centering theory that emerges from the vexed spaces of queer women of color lived experiences generates a vital interdisciplinary conversation that contributes to the ongoing political task of mobilizing affect for social action as a critical praxis. In the articles that follow we see this critical praxis at work in the form of community organizing, music, poetry, and performance art.     

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.     

Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference

The dilemmas and opportunities of interpellation and intelligibility play out also in the sexual domain. In “Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference,” Stephen Hartman shows how interpellation makes both him and Darren intelligible and therefore anxious: The power of discourse to legitimate desire means that you can lose your legitimacy and fall into abjection if you ever refuse your interpellation. Here Hartman, interpellated by The New York Times announcement of his marriage to another man, desexualizes and abjects his patient by interpellating his desire as a desire to be a married gay guy, a “good gay” too.     

Interpellation in the late Soviet period: contesting the de-ideologization narrative

Most literature on ideology in the late Soviet period notes the progressive de-ideologization of Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) politics under Mikhail Gorbachev. Looking specifically at the legitimating functions of ideology, the article contests this generalization. In doing so, it proposes the concept of ideological interpellation to clarify the relationship between doctrine and regime legitimation. The author argues that interpellation – the construction of the ideal Soviet subject, in a way that sustained the relations of domination and production – was a consistent goal throughout the last decade of communist rule. However, while the party approached interpellation in different ways, it was unable to resolve official ideology’s rigidity and narrowness of appeal. These conclusions are supported by a discourse analysis of the 26th, 27th, and 28th CPSU congress proceedings.     

Greedy Institutions,Overwork, and Work‐Life Balance

Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia, offered her thoughts on “Greedy Institutions” and the work‐life balance in her AKD Distinguished Lecture at the August 2013 meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York City. We appreciate Dr. Sullivan's willingness to revise her address for publication in Sociological Inquiry. In the age of smart phones and 24/7 accountability, her thoughts on these issues—particularly at American universities—are timely and instructive.     

Effort to remove Medicaid prior authorization for bupe in NJ advances

You're a health care provider, and your patient is interested in cannabis — perhaps for pain, for anxiety, for depression or even for trying to quit drinking or using drugs. You think it could help him or her. Or, rather, it might — you really have no idea, because you didn't learn about it in medical school (except that it's illegal and addictive), but you know it's now legal in your state and you want to know how to respond to your patient's request.     

Mum's the Word: Intersubjectivity,Alterity, and the Maternal Subject

Where motherhood and ethics are brought together, it is usually under the rubric of an “ethic of care,” with the mother-child relationship figured as a paradigmatic example of such an ethic. In this article I make use of Levinas' account of ethics as first philosophy to flesh out a notion of “maternal alterity” as an alternative to a maternal ethics based on the various complex mental and emotional tasks that make up care. This represents an attempt to recuperate something for the mother out of her often bewildering encounter with the enigmatic otherness of her child. Situating Levinas alongside a dialogue between Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler on intersubjectivity, I attempt to disentangle maternal subjectivity from the developing subjectivity of the child and offer an account of the maternal subject as an ethical subject situated, perhaps, “otherwise” to a discourse of care.     

Editor’s Introduction: All About the Mother

ABSTRACT

This short editorial note introduces a panel titled “All About the Mother” that is being presented in its original conference format with papers by Orna Guralnik, Jade McGleughlin, Julie Leavitt, and Stephen Hartman.     

Everyday Violence in Central America as Seen Through the Life of One Woman

Everyday violence in Central America assumes diverse forms, with the structural violence intrinsic to the poverty and inequality in the region being the most predominant. The life story of Andrea embodies many elements of that violence, as it led to her entering the labor force as a child, to her having her own children early, and to her employment in the service sector. But, Andrea came of age during a revolution in her country—that waged by the Sandinistas in the 1980s—which provided her family with resources of both a material and non-material nature. The changes it wrought, however, were not deep enough to transform the opportunities of the next generation and were undercut in its aftermath. Hence, Andrea’s aspiration for her children to have different lives from her own required her emigration to achieve it. Yet, it was also the revolution, in the form of a network that emerged from it, that made possible her work abroad in Italy. She was able to earn enough there to provide the education for her children that she sought. Drawing on an oral history I collected from Andrea, this article portrays the challenges she confronted, the ways she addressed them, and how her life course has been produced by the interaction between these phenomena. In addition to telling her story and describing the ways in which structural violence colored it, the article highlights the broader social, economic, and political dynamics that make this about more than just one woman.     

Dori: O Thou Seer,Go, Flee Thee

One way to view the relation between mind and politics is to see society as oppressive. But here the author also understands discourse, including interpellation, as facilitative: subjects of ourselves and subjects to social forces, we can have the social context we need only if we find ourselves through it. In relating his work with Dori, like him an Israeli immigrant, Eyal Rozmarin wants to connect the idea of discourse in critical theory to a notion of the collective unconscious. He reflects on the way, separately and together, he and Dori relate to the Third of discourse in the room: how to live out their shared cultural mission to realize their potential for the nation and to realize themselves, an enterprise in which they may lose themselves as well.     

Silence,Death, and D/discourse: Critical Literary Practices With Lesbian Seniors

This article reports on a federally funded research project in which old lesbians were invited to separate out and examine the complicated strands of lives lived through times of great social change—times in which notions of “woman,” “sexuality,” and “subjectivity” have been both over- and under-determined by dominant discourse (Stein, 1997). We argue, with Haug (1992), that close attention to the personal is central to critical feminist perspectives and that writers can become more aware of normalizing cultural influences when they pay close attention to language. In this article, we support our position with a case study of one participant in our “language school” (Haug, 1992). As we analyzed her written life narratives and oral testimony, we conclude that she was able to reconsider comfortable “coming out” narratives in order to construct new meaning and to challenge her understandings of the past.     

Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption,Racial Reparation,and Racial Transitional Objects

Transnational adoption involves the intersection of two powerful origin myths—the return to mother and to motherland. In this case history of a Korean transnational adoptee, Mina, problems relating to Asian immigration, assimilation, and racialization are central to her psychic predicaments. Mina mourns the loss of Korea and her Korean birth mother as a profoundly intrasubjective and unconscious affair. Her losses trigger a series of psychical responses that reconfigure Freud's notions of melancholia not as pathological but an everyday (racial) structure of feeling and Klein's theories of good and bad objects as good and bad racialized objects, as good and bad racialized mothers. Mina's case also draws attention to the analyst as a raced subject. The “public” fact of the analyst's and the patient's shared racial difference, and the “public” nature of the analyst's pregnancy during the course of the patient's treatment, constitutes the analyst, to reformulate Winnicott, as a “racial transitional object” for Mina. As such, Mina “uses” the analyst to manage her envy and to transition into a reparative position for race, one allowing her to create space in her psyche for two “good-enough” mothers-the Korean birth mother as well as the white adoptive mother.     

If it’s so good,why not make them do it? Why true dialogue cannot be mandated

True dialogue—as opposed to two-way communication—is a very specific and inescapably principled form of communication with benefits for all participants. This paper asks whether, given its highly-desirable form and function, governments could use legislation to require organizations to conduct true dialogue. An analysis of practitioner insights, however, shows the nature of the relationship between organisations and their stakeholders, and their perspectives on each other and the communication between them, preclude the conduct of true dialogue. The empirical data from this study allow the identification and articulation of these barriers to dialogue, moving the field of dialogue studies in public relations on from the assertion that true dialogue is hard to find in practice. This research allows practitioners and scholars alike to say why true dialogue does not happen. Because of this, it is possible to start developing strategies for dealing with—and perhaps overcoming—the barriers.     

Mothers, daughters and midlife (self)-discoveries: Gender and aging in the Amanda Cross' Kate Fansler series

In the same way that many aspects of gender cannot be understood aside from their relationship to race, class, culture, nationality and/or sexuality, the interactions between gender and aging constitute an interesting field for academic research, without which we cannot gain full insight into the complex and multi-faceted nature of gender studies. Although the American writer and Columbia professor Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) is more widely known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction in which she asserted her long-standing commitment to feminism, while she also challenged established notions on women and aging and advocated for a reassessment of those negative views. To my mind, the Kate Fansler novels became an instrument to reach a massive audience of female readers who might not have read her non-fiction, but who were perhaps finding it difficult to reach fulfillment as women under patriarchy, especially upon reaching middle age. Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis and her later fiction as substantiation to my argument, this paper will try to reveal the ways in which Heilbrun's seemingly more superficial and much more commercial mystery novels as Amanda Cross were used a catalyst that informed her feminist principles while vindicating the need to rethink about issues concerning literary representations of mature women and cultural stereotypes about motherhood.     

Using Yoga Interventions to Enhance Clinical Social Work Practices with Young Women with Cancer

It is widely published that physical, psychological, and social stressors adversely affect many individuals who are diagnosed with cancer, influencing their experience of treatment and perhaps, the quality of life after treatment is complete. No one is prepared for this battle, yet most patients are forced to make split-second decisions that are critical to their care. This case study highlights the mindfulness approach taken by one social worker to help a young woman during her journey with cancer. By guiding her through gentle yoga postures, yoga breathing, and meditation this patient learned how to take back some measure of control in her recovery, address her illness-related stress, and possibly enhance the quality of her life during treatment. As more clinicians combine conventional best practices with complementary healing therapies, they may provide tools any patient can use to instill hope and promote wellness during this most challenging time and beyond.     

The Role of Attachment Behaviors in the Link between Relationship Satisfaction and Depression in Clinical Couples: Implications for Clinical Practice

Using dyadic, clinical data from 104 couples in committed relationships, the purpose of this study was to determine whether relationship satisfaction was associated with depression through perceived partner attachment behaviors—accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement—for both men and women. We found that one's satisfaction in the relationship was the lens through which they viewed their partner's attachment behaviors and—women's relationship satisfaction was the lens through which her male partner viewed her attachment behaviors. Finally, women's relationship satisfaction is associated with both individuals' depression through her perceived partner's accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. The findings from this study are important because they provide clinically relevant and mutable constructs in which clinicians can intervene at an attachment level in distressed marriages with depressed partners.     

Unlocking Diane Arbus

In these five short reviews, the photographic work of Diane Arbus is illuminated from different personal and professional perspectives, ranging from interpreting her photographs as a sort of theft—taking something away from the individuals she photographed—to an intense desire to partake in a world of human beings living on the edge of society. The question occupying all reviewers is how Arbus's personality and style allowed her to enter into the worlds of demimondes, nudist camps, and dominatrixes without necessarily exploiting the privileged position she earned to occupy vis-á-vis her subjects.     

Nursing home satisfaction,biography, and the life worlds of psychiatrically disabled residents

The stereotype of nursing home life as a uniformly dismal experience is pervasive in American culture, but this examination of the attitudes of psychiatrically disabled residents calls this generality into question. Residents in this study exemplified a range of opinions about the nursing home — some were clearly satisfied or dissatisfied, but most were ambivalent. In this paper, I explore the relationship between nursing home satisfaction and individual interpretive activity through the biographies of three residents. I find that how residents made sense of their lives was powerfully linked to their perspectives on nursing home residence. In particular, satisfaction was linked to how each resident viewed his or her illness, institutionalization, and life purpose. Understanding the phenomenological contributors to the meaning of nursing home life is essential to appreciating how it is that residents in the same environment can have vastly different outlooks on their surroundings.