“Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary”

The question of jouissance today as reflected in fashion and its changes -- or no changes. They reflect the arrangements and rearrangements between the sexes

Dmitri Shalin Interview with Dean MacCannell about Erving Goffman entitled Some of Goffman’s Guardedness and Verbal Toughness Was Simply a Way of Giving Himself the Space and Time That He Needed to Do the Work That He Really Loved

This conversation with Dean MacCannell, Professor of Environmental Design at the University of California Davis, was recorded over the phone on July 7, 2009. The initial exchange lasting a minute or so is reconstructed from memory. Breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information and additional materials inserted during the editing process appear in square brackets. Undecipherable words and unclear passages are identified in the text as “[?]”

Circannual Patterns of Adipose Tissue Characteristics in a Hibernator, the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus)

Obligate hibernators express circannual patterns of body mass and hibernation, which persist under constant laboratory conditions. I hypothesized that in the 13-lined ground squirrel (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) thermogenic brown adipose tissue (BAT) and lipid storing white adipose tissue (WAT) volume would follow a circannual pattern. I housed animals at either 25°C (thermoneutral) or 5°C with 12h L:12h D photoperiods for an entire year. I determined volume and water-fat ratio of WAT and BAT using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). BAT volume follows a circannual pattern in both conditions, increasing prior to winter, decreasing in late winter with no change in water-fat ratio. Both body mass and WAT volume of cold-housed animals declined throughout the winter and recovered after hibernation. By contrast, thermoneutral housing produced no circannual pattern in body mass even though WAT volume declined in late winter. Warm-housed animals never entered torpor indicating that they might not be obligate hibernators

Posodabljanje užitka za dobo imaginarnega

Using contemporary fashion (both “high” and “low”) as my focus for analysis, I apply Lacan’s insight that sexual difference (feminine/masculine) is an effect of divergent psychical and bodily logics that guide a subject’s relation to jouissance. I point out Lacan’s growing reliance on Freud’s 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (which demonstrated the pressure for group conformity in dress, and overcoming gender distinctions) for his understanding of sexual difference in relation to social order. I point out that Lacan used Freud’s vision of an ego-based rather than a subject-based society for his analysis of capitalist/university discourse in his 1969 Seminar XVII; and I argue that Freud’s text also inspired Lacan’s subsequent exploration of the logic of femininity (a heretofore neglected topic) in Seminar XX 1972-3 and in Télévision in 1975. Late Lacan thus grounds my argument that postmodern/capitalist culture is dominated in its management of enjoyment – its ethos, its economics and its fashions – by only the masculine model for jouissance. I ask that we consider entertaining ideas about what forming our culture on the feminine model of jouissance might be like.V svoji analizi, osredotočeni na sodobno modo (tako »visoko« kot »nizko«), se opiram na Lacanov uvid, da je seksualna razlika (ženska/moški) posledica razhajajočih se psihičnih in telesnih logik, ki usmerjajo subjektov odnos do užitka. V prispevku ponazorim vpliv Freudovega dela »Množična psihologija in analiza jaza« (ki je prikazalo pritisk k skupinsko konformnem načinu oblačenja in preseganju spolne razlike)na Lacanovo razumevanje seksualne razlike v razmerju do družbenega reda. Pri tem opozarjam, da se je Lacan v Seminarju XVII iz leta 1969 pri svoji analizi kapitalističnega/univerzitetnega diskurza, opiral na Freudovo videnje družbe, ki se je bolj opiralo na jaz kakor na subjekta. V tej zvezi trdim, da je Freudov tekst navdihnil tudi kasnejša Lacanova raziskovanja ženske logike (dotlej zanemarjeno tematiko) v Seminarju XX iz leta 1972-3 in Televiziji iz leta 1975. Moj argument, da postmoderno/kapitalistično kulturo pri upravljanju z užitkom določa zgolj moški model užitka: njegov ethos, ekonomija in moda, se torej opira na poznega Lacana. V premislek želim predlagati, da si poskusimo zamisliti, kako bi bilo videti formiranje naše kulture iz perspektive ženskega modela užitka

Sexism of Fat: Is it sufficient to use only one sex in obesity research?

