38,311 research outputs found
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Imagining positive geographies: French AIDS writing in the 1990s as refusing and destabilising the psycho-social untouchable body
Disarming charisma? Mayoralty, gender and power in MedellĂn, Colombia
The âUrban Centuryâ has seen a rise in power of cities, and the emergence of city mayors as significant political actors both nationally and globally. The power of city mayors, which unifies pragmatic, techno-managerial leadership with the authority and legitimacy of public office, invites a reappraisal of the gendered construction of power in the âUrban Centuryâ, and the particular notions of hegemonic masculinity that city mayors recreate. This article explores the example of MedellĂn, Colombia, whose mayor Sergio Fajardo is widely regarded to have stewarded the city's rapid reduction in violence. Fajardo's leadership can be characterised as typical of the phenomenon of smart, cosmopolitan, charismatic mayors who are seen to respond professionally to local needs by making smart investment decisions and attracting international capital. The emergence of a techno-managerial mayor in the city of MedellĂn, which during the 1990s was the epicentre of Colombia's multi-faceted conflict with the highest homicide rate in the world, represents a fundamental change to the identity and gender of power in a context of violent conflict where legitimate authority in terms of a monopoly on the use of force, was fiercely disputed. I use this example to explore how mayoral power is gendered and how it relates to violence, which is central to liberal theories of leadership and the focus of the feminist critique of them. The possibility that such a character attain power indicates underlying changes in the gendered structure of political space, including the institution of a Sub-Secretariat for Women and formalisation of participation in political process
Narrative environments: how do they matter?
The significance and possible senses of the phrase 'narrative environment' are explored. It is argued that 'narrative environment' is not only polysemous but also paradoxical; not only representational but also performative; and not just performatively repetitive but also reflexive and constitutive. As such, it is useful for understanding the world of the early 21st century. Thus, while the phrase narrative environment can be used to denote highly capitalised, highly regulated corporate forms, i.e. "brandscapes", it can also be understood as a metaphor for the emerging reflexive knowledge-work-places in the ouroboric, paradoxical economies of the 21st century. Narrative environments are the media and the materialities through which we come to comprehend that world and to act in those economies. Narrative environments are therefore, sophistically, performative-representative both of the corporate dominance of life worlds and of the undoing of that dominance, through the iterative responses to the paradoxical injunction: "learn to live"
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Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Biologies: Gender and the Promises of Biotechnology
Three decades of work in the feminist studies of science and technology have shaped our evolving understandings of the relationships between sex, gender, and biotechnology. Sex, and gender are most often reduced to binary categories, severely limiting our conceptions not only of human diversity, but those of science and technology. Using two case study set in India, transnational surrogacy and the Indian Genome Variation Project, this paper explores how popular positions around biotechnology are reduced to binary positions promoting and opposing biotechnology as the solution for the economic and social development of India. By locating surrogacy and genomics within the larger geopolitical, historical, economic and cultural transformations of postcolonial India, the paper argues that both technologies are far more complex in their impact on women and gender. Why does technology become the major site of hope for the future? Why does genomics become the site for the promises of good health? Why has India become a site for reproductive tourism, and transnational surrogacy in particular? Drawing on the social studies of science, the paper argues that technology and human bodies are never neutral but always prefigured with a gender, race, caste and sexuality. Surrogacy and genomics should be understood within these colonial and postcolonial histories of science and technology
Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stokerâs Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-siĂšcle science
This paper considers Bram Stokerâs novel Dracula, published in 1897, as a window into techno-scientific and sociocultural developments of the fin-de-siĂšcle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology up to communication technology and brain research, but focusing on the birth of psychoanalysis in 1897, the year of publication. Stokerâs literary classic heralds a new style of scientific thinking, foreshadowing important aspects of post-1900 culture. Dracula reflects a number of scientific events which surfaced in the 1890s but evolved into major research areas that are still relevant today. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate realms, moreover, Stokerâs masterpiece encourages us to address the ways in which techno-scientific and psycho- cultural developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use his novel to deepen our understanding of emerging research practices and vice versa (Zwart 2008, 2010). Psychoanalysis plays a double role in this. It is the research field whose genealogical constellation is being studied, but at the same time (Lacanian) psychoanalysis guides my reading strategy.
