Search Results

Women and the family in political culture

Kathryn Gleadle

in Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815-1867

Historians of feminism, such as Jane Rendall, have demonstrated how the family was construed as a vital locus of civic virtue in Enlightenment histories, evangelical moralizing, and revolutionary ... More

Historians of feminism, such as Jane Rendall, have demonstrated how the family was construed as a vital locus of civic virtue in Enlightenment histories, evangelical moralizing, and revolutionary politics. More recently, scholars of elite politics have demonstrated that family networks of patronage and electoral influence were critical to the functioning of parliamentary politics. Within the family, gendered roles which privileged the position of the male head of the household remained remarkably enduring, a factor which complicated the construction of female political subjectivity. The family was an important forum for the constitution of political culture and women were sometimes fully implicated in this. It was a process which could — but did not inevitably — result in the construction of empowering female subjectivities. Whilst the bland imprecision of ‘female influence’ acknowledged women's potential for political input within the family, it obscured the complexities of exercising such sway within the actuality of family relations and underplayed the significance of broader cultural currents which prioritized wifely submission.Less

Making Rights Claims in the Age of AIDS

Karen Zivi

in Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship

This chapter analyzes rights claiming done in the context of AIDS policy debates in the United States and South Africa. It illustrates how rights claims made, particularly on behalf of HIV-positive ... More

This chapter analyzes rights claiming done in the context of AIDS policy debates in the United States and South Africa. It illustrates how rights claims made, particularly on behalf of HIV-positive pregnant women, challenged dominant conceptions and practices of motherhood in ways that enabled women’s political subjectivity and democratic participation.Less

Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World

Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto

in Postcolonial Disorders

This book reflects on the nature of subjectivity in everyday modes of experience, the social and psychological dimensions of individual lives, the psychological qualities of social life, the ... More

This book reflects on the nature of subjectivity in everyday modes of experience, the social and psychological dimensions of individual lives, the psychological qualities of social life, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection found in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is divided into three parts. The first explores the tension between our understandings of the dual meanings of disordered states, referencing political states and disordered lives, the everyday and spectral or imaginary qualities of the state, as well as the dynamics of political subjectivity. The second part examines subjectivity at the borderlands or margins of states and polities, and the third addresses the subjective stakes of postcolonial disorder through the lenses of psychiatric models and “other” or altered mental states.Less

Conclusions

Kathryn Gleadle

in Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815-1867

This book has shown how women occupied an enduring but peripheral location within the contemporary political imagination in Britain. Their status within the world of public politics remained ... More

This book has shown how women occupied an enduring but peripheral location within the contemporary political imagination in Britain. Their status within the world of public politics remained problematic throughout this period — even in campaigns apparently deemed suitable for female activism, such as anti-slavery. Family identities, moreover, remained crucial to the positioning of women as political subjects. In the years between the ending of the war with France in 1815 and the second Reform Act in 1867, there were gathering opportunities for female political engagement. However, these shifts occurred in complex ways. although there were many ‘losses’ for women in this period — such as the ending of freewomen's rights, the decline in parochial authority, and the decreasing significance of patronage networks — we have also seen how the seeds of change emerged. Women's political subjectivity was always in the making. Yet women remained borderline citizens whose ability to imagine themselves unambiguously as forthright political actors was continually compromised by the pull of conflicting discursive currents and the instability of their ambivalent political status.Less

Everyday Aids Practices: Contestations of Borders and Infectious Disease in Southwest China

Sandra Teresa Hyde

in Postcolonial Disorders

This chapter examines HIV as a spatialized disease, identified with communities at the borderlands along China's multiethnic southern frontier during the late-socialist period. It shows how political ... More

This chapter examines HIV as a spatialized disease, identified with communities at the borderlands along China's multiethnic southern frontier during the late-socialist period. It shows how political subjectivity and everyday practices of surveillance and implementation of public health policies not only link local, national, and global interventions in China's HIV crisis, but how they also inscribe the sovereignty of the state onto subjects in the borderlands. The chapter provides brief histories on the question of sovereignty and on the social epidemiology of HIV in southwest China, exploring four narratives of the everyday AIDS practices of state actors and their political subjectivity.Less

