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Rich addiction Subjectivity Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Bennett Gilbert
Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should
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The lived experience of reading Subjectivity Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Susanna Soosaar
Using the work of Louise Rosenblatt and her transactional theory of reading, this article examines the experiential nature of literature. Challenging notions of literature that rely solely on fixed categories, the writings of Louise Rosenblatt emphasize the dynamic nature of the literary work. A poem, a novel, or a play, Rosenblatt argues, is not an object but a lived event requiring the reader’s active
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“Le modèle bizarre qu’il devenait pour eux”: the ocean as a model for contemporary masculine (inter)subjectivities in Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) by Christine Montalbetti Subjectivity Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Sara Bédard-Goulet
This article examines Christine Montalbetti’s novel Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) (Nothing but Waves and Wind, 2017) to propose the ocean as a model to think about contemporary masculinities. This French road novel depicts homosociality in the post-2008 American landscape through the perspective of an outsider homodiegetic narrator. The ocean serves as a narrative model for the novel:
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Better than they know themselves? Algorithms and subjectivity Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Liran Razinsky
The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “better than they know themselves.” I address this idea from two perspectives. First I argue for the particular subjective qualities of experience and self-understanding issuing from our engagement with the world and the constitutive role of our reflexive relation to ourselves. These are not “known” by the
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Subjectivity and algorithmic imaginaries: the algorithmic other Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Alessandro Gandini, Alessandro Gerosa, Luca Giuffrè, Silvia Keeling
The notion of algorithmic imaginaries has been affirmed as an important heuristic to understand the functioning of social media algorithms through the account of users’ individual and collective experiences. Yet, the relationship between algorithmic imaginaries and users’ subjective engagement with social media, considering the personalised circulation of content on these platforms, demands further
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Bursting volcano, rushing river and heartbeat monitors: inscribing subjective experiences of childbirth in contemporary fiction Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Zita Kārkla
Placing contemporary representations of subjective experiences of childbirth at the centre of the analysis, the article examines birth scenes in Inga Gaile's novel Stikli (Glass Shards, 2016) and Anna Auziņa's novel Mājoklis. Terēze’s dienasgrāmata (The Dwelling. Terēze’s Diary, 2021). While Gaile explores experimental writing and rhythm to articulate natural birth from the immediacy of an embodied
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‘Is it okay to have a child?’: figuring subjectivities and reproductive decisions in response to climate change Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Leola Meynell, Mandy Morgan, Clifford van Ommen
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Intuition as a “trained thing”: sensing, thinking, and speculating in computational cultures Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Carolyn Pedwell
What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic? This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically, and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive, computational and corporate processes and (infra)structures that characterise algorithmic life. Bringing affect theory and speculative philosophies to bear on computational
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Somatic personhood and the dilemma of authenticity in ADHD subjectivity Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Alexandra Vrhel
In this paper, I discuss the dilemma of authenticity in ADHD subjectivity in the context of somatic, especially cerebral and neurochemical, personhood, which was stimulated by the rise of neuro-scientific knowledge, practices and technologies and their impact on culture and society. Through these processes, selfhood is continually identified with brainhood, in which mental processes are reduced to
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Weaving the algorithm: participatory subjectivities amongst food delivery riders Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Diego Allen-Perkins, Montserrat Cañedo-Rodríguez
The platform economy is an ecosystem of algorithmically-organised social–technical relationships. In the specific area of home food delivery via digital platforms, algorithmic mediation motivates agents to act in specific ways based on algorithmic logic, creating a distinct form of subjectivity. Based on an ethnography carried out with delivery riders in the City of Madrid (Spain) between 2021 and
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Caveman, genius, artist, entrepreneur: success and self-realization from literary naturalism to advice literature Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-08-08 James Dorson
This essay examines the dramatization of a new model of selfhood in U.S. naturalist fiction at the turn of the twentieth century and how it was taken up by advice literature during the interwar years. By tracing a lineage of the self through the characterological types of the caveman, genius, artist, and entrepreneur, the essay shows how the construction of the caveman as a more vital self than the
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Good body, good health, and the good mother habitus Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Jaime R. DeLuca, Jacob J. Bustad
This research explores the construction of a particular form of maternal identity described as the ‘good mother,’ an idealized form of motherhood within contemporary Western culture. Drawing on 133 interviews with 48 middle and upper-middle class postpartum women conducted in the nine months following pregnancy, we interrogate how maternal identity is uniquely intertwined and understood as associated
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The legacy of slavery, subjectivity and work: intergenerational transmission and the subjective relationship to work in Guadeloupe Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Valérie Ganem
