The art of riding imagines the human-horse relation in the image of the centaur. In synchronous motions, riding is a dance of sorts, contact of bodies in the skin of the moment. Yet always there is the possibility of fussing, flailing, falling and failing in moments of resistance, evasion and contrariness. Through phenomenological reflection on such moments, riding can be understood not simply in terms of its difficulties of centaurian mastery, but in terms of the postural, positional, gestural, expressive nuances (...) of interspecies communication. It is on the off beats, and within the syncopations and momentary stresses of riding, that resistance can be addressed through quiet insistence, evasions overcome through persuasion, and contrariness can be felt otherwise. Through contemplation of such moments, we find the reminders of a sensual and essential intercorporeality and the configuration of an agogic practice. (shrink)

This study explores the possibilities of identification and belonging in a socio-religious space that contains multiple communal boundaries. It is based on narrated accounts of White Christian German women living in Berlin, Germany, who have converted to Islam. Their shared cultural background with other White German women, their new Islamic religion, and, for some, their intermarriage affiliation with Muslims, position these women in a complex relation to the multiple communities within this space. This intersectional positioning opens up possibilities for constructing, (...) negotiating and articulating religious, cultural, and gender identification and belonging. This study aims to investigate how these women construct notions of gender, Islam and Muslimness, and how they position themselves in relation to communal boundaries of identification and belonging. It also explores the sense they make of their positionings, and how these are expressed in their daily lives. To this end, the research describes their encounters in the spheres of the community and the family. The research aims to contribute to an enhanced understanding of gutes Leben, the human flourishing, of White German women who have converted to Islam. (shrink)

This article reintroduces notions of the experiential, lived body as crucial for teaching. It critiques some recent moves within women’s studies, and cultural studies more generally, to use ‘theory’ as a way of abstracting bodies from the classroom. Using the work of Silvan Tomkins on affects, and Deleuzian notions of the body, it argues for a more comprehensive account of the affects, politics and practices of pedagogy.

This article details the making of community and bodies in online environments, specifically the online pro-anorexia community. Building community among members of these groups is particularly fraught because tensions over claims to authenticity permeate these groups. Because these are embodied practices and online spaces are presumably disembodied, participants constantly grapple with authenticity, largely through the threat of the ‘wannarexic’. Participants manage these tensions through engaging in group rituals and deploying individual tools that attempt to make the body evident online. This (...) article documents the way in which tensions around authenticity and embodied practices are managed through treatment of the wannarexic. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between home, belonging and the maternal in feminist theory and fiction. Feminist discourse isoften typified by its critique of home: analysing the gendered assumptions underlying the depiction of home as nurturing, or exposing the regressive and essentialist connotations of the search for safe homes. A number of recent feminist theorists (Probyn, Bammer, Young) have, however, pointed to thepersistence of ‘retrograde’ desires for safety and belonging, particularly in an era of widespread dislocations. At the same time, (...) feminist critics such as Roberta Rubenstein have re-invoked the contested relationship between home and the maternal by arguing that the desire for home speaks to our earliest needs for security: a desire that ultimately maps on to a longing for the (idealized) mother as the ‘original safe home’ (Rubenstein, 2001). This essay draws upon the work of Rubenstein, Bammer and Young in order to examine the relationship between home and the maternal in a recent Irish novel, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl. The plot of this novel, dealing with the events surrounding an incident of baby snatching, suggests both the persistence of (the maternal) home as a desire and the impossibility of identifying an original or authentic maternal/home. By exploring how the protagonists of this novel negotiate the demands and appeals of home and motherhood, this essay will ask to what extent it may be possible for feminism to recuperate, or re-envision, the maternal/home as utopian ideal. (shrink)

In this paper I distil a concept of the imaginary with which to make good the claim that our mode of embodied subjectivity is an imaginary embodiment in an imaginary world. The concept of the imaginary employed is not one in which imaginary worlds are contrasted with the real, but one in which imagination is a condition of there being a real for us. The images and forms in terms of which our imagined bodies and worlds are constituted carry, in (...) an interdependent way, cognition and affects. Imagined configurations have a resilience which makes their displacement more than a matter of appealing to considerations of truth or falsity. It involves encounters with alternative imagined configurations which can be recognized as making both cognitive and affective sense. (shrink)

