Renaissance Body Matters: Judith Butler and the Sex That Is One

This essay explores the impact of Judith Butler's work on the study of gender in Renaissance England. Theatre, in particular, has proved a productive site for New Historicist readers of the Renaissance in recent years. It has been argued that Renaissance theatre, and its opponents, called attention to the possibility that gender was a performative, rather than ontological state. This has been further influenced by Thomas Laqueur's formulation of the one-sex body. Feminist critics, however, have also pointed out other cultural sites where the reverse occurs: where gender is both naturalized and binary. Taking female witches as an example, this essay explores the possible readings opened up by Judith Butler's observations about the performativity of gender, particularly in terms of the framework for thinking about Renaissance practices of theatricality and cross-dressing, which can be drawn from Butler's Gender Trouble, and the framework, offered by her Bodies that Matter, for problematising those notions and, potentially, for negotiating the relationship between performativity and constraint in Renaissance models of gender.     

Theory: The Plague of the Subject: Psychoanalysis and Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power

In her book The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler explores the relation between power and subjectivity. The Psychic Life of Power presents a political account of the formation of the subject. For Butler, psychoanalysis is a crucial theoretical tool for providing such an account of the subject. This essay considers Butler's Foucauldian rereading of psychoanalytic theory through an analysis of her theory of the formation of the subject. In particular, the essay examines Butler's appropriation of psychoanalysis for her theory of subjectivity. The author argues that while Butler's theorising of the psychic life of power represents an important linking of Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theories, nevertheless, her use of psychoanalysis does not fully engage with the complexity of its theory of the subject nor with the implications of that theory for her political project.     

Politics: Butler's Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection

This essay examines the work of Judith Butler in relation to corporeality through an analysis of Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex and Butler's notion of politicized abjection. Abjection is considered in relation to bodily materiality and proposed as the most promising path for a revamped corporeal politics. Through a reading of two novels, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Barbara Gowdy's Mister Sandman, the essay examines how the abject body can function as politically subversive. Throughout, the essay analyses Butler's placing of the material body in a political domain, and argues that she ultimately endorses materiality as potentially disruptive to the symbolic domain of viable bodies. This recasting of matter within her theory is shown as redefining the body as an active agent rather than a passive receptacle for regulatory norms. The essay examines this under-theorized aspect of her work, and illustrates that politicized abjection is as crucial to her philosophy as the notion of gender as performative.     

GLB + T?: Gender/Sexuality Movements and Transgender Collective Identity (De)Constructions

In the United States during the 1990s, there emerged a new form of collective political organizing and action around transgender identity. In this essay, the author depicts the dynamics of transgender activism during the mid-1990s based on original research in the form of a postmodern ethnography of transgender activism. Using data from field research, interviews, and observation, the author illustrates the way that transgender activism was characterized by simultaneous claims to a shared transgender quasi-ethnic identity and the complications thereof. In particular, the author details transgender social movement processes of identity—both processes of collective identity construction and deconstruction—demonstrating that transgender politics are not simply identity politics nor deconstructive (queer) politics. Using constructionist social movement literature, the author argues that in sexuality/gender studies we must expand our understanding of identity politics in order to understand the simultaneity of constructions and deconstructions of identity and gender/sexuality movements today.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

Gift Giving, Identity, and Transformation: The AIDS Memorial Quilt

Those who have originated the AIDS Memorial Quilt have often referred to it as a gift. In this essay, the author discusses theories related to gift giving to discuss the quilt and its constructed effects for those who experience it as a gift. In particular, Weiner's notion of inalienable possessions is highlighted to address how the quilt, as a gift that is kept inalienable from its original creators, maintains historical identity and immortality for its originators, many of whom are gay and bisexual men. Also, Hyde's notion of erotic gifts is presented to consider the quilt's ability to draw people together, create feeling-bonds among them, and affect their transformation.     

Double Jeopardy in Hollywood: Age and Gender in the Careers of Film Actors, 1926–1999

There have been few studies of the concept of double jeopardy as it pertains to the effects of gender and aging on occupational outcomes. This research examines the utility of this concept in the field of film acting, traditionally a gender-integrated occupation. The results confirm significant negative effects of being female and being older on the number of film roles received by actors and their average star presence. Moreover, the gendered effects of aging on the career opportunities of actors have diminished somewhat over time with respect to number of film roles but not with respect to star presence.     