The study presented here examines the subjective relationship of workers to their work in the historical context. More specifically, it looks at the influence of the transatlantic slave trade on behaviours that have been transmitted across generations on the island of Guadeloupe (French West Indies) and have resulted in collective defence strategies used by today’s workers. These are examined through
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Technologies of the self in culture: critical reflections on the self-managed subject Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Roberto Rodríguez-López
The basis for this article is several sociological studies that have demonstrated contemporary socio-political transformations, such as the fragmentation of social ties or traditional communities, the breakdown of work or relationship spaces that used to provide safe havens for shaping identity, and analyses of neoliberal individuality, especially studies based on French philosopher Foucault’s research
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Being human as praxis: for people with learning disabilities Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Dan Goodley
The paper posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on postcolonial and critical disability theory I suggest that being human as praxis of People with Learning Disabilities is sophisticated and generative but is always enacted
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“Where there’s a will, there’s a way:” contingency, mobility, and subjectification at the Stratemeyer Syndicate Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Martin Klepper
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Does the COVID-19 pandemic lead to an infra-state of exception: Turkey’s responses and dismantling its medico-scientific policies Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Ibrahim Berkan Karatas
The new coronavirus strain that spread across the globe in clusters and claimed millions of lives has significantly impacted how subjectivity and power are performed. The scientific committees empowered by the state have become the leading actors, lying at the heart of all responses to this performance. The article critically examines the symbiotic interaction of these dynamics regarding the COVID-19
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Facing the skin: layers and counter-mirror subjectivities Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Rosa Traversa
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Consciousness, healing and personal growth: how ‘therapeutic mothering’ impacts on raising children for Argentinean natural mothers Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-03-04 María Jimena Mantilla
This paper focuses on how therapeutic culture is used to reshape the experiences of motherhood. Through childbirth supportive groups, raising children counselling and doulas’ emotional support among other activities, women learn to build their experiences as mothers in terms of personal growth, self-development and spiritual healing. Here, I examine these notions and the creation of new normative ideals
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The dominating self: subjectivities of government in the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions of colonial South America. Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Edgar Zavala-Pelayo
Whereas the multi-disciplinary literature on subjectivities and government has contributed to the understanding of the constitution and configuration of the subjectivities of a considerable range of governed subjects, it has tended to overlook the subjectivities of governing agents. Based on a genealogical analysis of textual materials on the Jesuit-Guaraní missions of colonial South America, I describe
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The achievement society: youths too good for their own good? Subjectivity Pub Date : 2023-02-04 Anders Petersen, Ole Jacob Madsen
The concept of “the achievement society” is a framework that has often been used for explaining and addressing an increase in psychological distress among Nordic teenagers, particularly in girls. This article provides an historical account of how “the achievement society” became influential in countries like Norway and Denmark, even giving birth to a generational label (“Generation Achievement”). We
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Person of Westworld: figurations of living machines, memory, and trauma Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-11-29 J. Macgregor Wise
Figurations of the living machine in film and television map contemporary crises of subjectivity. Centered on readings of Person of Interest and Westworld, this essay describes figurations of living machine subjectivity that foreground traumatic memory. In these texts, trauma is used as a means of territorializing subjectivity, allowing for the imposition of a figuration of a disciplined individual
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Fantasy and desire: EU post-normative power in the democratic crisis in Belarus Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-10-08 Emily Loucas
The EU is generally understood in terms of its construction as a normative power. The 2020 democratic crisis in Belarus, however, shows an EU that is unwilling to exercise its responsibility as such. With a response to the crisis that can be summed up as a series of targeted sanctions and some restrictive measures, the EU’s resistance towards deeper involvement in the democratic crisis of a bordering
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The affective-discursive ‘pruning’ of neoliberal selves: introducing the notion of self-othering Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Nilima Chowdhury
In this article, I develop the notion of self-othering defined as the affective orchestration of different voices-of-the-self as an important self-constitutive practice of neoliberal subjectivity. I posit that neoliberal subjectification relies on othering those facets—skills, attributes, bodily properties—that do not conform to idealised notions of the self. By applying this conceptual lens to empirical
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Competing narratives of modernization: the neoliberal subject of the knowledge-economy and its national duties Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Erick Viramontes
For nearly four decades, neoliberalism has established itself as a new modernizing project amidst the salience of other narratives of modernization, especially in "underdeveloped" societies. Thus, the subject of neoliberalism has had to interact with conceptions of the subject pertaining to other narratives of modernization, such as nationalism. The purpose of this article is then to analyze the interaction
