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.     

The specter of failure: rendering Afghan women as sites of precarity in empowerment regimes

This article analyzes how the category of “Afghan women” and discourses of precarity intersect within the women’s empowerment regime in Afghanistan. By examining an NGO that seeks to empower women through writing, I argue that staff members draw upon precarity as a go-to logic to describe the state of Afghan women writers’ successes under conditions of insecurity and limited communication. Specifically, it is writers’ desires to subvert their social orders and to carve out their own futures that staff members and writing coordinators frame as subject to potential destruction. While recent work has highlighted the importance of recognizing the precarious lifeworlds of vulnerable populations, this article points to the potential implications of a hyper-recognition of precarity – namely, the obscuring of the complexities of individual women’s past and present realities. Through analyzing the pedagogies of one empowerment NGO working with women in a post-9/11 Afghanistan, I show how the logic of precarity is concerned with the vulnerability of women’s desires and sentiments, rather than their material and political vulnerabilities. It is thus deeply inflected by a historically situated “common sense” about which potentialities and aspirations are inherent to Afghan women.     

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.     

Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in The Office

Our discussion here focuses on gender performativity — the evocation of gender through stylized modes of interaction and the recitation of particular cultural norms — in the BBC comedy series The Office. We suggest that The Office can be read as a cultural text that brings sedimented ways of thinking about and enacting gender into relief, a technique that effectively ‘queers’ management and organization as gendered phenomena. In doing so, we argue that not only does The Office parody the ways in which management is configured according to the terms of what Judith Butler has described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’, but that it also represents a parodic critique of the gendered ways in which this configuration is enacted in everyday organizational encounters. We also suggest that, in addition to its capacity to be read as a parody of gender performativity, The Office reflects queer theory's concern, particularly as the latter has been articulated in Butler's writing, to reveal something of the pathos inherent in the desire for recognition that underpins the hegemonic performance of gender. In this respect, our reading of The Office emphasizes that, as a popular cultural text, it throws into (comic) relief the extent to which the desire for recognition underpins the organizational performance and management of gender in accordance with the terms of the heterosexual matrix.     

Changing Signs: The Political Pragmatism of Poststructuralism

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum singled out Judith Butler for a particularly venomous attack. Nussbaum's criticism was very simple: good theory leads to practical political action, and Butler's theories do not. Nussbaum's criticism of Butler echoes a general criticism leveled against the emerging field of queer theory. Many advocates of sexual rights have suggested that poststructuralist approaches do not have practical political application. In this essay, the authors argue that Butler's work points to a new political pragmatism. In the past, many advocates of sexual rights have focused on essentialized notions of sexual identity. A politically pragmatic approach, informed by Butler's theories, can shift the debate so that the issue of homophobic discrimination, rather than sexual identity, becomes a primary focus of the sexual rights movement.     

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.     

Not all experiences of precarious work lead to precarity: the case study of young people at university and their welfare mixes

The concept of precarity has gained momentum and challenges social scientists to consider the effects of labour-market insecurity across classes and welfare arrangements. This article discusses the varieties of experiences of precarious work by young people in university and identifies in which cases they are also experiences precarity. It is one of the first studies of its kind to investigate the material triggers of inequality by comparing young people’s experiences across countries (England, Italy and Sweden) and by looking at the welfare mixes available to young people who are working at university. Through a comparative qualitative research involving young people from different socio-economic backgrounds and ‘welfare mixes’, the article shows that experiences of precarity concern a minority of young people who have an absolute necessity to rely on labour-market sources, due to the lack or insufficiency of state support and family sources. It also identifies: a group of young people who feel pressure to get precarious jobs to fill a decline in family resources; and a convenient use of precarious jobs suiting the circumstances of young people with abundant family resources. Overall, the research found that precarity is deeply connected to young people’s welfare mixes.     

Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

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Common frailty,constructed oppression: tensions and debates on the subject of vulnerability

Vulnerability holds a contentious position in critical disability scholarship. Tension surrounding the notion of vulnerability lies primarily in its straddling of two areas of concern: the phenomenological reality of living with impairment, and the idea that vulnerability is a socially constructed entity that oppresses people with disabilities. This paper is an exploration of current and historical understandings of vulnerability, drawing from disability scholarship as well as from the theoretical tenets of Kristeva, Douglas, and Foucault. Tensions within the field are considered, as is the possibility that such debate might serve to enrich and deepen considerations of frailty in disability studies.     

Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come

This essay explores Judith Butler's influence on feminist and gender studies at two levels. First, the essay examines Butler's specific theoretical contributions with special attention to the performativity of gender and the conception of agency connected with it. It highlights the contributions and limitations of Butler's account of agency and the ongoing feminist conversation that it has incited. Second, this essay explores how Butler's account of agency has unsettled feminist conceptions of established political practice and sketches how specific responses to Butler's work provide clues to key contested issues. The essay closes with a brief look at feminist scholarship that draws together Butler-informed political visions with traditional accounts of feminist political practice in a manner that foreshadows a dynamic feminist politics yet to come.     

Becoming Butlerian: On the Discursive Limits (and Potentials) of Gender Trouble at Ten Years of Age

This essay locates Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity with respect to the historical moment of its publication in 1990 and its influence on the evolution of gender studies and queer theory in the 1990s. It also discusses Butler's place in feminism and feminist theory, and interrogates the relationship between popular culture, activism, and work in the academy.     

From philosophy of history to political philosophy: an ideological investigation of globalization

Many have argued that one of the reasons for the irresistible trend of liberal democracy is the irreversible process of globalization. The logic assumes that globalization is not only an inseparable prerequisite for promoting economic development but also the dynamic to transform political structures into liberalism in less democratic countries, because economic development within countries creates new middle classes around the world, with their natural demands for more participation in decision and political pluralism. In other words, all societies will evolve to a point where they will adopt liberal democratic institutions. In turn, the resulting new world order will be characterized by international cooperation through market economies and liberal democracy. This paper investigates the ideological origin of globalization by inspecting Fukuyama's theory of the ‘end of history’. It argues that this belief is a continuance of modernization theory and reminiscent of functionalist concepts by Western scholars concerning the development of less developed countries. The difference is that globalizers cleverly cover their ethnocentrism with Hegel's philosophy, as it implies that the Western system is some perfect theory that all people will eventually accept as their cultures and societies evolve into a Western superior state.     

Malala and the politics of global iconicity

The article presents a case analysis of Malala Yousafzai's transformation into a global injustice icon after she was shot in 2012 by the Pakistani Taliban for advocating for girls’ right to education. The analysis focuses on the political aspects of this process and is divided into three parts. The first looks at factors that facilitated Malala's iconization as she was undergoing medical treatment and was unable to participate in her iconization. The second part starts when Malala enters the global public sphere and begins to actively contribute to the iconization process. The third part identifies de‐iconizing resistance to Malala from Pakistani actors who see her iconization as a symbolic colonization in which Malala has become a vehicle of the West. Theoretically, the article is located within cultural sociology, but expands it in a political and global direction.     

Glurbanization theory: an analysis of global cities

This article analyzes glurbanization theory. The theory rests on the premise that major urban transformations and reconfigurations through interscalar strategies and rescaling processes are a good method of increasing the capacity and status of cities (and their regions) to develop global competitive advantages. This urban model stems from the fact that cities are increasingly exposed to global competition. An important tenet of glurbanization is that large cities worldwide, called ‘global cities’, come to share the same essential attributes (i.e., cityscapes, skyscrapers, financial markets, cultural centers, etc.). Another important tenet of glurbanization is that it collapses the global and the local: urban spaces are restructured so that globalization does not become just a top-down hierarchical design whereby the nation-state dictates how things work; rather, globalization is made to happen both from ‘below’ and from ‘above’.     

The fanta-sy of global products: fizzy-drinks,differentiated ubiquity and the placing of globalization

ABSTRACT

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate how this exists in an assemblage which maintains coherence across space (i.e. is universally recognizable) yet is spatially differentiated in its components. Shedding light on how these processes coalesce in place we argue for the acknowledgement of the ‘ubiquitous’ in making place and the importance of difference in underpinning the ‘global’.     

