‘From Behind the Women's Petticoats’: The English Factory Act of 1874 as a Cultural Production1

Abstract In 1874 Parliament passed a law entitled ‘The Factories (Health of Women. etc) Act’ which limited the hours that women and children could work in textile factories to a 56 1/2 hour work week. In this paper I interpret the debates over hours legislation and the resulting Act as cultural productions. These cultural productions contributed to the formulation of a new social problem,‘the working mother’ promulgated an interpretation of who caused the problem, and reinforced a particular view of who was responsible for social reproduction. The rhetoric in the debates about the measure made crucial contributions to the future agenda for public policies concerning married women workers and working mothers, and reinforced a world view that state, economy and family are, and ought to remain, independent entities. My analysis draws from a range of theoretical traditions and works stressing the importance of language and other symbolic practices such as rituals in creating political subjects, problems and solutions. I examine the debates about state regulation in the 1870s to show how a symbolic or cultural analysis illuminates state-level politics and the formulation of public policy. It was through such laws and debates that the state contributed to the social construction of gender and a gendered economy.     

Public Sociology and the Public Turn in the Social Sciences

Public sociology broadly conceptualized is a form of intellectuality involving dialogue between sociologists and the publics with whom they are concerned. Beyond this broad framing, what type of dialogue, with what purpose, which public(s), and the functions of intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are widely contested. In this essay, I explore the politics of academic disciplines, knowledge, and discourse as it has emerged within the debate over public sociology, while also highlighting what public sociology and the rise of other ‘public’ disciplines tells us about these themes in relationship to the possibility of public culture.     

ON 'MAELSTROMS LARGE AND SMALL,METAPHORICAL AND ACTUAL': 'GRAY ZONES' IN THE WRITINGS OF PRIMO LEVI

This article examines the work of Primo Levi, with a focus on the tensions between ‘witness’ and ‘public intellectual’ in Levi's work. It analyses the notion of ‘gray zones’ in Levi's writings, where it functions as a way of indicating transformations in political action and public discourse in the wake of Auschwitz: most importantly, the Nazi genocide undermined the position of ‘spectator’ crucial to liberal discourse by implicating the spectator as a ‘bystander’. The study goes on to discuss the concepts of ‘work’, ‘science’ and ‘intellect’ in Levi's writing, showing how these categories reflect Levi's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to uncover a mode of political thought and public intervention adequate to the changes in political space of which the ‘gray zone’ is symptomatic, i.e. a condition of universal complicity and powerlessness. It concludes that implicit (and undeveloped) in Levi's thought is a set of ‘aesthetico-political’ presuppositions concerned with the articulation of founding, legitimacy and judgement. These presuppositions challenge the reliance of emancipatory discourses upon subjectivity and the logic of self-determination, indicating the need for a politics based on ‘pedagogical accountability’. Resisting the postmodern logic of ‘testimony’, which emerges in the gap between universal claims and their performance and hence dismantles the ‘outside’ as a space of judgement, i.e. the determination of the legitimacy of actions, the politics of pedagogical accountability grounds such an outside in the conjoining of power, responsibility for the world and boundary thinking. This space ‘outside’ ideology and the circulation of subjectivities emerges via resistance to the specifically ‘anti-political’ violence pervasive in late capitalism, and through the clarification of the distinction between this mode of violence and that (‘pre-political’) violence aimed at ‘subjects’.     

Quota trouble: Talking about gender quotas in finnish local politics

This article analyses the discourse concerning gender quotas and their implementation in Finnish local politics. Among our local actor interviewees, we found four different groups: feminist-oriented, non-feminist, accepting and disapproving. Despite the successful implementation of the quotas, our analysis reveals hidden conflicts and resistance. Respondents often resorted to memory lapses, strategies of distancing or assumptions about the interim character of quotas in an ‘almost gender equal Finland’ when discussing the implementation process. The predominance of these strategies is explained by contextual factors, including the strong cultural support for gender equality and legalism in Finland. We suggest that they can be interpreted as psychologized forms of resistance to a hegemonic discourse which does not really allow for anyone to be ‘against gender equality’ or wilfully negligent of the law.     

Women's entrepreneurship,neoliberalism and economic justice in the postfeminist era: A discourse analysis of policy change in Sweden

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.     

Beyond essentialism: negotiating Alevi identity in urban Turkey

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.     

The future of PR is ‘fantastic’, ‘friendly’ and ‘funny’: Occupational stereotypes and symbolic capital in entry-level job advertisements

Over the past decade, there has been a move towards examining public relations as a socio-cultural practice, acknowledging practitioners as influential communicators who produce and symbolise cultural values through public relations messages. Ideally, a diverse group of professionals would aide in representing a diverse society, but to date, the profession remains female dominated. In this article, it is proposed that practitioners’ own discourse do not only establish what is most valued in the occupation and which habitus suits the practice best, but that the discourse also opens and closes occupational entry for new practitioners thereby contributing to a lack of diversity.This article presents the findings of an indicative thematic content analysis of one of the most common, yet under-research sites of discourse, namely entry-level job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the analysis found that the advertisements placed little to no emphasis on the nature of the work, instead focusing on elements of ‘fit’ whereby new entrants were expected to be charismatic, friendly, and willing to work in an environment that is ‘fun’ and ‘flexible’. In doing so, public relations practitioners tacitly created invisible barriers, a self-limiting occupational culture and furthered existing stereotypes of the ‘perfect’ practitioner.     