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Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-09-14 Thomas P. Keating, Nina Williams
The relationship between ‘philosophy’ and the ‘geo’ has received renewed attention with the rise of the terrestrial and the planetary as leitmotifs for thinking about the collective subjectivation of particular kinds of world. In some of these conversations, this relationship is developed to consider how social collectives emerge with the production of particular kinds of territorial abstraction. Three
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Faith communities: immanence, aesthetics and thinking through figures Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-09-08 Anna Hickey-Moody
In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to develop a conversation between Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy (Deleuze and Guattari in What is philosophy?, Verso Books, London, 1994: pp. 85–113) and concepts within and findings from empirical fieldwork exploring religion, faith and everyday belief systems. This leads to some new ways of thinking about faith and draws parallels between religion
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Stories of earthly things: for a pragmatist approach of geostories Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Didier Debaise
In this article, I propose to take up and give new relevance to an intuition that W. James developed in Pragmatism: « things tell a story». I take this proposition as literally as possible: a physical entity, a living being, a technical object, would tell stories by themselves, in the materiality of their existence, in their very bodies. The stories would not be about how humans relate to more-than-human
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Geophilosophy as the end of philosophy Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Claire Colebrook
How does something like the Earth generate philosophy? This is the question of geophilosophy, which forms one of the central political claims in Deleuze and Guattari's work. Only when philosophy recognizes itself as the expression of the prephysical forces that bring the planetary into being does a genuine ethics of the future becomes possible.
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From ‘world’ to ‘earth’: non-phenomenological subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-08-10 Tom Roberts, Andrew Lapworth, J. D. Dewsbury
With the invention of the concept of ‘geophilosophy’, Deleuze and Guattari did not intend to invoke a new subfield of philosophy; for them, all philosophy is geophilosophy by virtue of its constitutive relationship with contingency. What is less well understood, however, are the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophical approach for how we think about subjectivity today. Working against
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We are what we smell: the smell of dis-ease during lockdown Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Louisa Allen
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Shame as a geophilosophical force Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Aline Wiame
In this article, I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s famous trope about “an earth and a people that are lacking” in the Geophilosophy chapter of What Is Philosophy? must be examined through a specific assemblage: the necessity for shame—as a powerful, non-psychological, and nonhuman affect—to enter philosophy itself both to resist stupidity and to include all the disfranchised of classical Reason.
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Affectivity, subjectivity, and vulnerability: on the new forces of mass hysteria Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-06-02 Raymond L. M. Lee
Affect theory raises greater awareness of non-representational forces in social life that can shape different levels of subjectivity in ways that may not be immediately known to the subjects. In outbreaks of mass hysteria when subjects are suddenly exposed to bizarre and extreme behaviors, the question of affect becomes a key to understanding how their subjectivity is impacted by situations that seemingly
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Hegel, subjectivity and youth Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-05-20 Alexandre Pais
This article discusses how the constant pressure for young people to optimise themselves, to become the masters of their lives and to enjoy life to the full, instead of leading towards a new empowered citizenship, can also be experienced as an existential burden. It does so by engaging with the most recent research literature on youth studies concerning the agency/structure debate, which will be illustrated
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Calculation and contingency in contemporary global markets: the logistics of subjectivity Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Montserrat Cañedo-Rodríguez, José C. Loredo-Narciandi
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The dream as transdisciplinary territory: a psychoanalytically oriented method at the service of social research Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Isis Castañeda Capriroli, Svenska Arensburg Castelli, Rodolfo Vásquez Torres
From a socio-anthropological consideration of psychoanalysis, we propose the dream as a way to access the study of malaise and as a territory for social research. The Transdisciplinary Laboratory in Social Practices and Subjectivity (LaPSoS) presents its theoretical and methodological contributions through a study entitled, "Everyday life, dreams and adolescent malaise". We outline the data collection
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Learning to feel: on practice and precarity in an Amsterdam yoga studio Subjectivity Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Alexandra Brown
This article articulates the practice of learning to feel taught in an Amsterdam yoga studio. Tattva Yoga constitutes one localized manifestation of postural yoga practices flourishing within neoliberal systems worldwide. As a scene of adjustment (Berlant, in Cruel optimism, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011) to conditions of precarity which shape the everyday lives of participants, Tattva Yoga encourages
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Disability, affect theory, and the politics of breathing: the case of muscular dystrophy Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Abrams, Thomas, Thille, Patricia, Gibson, Barbara E.
