Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism

Over recent decades, poststructuralist theories have allowed critical disability scholars to challenge essentialist understandings of the human species and to contest discourses which divide humans into ‘normal’/‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a wide – and ever expanding – range of corporeal and cognitive traits. For critics, however, these theories are deeply flawed. By focusing primarily on language, poststructuralism shifts our critical attention away from the often harsh material realities of life for disabled people. This has led some to turn to critical realism and to effectively re-essentialise impairment. In this article, I wish to consider an alternative approach. I suggest that the recent ‘ontological turn’ in social theory has seen the emergence of new-materialist approaches – including Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblage and methodology of assemblage analysis – which allow us to consider disability as a material phenomenon without a return to essentialism.     

Legitimizing leisure experiences as emotional work: A post‐humanist approach to gendered equine encounters

Due to changes in lifestyle and work patterns, education and values associated with wellbeing, non‐human animals are now incorporated into a range of human experiences and environments. This research specifically focuses on human–equine relations, examining blurred boundaries between therapeutic and recreational interspecies encounters. It is acknowledged that human–equine relations are often gendered and this research focuses mainly on women's narratives. Viewed through the post‐humanist lens, horses now form kinship and companionship roles, particularly for women, where relations have become mutually emotionally dependent as a result of interspecies communication and embodied encounters. Research utilizes feminist post‐humanist and cultural politics of emotion frameworks associate with the co‐agency on the co‐agency of animals. Embedded in the concept of equiscapes, or post‐humanist leisure spaces, research methods employ qualitative approaches, including in‐depth interviews, participant diaries and multispecies ethnography. Findings reveal how women make considerable investments in equine activities, which develops mutual welfare and wellbeing. Yet, despite these benefits, emotional and other expenditures are justified in work discourses to legitimize them as valuable to themselves, their families and their communities.     

托妮·莫里森对语言的后人道主义思考

在介绍后人道主义的基本理念、分析后人道主义与后现代文学关系的基础上,对美国后现代非裔女作家托妮·莫里森的诺贝尔奖演讲词和她的小说《宠儿》与《所罗门之歌》所体现的语言观进行后人道主义解读:莫里森对于语言暴力和大男子主义、种族主义和一神论的宗教语言的批判,对于语言本质的反思,以及对于语言力量的创造性运用,体现了作家对语言的后人道主义思考。     

Gender still at work: Interrogating identity in discourses and practices of masculinity

Apart from a few paragraphs reminiscing on how, in response to a publisher contacting us, Jill, Marilyn and I founded Gender, Work and Organization combined with a few comments on its evolution as a leading journal in our field, this article largely summarizes and seeks to develop my lifelong interests in discourses and practices of masculinity. It pays tribute to my doctoral students and/or research colleagues with whom many of these ideas concerning masculinities were shaped. The article then surveys the literature on discourses and practices of masculinities through the three waves: the unitarist, the pluralist and, finally, the performativist approach to discourses and practices of masculinity. A central argument of the article is that although each wave has contributed something of importance to the critical examination of masculinities, none of them fully interrogate identity to theorize how our attachment to the security that it promises is illusory. Posthumanist feminists come closest to realizing this and seeking an alternative embodied and ethical engagement with, rather than a competitive elevation of self over, the other. In the conclusion, there is a brief comment on how the global backlash from the political right has made struggles against dominant masculinities all the more urgent.     

‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research

In this article I argue that in their current genealogical and philosophical configuration, qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) practices – and a wider regime of knowledge, ethical, moral, legal, technological, political and economic practices with which they are entangled – embed and enact representational assumptions in which the realities being investigated – time, change and continuity; the past, present and future – are taken as ontologically given and independent of these QLR (and wider) practices. My approach is to conceptualize QLR practices along nonrepresentational lines, through a philosophical framework that is able to materialize the constitutive effects of QLR (and wider) practices on the objects of study and knowledges produced. For this, I turn to Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative metaphysics – ‘agential realism’ – a framework that embodies and enacts a non-classical ontology in which entities are seen as constituted through material-discursive practices. On this account, QLR (and wider) practices are understood as an ineliminable and constitutive part of the realities they help bring into being.     

对威廉·默温所译《高文爵士与绿衣骑士》的后人文主义探究

默温的翻译版本出版后不久,伦敦《泰晤士报》发表评论,尖锐地批评默温,尤其针对该译文中"野蛮的政治正确",其中包括默温身为捍卫动物权利者对打猎场景所采取的描写。后人文主义视角推翻了人文主义者加诸文本之上的意图谬误,即依据人为中心的利益观念为文本强加意图,而非出于除人类中心以外的利益和考虑。     

The Protagorean presumption and the posthuman: Ceci n’est pas un calmar

Through readings of Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers and Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, this paper considers possible ways in which one might address that which is posthuman. Exploring the place(s) of various nonhuman animals within the philosophical canon, animals are here engaged with as ciphers, indices, fables, mirrors, phantoms, and as feral singularities. Further, this paper interrogates Flusser’s claim to have escaped both idealism and anthropocentrism, and in so doing considers, with Tyler, the necessity or otherwise of anthropocentrism in theoretical discourse.     

Monstrous schoolteachers: women educators in popular cultural texts

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.     

Exploring normativity in disability studies

Normativity is a concept that is often misapplied in disability studies, especially in ‘postconventional’ accounts, where the concept is conflated with ‘normal’, ‘normate’, or ‘standard’. This article addresses this confusion, explores the meaning and use of ‘normativity’, and presents some analytic tools to discuss normative issues of right and wrong. The article finishes by discussing examples where conceptual confusions result in confused normative judgments focusing in particular on agency, responsibility and moral status. The article argues that disability research should carefully consider the use of theories and empirical knowledge in the light of their ethical implications as well as the lived experiences of disability.