The Cultural Functions and Social Potential of Queer Monuments: A Preliminary Inventory and Analysis

Public monuments function as cultural agents, reifying dominant public narratives or fostering change. Either way, their representation of people and events intervene in public discourse and contribute to cultural, economic, political, and social environments. Queer monuments, defined here as heritage sites that honor gender and sexual minorities, represent communities that have often been excised in dominant public narratives. This article provides a preliminary global inventory of queer monuments and describes three of their major functions: (1) to provide visibility and reduce stigma; (2) to educate the public on the abuse and attempted extermination of gender and sexual minorities; and (3) to stimulate public debate and discourse about gender and sexual minority rights. This still rare type of monument is growing more common and prompting more active and equitable representations in public space. Queer monuments have the potential of lessening stigma and improving the lives of sexual and gender minorities.     

Doing and denying sexism: online responses to a New Zealand feminist campaign against sexist advertising

In 2012 a New Zealand feminist group launched a campaign against a series of local beer advertisements they deemed “retro-sexist.” The campaign generated media coverage across a range of viewpoints, but drew a largely negative response from the online public. This article analyses a comprehensive corpus of 753 online comments responding to news of the campaign. We discuss the dominant discursive constructions of gender and of feminists, and the ways these were deployed to trivialise the campaign, demonise the feminist campaigners, and depoliticise the issues. The comments overall, ironically, simultaneously disavow and perform sexism in this online public space. This imbrication of the denial and doing of sexism creates a hostile reception for public feminist voices, potentially dampening the field of possibility for action against sexism within mediated culture.     

Becoming “People of Faith:” Personal Moral Authenticity in the Cultural Practices of a Faith-Based Social Justice Movement

Interactive cultural practices such as songs and storytelling are key to contemporary social movement organizing because they can attenuate the challenges of social difference by expanding participants’ understandings of self and community. Yet the precise cultural dynamics through which such practices become effective are not well understood. Using the case of a large faith-based community organizing coalition, I show that practices focused on personal moral authenticity are especially effective in fostering alignment between social movement goals and individuals’ pre-existing moral commitments. I define personal moral authenticity as the ambition to develop, enact, and perform a moral identity that is “true” to an enduring internal self, and validate that identity through interactions with others. This is an effective basis for organizing practices because it spans the various cultures of commitment that prevail in different racial and religious subgroups and gives individuals a personal stake in social change projects. In highlighting how it animates practices in faith-based community organizing, one of the most robust fields of grassroots civic activity in the United States, this article illuminates an important part of the cultural dynamics underlying much contemporary social change work, and specifies how religion contributes to progressive social change efforts amid ongoing religious disaffiliation.     

LGBT Studies Without LGBT Studies: Mapping Alternative Pathways in Perú and Colombia

ABSTRACT

Our article tackles gender and sexual diversity scholarship in Colombia and Perú, two countries without institutionalized LGBT studies programs. By analyzing the impact of literary works in Perú and an annual conference in Colombia’s capital, we show how LGBT-related scholarship (and activism) has been advanced in these Andean countries with tactful maneuvering, as they offset contemporary violence—and a strong religious influence. Our comparison allows us to showcase two of the most common ways through which these countries have engaged in LGBT research and activism. This region-centered, dual-country approach underscores the broader need of researching and documenting these efforts.     

Transnational contention,domestic integration: assimilating into the hostland polity through homeland activism

While scholars have studied the political incorporation of migrants and refugees through measures related to naturalisation and voting, others have investigated the ways by which participation in protests and other forms of activism foster assimilation. But how is transnational contention connected to domestic integration? Using archival research and life history interviews of Filipino migrant activists in the U.S. and the Netherlands and drawing from the literatures on immigrant assimilation and social movements, I show the processes and mechanisms that enable activists to become simultaneously involved in the movements for homeland regime change for migrant/minority rights in the hostland. Thus, they assimilate into the domestic polity while they participate in transnational politics. I argue that as activists perform the functions associated with homeland activism, they develop relations and networks that allow new forms of collective identities to emerge, often rooted in civil-society spaces in the hostland. This study contributes to the debate on transnationalism and assimilation, which has recently moved from contradiction to synergy.     

