After reviewing the use of isolation in US prisons and public restrooms to confine transgender people in solitary cells and single‐occupancy bathrooms, I propose an explanatory theory of eliminative space. I argue that prisons and toilets are eliminative spaces: that is, spaces of waste management that use layers of isolation to sanctify social or individual waste, at the outer and inner limits of society. As such, they function according to an eliminative logic. Eliminative logic, as I develop it, involves three (...) distinct but interrelated mechanisms: 1) purification of the social center, through 2) iterative segregation, presuming and enforcing 3) the reduced relationality of marginal persons. By evaluating the historical development and contemporary function of prisons and restrooms, I demonstrate that both seek to protect the gender binary through waves of segregation by sex, race, disability, and gender identity. I further argue that both assume the thin relationality of, in this case, transgender people, who are conceived of as impervious to the effects of isolation and thus always already isolable. I conclude that, if we are to counter the violence of these isolation practices, we not only need to think holistically about eliminative spaces and logic, but also to richly reconceptualize relationality. (shrink)

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and (...) the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same. (shrink)

This paper aims to queer evidence‐based practice by troubling the concepts of evidence, knowledge and mental illness. The evidence‐based narrative that emerged within biomedicine has dominated health care. The biomedical notion of ‘evidence’ has been critiqued extensively and is seen as exclusive and limiting, and even though the social constructionist paradigm attempts to challenge the authority of biomedicine to legitimate what constitutes acceptable evidence or knowledge for those experiencing mental illness, biomedical notions of evidence appear to remain relatively intact. Queer (...) theory offers theoretical tools to disrupt biomedical norms and challenges biomedical normativity to indicate how marginalisation occurs when normative truths about mental health classify those who differ from the norm as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’. Queer theory's emphasis on normativity serves the political aim to subvert marginalisation and bring about radical social and material change. Reference will be made to mental health subjects within each discourse by indicating how the body acts as a vehicle for knowing. Deleuzian notions of the rhizome are used as metaphor to suggest a relational approach to knowledge that does away with either/or positions in either biomedical, or queer knowledge to arrive at a both/and position where the biomedical, constructionist and queer are interrelated and entangled in needing the other for their own evolution. However, queer does not ask for assimilation but celebrates difference by remaining outside to disrupt that which is easily overlooked, assumed to be natural or represented as the norm. The task of queer knowledge is to do justice to the lives lived in the name of evidence‐based practice and demands that we consider the relations of power where knowledge is produced. This pursuit creates different knowledge spaces where we identify new intersections that allow for socially just understandings of knowing or evidence to emerge. (shrink)

: Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires, retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Volume 24, Issue 5, August 2019, Page 553-562.

After hearing Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Newt Gingrich was interviewed live on CNN about the menacing tone of the address. Gingrich not only defended Trump's nearly apocalyptic vision of America if he was not elected, the former Speaker of the House swiped aside the clear data that indicated that the criminalized landscapes portrayed in Trump's speech might just be the work of a frenzied and fearful imagination rather than based in fact. (...) "'People feel more threatened,'" Gingrich insisted. "'As a political candidate, I'll go with what people feel '". Commenting in Forbes shortly thereafter, Ethan Siegel, a scientist and science... (shrink)

This review article examines Kelly Oliver’s recent book, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. It has two particular points of focus: Oliver's development of Jacques Derrida’s writing on the ‘animal question’ in light of the expansion of critical animal studies more generally, and Oliver’s specific development of the relations between sexual differences and animal differences.

Phenomenologically grounded research on pregnancy is a thriving area of activity in feminist studies and related disciplines. But what has been largely omitted in this area of research is the experience of childbirth itself. This paper proposes a phenomenological analysis of childbirth inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty. The paper proceeds from the conviction that the concept of anonymity can play a critical role in explicating the affective structure of childbirth. This is evident in at least two respects. First, the (...) concept of anonymity gives structural specificity to the different levels of bodily existence at work in childbirth. Second, the concept of anonymity can play a powerful explanatory role in accounting for the sense of strangeness accompanying childbirth. To flesh these ideas out, I focus on two attributes of birth, sourced from first-person narratives of childbirth. The first aspect concerns the sense of leaving one’s body behind during childbirth while the second aspect concerns the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them as being instructive not only of the uniqueness of childbirth but also revealing something important about bodily life more generally. Accordingly, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I will critically explore the concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty; second, I will apply this concept to childbirth; finally, I will provide an outline of how childbirth sheds light on the broader nature of bodily life. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes (...) gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExperiences that contradict one's core concepts elicit intense emotions. Such schema incongruence can elicit awe, wherein experiences that are too vast...

Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the (...) panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. (shrink)

In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective (...) space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential-maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically. (shrink)

What does considering skin carefully and specifically illuminate about addiction, addiction discourse and/or the visual culture of addiction, that more general considerations of the body do not? What light is shed when we talk about skin and addiction? I want to propose in this brief article that in looking at addiction and addiction discourse through the lens of skin studies, we see with even more clarity the thinness of the argument that addiction is legible from corporeal evidence. I conclude that (...) while we may want skin to tell us things about others, it nevertheless behooves us to be wary of what we think skin tells us about addiction. (shrink)

Drawing on observations from on‐ and offline fieldwork among transhumanists and artificial superintelligence/singularity‐focused groups, this article will explore an anthropology of anxiety around the hoped for, or feared, posthuman future. It will lay out some of the varieties of existential hope and existential despair found in these discussions about predicted events such as the “end of the world” and place them within an anthropological theoretical framework. Two examples will be considered. First, the optimism observed at a transhumanist event will be (...) examined to emphasize the positive affective aspects of certain apocalypse scenarios, especially those with an implicit eschatological direction. Second, an online location where examples of existential despair can be noted will be explored further to demonstrate the kinds of negative responses to certain superintelligence/singularity ideas. These examples of existential hope and despair will demonstrate the intrinsic role of anxiety in ideas about a future artificial intelligence apocalypse. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This article proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address this legacy and, (...) to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body – the New World slave – with subjecthood. From this discussion, the article makes the case for developing a ‘poetics of slavery’ that could help to address the colonial strictures still residual in the concept of civilization. (shrink)

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva’s theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva’s notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on ‘product’. Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new direction in educational philosophy and theory, and Kristeva represents one contemporary French intellectual who implicitly inspired the creation, research and development of edusemiotics. The article will briefly address the (...) distinguished features of edusemiotics, the central of which is process ontology in contrast to the old Cartesian paradigm of substance dualism that continues to haunt education. The article will also address the role of presymbolic dimension in the process of self-formation and, as a follow up, reformulate the concept of lifelong education and teacher training. (shrink)

The externality of the inside: body images of pregnancyThis paper draws on literature, empirical data and a range of theoretical perspectives on the maternal body to examine understandings of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her foetus, with a particular focus on the body images used by women to represent this relationship. Psychoanalytic and nursing accounts of the relationship between mother and foetus have often described a symbiotic ‘oneness’ or unity during pregnancy. Such accounts, however, stress the temporary nature (...) of this unity and identify a series of ‘stages’ of separation or ‘polarisation’ between mother and foetus during pregnancy. In contrast, many of the 25 women who participated in our interview study of new motherhood described a confusion of the boundary between self and foetus. For many women the experience of pregnancy and the relationship with the unborn baby was ambiguous and uncertain. Importantly, none of these women described her relationship with the foetus as a series of developmental stages, but rather saw it as fluctuating throughout pregnancy. These findings are more consistent with the work of feminist theorists who describe pregnancy as a dynamic and fluid merging of the inside and the outside of the body/self. (shrink)

This essay centers on a storyteller's performance of ritual in stories to draw associations between the life of the Biblical Mary with her son Jesus and the subjectivities and dispositions of people living in impoverished conditions. The storyteller explores these subjectivities and dispositions, characterizing the exploration as a journey. She also defines an ethical position where the self meets otherness—both sacred and cultural—to engender positive human relations. The essay combines the storyteller's performance with the author's to reproduce the effects, advance (...) the ethics, mitigate the politics of representation, and provide an understanding of the journey's end—a place called home. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long debated on a key contradiction in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes: While he sees women as free and equal to men in the state of nature, he postulates their subjection to male rule in the civil state without any apparent explanation. Focusing on Hobbes’s construction of the mother–child relationship, this article suggests that the subjugation of the mother to the father epitomizes the neutralization of the ancient principle of ‘governance’, which he replaces with a novel (...) concept of ‘power’ as formally authorized command. This scrutiny leads to three main conclusions: a radicalization of Pateman’s concept of ‘sexual contract'; the acknowledgement that patriarchy is inseparable from the logic of political authority constructed by Hobbes; and the claim that criticism of patriarchal rule requires an overall problematization of the mainstream conception of political participation we have inherited from modern political science. (shrink)

