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The Allure of Affect: Rigor, Style, and Unintelligibility in Kristeva and Irigaray
In this dissertation, I develop a theory of interpretation that attends to the often neglected affective dimensions of reading through a careful investigation of the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. For much of the history of Western thought, a privileging of systematic and linear discourse as a crucial signifier of philosophical rigor has gone hand in hand with a certain disdain for the body and the emotions. The texts that I examine attempt to disrupt and discredit the equation of philosophy and systematicity. They refuse both in content and in style the steady march of analytic logic in favor of writing that is more intuitive, more experimental, and eminently more risky. I contend that even psychoanalytic and deconstructive interpretive approaches, which privilege the marginal, the de-centered, and the inaccessible, have not fully engaged with the question of affect in philosophical writing. The overarching question this dissertation seeks to examine is this: how can we find a way to take seriously the affective responses that philosophical texts provoke, and to incorporate their content, strength, and effect into the arsenal of strategies for reading and interpretation without relegating such reactions to the damning category of the "merely subjective"? I take as my primary focus texts that foreground and even force an affective response, and I read such works as possessed of their own distinctive rigor. I maintain that one of the ways that affect is made evident to the reader is through what I term a "rigorous unintelligibility." I argue that attention to the protocols of such rigorously unintelligible texts produces a way to read that neither accentuates the individual reader at the expense of the text, nor banishes the reader's visceral affective reactions to the realm of the subjective and inadmissible. Throughout, I refine the always slippery category of affect. In particular, affect is not simply interior; rather, it emerges and communicates itself through the ongoing interaction with the world. Affect is in rooms, in texts, in averted glances, in speeches, in dreams, in crying jags and in lecture notes, in philosophy and in poetry, in theories and in bodies. It has a deeply un-Cartesian lack of respect for or knowledge of the membrane of the skin, the boundary between the self and the world
Technologies of contraception and abortion
Soon to turn 60, the oral contraceptive pill still dominates histories of technology in the ‘sexual revolution’ and after. ‘The pill’ was revolutionary for many, though by no means all, women in the west, but there have always been alternatives, and looking globally yields a different picture. The condom, intrauterine device (IUD), surgical sterilization (male and female) and abortion were all transformed in the twentieth century, some more than once. Today, female sterilization (tubal ligation) and IUDs are the world's most commonly used technologies of contraception. The pill is in third place, followed closely by the condom. Long-acting hormonal injections are most frequently used in parts of Africa, male sterilization by vasectomy is unusually prevalent in Britain, and about one in five pregnancies worldwide ends in induced abortion. Though contraceptive use has generally increased in recent decades, the disparity between rich and poor countries is striking: the former tend to use condoms and pills, the latter sterilization and IUDs. Contraception, a term dating from the late nineteenth century and since then often conflated with abortion, has existed in many forms, and techniques have changed and proliferated over time. Diverse local cultures have embraced new technologies while maintaining older practices. Focusing on Britain and the United States, with excursions to India, China and France, this chapter shows how the patterns observed today were established and stabilized, often despite persistent criticism and reform efforts. By examining past innovation, and the distribution and use of a variety of tools and techniques, it reconsiders some widely held assumptions about what counts as revolutionary and for whom. Analytically, it takes up and reflects on one of the main issues raised by feminists and social historians: the agency of users as patients and consumers faced with choice and coercion. By examining practices of contraception alongside those of abortion, it revisits the knotty question of technology in the sexual revolution and the related themes of medical, legal, religious and political forms of control