Dracula, the infectious, undead Vampire has become an archetypal cinematic icon and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars (Browning & Picart 2009). The vampire complex built on various folkloristic and literary sources and culminated in two famous nineteenth-century literary publications: the story The Vampyre by John Polidori (published in 1819)2 and Stokerâs version. Most of the more than 200 vampire movies released since Nosferatu (1922) are based on the latter (Skal 1990; Browning & Picart 2009; Melton 2010; Silver & Ursini 2010). Yet, rather than on the archetypal cinematic image of the Vampire, I will focus on the various scientific ideas and instruments employed by Draculaâs antagonists to overcome the threat to civilisation he represents. Although the basic storyline is well-known, I will begin with a plot summary
On Laruelle and the Radical Dyad: Katerina Kolozova's Materialist Non-Humanism
As one of the seminal theorists further developing François Laruelleâs politically-poised ânon-standard philosophy,â Katerina Kolozovaâs approach to animality and feminism is part of a particular post-humanist Marxist continuum (which includes Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles). Nonetheless, Kolozova distinguishes herself from this lineage by adhering to Laruelleâs method, liquidating philosophy of its anthropomorphic nexus. Thus, Kolozova also belongs to a more recently inaugurated and nascent tradition, working in tandem with post-Laruellean philosophers of media, technology, aesthetics and feminist critique, such as Bogna Konior, Yvette Granata, Jonathan Fardy and John Ă Maoilearca. Within this variegated assemblage, Kolozovaâs most recent project, Capitalismâs Holocaust of Animals(2019), saliently reconciles and radicalizes Harawayâs epochal dyad of the âinhumanââa bifurcation riven by technology on one node and the animal on the otherâby a resolution of superlative unity. This methodology, adhering to Laruelleâs system ofâsynthesis-without-synthesizingâ attempts to dissolve the spectral chimeras that have haunted philosophyâs metaphysical heredity, proffering a generic identity
Bodies of Knowledge: An Anatomy and Kinesiology of the American Prison Nation, \u27Human\u27-making, and Twenty-first-century Techno-gods
The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the âHumanâ.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the âprison nation,â I will show the âhumanâ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and âHumanâ (Flesh-Body-âHumanâ) statuses and subjectivity.
Bringing this âHumanâ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American âprison nation.â Following Mark Hansenâs treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I posit that the contemporary, technologically mediated and âdatafiedâ prison nation,[2] like digital media, performs a further displacement of the âHumanâ as âthe privileged arbiter of experience.â[3] This displacement has various effects which I explore in terms of what I call a techno-apotheosis in the advent of techno-gods. I propose that subjectivity is affected and should be rethought in terms of networked assemblages of subject positions and thing positions, or âhumanâ selves and thing selves.[4] With this, a technologically mediated and transnationally competitive economy of the âHumanâ emerges. (Re)produced as it is circulated through social institutions of neoliberal, law-and-order governance, this globalizing âHumanâ economy situates each social entityâhuman and other-than-human, organic and inorganic, material and immaterialâwithin relational, networked, epistemological and ontological continua operational as the twenty-first-century âdatafiedâ âprison nation.â
[1] Throughout, I am deploying Brian Massumiâs conceptualization of the âsocialâ as an articulation of the cofunctioning of the cultural, political and economic, and which, following Gilles Deleuze among others, includes human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial entities and processes as efficacious actants within these enmeshed spheres.
[2] For Patricia Ticineto Clough and Mark Hansen âdataficationâ refers to the full digital landscape of data analysis and computation the scale and capacity of which is unprecedented. This digital landscape includes âbig-dataâ, data mining, tracking, surveillance, capture, and affect-based âpredictiveâ, anticipatory, biometric, and environmental measure and modulation at unprecedented scales of molecular and molar âvisibilityâ and âsense-abilityâ.
[3] See Mark Hansenâs work, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Hansen 50-52).
[4] For a rich engagement with thingness see Patricia Ticineto Cloughâs forthcoming Introduction to The User Unconscious, which picks up and expands Sue Grandâs work on trauma and split subjectivity in âUnsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self,â 2003
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