Skin as cover: the discursive effects of 'covering' metaphors on wound care practicesThis paper outlines a Foucauldian analysis of interactions between nurses and patients during wound care procedures in a burns unit. It explores the use of Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of abjection and the abject body to illuminate the emotional affects of wounds on nurse and patient. In this process, I identify how cultural metaphoric understandings about skin influence and organise the care of burns patients. Such analysis suggests the import (...) of the complete skin, the medical scientific control over the definition of this work, and the emotional forces that resist such control. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of technoscience have long argued that it is vital that we question biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, that we disable the conception of medical visualising technologies as neutral or transparent conduits to the “fact” of the body. In this paper we suggest that corporeal feminism is well situated to provide such a critique. Feminist phenomenologists over the past decade have theorised embodiment in a number of critical ways, many deriving (...) concepts from the work of Merleau-Ponty, and emphasising the pliability and diversity of our body images and corporeal schematics. Others such as Elizabeth Wilson, Cathy Waldby and Drew Leder have considered the interdependence of our inner biology or viscerality with the socio-cultural inscriptions of embodiment. In this paper, these adaptations of phenomenology, and their account of the specificity and depth of embodied being, will be discussed and applied to the discourse of biomedicine and the apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

This paper offers a counterpoint to the prevailing account of waste in the human sciences. This account identifies waste, firstly, as the anomalous product of arbitrary social categorizations, or ‘matter out of place’, and, secondly, as a distinctly human way of leaving behind and interpreting traces, or a mirror of culture. Together, these positions reflect a more or less constructivist and anthropocentric approach. Most commonly, waste is placed within a framework that privileges considerations of meaning over materiality and the threat (...) of death over the perpetuity of life processes. For an alternative I turn to bio-semiotics and cross-species scholarship around the question of the animal. Specifically, the paper asks what theories of waste would look like if instead of taking ‘dirt’ as their starting point, they began with trans-species encounters with animal scat. Following bio-semiotics and efforts to deconstruct the animal/human binary, it is suggested that the objectual forms commonly referred to as ‘waste’ are not arbitrarily classified but purposefully expended, and thus symptomatic of life’s spatio-temporal continuation. Waste matter, therefore, is best construed not as anthropocentric but as semi-biotic: a sign of the form of life to which it once belonged. This alternative perspective has implications for how approaches to industrial forms of mass waste can be reconceived. (shrink)

The Kristeva–Lacan relationship has been a difficult one, with commentators tending to either collapse the former into the latter or insist on an absolute division wherein Kristeva emphasizes the m...

Bracha Ettinger (formerly known as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger) is an Israeli-born Paris-based artist, analyst and feminist theorist who has produced over the last decade a major theoretical intervention through a tripartite practice. This article offers an expository introduction and overview of core aspects of her theoretical contribution while relating it to major trends in feminist and general cultural theory of subjectivity, hysteria, memory, trauma and the aesthetic. Organized in several parts, each section addresses the developing vocabulary, terminology and significance of (...) her work. With core concepts are Matrix, metramorphosis, trans-subjectivity, co-poïesis, co-emergence and co-affection, Ettinger’s theory opens out beyond the blind spots of advanced feminist thought. From its independent and original theorization of subjectivity-as-encounter and an-other sexual difference, Bracha Ettinger challenges our attempts to think about femininity associated with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Linked to, but distinct from, the philosophical speculations of Deleuze and Levinas, this work creates a transferential theoretical space for Jewish and feminine difference, sexuality, subjectivity and the traumatic residues of modern catastrophe that has major repercussions for cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark their (...) moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power. (shrink)

This paper reports on a particular aspect of a larger ethnographic study of nursing culture in an intensive therapy unit (ITU), accomplished through participant observation over a 12‐month period, followed by interviews with 15 nurses. The paper suggests that the ITU environment is perceived as ‘dangerous’, its dangerousness stemming from the ambiguity of its patients’ conditions. Drawing on anthropological concepts of liminality, pollution, anomaly and breaching of boundaries, the paper identifies various ambiguities inherent in ITU patients’ conditions. It then explores (...) the ways in which these anomalies are managed through sequestration and other ritual and symbolic practices. Notwithstanding the undoubted scientific reasons for particular nursing practices, the paper argues that there are also ritual and symbolic elements serving other more complex purposes, both protecting patients and staff and symbolising the highly valued phenomenon of keeping patients safe. The paper identifies a contradiction inherent in nursing work in this locale inasmuch as rituals and symbolism coexist with technical and research‐based elements of nursing care. (shrink)

