Recodifications of academic positions and reiterations of desire: change but continuity in gendered subjectivities

This paper argues that the analysis of changes in the social position of women needs to distinguish between levels of social practice and psychic subjectification. The argument draws on Lacan's conception of the relationship between subjectivity, desire and sexual difference to describe gendered aspects of subjectivity embedded within the (re)organisation of social fields. The data is taken from a comparative case study of undergraduate modules in four universities, and the analysis identifies gendered differences in the tutors? pedagogic and disciplinary practice. These differences suggest that while the practice of the female tutors, in different ways, constituted recodifications of existing disciplinary and pedagogic practices, these instances of recodification can simultaneously be interpreted as gendered identifications with an external, feminine position in relation to the dominant structures of the Symbolic Order. Thus, while change may be instituted at the level of practice within specific social fields, at the level of subjectification the recodifications that mark such changes can be read as a reiteration of primary gendered identifications

The ethics of interpretation : The signifying chain from field to analysis

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Hey's conceptualisation of 'rapport' as form of 'intersubjective synergy', a moment of recognition of similarity within difference – similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffe's conceptualization of hegemony – the paper explores how we can understand these moments of recognition as positioned within a complex web of signifying chains that interlink social, psychic and linguistic means of representation. Laclau and Mouffe's logics of equivalence and difference and Lacan's account of the production of meaning through metaphor and metonymy provide a theoretical language through which to explore chains of meaning in two fragments of data drawn from a study comparing disciplines and institutions in higher education. My argument is that an awareness of these processes of production of meaning is necessary to the development of an ethical mode of interpretation

Recontextualising ‘play’ in early years pedagogy : Competence, performance and excess in policy and practice

This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier ‘play’. Drawing on Bernstein’s conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in children’s ‘play’. The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier ‘play’ maintains within discourses that appear antithetical to traditional understandings of ‘play’. Keywords: play, Bernstein, early years, recontextualising strategies, pedagogic discours

Interpreting 'resistance' sociologically: a reflection on the recontextualisation of psychoanalytic concepts into sociological analysis

This paper explores the contextual, methodological and theoretical implications of using psychoanalytic concepts within sociological analysis. Through the interpretation of an interaction between myself and a research participant as an instance of 'resistance', I will argue that it is possible to recontextualise psychoanalytic concepts, but that this recontextualisation involves an inevitable transformation in meaning. In addition, I will suggest that an analysis incorporating psychoanalytically derived interpretations, combined with more traditional approaches to discursive social analysis, can enhance our understanding of social phenomena

Antagonism and overdetermination: the production of student positions in contrasting undergraduate disciplines and institutions in the United Kingdom

Based on data drawn from an empirical research project in four UK universities, this article presents a picture of student positions in undergraduate classes as a product of the relationship between the discursive fields of discipline, institution and gender. It begins by providing a description of some contrasting features of academic disciplines, and then identifies ways in which these features conflict with features of other discursive fields, to marginalize specific students or groups of students. The article draws on the conceptual vocabulary of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to argue that where features of discursive fields overlap, social identities are overdetermined, while where features of discursive fields conflict, social identities are placed in an antagonistic and unstable relation to social and symbolic systems

‘Two for joy’: Towards a better understanding of free associative methods as sites of transference in empirical research

This paper explores the relation between transference and free association in the production of data in sociological and social research. Drawing on Laplanche’s notion of the analyst as a provocation for the transference and Lacan’s understanding of the analyst as cause of desire, we map transference as a condition for free association and theorise an ‘enigma of participation’ in research. We develop these ideas through a discussion of two astonishing moments in recent research interviews. We propose that free associative interviews can be understood as sites of transference that help us to glimpse the unconscious in social and political discourse and offer insights into the (im)possibilities of subjective change

Which subject, whose desire? The constitution of subjectivity and the articulation of desire in the practice of research

Following recent debates within Psychosocial Studies, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the relation between subject and other. Starting from a discussion of ‘countertransference’, the paper goes on to explore Lacan’s notion of the ‘action of interpretation’, and what this might look like within the practice of research. It does this through an exploration of instances from an interview based research project investigating unconscious relations in academic practice. These instances relate to moments of disruption to disciplinary or methodological identities. The analysis draws attention to shifting locations and modes of articulation of desire within research

Institutional accountability and intellectual authority : unconscious fantasies and fragile identifications in contemporary academic practice

In my analysis of instances of data emerging in my recent interview with academics I attempt to trace both the structure of privileged fantasies within higher education institutions, and also, very speculatively, to suggest some aspects of the mechanisms by which participants in the project construct relations to these fantasies that help them to redirect the affect associated with repressed signifiers of desire. Identifications/relations to the social fantasy have a dual purpose: they produce, for the subject, a legible, socially recognizable identity and they permit a re-articulation of repressed desire. This unconscious movement of desire via symbolic relations between elements of discourse, the very undecidability of the subject, replaces more humanistic notions of ‘agency’. My analysis thus attempts to shift the focus of our understanding of higher education from individualized agents to unconscious relations to institutional and social fantasies of knowledge and accountability

Re-Reading Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade”: Putting Sex and the (trans) Body Back into Question

This chapter develops a re-reading of Joan Riviere’s 1929 paper “Womanliness as Masquerade.” My reading holds onto aspects of Rivière’s analysis but expands possibilities for understanding the masquerade as an articulation of the social, something beyond an internalized family drama, and as an embodiment of corporealities that both resist and seek categorizations of sex and gender. To do this, my first move is to go to Lacan (1958a, b) and Butler (Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 1990; Giving an account of oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005), my reliable and subjective sources of symbolic destabilization and a discursive politics of sex. Alongside that, I set out some of the exclusionary effects traced in cultural analyses of Riviere’s work (Walton, Re-placing race in (White) psychoanalytic discourse: Fournding narratives of feminism. Critical Inquiry, 21(4):775–804, 1995; Vyrgioti, In the closets of fanon and Riviere: Psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and the psychosocial. In Frosh S (ed) New Voices in Psychosocial Studies, 2019). I then map parallels and divergences between Riviere’s paper, feminist analyses of early childhood education (Blaise, A feminist poststructuralist study of children “doing” gender in an urban kindergarten classroom. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 20:85–108, 2005; Jones, Becoming child/becoming dress’, Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3):289–296, 2013; Davies, Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20:734–741, 2014), and Patricia Gherovici’s contemporary Lacanian theorization of transgenderism (2010). I also share some of my own associations to Riviere’s paper, that seems to have evoked for me a continual coming into being of the sexed body; and suggest that the chapter has implications for the way psychosocial studies might think about unconscious relations in writing and politics, and ways of attending to the subjective location of our analyses and our theories