Kate Lockwood Harris
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190876920
- eISBN:
- 9780190876968
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190876920.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that ...
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Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that represent the world and correspond to things in it, communication remains a way to describe violence. Under this representationalist line of thinking, communication is split from the material world and cannot do harm. Similarly, when people assume that agency is a human’s intentional decision about how to act, the broader processes that inform action fade from view. An individual perpetrator becomes the sole violent actor. Both sets of assumptions make it difficult to conceptualize an organization’s role in violence. This chapter relies on feminist new materialism to problematize these assumptions. After providing an overview of the theory’s distinctive features, the chapter shows its resonances with existing scholarship on communication, agency, and organizations. These resonances provide a framework for understanding organizations to be more than mere sites for violence.Less
Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that represent the world and correspond to things in it, communication remains a way to describe violence. Under this representationalist line of thinking, communication is split from the material world and cannot do harm. Similarly, when people assume that agency is a human’s intentional decision about how to act, the broader processes that inform action fade from view. An individual perpetrator becomes the sole violent actor. Both sets of assumptions make it difficult to conceptualize an organization’s role in violence. This chapter relies on feminist new materialism to problematize these assumptions. After providing an overview of the theory’s distinctive features, the chapter shows its resonances with existing scholarship on communication, agency, and organizations. These resonances provide a framework for understanding organizations to be more than mere sites for violence.
Sigrid Vertommen
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781479833498
- eISBN:
- 9781479842308
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479833498.003.0013
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
This chapter aims to transcend the uncomfortable silence that exists between two strands of feminist materialism, i.e. historical materialism and new feminist materialism by offering a ...
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This chapter aims to transcend the uncomfortable silence that exists between two strands of feminist materialism, i.e. historical materialism and new feminist materialism by offering a cross-materialist feminist analysis of the ways in which female bodily productivity is being mobilized in twenty-first-century bio-economies, Through a diffractive reading of historical materialist and new materialist feminist contributions I elucidate on the (dis)continuities between both perspectives on the use of women’s reproductive tissues in stem cell economies. By focusing on various themes such as reproductive labor, the nature-culture divide, and the position of biology and critique within feminist studies, I argue that old and new materialist feminist perspectives can cross-fertilize each other productively, if certain challenges are adequately addressed.Less
This chapter aims to transcend the uncomfortable silence that exists between two strands of feminist materialism, i.e. historical materialism and new feminist materialism by offering a cross-materialist feminist analysis of the ways in which female bodily productivity is being mobilized in twenty-first-century bio-economies, Through a diffractive reading of historical materialist and new materialist feminist contributions I elucidate on the (dis)continuities between both perspectives on the use of women’s reproductive tissues in stem cell economies. By focusing on various themes such as reproductive labor, the nature-culture divide, and the position of biology and critique within feminist studies, I argue that old and new materialist feminist perspectives can cross-fertilize each other productively, if certain challenges are adequately addressed.
Tobias Skiveren
Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and Martin Karlsson Pedersen (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781474461313
- eISBN:
- 9781474496179
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461313.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter examines the potential embedded in feminist New Materialism for transforming established methods, conceptualizations, and attitudes within feminist literary criticism. It sketches a ...
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This chapter examines the potential embedded in feminist New Materialism for transforming established methods, conceptualizations, and attitudes within feminist literary criticism. It sketches a chronological outline of feminist theory and feminist literary criticism in order to situate feminist New Materialism as the latest cross-disciplinary transfer in an ongoing history of dialogues and appropriations from (1) second wave feminism, (2) French feminist theory and (3) queer theory. Drawing on ideas from Mayra Rivera, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, the chapter argues that the lines of thought promoted by these figures are best adopted to literary criticism by engaging literature as an affective and imaginative site for witnessing what it feels like to live as a specific carnal configuration, subjected not only to the powers of discourse, but also to the recalcitrant materiality of the flesh, thereby revitalizing the emphasis on affect and experience also characteristic of the gynocritical approaches of the 1970s.Less
This chapter examines the potential embedded in feminist New Materialism for transforming established methods, conceptualizations, and attitudes within feminist literary criticism. It sketches a chronological outline of feminist theory and feminist literary criticism in order to situate feminist New Materialism as the latest cross-disciplinary transfer in an ongoing history of dialogues and appropriations from (1) second wave feminism, (2) French feminist theory and (3) queer theory. Drawing on ideas from Mayra Rivera, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, the chapter argues that the lines of thought promoted by these figures are best adopted to literary criticism by engaging literature as an affective and imaginative site for witnessing what it feels like to live as a specific carnal configuration, subjected not only to the powers of discourse, but also to the recalcitrant materiality of the flesh, thereby revitalizing the emphasis on affect and experience also characteristic of the gynocritical approaches of the 1970s.
Suzanne Bost
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042799
- eISBN:
- 9780252051654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042799.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and ...
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Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.Less
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.
Kate Lockwood Harris
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190876920
- eISBN:
- 9780190876968
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190876920.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates ...
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In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.Less
In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.