I Alderdommen (1970) fremsetter Simone de Beauvoir en filosofisk analyse av alderdom og eldre menneskers situa- sjon, og hevder at behandlingen de får er «skandaløs»; samfunnet «returnerer dem som en vare det ikke lenger er bruk for». Hun tilkjennegir et like stort engasjement mot den urett som eldre utsettes for som hun gjør i Det annet kjønn (1949) når det gjelder undertrykkelsen av kvinner. Likevel påstår Beauvoir at alderdommen først og fremst er et problem for mannen, og det har blitt (...) hevdet at Alderdommen er et verk om aldersdiskriminering hvor mannens aldringsprosess gjøres til norm – ikke et feministisk verk på linje med Det annet kjønn. I denne artikkelen argumen- terer Tove Pettersen for at det nettopp er den feministiske filosofien Beauvoir utvikler i Det annet kjønn som ligger til grunn for hennes undersøkelser av undertrykkelse og diskriminering av eldre. I tillegg demonstrerer Beauvoirs omfattende analyse av alderdommen at hverken alder eller kjønn kan studeres uavhengig av hverandre. Alder og kjønn virker sammen, og må ses i lys av den situasjon disse fenomenene fremtrer i hvor også klasse er av stor betydning. Alderdommen kan derfor leses som et verk hvor Beauvoir viser hvordan ulike former for undertrykkelse virker sammen og bidrar til marginalisering og diskriminering av eldre. Nøkkelord: Simone de Beauvoir, Alderdommen, Det annet kjønn, feministisk filosofi, Den andre, aldersdiskriminering, alderisme******* -/- In The Coming of Age (1970), Simone de Beauvoir presents a philosophical analysis of old age and the elderly’s situa- tion, and claims that the treatment they receive is “scandalous”; society ‘returns them as a commodity that is no longer needed.’ She exhibits the same level of commitment regarding the injustice to which the elderly are exposed as she does in The Second Sex (1949) when it comes to the oppression of women. Nevertheless, Beauvoir claims that old age first and foremost is a problem for men, and it has been argued that The Coming of Age is a work on age discrim- ination where the male aging process is made the norm – not a feminist work on par with The Second Sex. In thisarticle, Tove Pettersen argues that it is precisely the feminist philosophy that Beauvoir develops in The Second Sex that enables her to analyze the oppression and discrimination of the elderly. Additionally, Beauvoir's comprehensive analysis of old age demonstrates that neither age nor gender can be studied independently. Age and gender intersect, and must be be seen in light of the situation in which class is of great importance. Thus, The Coming of Age can be read as a work in which Beauvoir shows how different forms of oppression work together and contribute to the mar- ginalization and discrimination of the elderly. Keywords: Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, The Second Sex, Feminist Philosophy, The Other, Age Discrimination, Ageism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith —is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, and culminating in The Paying Guests, this (...) phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion. (shrink)

Imperialism and its aftermath set off an extraordinary wave of travel, exploration, and migrations around the globe, in which writers, or potential writers, were inevitably caught up. One consequence was that many novels of the last one hundred and fifty years, especially British novels, have had exotic settings.David Lodge, “The Exotic”, The Art of Fiction, pp. 158-9.

Modern feminist movements run the risk of being appropriated by capitalist agenda and commodified for mass appeal, thus stripping them of their revolutionary potential. I would propose that in order for feminism to challenge this, movements may want to consider the subversion of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman emphasise a subjectivity not confined by rigid identity, such as man/woman. However, feminists have challenged this theory, suggesting it is difficult to both fight for and dispel the very (...) same notion, that is, woman. I argue that in first considering the feminine subject via the Lacanian understanding of ‘Woman’, it can be argued that feminine subjects can engage with becoming-animal to destabilise the notion of ‘Woman’. Riot Grrls, FEMEN and Pussy Riot all demonstrate tactics which could be said to utilise becoming-animal and have had varying success in avoiding commodification. (shrink)

This paper examines the discourse of war from a semiotic point of view and suggests some ideas for the development of practices of resistance to it. The discourse of war can be considered symptomatic in respect to underlying discourses of totality such as globalisation. By aiming at explanatory simplification, this kind of discourse takes the paradoxical form of an exhaustive paradigm which always engenders a residuum to be eliminated. Semiotics can develop practices of resistance to the discourse of war by (...) operating on the syntagmatic chains generated by its mediatic agencies. These practices are based on the postmodernist critique of totalising discourses. A process in which details are disconnected from the mediatic chains where they vanish might trigger the opening of a space of community that makes the residuum of war discourse presentable through metaphorical substitutions. Semiotic practices of resistance to the discourse of war presuppose a shift in theory from the paradigm of globality to that of partiality. Partiality must be understood both from a political and an epistemological point of view and it could therefore represent an important element in the development of a semioethics. (shrink)

