At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill, tells a story of gay teen romance in the wake of the Easter Rising. This paper considers the ways in which the characters engage in patterns of masculine behaviour in a context that excludes queer men, and the rhetorical effect of transgressive strategies to form a coherent identity. These patterns include involvement with the masculine and heteronormative nationalist movement, as well as a regime of physical exercise, and a religious upbringing (...) in 20th-century Ireland. The strategies of broadening the practices of masculinity include their renegotiation and redefinition, as well as attempts to construct the Irish and the gay canons of history and literature. These strategies, as exemplified by character development, become a rhetorical basis for the novel’s main argument for inclusiveness. This analysis deals with the central metaphors of space and continuity in the novel in the light of a struggle between identities. It also observes the tradition of parallels drawn between the emasculated position of the gay man and the Irish man at the beginning of the 20th century, and O’Neill’s rhetorical deployment of the shared telos in construction of a coherent gay Irish revolutionary identity. (shrink)

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded (...) the built environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form. (shrink)

Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender.

_How does the image of the succubus relate to psychoanalytic thought?_ _Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine_ explores the idea that the image of the succubus, a demonic female creature said to emasculate men and murder mothers and infants, has been created out of the masculine projection of shame and looks at how the transformation of this image can be traced through Western history, mythology, and Judeo-Christian literature. Divided into three parts areas of discussion include: the birth (...) of civilization and the evolution of the succubus the image of the succubus in the writings of Freud and Jung the succubus as child killing mother to the restoration of the eternal feminine. Through a process of detailed cultural and social analysis, the author places the image of the succubus at the very heart of psychoanalytic thought, highlighting its presence in both Freud’s Medusa and Jung’s visions of Salome. As such, this book will be of great interest to all those in the fields of analytical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Recent feminist and postmodern thought has critiqued traditional conceptions of masculinity, describing the effect that the distinctive masculinity of the "man of reason" has had on the history of philosophy, on consciousness, and on the academy. A common characteristic of the recent literature on masculinity is that it reflects the historical and cultural context in which it is written -- a context of binary, hierarchical dualisms which involve certain symbolic associations. These dualisms, such as Man-Woman, masculine-feminine, (...) and reason-emotion, arguably find their roots in Pythagorean philosophy and can be traced through the Renaissance to our current historical context. One example is our conception of reason: the association of maleness with a clear, determinate mode of thought, i.e. reason, was incorporated into the form-matter distinction that was central to Greek thought. This paper will show that in cases where women attempt to redefine the dichotomy by revaluing the traditionally feminine (like feelings and emotions) over the traditionally masculine (like reason) their work is often mistakenly criticized for being purely political; conversely, when men attempt to redefine the same dichotomy in an attempt to allow men to "get back in touch with their feelings," to be nurturers, their work is described in terms of providing a better epistemology. The current literature on masculinity explores alternatives to rewriting or redefining Woman that try to avoid the problem of status remaining with redefinition. This alternative is rewriting or redefining Man. Through redefining Man, one may be able to reconceptualize the privileged side of the hierarchical dualism in such a way that it is no longer privileged. Deprivileging, as well as redefining Man, is argued by theorists of masculinity to be possible because while the devalued status of the inferior side of a hierarchical dualism tends to keep the same status when redefined, it may be possible to redefine the privileged side of the dualism in such a way that it loses its privileged status. Unfortunately, many of these attempts to rewrite or redefine masculinity have detrimental faults of their own. Finally, this paper will discuss more promising possibilities for new definitions of Man, as well as a vision for better interaction between the work of women and men in general. (shrink)

This paper offers a case study based on qualitative research in the burley tobacco region of central Kentucky, where farmers are urged to diversify away from tobacco production. “Replacing” tobacco is difficult for economic and material reasons, but also because raising tobacco is commensurate with a locally valued way of doing masculinity. The focus is on these two questions: How can the doing of work associated with tobacco production and marketing be understood as also doing a particular masculinity? (...) What does an understanding of farm work as a simultaneous doing of gender illuminate about the challenges of diversification away from tobacco? Asking tobacco farmers to “grow something else” is also asking them to do gender differently, suggesting that the transition away from tobacco must be understood as a gendered transition. This research, focused primarily on male farmers who continue to raise tobacco, suggests the need for gendered research with women and men who have moved away from tobacco to other crops. (shrink)