The Subject of Mental Illness: Psychosis, Mad Violence, and Subjectivity in Indonesia

Byron J. Good, Subandi, and Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good

in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

This chapter studies the relationship between the subjective experience of psychotic illness and political subjectivity, and the madness of the psychotic and that of violent crowds in modern ... More

This chapter studies the relationship between the subjective experience of psychotic illness and political subjectivity, and the madness of the psychotic and that of violent crowds in modern Indonesia. It reveals deep fractures in the symbolic ordering of sufferers' relation to families and the world of commodity capitalism and the medicoscientific order of reality. The chapter also shows how the experiences of acute psychoses are mixed up with Indonesia's current political and economic turmoil, and emphasizes the dissonances, ambiguities, and limitations of representing subjectivity in mental illness.Less

Interrogating Sovereign Politics:: An Alternative Citizen-Subject

Aoileann Ní Mhurchú

in Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration

Chapter three contextualises the work of Étienne Balibar, Engin Isin and RBJ Walker within the broader theoretical field of poststructuralism. It outlines how a poststructuralist approach (broadly ... More

Chapter three contextualises the work of Étienne Balibar, Engin Isin and RBJ Walker within the broader theoretical field of poststructuralism. It outlines how a poststructuralist approach (broadly defined) produces an alternative conception of political identity and belonging which is not based on sovereign time and space. This chapter looks at a range of key theorists whose work is associated with poststructuralism. It outlines the importance of a de-centred subject and a relational view of power drawn from the work of Michel Foucault for interrogating and moving beyond a state sovereign territorial framework. It discusses subsequently how Julia Kristeva's work provides an alternative understanding of political subjectivity which is based on an ontology of process rather than an ontology of presence.Less

Envisioning Civilian Childhood

Rebecca A. Adelman

in Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

“Envisioning Civilian Childhood” focuses on a collection of scandals related to the exposure of civilian children to militarized violence. These scandals are fueled by the affects of apprehension, ... More

“Envisioning Civilian Childhood” focuses on a collection of scandals related to the exposure of civilian children to militarized violence. These scandals are fueled by the affects of apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and anger, and all of them unfold in classrooms. In every case, a range of stakeholders—including parents, administrators, and journalists—rush to the defense of the children’s senses, especially their sight, to insist that they deserve a view of the world unclouded by violence. To contextualize the anxieties reflected in these scandals, the chapter begins with a brief history of the construct of ‘childhood’ in America, from the Colonial period to the present. This history demonstrates that predominant beliefs about childhood innocence are not simply natural responses to their vulnerability. Instead, these beliefs are historically variable, socially constructed, and unevenly applied to different types of children. Here, they are activated around the civilian child encountering the graphic realities of war. An analysis of the resultant scandals reveals that these affects become overwhelming when the vision of the innocent, apolitical child is threatened, insulted, or troubled.Less

Architectures of Air: Media Ecologies of Smart Cities and Pollution¹

Jussi Parikka

in Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity

In this chapter Jussi Parikka discusses air pollution and waste as media, data and environmental art created in the contemporary smart city. The way these, otherwise unwanted, elements are sensed and ... More

In this chapter Jussi Parikka discusses air pollution and waste as media, data and environmental art created in the contemporary smart city. The way these, otherwise unwanted, elements are sensed and perceived unveil the political subjectivity in an urban context and as data feedback from various readings, understandings and governance of the city. This sort of a materiality is one that is about folds between architectures, data and the chemistry of the air -a sort of a media ecology of multiple materialities. The creative power of smog that intertwines old computational infrastructures of urban pollution and new infrastructures such as monitors, programming and data storage is explained. The chapter focuses on urban environments as defined by the emergence of new forms of measurement of the city -and its airborne pollution - through smog sensors. The smart, modern city as defined through its unwanted elements, in this case, pollution and waste, are further discussed.Less

Affective Pedagogies for Military Children

Rebecca A. Adelman

in Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

This chapter explores how a range of institutions, both state and non-state, negotiate the instability latent in the term ‘military child.’ Focusing on internet resources for military children, the ... More