Gendering Resistance: Multiple Faces of the Kurdish Women's Struggle

The article explores the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey by bridging two forms of resistance: those of guerrilla women fighters and of activist women. Based on my extensive ethnographic and archival research, I ask how women under conditions of war engage in different modes of resistance. In what ways does the “heroic resistance” of guerrilla women resonate with and/or contradict the everyday, “ordinary” struggles of activist women? The potent image of the Kurdish guerrilla woman that emerged in the early 1990s is constitutive of many other modes of political subjectivities, even among women who do not or cannot become guerrillas. One of those subjectivities is that of the activist woman. My analysis suggests that women's activism opens up a middle ground of action between “heroic” and “ordinary” resistance by reconciling revolutionary politics with everyday activism around gender‐based violence, democracy, and human rights. Although both revolutionary movement participants and scholars of revolutionary resistance often contrast the “ordinary” with the realm of armed resistance, this article challenges this dichotomy. I take the two realms of resistance—the ordinary and the heroic—as the core constituents of revolutionary resistance, and I reconsider the gendered interplay between them.     

Still fighting the good fight: An analysis of student activism and institutional response

The current study employs content analysis of news coverage on recent campus protests (the University of Missouri, the University of Cincinnati, Harvard School of Law, and Ithaca College). Using the contingency theory of conflict management as a theoretical framework, the study sought both parties’ (institution and student activist group) stances along the continuum of pure advocacy to pure accommodation. The study also examined whether recent student groups applied radical activist strategies, and if institutions employed conflict resolution strategies.Results indicate both parties were advocating, with only institutions moving along the continuum from advocacy to pure accommodation. Students were found to execute radical activist strategies and institutions’ responses were dominantly unconditionally constructive.     

改变世界的哲学何以可能(下)——一个基于行动者与旁观者双重视角的构想

基于行动者与旁观者双重理论视角,对马克思主义哲学处理决定论与能动论关系的问题,可探寻一种更为合理的处理方式。基于这一双重视角,理论与实践的关系可被理解为旁观者与行动者的关系,即决定论是旁观者的理论世界中的存在状态,而能动论则是行动者的实践世界中的存在状态。由于决定论与能动论分别存在于旁观者的理论世界与行动者的实践世界这两个不同的世界之中,因而关于世界的决定论描述与能动论描述能够并存而不自相矛盾。由此,可勾画出一种总括性的"本体论承诺":基于旁观者立场对于有限的确定性的承诺,我们不能设想世界的绝对偶然论;而由行动者立场对于不确定性的承诺,我们亦不能设想世界的绝对的决定论。由于这两个方面的承诺都是有限的、非绝对的,因而两个方面就能够共存在一起而构成一种关于宇宙的"开放性"设定。基于这样一种本体论,改变世界就是可能的。     

改变世界的哲学何以可能(上)——从马克思到后马克思主义

马克思主义哲学是一种指向改变世界的哲学,它肯定了人具有改变世界的历史行动的能力,而这就预设了世界的可改变性或非决定性,否则,改变世界就是不可能的;但另一方面,历史唯物主义又往往被理解为一种历史决定论,而这在逻辑上就使得改变世界成为不可能或不可理解之事。对于强调理论与实践相一致的马克思主义来说,这一矛盾无疑是根本性的大问题,因而也就成了每一种马克思主义哲学理论所不可避免地关注的核心问题。从第二国际马克思主义到当今后马克思主义,在理论上的每一重大变化,都可以看成是对这一矛盾处理方式的变化。而从当今后马克思主义所引发的激烈争论来看,这一矛盾仍然是我们不得不面对的根本性问题。迄今为止,关于马克思思想中改变世界的历史行动何以可能这一根本性的哲学问题,人们还只是提供了一些并不成功的解决方案,因而有必要探寻一种更为合理的处理方式。     

Problematization and de-problematization – 30 years of cultural studies and cultural criticism in mainland China

ABSTRACT

In the past 30 years, cultural studies in mainland China has developed its own history, theoretical characteristics and problem framework with the introduction of Western theory, discussion of Chinese issues and active dialogue with international cultural studies scholars. The studies of sociology, philosophy and politics have overlapped with cultural studies in problems such as rural governance, class research, the bottom society research, gender politics and consumer society theory. Chinese cultural studies started with a critical consciousness, then activated the drives of anti-authoritarianism and generated an illusion of emergency. Today, it has outgrown the paradigm of the 1950s, and must establish new theories and thoughts on the basis of a new sense of criticism at this moment.