L’article analyse la représentation des ouvriers durant la seconde moitié du xxe siècle, et notamment de leur masculinité : il pointe la superposition des deux images de l’ouvrier et de l’homme, dans la mesure où la représentation du travailleur en tant qu’homme naît de la conviction que le travail est le principal outil de définition de la masculinité. Ces deux représentations sont étudiées en confrontant les images des espaces de travail et des travailleurs avec leurs propres autoreprésentations, à travers les (...) films, les photographies, les romans et les récits autobiographiques. L’article fait l’hypothèse d’une connexion entre la fin de la centralité du travail industriel depuis les années 1970 et les transformations de la masculinité, sous l’influence, tant du féminisme, que du changement des valeurs sociales, d’une manière plus générale. Pendant cette période, l’identité masculine se redéfinit : celle-ci n’est plus construite à partir du travail, mais plutôt, d’une nouvelle conscience de soi fondée sur le corps. (shrink)

This book analyses contemporary gay "pig" masculinities, which have emerged alongside antiretroviral therapies, online porn, and new sexualised patterns of recreational drug use, examining how they trouble modern European understandings of the male body, their ethics, and their political underpinnings. This is the first book to reflect on an increasingly visible new form of sexualised gay masculinity, and the first monograph to move debates on condomless sex amongst gay men beyond discourses of HIV and/or AIDS. It contributes to existing (...) critical histories of sexuality, pornography and other sex media at a crucial juncture in the history of gay male sex cultures and the HIV epidemic. The book draws from fieldwork, interviews, archival research, visual analysis, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies, using empirical, critical, and speculative methodologies to better think gay "pig" masculinities across their material, affective, ethical and political dimensions, in a future-oriented, politically-inflected, reflection on what queer bodies may become. Spanning historical context to empirical and theoretical study, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures will be of key interest to academics and students in sexuality studies, film, media, visual culture, cultural studies, and porn studies concerned with masculinities, sex and sexualities and their circulation across an array of media. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MASCULINITY AS VIRILITY IN TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S WORK Lahoucine Ouzgane University ofAlberta To be a woman is a natural infirmity and every woman gets used to it. To be a man is an illusion, an act of violence that requires no justification. (Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, 70) Inthe last ten to fifteen years, scholarly attention to gender issues in.the Middle East and North Africa has been focused (...) almost exclusively, sometimes obsessively,1 on a quest to understand femininity: what it is and how it is made and regulated—with Muslim women's oppression, the everlasting question of the veil, and the practice of female genital mutilation receiving most of the scrutiny.2 But while this attention—by female and male scholars—to the Muslim woman is indeed a salutary one,3 masculinity in Islamic cultures has so far remained an 1 An international conference on Contemporary Issues in Islamic Studies (to be held in Virginia in November 1996) is soliciting papers in these categories: 1) Islamic Law: Theory and Practice; 2) Fundamentalism; 3) Women in Islam. 2As a parody ofthis preoccupation, Fedwa Malti-Douglas writes: "The Arab woman is a most fascinating creature. Is she veiled? Is she not veiled? Is she oppressed? Is she not oppressed? Were her rights greater before Islam? Are her rights greater after Islam? Does she have a voice? Does she not have a voice?" (3) 3 Some ofthe most significant literature on this subject includes LeilaAhmed's Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a study of the development of Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancientworld to the present, Mamia Lazreg's The Eloquence ofSilence (1994), a detailed analysis ofthe gender relations in Algeria from the precolonial era to the present; The Veil and the Male Elite (more commonly known in French as Le Harempolitique, 1987) by 2 Lahoucine Ouzgane unrecognized and an unacknowledged category that secures its power by refusing to identify itself. There are as yet no studies that make Muslim men visible as gendered subjects and that show that masculinity (like femininity) has a history and clear defining characteristics that are incomprehensible apart from the totality of gender relations in Islamic cultures. In this essay, I wish to consider masculinity as it is depicted in some ofTahar Ben Jelloun's major fiction. With more than twenty novels, two plays, and three poetry collections produced in the last thirty years, Ben Jelloun is undoubtedly the most prolific contemporary francophone North African writer. Though he had earned several important literary awards before, his rise to literary and public prominence began when he became the first African Arab writer to be awarded Le Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for his novel La nuit sacrée published in 1987. Ever since, some of his works have been translated into fifteen languages (Daoud 62) and The SacredNight has recently been made into a film. Some critics have even begun to refer to Ben Jelloun as a future Nobel Prize candidate (Ndiaye 48). I will argue that in a world where the social has taken precedence over the religious, in a world where transcendence has given way to what René Girard describes as "mimetic rivalry,"4 Ben Jelloun's characters are unable to know love as an "experience of transcendence" (Gans). As a consequence they inevitably reduce masculinity to virility, a fragile attribute sustained only through repeated acts of violence. It is indeed possible to read masculinity in such a setting as a set of distinctive practices which emerge from men's positioning within a variety of social structures. In short, masculinity in Ben Jelloun's fiction is perhaps best Fatima Mernissi, an indictment of the way in which numerous Hadiths (or sayings by the prophet) have been manipulated by a male elite to maintain male privileges; Fatna Sabbah's Woman in theMuslim Unconscious(1984), a critique ofthe seemingly contradictory messages which the Islamic legal and erotic discourses imprint on the female body; and Fedwa Malti-Douglas' Woman's Body, Woman's Word (1991), a mapping out of the relationship of woman's voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse to sexuality and the body. 4Central to Girard's thought is... (shrink)