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.     

Governing ‘emotional’ life: passions,moral sentiments and emotions

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statement that passions and not inactive reason are the motives that decisively influence the will and constitute the true drivers of human action promoted a new object of problematization and control on the part of the theoreticians of the art of government. Since then, a battle has waged over the general designations and definitions of what ‘emotional’ life is, and different dispositives of ‘emotional’ power (or pathospower) have been developed as central mechanisms for governing human beings. Analysing the British discourse on governmentality from the period, I recount the history of the emergence of the three main modern concepts of ‘emotional’ life and of its respective power strategies: passions in the discourse of utilitarian liberalism, moral sentiments in the discourse of conservatism, and emotions in biological and evolutionist psychology that underlies eugenic politics.     

Constructing the sick child: the cultural politics of children's hospitals

Drawing on an ESRC funded study of children's experiences of hospital space this article explores the cultural politics of contemporary English childhood. Using the words and commentaries provided by both children and young people, the article argues that although, as patients, children and young people share the same hospital spaces, their experiences of them are quite different. Through mundane material and symbolic practices, a number of experiential continuities are created for the youngest children between life in hospital and life at home, continuities that work to downplay their identities as children who are sick. For young people, however, these practices are more problematic since the discourses of childhood that are recreated have little resonance with young people's own experiences and sense of self and identity. Thus this article provides evidence of the need for a more nuanced understanding of not only young people's needs in relation to hospital services, but also of the significance of understanding the ways in which particular constructions of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ are threaded through public discourses and come to be realized in institutional settings.     

AUSTRIFYING EUROPE: ULTRARIGHT POPULISM AND THE NEW CULTURE OF RESISTANCE

The article investigates the political and cultural causes of the emergence of right-wing coalitions throughout the European Union, taking Austria as a symptomatic case of this return of political antagonism within a culture of consensus. It is argued that, methodologically and theoretically, a valid analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobic populism can only be achieved with the combined effort of both political and cultural theory,respectively of both political discourse analysis and cultural studies. Two axes of analysis have to be taken into account: the first being the relation between culture (or the popular) and politics (or the ‘people’), and the second concerning the even more fundamental relation or difference between politics and the political.     

‘Say no to the ATO’: the cultural politics of protest against the Australian Tax Office

Researching a broad array of protest forms offers valuable insights into social change. One such unusual form includes protests against tax law rulings made by the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Across Australia thousands of taxpayers invested in ‘tax effective schemes’ in the late 1990s. However, by 2000 each owed on average AUS$75,000 as a result of these schemes being ruled illegal. Rather than pay the money owed many have refused, publicly protesting through formal administrative and political mechanisms, and through public debate. At first glance, this appears an issue of individual economic self‐interest. However, qualitative research methods provide a more detailed and contextual picture of why protestors feel justified in their actions. Focusing on the hard‐hit Goldfields region of Western Australia, protests are argued as being about real and imagined identities; concerns over roles and status in Australian society; and the failings of institutional and political frameworks that should support, not penalize, citizens. The offence and ‘moral shock’ of being publicly labelled as ‘tax cheats’ facilitated protestors' view of themselves as workers trying to do the ‘right thing’ by their families and country. And as such, the normally private issue of individual tax affairs became a public debate and a site of cultural politics wherein the ATO's official discourse of rationality and regulation compliance is received by protestors as symbolic of their beleaguered position in Australian society. Here, citizenship struggles have not been eclipsed by post‐material or ‘new social movement’ concerns. Rather, sites of cultural politics, such as struggles over tax and identity, are constantly redrawn in light of new social practices and relations.     

Public spheres,hidden politics and struggles over space: boundaries of public engagement in post‐apartheid South Africa

The development of a public sphere forms a central ingredient in the consolidation of a new political culture following a transition to democracy. The Habermasian idea of the public sphere has been challenged for not taking into account the role of ‘part’ and ‘counter public spheres’, particularly with reference to ‘developing’ societies. ‘Actually existing’ public spheres must therefore be conceptualised within the framework of a broader category of ‘public space’. A national public sphere in South Africa is held back by inequalities of wealth and power. A minority public of privileged consumers has access to a structure of print and electronic media, while the majority population relies on different systems of networking that make up counter publics. After 1994, the public sphere has been influenced by a dominant‐party system, accompanied by a division into formal and informal politics, with formal politics assuming a ritualistic function and ‘Realpolitik’ being played out within the non‐public structures of the dominant party. Meanwhile, critical public debate has had to find its course through varieties of informal politics. The article examines how moral debates around HIV/AIDS and crime in KwaZulu‐Natal have constituted an alternative arena for debate, and how cultural and religious discourses have been the channels of a local public sphere. The article discusses to what extent debates have constituted a local democratic ‘deliberative public sphere’, and looks at the ways in which the local state in the form of the eThekwini Municipality has interacted with local publics since 1994.     