This chapter explores how a range of institutions, both state and non-state, negotiate the instability latent in the term ‘military child.’ Focusing on internet resources for military children, the chapter analyzes how the websites represent the emotional experiences of military childhood back to that very audience. The chapter begins with the story of Omar Khadr, illustrating the politics of recognizing the militarized political subjectivities of young people. It then turns to a genealogy of the so-called military brat and an overview of the various ways that the U.S. military has interfaced with children, and how these histories inform the investments of affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and anger circulating around military children today. The core of the analysis is a comparison of two websites, Sesame Street for Military Families (SSMF) and Military Kids Connect (MKC). Military homes on Sesame Street are characterized by warmth, intimacy, and intense focus on children’s needs. By contrast, Military Kids Connect presumes a military household marked by varying degrees of stress, constraint, and dysfunction. In disparate ways, both of these websites acknowledge and deny the impact of militarization on children, while also instrumentalizing their emotional well-being and transform coping into a child’s patriotic obligation.Less

Introduction: In the Shadows of Citizenship: African Americans and Democracy's Alterity

Ivy G. Wilson

in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.

Beginning with a reading of a Sojourner Truth carte-de-visite and its epigrammatic phrasing, this introductory chapter prefigures Ralph Ellison's notion of the “shadow” and Jacques Derrida's notion ... More

Beginning with a reading of a Sojourner Truth carte-de-visite and its epigrammatic phrasing, this introductory chapter prefigures Ralph Ellison's notion of the “shadow” and Jacques Derrida's notion of the “specter” to underscore the book's critique of democratic sociality in mid-19th century America. Using the context of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and the 1857 Dred Scott decision to intimate the fraught condition of antebellum black political subjectivity, the chapter stages the book's central concern with aurality and visuality. On the one hand, it outlines how a preoccupation with the vernacular practices of vocal enunciation was part of a larger national rhetoric about democracy. On the other hand, it outlines how a preoccupation with the meanings of visual representations was tied to the graphic processes of imagining the citizen.Less

Introduction

Athena Athanasiou

in Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black

This introductory chapter pursues the main question of the book: How might we capture the performative power implicit in processes of turning the impossibility of mourning into an incalculable ... More

This introductory chapter pursues the main question of the book: How might we capture the performative power implicit in processes of turning the impossibility of mourning into an incalculable political potentiality that deconstitutes its interpellating terms and contests state-nationalist authoritarianism? It outlines the challenge that the critical methodology of a feminist political movement in post-Yugoslavia presents for the available theoretical and political vocabularies of agonism. Through an anthropological account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade (Žene u Crnom), the Introduction addresses the ways these activists, by engaging in practices of undoing grief as feminine and national language, open onto spaces for challenging conventional divisions between the affective and the political, between the political and the performative, as well as between body and language.Less

Conclusion: Dreams Multiplied … A Final Entrée to Cuba

Andrea J. Queeley

John M. Kirk (ed.)

in Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba

The concluding chapter reflects upon changes in Cuban society from the early twentieth century to the post-Soviet era, reviewing key moments for the Anglo-Caribbean Cuban community and emphasizing ... More

The concluding chapter reflects upon changes in Cuban society from the early twentieth century to the post-Soviet era, reviewing key moments for the Anglo-Caribbean Cuban community and emphasizing the paradoxical nature of the political subjectivities of Anglo-Caribbean Cubans. Queeley suggests that the historical pattern of discrimination directed toward people of African descent who have broken through racial barriers in education, employment, and even politics complicates claims to a raceless society and has implications for the direction of transformative visions and antiracist activism in Cuba and beyond. Queeley closes by first suggesting that this dilemma be taken into consideration by antiracist groups in Cuba and, second, by reflecting on what the future might hold for the next generation of Anglo-Caribbean Cubans.Less

A Radical and Unsentimental Attention

Rebecca A. Adelman

in Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

This conclusion posits ethical anger as an alternative to the forms of affective investment critiqued in the preceding chapters. It notes that none of the figures described in this book are permitted ... More