In the context of feminist and postmodern thought, traditional conceptions of masculinity and what it means to be a “Real Man” have been critiqued. In Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason, this critique takes the form of exposing the effect that the distinctive masculinity of the “man of reason” has had on the history of philosophy. One major feature of the masculine-feminine dichotomy will emerge as a key notion for understanding the rest of the paper: the dichotomy (...) of reason-feeling, a parallel and a foundational aspect to the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity. In exploring the history of symbolic conceptions of masculinity in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the present, one finds that the oppression of women is integrally linked to the traditional tie between masculinity and reason. There have been many efforts in recent feminist philosophy to rewrite or redefine “Woman” in such a way as to alleviate the oppression of women. I argue that the effectiveness of rewriting Woman for this purpose is problematic, primarily because any rewriting of this type must occur in the current historical context of hierarchical dualisms, like Man-Woman, masculine-feminine, male-female. These binary oppositions arguably find their roots in Pythagorean philosophy and can be traced through the Renaissance to our current historical context. It is these dualisms that have traditionally valued the masculine side of the Man-Woman dichotomy more than the feminine. Further, it will be argued that the hierarchical dualism of Man and Woman is so pervasive that if we rewrite or redefine the inferior, deprivileged side of that dualism, we cannot correct its devalued status. Instead, we redefine that which is undervalued but retain its devalued status. This particular aspect of attempts to critique hierarchical dualisms like reason and feeling has been reflected in the writings of many feminists, male and female. This paper will show that in cases where women attempt to redefine the dichotomy by revaluing the traditionally feminine (like feelings and emotions) over the traditionally masculine (like reason) their work is often mistakenly criticized for being purely political; conversely, when men attempt to redefine the same dichotomy in an attempt to allow men to “get back in touch with their feelings,” to be nurturers, their work is described in terms of providing a better epistemology. The current literature on masculinity explores alternatives to rewriting or redefining Woman that try to avoid the problem of status remaining with redefinition. This alternative is rewriting or redefining Man. Through redefining Man, one may be able to reconceptualize the privileged side of the hierarchical dualism in such a way that it is no longer privileged. Deprivileging, as well as redefining Man, is argued by theorists of masculinity to be possible because while the devalued status of the inferior side of a hierarchical dualism tends to keep the same status when redefined, it may be possible to redefine the privileged side of the dualism in such a way that it loses its privileged status. Unfortunately, many of these attempts to rewrite or redefine masculinity have detrimental faults of their own. Finally, this paper will discuss more promising possibilities for new definitions of Man, as well as a vision for better interaction between the work of women and men in general. (shrink)