‘Pure milk’: dairy production and the discourse of purity in Mongolia

In this article I explore some of the ways in which consumer discourse related to factory-produced tarag (drinkable yogurt) reflects concerns about food safety and cultural identity in Mongolia. Providing examples of how Mongolian industrial dairy producers position products made from imported milk powder as ‘local’, ‘pure’, and ‘natural’, I contrast consumers’ views of ‘artificial’ or ‘poisonous’ milk from Inner Mongolia (China), uncertainty over the nature of Mongolian milk products, and the increasing terminological confusion brought about by dairy process standardization. This paper draws on an analysis of comments posted to Mongolian-language online news sites, in response to rumours that ‘Goyo Tarag’ – a popular yogurt beverage manufactured by Orgil Foods – might in fact be Chinese in origin.     

‘Let your indulgence set me free’: reflections on an ‘Africanised’ Tempest and its implications for critical practice

A joint production of The Tempest by Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre raises questions about the possibilities, and difficulties, of the deliberate ‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare. I argue that the discursive fields within which ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ are read carry significations that preclude easy acknowledgement. I consider the interpretative function an unapologetic, celebratory ‘Africa’ performs when it is put in conversation with canonical Shakespeare. Drawing on Terence Hawkes’s notion of ‘presentism’, I argue that in its effects this particular staging gives life both to the partisan discourse of public forgiveness in South Africa and to the powerful figure of ‘Shakespeare’. An African Tempest that engages the discourse of forgiveness allows ‘Shakespeare’ to share in the sociality invoked by ubuntu. Post‐apartheid theatre would do better to resist a post‐Truth and Reconciliation Commission hope of transcendence and an iconic ‘Shakespeare’. However, it may take great boldness to claim the latitude with which to trespass beyond an apparently familiar ‘Africa’ and an uninterrogated ‘Shakespeare’. The cultural legacies of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ need to be treated with the kind of unflinching critique of self and society that Edward Said deems central to the work of the humanities.     

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post‐Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what ‘counts’ as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re‐imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian‐inspired assemblage theory – most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) ‘new philosophy of society’ – the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a ‘social construction’ brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a)     

‘Your momma is day-glow white’: questioning the politics of racial identity,loyalty and obligation

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.     

Racialisation and the afterlife of colonial divide and rule: a response to Avtar Brah

In this response to Avtar Brah’s review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationship between the concepts ‘racism’, ‘race’ and ‘racialisation’. I expand my framing of the book as less about racism and more about specific processes of racialisation. To this end I draw on material from and beyond the book to illustrate the value of the concept ‘racialisation’ for understanding the afterlife of colonial divide and rule in South Africa and other former British colonies in Africa. I show the ways in which re-articulations of the ‘signification-action complex’ at the heart of processes of racialisation in post-1994 South Africa produce a politics of evasion as well as tensions between struggles for recognition on the one hand and on the other, struggles for justice and freedom. With these re-articulations come varying convergences - of claims of culture, belonging and victimhood, genomic science, jurisprudence and global discourse on indigenous rights – that reify notions of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’.     

Disciplining the sex ratio: exploring the governmentality of female foeticide in India

The ‘girl child’ has attracted a considerable amount of attention in India as an object of policy addressing gender discrimination. This article examines the field of campaigns seeking to address female foeticide and positions the public discourse on the ‘girl child’ and sex selective abortion in India within a broad cultural backdrop of son preference. The article argues that anti-female foeticide campaigns exist within a disciplinary domain of female foeticide which both generates a discourse of saving the ‘girl child’ and also shows attempts to utilise both incentives and punitive measures in carving out a female foeticide carceral space.     

The couch and the clinic The cultural authority of popular psychiatry and psychoanalysis

This paper examines the discourse produced by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who wrote for non-professional audiences. As professionals who reached out beyond their professions, their writing raises questions about the authority they invoked. The two factions in this popular psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, staked out cultural authority using systematically different types of appeals. The psychiatric approach involved a ‘pure’ professionalism, invoking psychiatry’s similarities to medicine. The psychoanalytic approach involved an explicit dissociation from medical authority, and claimed a difference from medical expertise as a mark of intellectual transcendence. What becomes clear is that these standpoints were constructed through discourse as types of strategic positionings. Concluding notes address the idea that Antonio Gramsci’s labels of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ are not only types of intellectuals; they are also stakes in the game amongst competitors for cultural authority. This insight is then applied to broader considerations regarding public intellectuals.