This conclusion posits ethical anger as an alternative to the forms of affective investment critiqued in the preceding chapters. It notes that none of the figures described in this book are permitted to be angry, a prohibition that sustains militarism by making it easy to imagine that no one objects to it. This ethical anger is distinct from that which is felt vicariously for suffering others, or on their behalf, as forms of second-hand feeling that short-circuit the possibility of the other’s anger and subjectivity. The form of anger that this conclusion endorses is a way of registering the suffering of others without making any kind of epistemological or affective claim on it. This anger notes what is unknowable about the suffering of others, and it is a frustration not with that unknowability (rooted in a greed for experience and sensation) but with the efforts to make it falsely intelligible. Consequently, such anger has the potential to serve as the foundation for a more meaningful ethical response to the suffering that militarism engenders.Less

Tolerating Babel: Biopolitics, Film, and Family

Erin Runions

in The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty

This chapter shows how biopolitics, Babel, and the discourse of tolerance are imbricated in two important films: D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages, and ... More

This chapter shows how biopolitics, Babel, and the discourse of tolerance are imbricated in two important films: D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel. Both films articulate a wish to rebuild Babel: They propose cinema as a tolerant universal language. While advocating tolerance, they sexualize and negatively appraise the otherness of Babylon in ways that uphold the normative sexual relations of the white heteronormative family. The ambivalence of these films toward their central metaphor is also consistent with the shifts in political subjectivity in biopolitics. Together, they reveal how Bible, film, family, and tolerance discourse all work together to authorize U.S. empire, to normalize biopolitical divisions of populations and to model a political subjectivity (the subject of interest) that is free but not too free.Less

The Kebab and the Wurst

Nitzan Shoshan

in The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany

This chapter examines how young right-wing extremists in Berlin articulate their relations to immigrants and ethnic alterity and how they negotiate layers of otherness in order to trace, in their own ... More

This chapter examines how young right-wing extremists in Berlin articulate their relations to immigrants and ethnic alterity and how they negotiate layers of otherness in order to trace, in their own voices, their rendering of dominant imaginations of the social and political landscape. It explains how the rise of ethnicity and of a corresponding notion of culture as standard markers of difference has gone hand in hand with the public celebration of diversity, its active interpellation, and new modes of visualization that it has acquired in Berlin. It also shows how the resonances between ethnic otherness, urban landscape, and political contrasts come into sharp focus around food, noting that political subjectivity unfolds between the Wurst (sausage) as proper German nutrition and the Döner (kebab) as the seductive sensuality of otherness.Less

Coda: The Living Indebted (on Students and Sabotage)

Annie McClanahan

in Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture

The Coda to Dead Pledges explores an emerging anti-debt politics, arguing that “debt strikes” and the occupation or sabotage of domestic space are forms of protest that attempt to block capital at ... More

The Coda to Dead Pledges explores an emerging anti-debt politics, arguing that “debt strikes” and the occupation or sabotage of domestic space are forms of protest that attempt to block capital at the point of circulation. Exploring the economics of student debt and taking up the treatment of education debt as an “investment in the future,” this chapter suggests that the politics of student debt illuminate the relationship between workers and students and between the university and capitalism. It concludes by exploring the emergence of what it terms “crisis subjectivity”: a demystified condition of radical percipience and canny knowing.Less

Conducting unleashing interviews where control means life or death

Rose Løvgren

in Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence: Fieldwork Interrupted

This chapter discusses ethical concerns about empathetic engagement in interviews about violence. It discusses cases from fieldwork in Rwanda where emotional investment in the field can be ... More

This chapter discusses ethical concerns about empathetic engagement in interviews about violence. It discusses cases from fieldwork in Rwanda where emotional investment in the field can be experienced as deeply intrusive, and explores the ethical and political meaning of the author’s own doubts and insecurities with regards to these encounters. The chapter argues that interviewees living in violent settings may at times subdue their sense of self as a survival tactic. When the research interview works to affirm the interviewee’s sense of self, it is often experienced as a threat. The chapter discusses a case where insecurity in the aftermath of a research encounter took part in structuring the author’s gendered and sexed positionality in the field. The cases discussed are used to illustrate that empathetic engagement in violent research settings can cause interviewees experience of harm through loss of control in a setting where control means life or death.Less