This article investigates a short Greek Christian homily, from the 4th century CE, by an anonymous Cappadocian preacher on the narrative of Susanna in Dan 13 LXX. The homily is simply titled, On Susanna (CPG 4567), and has been erroneously transmitted as a work of John Chrysostom. The purpose of this article is to examine more closely the construction of Susanna in the homily, with specific reference to the use of masculinity, psychic typology and finally, the construction of early (...) Christian salvation history. After addressing, in brief, some matters of canonicity, a close reading of On Susanna is given. It is demonstrated that the Cappadocian strategically constructs Susanna like a virginal Christian martyr and ascetic, with the aim of highlighting her masculine steadfastness and dominance in her contest ( agōn ) against the elders. A significant second move that is made in the homily is to position the masculine Susanna as a type for the soul of the individual, which should also be guarded against the onslaught of sin and the passions. Contribution: This Christian reconstruction of Susanna brings the subjectivity of the individual listener in the audience, and the character of Susanna, in close proximity to one another. In effect, by internalising the narrative of Susanna into the realm of the soul, the anonymous Cappadocian preacher is able to utilise a layered biblical salvation history that incorporates not only narratives from the Bible, but also the audience member’s own individual narrative and struggles into the grander scheme of salvation history. (shrink)

Bonaventure in his Itinerarium mentis in Deum traces the mystical journey of the spiritual wayfarer from the state of man posterior to the Fall of Adam and Eveto union with the Trinity as a partaker of the inter-Trinitarian love life. This journey takes the form of an ascent characterized by a Procline and Augustinian influenced ontology. I argue that the first two levels of the three-tiered ascent are understood ontologically as feminine and masculine principles, or evaluative metaphors, and mirror the (...) coinciding of the opposites of Good and Being in Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology. Furthermore, the process of the ascent is operative by means of yearning, or desire, acting as a unitive force in the ascent. The ascent of the Itinerarium is best realized in the person of Francis of Assisi upon whose very corpus is the ascent impressed according to the signs of the crucified Christ, the stigmata. (shrink)

In 1962 a team of scientists conducted their first joint fieldwork in a Xavante village in Central Brazil. Recycling long-standing notions that living Indigenous people represented human prehistory, the scientists saw Indigenous people as useful subjects of study not only due to their closeness to nature, but also due to their sociocultural and political realities. The geneticists’ vision crystalized around one subject – the famous chief Apöwẽ. Through Apöwẽ, the geneticists fixated on what they perceived as the political prowess, impressive (...) physique, and masculine reproductive aptitude of Xavante men. These constructions of charismatic masculinity came at the expense of recognizing how profoundly colonial expansion into Mato Grosso had destabilized Xavante communities, stripping them of their land and introducing epidemic disease. The geneticists’ theorizing prefigured debates to come in sociobiology, and set up an enduring research programme that Apöwẽ continues to animate even four decades after his death. (shrink)

Les quatre textes qui suivent tentent d'analyser dans la littérature québécoise et française récente les manifestations d'une société en mutation, désireuse ou non de rompre avec les stéréotypes de sexes, de revisiter et réconcilier féminin et masculin. Les écrivaines, avec quelques belles longueurs d'avance, continuent de vouloir à la fois le corps et l'esprit, la vie et la fiction, de jongler avec l'altérité et les identités plurielles et de travailler des textes ûctionnels, théoriques et incamés, qui prennent en compte le (...) réel Leur travail de réflexion et de création ne cesse, en fait, d'interroger les artifices de l'art, les mensonges de la petite et de la grande histoire, et de prouver qu'on ne peut impunément dissocier éthique et esthétique ! Le thème de l'autobiographie foetale qui hante la littérature masculine récente est très représentatif de la masculinité en crise; il cristallise ses angoisses, ses résistances ou sa nouvelle quête émotive, affective et corporelle.The following four-part paper try to analyse in recent quebecer and french littérature the manifestations of a changing society, wether it be willing or not to break with gender stereotypes and reconcile the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Female writers still show leadership in wanting both body and mind, life and fiction; in thinking ofalterity and multiple identities; and in working at fictionnal, theoretical and incarnate texts wich take reality into considerations. Their reflexion and creation in effect never stops questionning the artistic device, the lies of both small and big history to prove that we cannot inconsiderately dissociate Ethics from Esthetics ! The foetal autobiography team now haunting recent male littérature is very representative of the masculinity crisis; it cristallizes his anguish resistances or his new emotive, affective and corporeal quest. (shrink)