This paper uses affect theory to interrogate the politics of disability and rehabilitation. Drawing on observational research of the clinical interactions between young men with muscular dystrophies, their parents, and practitioners, we argue affect theory engages disability politics, both within and outside the clinical space. Looking to the foundational work of Spinoza, refracted through writings
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Of cityscapes, affect and migrant subjectivities in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Nanda, Aparajita
Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss revolves around questions of identity and entities flawed by a deep sense of deprivation and loss left by colonization that manifests itself in various forms through generations. The novel chronicles the lives of an Anglophile Indian judge, Jemubhai Patel, whose educational sojourn in Britain permanently brands him as an alien both abroad and in his homeland, and of
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Correction to: Governing uncertainty, producing subjectivity: from Mode I to Mode II scenarios Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-09-03 Limor Samimian-Darash,Michael Rabi
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Feeling the city: migrant narratives and urban space Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Ágnes Györke,Eszter Timár
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Devising conviviality: intersubjective becoming through labor of community-building Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-08-25 Birey, Tegiye
Based on an ethnographic take on Malmö Community Theater, this article focuses on the method of devising in theater to explore the labor of community-building it generated in terms of performative alliances, embodied translations, affective negotiations and resource (re)distribution. Particular attention is paid to the negotiation of gendered/racialized narratives that have been central to the border-making
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Affect, stimmung and governing young drug users: an affirmative critique of a Danish drug user treatment programme Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-08-19 Bank, Mads
This article has two key contributions. The first is empirical, and looks at how a Danish drug treatment agency, inspired by critical and post-modern approaches to psychology, has developed methods of overcoming problems of participation and stigmatization, and of empowering young people with a known history of illegal substance use. I will analyze how, in collaboration with social workers, young users
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Polic(sh)ing up the Leipzig Main Station: an ethnographic reflection on abjection, space and resistance Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-08-19 Kirndörfer, Elisabeth
In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station
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Transfilial negotiations and palimpsestuous traces: queering postcolonial memory and intergenerational transmission Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-08-12 Quinan, C. L.