全球化竞争下我国创新型中小企业发展的挑战和对策

中小企业对于经济增长和就业的贡献早已成为各界的共识。在当前应对国际金融危机中,政府调动各方面力量帮助中小企业度过融资难的困境,无疑是及时和必要的。但中小企业面临的困难决不仅仅体现在融资方面,更体现在产业、税收、投资等各方面受到的政策歧视。我国经济要想走出危机的阴影,必须立足于经济转型,而转型则离不开民间投资的启动和中小企业的真正复苏。在此过程中,创新型中小企业应当受到特别的关注和重视。本报告的主张是：创新型中小企业的健康发展是我国赢得未来全球竞争的关键。我国还存在着诸多影响创新型中小企业健康发展的制度和政策性障碍,应当把发展创新型中小企业提升到国家战略层面,形成清晰完整的发展思路和目标,并通过制度创新和重点政策的突破,推进创新型中小企业的全面繁荣和发展。     

The Isle of Man and the First Votes for Women

Over a century ago, the Isle of Man became the first country to grant propertied women a parlamentary franchise. This paper presents a case study of the Manx Election Act of 1881 which first enfranchised women and examines some of the factors which may have helped make its passage possible. Chief among these were the involvement of the Manchester National Society for Women's Suffrage and its liberal, middle class appeal, strategy and tactics; the personalistic style of politics on the island; and the absence of any party system.     

The politics of the face: the scopic regime and the (un-)masking of the political subject

Face is commonly seen as a feature exclusive to each person. It expresses subject’s feelings, thoughts and in turn represents knowledge that is otherwise deemed personal. However, face is mistakenly seen as pure expression of subject’s thoughts. This article aims to show that face is a product of governing practices of seeing and knowing. It is thus not a unique individual expression, but a mask that the socio-political order attaches to individuals as they are turned into political subjects. The article begins with a discussion of the two governing practices: the seeing (or the spectre of the visible) and the knowing (or the practice of locating faces in the socio-political field) with an aim to unveil the role face plays in the socio-political reality. The first interrogation looks at how face creates a field of recognition and opens a distinct form of political visibility: who, what and how one sees and what remains unseen. Whereas the second interrogation discusses how appearances produce meaning and how knowledge is taken off the face. Finally, the face as a knowledge producer and a mean of subject’s social recognition (identity) is put in the encounter with the idea of the anxious gaze and the work of Marlene Dumas. Instead of recognition, here a subject is met with dissociation and displacement of subject’s socio-political image. The three presented studies paint the politics of the face as an obscene governing strategy caught between endless attempts to create the face as a known, seen and governed space and illusive attempts to grasp the actual meaning of a pre-symbolised face.     

Translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice

ABSTRACT

This paper makes the case for considering the role of cross-cultural encounters in shaping developers’ notions of information privacy. Recent studies on privacy by design shed light on developer practices yet tend to regard these workers as a generic category. The paper draws on two interviews with workers in a late-stage Israeli startup as a step toward localizing developers and the global products they design. The analysis identifies four narratives that juxtapose the local, the global and the commodification of users’ personal information: (1) the origin myth of the company; (2) workers’ personal and professional biographies; (3) reports on external regulations; and (4) accounts of work practices, rituals and communication formats. The analysis suggests how the globalization of the startup was implicated in changing ideas and practices relating to users’ information. The paper concludes by discussing some of the challenges facing a culturally-sensitive study of developers as mediators of privacy.     

Identity processes in the global era: the case of young immigrants living in Italy

The paper explores processes of identity construction in young people of foreign origin living in Italy. The aim was to understand how youth construct their selves in the global era, characterized by an increase in the possibility of choosing but also in the perception of uncertainty; how they perceive this uncertainty, whether as a chance to construct multifaceted and continually changing identities or as a source of insecurity and loss for their identity. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews, the research reveals that young people of foreign origin are continually shaping their identities mixing different cultural repertories related to their – or their parents’ – homeland, to the host country, global cultures and youth cultures. Several patterns of identity emerge and they are linked to different perception of uncertainty. A typology of these patterns was developed: young people construct flexible identities or hyphenated identities, or move from a fixed identity to an undefined identity. These types of identity are respectively associated with the perception of uncertainty as a resource, as a constraint, finally with a strategy of reducing or eliminating uncertainty.