A decade ago, the “new sociology of masculinity” emerged as an exciting new paradigm for understanding gender, emphasizing the study of “hegemonic power relations” among men and women. However, subsequent research has not fully redeemed the promise of the NSM, failing to seriously engage the theoretical implications of studying hegemony. This article addresses the lacunae by presenting a theoretically informed analysis of life history interviews with Chinese American men. Its chief empirical question is how Chinese American men “achieve” (...) masculinity in the face of negative stereotypes. This is accomplished, it is found, through four possible gender strategies: compensation, deflection, denial, or repudiation. The author then fashions a theoretical account of these strategies to show how they can reproduce the social order by striking a hegemonic bargain, which occurs when a Chinese American man's gender strategy involves consciously trading on—or unconsciously taking advantage of—the “privileges” of his race, gender, class, generation, and/or sexuality for the purposes of elevating his masculinity. (shrink)

This paper responds to two trends in debates about Plato's view of women in the Republic. First, many scholars argue or assume that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as “masculine” as possible. Second, scholars who address the relationship between Plato's views of women and his psychological theory tend to focus on the reasoning and appetitive parts of the tripartite soul. In response to the first point, we argue (...) that the idea that Plato seeks to masculinize/de-feminize the city oversimplifies his treatment of Greek gender norms. Although he does want to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also seeks to eliminate many masculine qualities as well. Moreover, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he simultaneously aims to make guardian men more like Greek women in important ways. Regarding the second point, we argue that this project of reimagining gender norms is illuminated by Plato's psychology, but instead of emphasizing reason and appetite, we show how his views are connected to his account of the third, “spirited” part of the soul, thumos, and its dual hard/soft or aggressive/gentle nature. (shrink)

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white (...) working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

Ce livre réunit douze articles publiés dans différentes revues entre 1979 et 1993 qui, tous, abordent sous un angle un peu différent une question qui taraude l'auteur : quel est le fondement de la hiérarchie entre les sexes ? Françoise Héritier, anthropologue, observe tout d'abord celle-ci chez les Samo, ethnie du Burkina Faso qui fut son premier terrain, mais elle la repère également dans tous les systèmes de parenté. C'est en effet en tant qu'anthropologue de la parenté qu'elle pours..

The central role of the virtue of compassion in the shaping of the professional character of healthcare providers is a well-emphasized fact. On the other hand, the utmost obligation of physicians is to alleviate or eliminate human suffering. Traditionally, according to the Aristotelian understanding of virtues and virtue ethics, human virtues have been associated with masculinity. In recent decades, the founders of the ethics of care have introduced a set of virtues with feminine nature. This paper analyzes the notion (...) of compassion as a common virtue between the traditional/masculine and care/feminine sets of virtues and shows that compassion is a reunion and merging point of both sets of human virtues. This role can be actualized through the development and promotion of compassion as an important part of the character of an ideal physician/healthcare provider. In addition, this paper argues that the notion of compassion can shed light on some important aspects of the contemporary debates on healthcare provider-patient relationship and medical futility. Despite the recent technological and scientific transformations in medicine, the interpersonal relationship between healthcare providers and patients still plays a vital role in pursuing the goals of healthcare. The virtue of compassion plays a central role in the establishment of a trust-based physician-patient relationship. This central role is discernible in the debate of medical futility in which making difficult decisions, depends largely on trust and rapport which are achievable by compassion in the physician and the recognition of this compassion by the patients and their surrogate decision makers. (shrink)