Sexual Involvement and Social Research in a Fat Civil Rights Organization

Sex between researchers and informants in the field represents a kind of dirty little secret among ethnographers: It frequently occurs but is hardly ever discussed in print. Recently, anthropologists have begun violating that taboo, but sociologists remain silent on the subject. The author argues that this is a mistake, that sexual intimacy raises a number of methodological and ethical issues that demand discussion.     

The second sex: Women's place in polling language

Recent research suggests that gender nouns such as man, and pronouns such as he,· are not generic forms referring to humanity, but often refer exclusively to males. The use of male terms in a variety of role contexts serves to deny females identification with these contexts, and thereby stereotypes the roles of men and women. Public opinion polling, through its use of the questionnaire, represents an important social context where gender-biased phrasing can have an adverse impact on a large segment of society. A content analysis of polling questions from 1936–1973 was undertaken to ascertain their gender representation. Those questions containing gender referrants constituted ten percent of the sample. Questions were analyzed for their gender content in the areas of social, political, and economic life. The findings show a differential use of male and female terms, with the use of female gender most apparent in contexts traditionally defined as female: home and family. When females are mentioned in non-traditional contexts, they appear most often in competition with men. Male pronouns appear exclusively in contexts traditionally defined as male: work and politics. The methodological and social implications of these findings for survey research are discussed.     

Slavery in capitalism

Conclusion I have attempted here to reconceptualize the dynamic of the cotton culture by situating it within its world-historical context. This does not, however, mean a simple extension of view. Rather, it is a methodological matter in the sense that slavery itself needs to be reconceptualized as a component of the global circuits of the wage-labor regime. Nineteenth-century capitalism, under British hegemony, transcended segmented colonial system markets and forged a global unity of commodity circuits reproducing industrial capital. Under this regime, commodity producers worldwide were now subject to the law of value. This is the context within which nineteenth-century slavery needs to be analyzed.The resurgence of slavery during this period appears paradoxical - defying the logic of the industrial regime shaping the world market. Not so if we reconceptualize slavery as now internal to that regime, and one of the several forms of labor that expanded with the general development of the regime. But why then did slavery subsequently collapse? Again, being internal to the regime, it was now subject to that regime's superior economic competition, in addition to being a social and moral anachronism in the ideology of that regime. In either case, the relation between slavery and capitalism was not governed by some essential linear economic movement in which slavery was a historical anachronism.The key methodological point is to distinguish the phenomenal form of slavery from its historical content. The same applies to our conception of wage labor. While empirically it may have concentrated in metropolitan regions, theoretically it had universal implications insofar as it was premised on the development of global commodity circuits. Not only was metropolitan wage labor globally sourced, but also non-metropolitan commodity producers were redefined (but not necessarily extinguished) as they absorbed capitalist circuits and submitted to value relations. But we cannot understand the dynamics if it is assumed that non-wage forms of labor are prior to wage labor. As Marx wrote: It would ... be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The precondition of this historical method is what unifies the body of literature earlier identified as locating the formation of modern regional identities and local labor systems within determinant world-historical processes. The goal is to understand their distinctiveness as outcomes of a connective historical process, rather than as unique and bounded cultures in their own right.In this essay the connective historical process is the rise of wage labor, and the generalization of its conditions of reproduction. The process has various dimensions, unifying either extant or newly created commodity producers. An illustration of the former process is the restructuring of relations between the Ottoman state and its peasants in the context of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism. New taxes on peasants were geared to expanding grain exports to finance the national debt resulting from public loans from Europe to build railways. Peasant commodity production became linked to the provision of wage foods for the European proletariat - as Luxemburg put it: and so the peasant grain of Asia, converted into money, also serves to turn into cash the surplus value that has been extorted from the German workers. Illustrating the latter process, of newly created commodity producers, is Friedmann's work on New World family farming. But more often than not it is a combination, where extant producers are redefined and reproduced on an expanding scale. This is the case with Roseberry's Venezuelan peasants - both precipitates of global processes of proletarianization, and exemplars of an unresolved historical movement of smallholder survival strategies (cash-crop coffee growing in this instance). In conclusion, the rise of wage labor and the generalization of its conditions of reproduction are more than a process of uneven and combined development on a global scale. It is also a process of reformulation of the content of non-wage forms of labor within a contradictory unity governed by value relations. It is here that the concept of a global wage relation becomes useful. As an abstract concept, it expresses (a) those value relations common to the different phenomenal forms of commodity-producing labor, and (b) the historical fact of wage-labor's determinant position within this unity. The global wage relation is not coterminous with the phenomenon of wage labor alone, rather it expresses the world-historical conditions that constitute wage labor and its contradictory movement. Nineteenth-century slavery was one such condition. Its resurgence and demise precisely expressed the fluidity of the global wage relation, as a world-historical relation.