This article argues that the influence of heteronormativity on the conceptualization of women and technology in feminist constructivist technology studies creates serious problems for the analysis. This research aims to understand the coproduction of gender and technology in society, but does not approach the two elements in a symmetrical fashion. Hence, ethnographic studies can only exemplify how the gender of technology producers is reflected in the technology created. Masculine gender identity is stabilized as a cause for the masculinity of a (...) technology that is shaped by social relationships. The criticism is fleshed out in a close examination of case study accounts of ethnographies among producers and users of technology. It is argued that a habitual reproduction of heteronormativity, present in the surrounding culture and in the technological communities studied, has prevented the adoption of approaches to the subject conducive to the objective of this feminist research. Acknowledging that destabilizing gender can undermine the critical thrust of feminist critique, the paper turns towards queer theory for ideas about how to produce criticism that does not rely on the stability of identity. The article closes with suggesting how a queer feminist approach could contribute to different readings of life with technology. (shrink)

This article considers the academic writings and activism of the major Continental feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti against the background of the growing religiously and racially biased anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Special attention is paid to Braidotti’s recent response to the post-secular turn in feminism. The article contends that Braidotti’s work highlights and embraces the destabilising structural effects the intensified migration flows have on European identity. It argues that Braidotti charts new models of European subjectivity that would facilitate mutually affirmative and (...) trans-formative relationships between those (self-)perceived as Western feminists and those positioned as immigrant women. (shrink)

Children, the image of the child, and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are thematics that run through the work of Deleuze and feature prominently in his joint writing with Guattari. However, there are many different children in Deleuze's writings. Various child figures do distinct things in Deleuze's work. In this article, I argue that his work on children can be utilized to rethink popular, teleological notions of childhood and growing up.

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly (...) set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can ‘let go’ and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras’ work questions this process of ‘letting go’ and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras’ work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential. (shrink)

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. As Game suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value (...) and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality. (shrink)

Stigma is often encountered by recipients who receive food donations from charities, while the consumption of wasted food, also traditionally considered to be a stigmatized practice, has recently become part of a popular food rescue movement that seeks to reduce environmental impacts. These two stigmas—charitable donation and the consumption of waste—are brought together at the Open Table, a community group in Melbourne, Australia, that serves community meals cooked from surplus food. This paper examines how Open Table de-stigmatizes food donations through (...) food waste discourse to enable greater social inclusion. I draw on the experiences of donors, cooks, volunteers and eaters gathered from diverse Open Table sites. Taking a ‘follow-the-thing’ approach, I analyze how food ‘waste’ becomes re-valued by embracing goals of environmental justice enacted through local processes of care and conviviality. Relying on networks of volunteers and not-for-profit agencies, Open Table provides a simple, effective and adaptable model for possible replication for overcoming drawbacks of traditional charity practices. Critically though, as hunger in society continues to grow, this approach is increasingly threatened by the need to ‘single out’ disadvantaged recipients to justify continued supply. This paper contributes to food poverty, waste, and Alternative Food Network literature in two important ways: first, by analyzing the outcomes of community food redistribution approaches with regards to stigma and inclusion; and secondly, by arguing that such holistic approaches need to be acknowledged, valued and supported to shift current discourses and practice. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze two memoirs—Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS—which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key (...) terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical “pragmatics” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

. Angels in the archive: Lines into the future in the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 206-222.

This article presents the results of a research project which investigated the vernacular political philosophy of the television program Doctor Who. Fans were asked about their political thinking, their interpretations of the politics of that program, and the relationship between these two. The results contribute to a cultural history of the political natures of different kinds of texts. These television viewers are revealed to be well able to articulate their own political thinking, and to argue cogently that Doctor Who is (...) not useful for that thinking. The politics of this group range from self-nominated Marxist to extreme right-wing; and their interpretations of the program's politics, when they are asked to produce them, are similarly wide ranging. It seems that the program does not function as vernacular political philosophy. This has implications for thinking about the 'ideology' of popular texts. (shrink)