:This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through the insights (...) that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities. (shrink)

The impact of feminism on men has produced both backlash and attempts to reconstruct masculinity. The Australian environmental movement, strongly influenced by countercultural ideas, is a case in which feminist pressure has produced significant attempts at change among men. These are explored through life-history interviews founded on a practice-based theory of gender. Six life histories are traced through three dialectical moments: engagement with hegemonic masculinity; separation focused on an individualized remaking of the self, involving an attempt to (...) undo oedipal masculinization; and a shift toward collective politics. This last and most important step remains tentative. (shrink)

Etudie l'homosexualité masculine, désignée par l'expression d'amour philosophique au XVIIIe siècle, en montrant que celle-ci est alors une question philosophique avant tout. Il montre notamment que les Lumières constituent une période charnière où l'on passe du péché de sodomie à la notion d'homosexualité et aux prémices d'une identité gay et étudie les positions ambiguës de philosophes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DisaffiliationsBeauvoir and Gorz on Masculinity as AgingPenelope DeutscherThe same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked by death.The Second Sex, 763Simone de Beauvoir wrote her second large theoretical work in 1970, La Vieillesse (V), some nine years after André Gorz published a two-part article, “Le Vieillissement,” in Les Temps Modernes, in 1961 (...) and 1962. These were essays in which Gorz did not hesitate to refer to the “conflict between generations.” He found unremarkable the constant transitions involved in what he saw as a combat between younger and older age groups, unremarkable that the young would resent the domination of the aged and find themselves resented in turn. The aged would bear heavily on the young, but eventually find themselves demeaned if not subordinated by them.Since Gorz was one of the many references in La Vieillesse, Beauvoir was using resources that could have prompted her to think of youth and aging as a further domain of group-based conflict and hostility. Instead, she preferred a different language. Stories that might have seemed to be those of inter-generational conflict were present in her work—she mentions a story from the Brothers Grimm of three generations: son, father, and grandfather. The father treats the grandfather abusively until he learns that his son accordingly anticipates repeating the same treatment toward him. But Beauvoir does not narrate the story as one of conflict between groups who should be understood as “generations.”1 For Gorz, by contrast, such relations seem inevitable. He writes [End Page 88] of young men frustrated by their disenfranchisement by older men, who are in turn disenfranchised as young men eventually manage to usurp them.Just as the language of group-based conflict seems to Gorz obvious to describe such relations, so does the tacit (though not overtly noted) masculinity of their experience. But because he does not directly note that the conflict, on his own account, occurs between the younger and older generations of males, it is not clear how a vision of generational conflict might be inflected by a sense that such relations are also those of sexual difference. How might that affect relations between the sexes or relations among women of different ages?For her part, Beauvoir did refer to tensions between younger and older women, both in The Second Sex (SS) and Old Age(OA), but these were largely references to relations between mothers and daughters. They were familial stories. Certainly, they were refracted through structure and social context: It is the impoverished status and history of women that, in Beauvoir’s view, inhibits their lives to the point that mothers and daughters resent each other. But describing such tensions, Beauvoir does not present them as competition between groups. Her visions are those of individual experiences occurring in family contexts, not those of a generation of women of a particular age group, understanding each other as engaged in some kind of potentially conflictual group relations with a group of women understood as generationally younger or older. This is not to say that Beauvoir ought to have preferred the language of generational conflict in considering aging. But in understanding that she turned away, without saying so, from a model that might well have seemed most plausible, we can think further about the interpretation that did seem more plausible to her.How, then, do aging and sex interact for Beauvoir? Her presentation of aging in The Second Sex is characteristically ambivalent. She describes middle-aged women who have bet on the norms of femininity—“She has counted on her sexual attributes far more than man has” (SS, 620)—only to be confronted with the dilemmas of the transformation brought by time. Beauvoir takes this transformation to be largely negative—comprehended in terms of loss rather than possible gain. She describes the physical transformation of aging in terms of degeneration and the passing of youth, beauty, health, innovation, capacity. She also claims, albeit with an important exception, that it is experienced by the woman negatively, with accompanying effects of shock, discontinuity, crisis, anxious concern, denial... (shrink)

