Freedom and Determinism in 'Middlemarch', or Dorothea, the Lunatic

In a recent monograph, Pauline Nestor asks if George Eliot continues to be relevant to us today. Contrary to some, who argue that Eliot “lives in a distant and unrecoverable country of her own.” Nestor insists that Eliot’s fiction “forms an extended, particularized and dramatic investigation of fundamental ethical problems”, especially those concerning ethical responsibility. I am in broad agreement with Nestor’s treatment of Eliot and in this paper will focus on the ethical problem of freedom and determinism as presented in Middlemarch

Anti-communal, Anti-egalitarian, Anti-nurturing, Anti-loving: Sex and the 'Irredeemable' in Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon

The work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon on sex and sexuality has often been posed as adversary to the development of queer theory. Leo Bersani, in particular, is critical of the normative ambitions of their work, which he sees firstly as trying to ‘redeem’ sex acts themselves, and secondly as advocating for sexuality as a site of potential for social transformation. In this article, I argue that this is a misreading of their work. Drawing on Dworkin's wide body of writing, and MacKinnon early essays in Signs, I suggest that their work makes no such case for sex or sexuality. Rather, by bringing their analysis into conversation with Halberstam's recent work on ‘shadow feminism’, I contend that Dworkin and MacKinnon's antisocial, anti-pastoral and distinctly anti-normative vision of sex and sexuality shares many of the same features of queer theory, ultimately advocating for sex as ‘irredeemable’

Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies

In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first, I give an overview of Ioannidou’s artwork, making connections with significant events in her life; then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography; and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artist’s portrayal of women’s bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centerpiece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation

Woman-Centered Design through Humanity, Activism, and Inclusion

Women account for over half of the global population, however, continue to be subject to systematic and systemic disadvantage, particularly in terms of access to health and education. At every intersection, where systemic inequality accounts for greater loss of life or limitations on full and healthy living, women are more greatly impacted by those inequalities. The design of technologies is no different, the very definition of technology is historically cast in terms of male activities, and advancements in the field are critical to improve women's quality of life. This article views HCI, a relatively new field, as well positioned to act critically in the ways that technology serve, refigure, and redefine women's bodies. Indeed, the female body remains a contested topic, a restriction to the development of women's health. On one hand, the field of women's health has attended to the medicalization of the body and therefore is to be understood through medical language and knowledge. On the other hand, the framing of issues associated with women's health and people's experiences of and within such system(s) remain problematic for many. This is visible today in, e.g., socio-cultural practices in disparate geographies or medical devices within a clinic or the home. Moreover, the biological body is part of a great unmentionable, i.e., the perils of essentialism. We contend that it is necessary, pragmatically and ethically, for HCI to turn its attention toward a woman-centered design approach. While previous research has argued for the dangers of gender-demarcated design work, we advance that designing for and with women should not be regarded as ghettoizing, but instead as critical to improving women's experiences in bodily transactions, choices, rights, and access to and in health and care. In this article, we consider how and why designing with and for woman matters. We use our design-led research as a way to speak to and illustrate alternatives to designing for and with women within HCI.QC 20200930</p

Bodies Moving and Being Moved: Mapping affect in Christian Nold's Bio Mapping

In A History of Spaces (2004), John Pickles observes that one of the less well-known representational norms of mapping is its focus on ‘natural and physical objects rather than developing universal conventions dealing with symbol, affect and movement.’ New media artist Christian Nold's work has dealt explicitly with two of these cartographic blindspots, grafting new and old technologies that both, in different ways, create bodily traces – the GPS trace of movement and the GSR (galvanic skin response) trace of arousal, often taken as an index of emotional response. Although Nold's socially engaged practice can be placed within the ‘locative media’ genre it also taps into the technological imaginaries around physiological sensors and intimate data. This paper considers Nold's Bio Mapping (2004-) projects in the context of his longstanding concern with social collectives and public space as a field of social relations. Looking at particular maps from Nold's Bio Mapping project, it considers the implications of blending the traces of the body's internal states with the traces produced by locomotive movement, and the relationship between the individuals thus traced and the collectives that Nold seeks to represent. Concurrent with Nold's practice there has been a wave of interest in affect and emotion (and the distinction between them) within the humanities. This paper brings Nold's work into contact with the Deleuzian/Spinozan concept of affect employed in one strand of this writing, drawing in particular on the work of Brian Massumi. Rather than using theory to simply illustrate Nold's practice, it follows the implications of Deleuze's cartographic model of individuation, the logic of which ultimately problematises the very distinction between the two bodily phenomena traced by Nold's device

Living with George Eliot

George Eliot’s fictional experiments were designed to provoke the reader to reflect on the ways in which political institutions and social and sexual mores help to determine the shape of human life. Yet Rebecca Mead’s popular recent reading of Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, barely mentions social and political institutions and their differential effects on the capacities of individuals to realise their ambitions. Has Mead fallen prey to the egoism that Middlemarch so forensically—and compassionately—lays bare, asks Moira Gatens in the Australian Review of Public Affairs. &nbsp; Title: The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot Publisher: The Text Publishing Company Date Published: 2014 Author: Rebecca Mead Image: book cove