There is a weight issue weighing down the public health care systems across the world. Although obesity is prevalent in both males and females, the location of fat and impact on cardiometabolic health is strikingly different. These differences are apparent in the clinical setting, but there remains a bias towards using a single sex in mouse models to create simpler and cheaper experiments. The bias towards using a single sex in experiments skews the results and only offers translational research to one half of the human population. We examined sex differences and their effect on obesity by inducing obesity in both male and female mice by feeding them high fat diet (HFD) for 10 weeks. Mice were weighed weekly and after 10 weeks of HFD feeding, mice underwent metabolic tests to determine the impact of obesity. Male mice became obese after only 1 week of HFD feeding, however it took female mice 9 weeks of HFD feeding to become obese. Male mice were more susceptible to diabetes and male mice lost increased metabolic difference when fed HFD. This study highlights the importance of using both sexes to study obesity and associated diseases while highlighting novel differences in metabolism between sexes

Metabokines in the regulation of systemic energy metabolism

Metabolism consists of life-sustaining chemical reactions involving metabolites. Historically, metabolites were defined as the intermediates or end products of metabolism and considered to be passive participants changed by metabolic processes. However, recent research has redefined how we view metabolism. There is emerging evidence of metabolites which function to mediate cellular signalling and interorgan crosstalk, regulating local metabolism and systemic physiology. These bioactive metabolite signals have been termed metabokines. Metabokines regulate diverse energy metabolism pathways across multiple tissues, including fatty acid β-oxidation, mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, lipolysis, glycolysis and gluconeogenesis. There is increasing impetus to uncover novel metabokine signalling axes to better understand how these may be perturbed in metabolic diseases and determine their utility as therapeutic targets

The Strange and Spooky Battle over Bats and Black Dresses: The Commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend and the Loss of a Subculture

From counterculture to subculture to the ubiquity of every black-clad wannabe vampire hanging around the centre of Western cities, Goth has transcended a musical style to become a part of everyday leisure and popular culture. The music’s cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. In this article, we examine the phenomenon of the Whitby Goth Weekend, a modern Goth music festival, which has contributed to (and has been altered by) the heritage-tourism marketing of Whitby as the holiday resort of Dracula (the place where Bram Stoker imagined the Vampire Count arriving one dark and stormy night). We examine marketing literature and websites that sell Whitby as a spooky town, and suggest that this strategy has driven the success of the Goth festival. We explore the development of the festival and the politics of its ownership, and its increasing visibility as a mainstream tourist destination for those who want to dress up for the weekend. By interviewing Goths from the north of England, we suggest that the mainstreaming of the festival has led to it becoming less attractive to those more established, older Goths who see the subculture’s authenticity as being rooted in the post-punk era, and who believe that Goth subculture should be something one lives full-time

Tourism geographies and the place of authenticity

Along with the earliest theories of tourism arose an interest in understanding the role of authenticity. These burgeoning efforts were based in history, anthropology, and sociology (see Boorstin, 1961; MacCannell, 1973, 1976; Cohen, 1979); yet, the subsequent infusion of geographical perspectives that spatialize authenticity have greatly enriched our conceptualizations. Indeed, these scholars were invaluable in laying the foundations of key aspects of authenticity – Boorstin (1961) in asserting tourism is comprised of pseudo-events drew attention to staged aspects of tourism encounters, MacCannell (1973; 1976) explicated the mechanisms through which staging occurs and initiated a discussion of the socio-cultural significance of authenticity, which Cohen (1979) then refined by elaborating on the various ways authenticity comes into play in tourists’ motivation for recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental, and existential experiences. However, what these contributions were lacking was attention to the geographical, that tourism is simultaneously a mobilities and a placed-based phenomenon, and as such the roles of scale, mobilities, space, place, and landscape are crucial to experiences of authenticity