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in (...) the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and FoucaultJudith Surkis (bio)In August 1963 Critique published an “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” a special issue commemorating the death of its founder. How did the volume’s contributors go about the seemingly tricky business of pledging fealty to the philosopher of sovereignty? How did they profess loyalty to, in effect recognize, the sovereign subject known (...) to insistently refuse masterful identity?Apparently undisturbed by this difficulty, the articles written by Bataille’s acquaintances—Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, and Jean Piel amongst them—establish an explicitly fraternal relation to their contemporary. Piel begins his homage with an account of their initial encounter chez Queneau in 1927, noting his “impression of extraordinary fraternity, an impression which, through our last meeting days before his death, never diminished” [721]. Intermingling intellectual and personal history, these occasional pieces remember Bataille in a variety of contexts: the awakening of his interest in ethnology and work on Documents in the 1920s, his early “confrontations” with Hegel and work on Critique sociale and Contre-attaque in the 1930s, his sensitivity to events and developments in post-World-War-II Europe. While significantly diverse in focus, these articles manifest a similar approach, at once biographical and autobiographical, detailing the unfolding of shared intellectual amitié in favorite cafés, apartments, and studios. Bataille emerges here as a historical subject whose interests and investments, while multiple and, to use Leiris’s metonym, even “impossible,” are repeatedly linked to a variety of intellectual and political milieux.Michel Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression” assumes a more reverential tone than the pieces written by members of Bataille’s own generation. While framed as an explicit “homage” in its recognition of a certain debt to Bataille, Foucault’s essay also plays upon the contradiction of pledging loyalty to a “sovereign” who repeatedly renounces his own claim to mastery. Bataille’s death becomes an occasion on which to herald the “breakdown” and “shattering” of the masterful philosophical subject conventionally assumed to be in control of the “natural” language of dialectics [42–43]. For Foucault, a new possibility for philosophy is seen to arise in “the non-dialectical language of the limit which arises only in transgressing the one who speaks” [44], a transgression repeatedly performed, according to Foucault, in Bataille’s own writing and metaphorically enacted in and by his death. Bataille had, after all, proclaimed in the conclusion to Erotism: “To give transgression to philosophy as a foundation (it is the approach of my thought)...” Bataille’s theory of transgression aims to evoke a “world of play” in which “philosophy disintegrates” [275]. Yet, if the disintegration of philosophy in and through transgression is already Bataille’s “project,” we might inquire into why Foucault frames his article as a preface. [End Page 18]In introducing this presumably already achieved transgression, the “Preface” affects a curious, alternating temporality, a certain confusion of anteriority and posteriority. 1 At once following and preceding Bataille, Foucault remains out of sync and hence unable to coincide with Bataille in the shared amitié inscribed by the author’s contemporaries; it would appear that this generational gap introduces a certain shift in the recollection of Bataille’s legacy. Following in his footsteps, Foucault appropriates one of Bataille’s own disorienting gestures—the tactical use of prefaces, itself mentioned in the “Preface” [43]—in order to dislodge Bataille from his anterior position; instead, Bataille comes to epitomize the transgression predicted by Foucault’s “philosophical” preface. Bataille’s (and, by implication, Foucault’s own) “location” becomes confused and obscured; as I hope to show, Foucault is invested in achieving this state of indeterminacy for both himself and Bataille.To honor Bataille in death assumes a double significance for Foucault: it represents a “transgression of the philosopher’s being” which “has sent us to the pure transgression of his texts” [40] and simultaneously allows Foucault to sacralize Bataille. “Pure transgression” becomes liberated from the historically located being of the philosopher. And further, since the language of transgression is linked by Foucault to the “death of God,” Bataille becomes, in a sense, “deified” in the announcement and celebration of... (shrink)