An abundance of creative work dealing with the French–Algerian War has recently emerged, with writers, filmmakers, and artists grappling with the traumatic traces it has left behind. Applying an approach to memory inspired by queer theory, this article explores how the effects of a colonial past are evidenced not only via recollections of those involved, but also through the ways in which they are
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Governing uncertainty, producing subjectivity: from Mode I to Mode II scenarios Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Limor Smimian-Darash, Michael Rabi
Tracing the emergence of the scenario technology and key shifts in how it is used, we argue that scenarios represent a new way of governing future uncertainty. We analyse two of the most influential approaches to the technology—those of Herman Kahn and Pierre Wack. In the first, scenarios emerge as a solution to an ontological problem of future uncertainty—a solution that seeks to use imagination as
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Confession, psychology and the shaping of subjectivity through interviews with victims of female-perpetrated sexual violence Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-06-14 Sherianne Kramer, Brett Bowman
Female-perpetrated sexual abuse (FSA) is often seen as rare and of little consequence. Confessing to being a victim of FSA is infrequent and often met with incredulity. Identifying as such a victim is thus often a response to an incitement to speak in the mode of confession. Interviews producing the possibility for such confessions were conducted with ten self-identified South African FSA victims and
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Producing and managing continuous change in an educational context: liminal affective technologies and leadership Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Dorethe Bjergkilde, Paul Stenner
Currently, municipal schools in Denmark face reforms and political demands for organizational change (EVA in Ledelse tæt på undervisning og læring : erfaringer fra fire skoler med gode ledelsespraksisser, 2015). The perception is now commonly held that it is necessary to radically rethink the entire set up of the institutional school towards a more flexible, adaptable and co-operative organization
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Rhythms of individuation: time, stratification and youth trajectories at the periphery Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-05-19 Matthew Aaron Richmond
The formation of subjects’ temporal frames of thought and action has long been central to the study of social stratification. However, theorisation of these processes has tended to focus on highly institutionalised environments in the global North. By contrast, the peripheries of Brazilian cities constitute “heterogeneous fields” of subjectivity formation, in which state institutions act in highly
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“When I was a kid:” Childhood memories, care work, and becoming mom Subjectivity Pub Date : 2021-05-13 Maria Kromidas
This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as maternal subjects. So affectively loaded is the child figure, and so diffuse and malleable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple figurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother
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Affective archives as political impasse Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Margarita Palacios,Derek Hook
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Mapping practices and the cartographic imagination Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Simonetta Moro
This paper claims that maps and the “act of mapping” have the capacity to disrupt symbolic horizons concerning representations of space constructing aesthetic, political and subjective worldviews. These worldviews constitute modes of subjectivity that challenge the notion of the Cartesian subject, and put forward a “situated” concept of subjectivity. Through an intertextual analysis of Deleuze and
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‘Aberrations of affect’, the critique of ontology and the specificity of the colonial relation in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-11-28 Efthimios Karayiannides
In a decade deeply marked by renewed calls for racial equality and decolonisation culminating in the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement globally, the thought of no single thinker has resonated more profoundly with our contemporary political moment than that of Frantz Fanon. I argue that the temptation, in the reception of Fanon’s thought since the 1980s, to ontologise aspects of Fanon’s analysis
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Dreaming from the perspective of everyone Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Ross Truscott
This paper offers a reading of Sharon Sliwinski’s Mandela’s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming. Sliwinski reflects on Nelson Mandela’s dream-life while he was incarcerated on Robben Island, and the ways in which his dreams, which staged for him the affect of racial oppression, may have contributed to his judgment of apartheid and his concept of freedom. While acknowledging the productivity
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Death-bound subjectivity: Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and the Lacanian death drive Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-11-03 Derek Hook
Is there a distinctive form of political agency that emerges from the conditions of ‘death-bound subjectivity’? Fanon’s idea of the zone of nonbeing suggests that this is indeed the case. Yet there is an omission in the secondary literature on Fanon in this respect. While a renowned Fanon scholar like Lewis Gordon usefully explores how the zone can be understood as domain of ontological erasure, he
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Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective-aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-10-31 Margarita Palacios, Stephen Sheehi
In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we
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Energy archives: of rocks, rubbish, and feminist feeling in Aliki Saragas’s Strike a Rock Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-10-29 Helene Strauss
Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affective charge of rocks and rubbish—in their material, symbolic, aesthetic and archival forms—as a feminist challenge to violent extractivism’s intergenerational echo. Set in Nkaneng, a township adjacent to the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana, where in 2012 the South African police opened fire on a group
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The spatiotemporality of nationalist populism and the production of political subjectivities Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-10-13 Michaelangelo Anastasiou
While recent research has made progress in analytically disentangling “nationalism” from “populism”, the question that is left unanswered is why, from an empirical standpoint, populist movements typically impinge on national(ist) modalities. I argue that this impasse is encountered because research has not yet comprehensively examined the manner, and the extent to which, nationalism comes to be imbricated
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The spatiotemporality of nationalist populism and the production of political subjectivities Subjectivity Pub Date : 2020-10-13 Michaelangelo Anastasiou
While recent research has made progress in analytically disentangling “nationalism” from “populism”, the question that is left unanswered is why, from an empirical standpoint, populist movements typically impinge on national(ist) modalities. I argue that this impasse is encountered because research has not yet comprehensively examined the manner, and the extent to which, nationalism comes to be imbricated