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The “hurried child”: The myth of lost childhood in contemporary American society

The hurried child writers argue that childhood has changed fundamentally for the worse in contemporary American society. The authors assert that today's youth are too adultlike: they behave like adults and are treated as adults by parents, schools, the workplace, the media, and society in general. While offering some perceptive insights, the thesis poses numerous methodological, substantive, and empirical problems. These include (1) a limited historical perspective on the changing nature of American childhood, (2) a failure to identify exactly who the hurried children are, and (3) the use of a deterministic model and negative bias in their work. Our analysis indicates no large-scale destruction of childhood and adolescence hypothesized by the hurried child writers. For the vast majority of contemporary American children, the hurried child is more myth than reality.     

Innocence, Perversion, and Heather's Two Mommies

This paper begins by untangling the twisted threads linking homosexuality and childhood in the mind of America, and explaining how contemporary constructions of homosexuality have become entwined with modern conceptions of childhood. The author draws on the literature on the invention of childhood and especially the pioneering work of Jonathan Silin to show how the entrenchment of capitalism and arrival of compulsory schooling have created a hegemonic form of family and produced a child at once innocent and ignorant. The author then probes the construction of the homosexual in the late 19th century and uncovers interconnections between this new social typology and representations of childhood. By examining how these linkages are historically embodied in incidents of sex panic, the author argues that the psyches of lesbians and gay men who are in relationship with children (as parents, teachers, coaches . . .) are often suffused with anxiety and self-doubt. Hence a gay movement emerges rife with hyper-traditional representations of children and youth. Contemporary queer representations of childhood are then explored through a focus on children's books designed for the offspring of lesbian and gay parents. The author suggests that contemporary gay advocacy, which attempts to dislodge perversion as the central representation of homosexuality, will be unsuccessful until activists abandon tactics that infantilize children and perpetuate a vision of childhood as vulnerable, innocent, and unknowing.     

Gender Relations and Identity at Work: A Case Study of Masculinities and Femininities in an Advertising Agency

The paper explores gender relations and genderidentity, based upon an ethnography of a Swedishadvertising agency. The organization is of specialinterest as it has a strong gender division of labor,where men hold all senior posts, at the same time ascreative advertising work seems to have much moresimilarity with what gender studies describe as"femininity" rather than with forms ofmasculinity. The paper discusses how gender is constructedin an organizational context. Emphasis on workplacesexuality is related to identity work of men in responseto the highly ambiguous and contested context of advertising work. Tendencies toward thefemininization of the work and clientrelationships put some strain on (gender) identity formen, triggering a structuring of gender relations andinteraction at the workplace to restore feelings ofmasculinity. The paper problematizes ideas ofmasculinities and femininities and argues for arethinking of their roles in nonbureaucraticorganizations. Also assumptions about a close connection between domination ofmasculinity and of males are criticallydiscussed.     

An Exploratory Study of “Parasites” in Taiwan

Deriving from Parasite Single proposed by Yamada (1997), parasites in this study is redefined as those who live with and financially rely on their parents in terms of living expenses after school graduation. The current study adopts the logit model and utilizes the data from the 1999 to 2000 Taiwan Panel Study of Family Dynamics to investigate the determinants of parasites. The finding reveals that gender, age, marital status, and the value of filial piety are significantly different between parasites and non-parasites. Moreover, gender, monthly income, age and marital status are determinants of the probability of being parasites.     