This paper considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize around training algorithms to generate artworks based on datasets derived from the Western art historical canon. Over the last decade, a shift towards the rejection of canonicity has begun to take shape in art historical discourse. At the same time, algorithmically enabled practices in the US and Europe have emerged that entrench the Western canon as a locus and guarantor of aesthetic value. Operating within the epistemic framework of (...) a “view from nowhere,” this tendency in generative art inherits the coloniality of both art history and artificial intelligence. Producing “art histories from nowhere,” this tendency conflates the conceptual category of visual art with the histories of Western cultural production. It reproduces a set of aesthetic values that entrench the mythology of the artist-genius and his imputed whiteness and masculinity; the extolment of innovation and novelty as self-evident virtues; disembodied Cartesian models of knowing and sensing; and the erasure of contributions that have been occluded from canonical visibility. As we encounter systems trained on particular visions of art history and of the artist, how might we remain attentive to the specific lens through which they are taught to see? This essay addresses that question by bringing the coloniality of recent experiments into view, bridging data feminisms and decolonial studies to formulate alternative visions of encounters between art and AI. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This (...) book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the dominant discourse of our day is econ omic universalism. This has translated comfortably from modernity to postmodernity. Within this discourse real differences and inequalities are homogenized by narratives such as those of choice and diversity. I shall question this in two ways: first, by borrowing from French post- structuralism to rename the discourse a 'masculine economy', and thus to invoke a 'feminine economy' both as a philosophical structure of difference and as a deliberate (...) introduction of the body; second, by analysing economic narratives concerning women's work which tend to flatten out difference altogether or recast it as (well-advised) choice. Within this economic language game, I shall try to emphasize material differences and inequalities, in other words, I shall borrow from the language of opposition. I claim that only the asymmetrical oscillation between difference and opposition can attempt to prevent either one falling back into some kind of more or less comfortable universalism. (shrink)

In the great kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia, the king’s power was often evoked by means of lion symbolism. This has led scholars to conclude that lion motifs, and especially that of the lion-slaying hero, in early Greek art and literature were cultural borrowings from the more populous and urbanised civilisations to the east. Yet it is also notable that the Greek tradition, at least from the time of the Homeric poems, tended to problematise the ethics of the leonine man. This (...) article explores the function of lion imagery in narratives of elite masculinity in western Asia and early Greece respectively. It will argue that Greek myth and epic reflect on and problematise any potential equation between lions and kingly prestige, power and masculinity, instead drawing attention to the savagery and social isolation of the lion-like man-of-power, and his difficulty in conforming to the expectations of civilised society. (shrink)

Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in particular. (...) The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual? (shrink)

aspirations, the rise of western monasticism was the most note worthy event of the early centuries. The importance of monasteries cannot be overstressed as sources of spirituality, learning and auto nomy in the intensely masculinized, militarized feudal period. Drawing their members from the highest levels of society, women's monasteries provided an outlet for the energy and ambition of strong-willed women, as well as positions of considerable authority. Even from periods relatively inhospitable to learning of all kinds, the memory has been (...) preserved of a good number of women of education. Their often considerable achievements and influence, however, generally lie outside even an expanded definition of philo sophy. Among the most notable foremothers of this early period were several whose efforts signal the possibility of later philosophical work. Radegund, in the sixth century, established one of the first Frankish convents, thereby laying the foundations for women's spiritual and intellectual development. From these beginnings, women's monasteries increased rapidly in both number and in fluence both on the continent and in Anglo-Saxon England. Hilda (d. 680) is well known as the powerful abbsess of the double monastery of Whitby. She was eager for knowledge, and five Eng lish bishops were educated under her tutelage. She is also accounted the patron of Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet of religious verse. The Anglo-Saxon nun Lioba was versed in the liberal arts as well as Scripture and canon law. (shrink)

Is logic masculine? Is women's lack of interest in the "hard core" philosophical disciplines of formal logic and semantics symptomatic of an inadequacy linked to sex? Is the failure of women to excel in pure mathematics and mathematical science a function of their inability to think rationally? Andrea Nye undermines the assumptions that inform these questions, assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independenet of concrete human relations, and logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series (...) of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists. (shrink)