Importing Feminist Criticism

1999-01-01

Derrida reappraised : deconstruction, critique and emancipation in management studies

Derrida has been significantly misread by many management scholars. The paper argues that his work is not ‘postmodernist’; further, that Habermas’ (1987) influential critique of Derrida’s views on truth and politics have led to widespread but misleading views of his critical credentials. Although Habermas is not entirely misguided, a defence of Derrida is provided that sets out the potential for his work to inform management scholars who wish to provide emancipatory critique

Resisting the palimpsest: reclamation of the female cultural body

The implicit politics of female body performativity are played out constantly within the liminality of socio-cultural space. Women need to be able to renegotiate the complexity of constructed and encoded gender expectations and representation in order to expand the contemporary narrow vision of femininity that interpellates all of us in an advertorial way. The most visceral component of corporeal semiotics is the skin which can, certainly in Post-modern and Post-colonial terms be seen as a liminal space, which according to Homi Bhabha, is a space for cultural hybridity, performativity and minority diatribes to exist. In order to negotiate prescribed notions of physical aesthetics and ideas of femininity and beauty, the skin can be used to perform the renegotiation of this encoded, fixed tablet of gender traditions. How that skin exists culturally requires inspection. Space unfolds to interaction (Massey, D) and if, as McLuhan stated, the medium is the message, then the skin and the body are the medium. People, more predominantly women, who use their skins as semiotic canvasses by being tattooed, actively choose to perform subverted notions of beauty and performativity and challenge the dominant culture through the ritual of tattooing. The female body is perennially rewritten by the hegemony of each historical period. By using tattooing as a process of reclamation, one can refuse to let one’s body be inscribed by cultural hegemonic texts and practices. Through tattooing, bodily reclamation can resist the palimpsest by marking one’s journey, ideologies and artistic tastes on one’s skin. According to William Blake and Edward Said, ‘the foundation of empire is art and science; remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more’ (4; 87). By tattooing the body, this process resists engendered codes of behaviour, constructed aesthetics of beauty and of the imposition of cultural imperialism because there is already a fixed, irremovable narrative in place that is autonomous and not state sanctioned. This paper will examine notions of female cultural space, encoded gender expectations, performativity and aesthetic constructs to demonstrate that through the process of tattooing, alternative ideological positions that are not represented by the hegemony exist in a liminal space and occupy a vital but subordinated (and therefore categorised female) position. As a result, revolution becomes embodied and performed on the skin

The advent of heroic anthropology in the history of ideas

In this article the advent of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology is described as a reaction against the predominantly phenomenological bias of French philosophy in the post-war years as well as against the old humanism of existentialism which seemed parochial both in its confinement to a specific tradition of western philosophy and in its lack of interest in scientific approach. Nevertheless, the paradigm of structural anthropology cannot be equated with the field of structuralism, which became a very contestable form of intellectual fashion. The reception of Lévi-Strauss’s theory in the English-speaking world carried on both the same enthusiasm and the same distortions and simplifications, to the extent that in the course of anti-structural criticism, the main thrust of the epistemological approach of Lévi-Strauss seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology

A Guide to Critical Legal Studies

Review of: A Guide to Critical Legal Studies. By Mark Kelman. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1987

The myth of 'the myth of Irish neutrality': deconstructing concepts of Irish neutrality using international relations theories

A number of academics, journalists and political elites claim that Irish neutrality is a 'myth', and many also characterise public support for Irish neutrality as 'confused' and 'nonrational'. This 'unneutral' discourse in the academic literature and mainstream Irish media is based on an academic thesis, that of an Unneutral Ireland. The Unneutral thesis constructs a particular concept of neutrality in order to draw its conclusion that Ireland is 'unneutral'. Using a poststructuralist approach--a rarity in the discipline of International Relations (IR)--this paper deconstructs concepts of Irish neutrality using a framework of IR theories. The results show that the concept of neutrality put forward in the Unneutral Ireland thesis and the dominant discourses on Irish neutrality are based on a hegemonic IR theory, the theory of neorealism, rather than on seemingly 'objective' scientific research methods. The paper concludes that non-realist theories and approaches may provide a better understanding of Irish neutrality and of the dynamics of public support for Irish neutrality