Where does the object or idea begin, and where does it end as ‘unseen’? There is scope in Maori philosophising to think of the seen object or its idea in various ways, including as materially constituting the self and the rest of the world; as incomplete for a mental representation; as constituted in itself by the unseen ; and as co-constitutional with nothingness and presence. The possibilities of the seen object are several, especially if the concept of ‘seen’ is understood (...) as immediately determined by its other. This paper considers the consequences of the seen and unseen and the illogical in Maori thought for ‘teach-learn’ and in particular for the translation of teach-learn as ‘ako’ in the Maori language. It also discusses some possibilities for the term ‘porangi’, which is often quoted in relation to ‘madness’ but has deeper metaphysical potential that combines the reality of gloom/unseen alongside a heady potential. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘giddying abjection’ and turn it towards unpicking the certainty that ako as teach-learn replicates. Porangi can refer to self-derision, and I take certain statements of mine and destabilise them from their certainty. In that act I hope to show that students and scholars could follow a similar path with their own statements and, in so doing, subject their own utterances to madness. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do so by (...) figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

This article examines some recent theoretical objects of feminism with a view towards a reinvigorated dialogue with psychoanalysis. Against the backdrop of debates on essentialism, universalism, social constructionism and historical change, it aims to reintroduce the value of psychoanalytic ideas to feminism by unfolding a dimension of history in the divided subject and adding a positive value to psychoanalytic universalism. This argument is carried out with the help of the writings of Julia Kristeva, from the early essay, `Women's Time', to (...) the psychoanalytic publications of the 1980s and 1990s. (shrink)

This article examines the character of Miriam the prophetess and raises questions regarding the contradictions and contrasts in the way she is portrayed in the biblical text. Contrary to some researchers, who argued that Miriam was not actually a prophetess and did not deliver the word of God, this essay argues that Miriam was indeed equal to her brother Moses, both as a prophetess and as a messenger, equal in both essence and spiritual role. This essay aims to reveal, using (...) the approach of cultural symbolism, the female parts of the story and the tradition of Miriam, which were censored and silenced in the hegemonic text. The essay aims to prove that Miriam, like Moses, was present at moments of revelation and was sent on the mission of leading and delivering the Hebrew nation. (shrink)

Taking a largely thematic approach, this reflection aims to demonstrate the richness of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical work in relation to questions of justice and injustice. Injustice becomes primary because a definition of justice continues to be open to debate, whereas injustice as incarnate in the scapegoat as depicted by René Girard is far less so, if at all. Through her analyses of the work of Mallarmé and the Paris of the Dreyfus affair, Céline and abjection and anti-Semitism, the ‘need to (...) believe’ as a key component of subjectivity, the foreigner as the other in ourselves, Dostoyevsky and forgiveness, a vista is opened up onto injustice and how it might be combatted. (shrink)

Should the remains of aborted fetuses be treated as human corpses or medical waste? How can feminists defend abortion rights without erasing the experiences of women who mourn fetal death or lending support to pro-life constructions of fetal personhood? To answer these questions, I trace the role of abjection and mourning in debates over fetal remains disposal regulations. Critiquing pro-life views of fetal personhood while challenging feminists to develop richer and more compelling accounts of fetal remains, I argue that embracing (...) the ambiguity and diversity of pregnant bodies can strengthen rather than undermine reproductive autonomy. I conceptualize reproductive autonomy relationally, contending that it entails the pregnant subject’s authority to construct as well as to interpret her lived body, including the fetus. Additionally, because the embodied self is inextricable from social context, reproductive autonomy also requires community support. To support these claims, I develop an account of pregnant bodies as ontologically multiple and advocate embracing abjection rather than suppressing it. Finally, I object to fetal remains regulations because they inscribe fetal grievability into the law. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the popularity of phenomenologies and the tensions that arise from their use as research methodologies in nursing. Among these tensions are: the troublesome issues of adapting a fundamentally philosophical means of understanding human being(s) for use as a more pragmatic and robust research approach in a practice discipline; the various types of phenomenology and the confusions that surround these and other interpretive methodologies, particularly within different intellectual and cultural traditions; and the need for nursing to (...) find a space in which it can give voice to aspects of its practice that are silenced in less existentially oriented methodologies. Although phenomenologies are currently popular and possibly fashionable in nursing, there are important issues in relation to their use in a methodological sense that remain to be addressed. (shrink)