Triangular empathy: “The other” in psychotherapy with individuals

This paper seeks to explore triangular dimensions in individual psychotherapy. In addition to serving as the dyadic object of transference projection and/or as selfobject for a person in psychotherapy, the therapist may be called upon to help the patient work on relationships with certain early, important people or their representations and on the interplay between such relationships and the therapeutic one, that is, in a triangular configuration. Because patients' attempts to introduce others into individual psychotherapy are sometimes experienced by therapists as resistant rather than as integral to the therapeutic process, I propose an empathic reconsideration of such patient efforts to get us to help with the complicated dimensions of human relatedness.     

Historical legacies, nationalist mobilization, and political outcomes in Russia and Serbia: A Weberian view

Conclusion In the preceding analysis, I attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of some of Weber's key theoretical ideas on nations, nationalism, and imperialism by way of a comparative examination of contemporary Russian and Serbian nationalism. More specifically, I try to show how long-term historical and institutional legacies, shared memories, and defining political experiences, played themselves out in the contemporary period, influencing the different availability of mass constituencies in Russia and Serbia for nationalist mobilization under the auspices of new empire-saving coalitions.But political outcomes are never wholly pre-determined as historical legacies are subject to different cultural interpretations and political contest. To put it simply, nationalism is made and remade by politicians and ideologists; and there is no need to gloss over the frequently bloody and unpredictable consequences of their struggles with unduly abstract sociological generalizations. Instead, we should theorize our narratives, while giving contingency its place.I suggest that the presence of a highly symbolic issue (such as the World War Two experiences of Serbs in Croatia, the mythology of Kosovo, Sevastopol or the mythology of the Russian fleet), which touches on the core historical mythology of one nation, but is contested by another on different grounds (demographic, ethnic, or for reasons of historical justice, for example) increases the likelihood of national conflicts. Once highly symbolic issues are involved, national conflicts quickly assume the form of struggles over ultimate values not subject to compromise and conflict-regulation. However, as the Russian case demonstrates, other symbolic legacies (the experience of Stalinism) might be powerful enough to override nationalism.I also suggest in this article a few simple ways in which we can interpret, and possibly, test the likelihood of the emergency of national conflicts: the significance of prestige considerations, the absence of compensatory mechanisms such as economic prosperity, the egalitarian character of nationalist appeals, the dynamic of status-reversal, and the theory of the superimposition of conflicts. To understand the exclusivist overtones of much of contemporary nationalism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, however, it would also be necessary to pay more attention to the political-cultural and social-structural legacy of Communist rule. The prevalence of uncompromising stances among political leaders, the absence of mechanisms of conflict-regulation, the hostility to proceduralism and legal mechanisms as a means of resolving the emerging national questions, and the appeal of the new nationalism to state-dependent and traditionalist strata are among the most important elements of this legacy.     

Beer and Tea: Harmony and Contradiction Among Two Unlikely Counterparts

This essay begins by examining the representations and interpretations of women and men in two sets of images: the Women's Institute Alternative Calendar and a television commercial for Guinness beer. Both of these compositions are exceptional in their own right, and have captured the imaginations of wide audiences. Taken together, the counterpointing of culture and nature, serenity and intensity, and feminine charm and virility creates a montage of images that both reflect and represent traditional forms of femininity and masculinity. This essay draws on a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, with an emphasis on the storied nature of lives, sexuality, and life change. C. Wright Mills declares that the sociological imagination is necessary in order to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society (Mills, 1959, p. 6). The author's aim in this essay, following through on Mills's idea, is to provide insight into the lives of earlier cohorts of women and a glimpse into how personal and social change comes about.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

Developmental origins of antihomosexual prejudice in heterosexual men and women

Antihomosexual prejudice, popularly referred to as homophobia, is a complex phenomenon whose roots traditionally have been traced to the cultural context. However, such theoretical explanations fall short of accounting for the power and endurance of this bias. By locating the threat of homophobia in the development of male core gender identity and female heterosexual object choice, the author suggests that heterosexual men's and women's responses to homosexuality may have different origins. She further argues that only by combining cultural with psychodynamic factors may the clinician develop a sufficiently empathic response to patients struggling with homophobic affects.