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comrade-meow · 3 years

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The “world historical defeat” of the female sex continues apace.

Women in their tens of thousands are trafficked into sexual slavery every year. Increasing numbers of poor, black and brown women are virtually imprisoned on commercial surrogacy farms, producing babies for the benefit of rich couples. Brutalisation of women in the porn industry is feeding through into its viewers’ sex lives, with grim consequences, while teenage girls face an epidemic of sexual harassment at school and on the streets.

The frequency of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage has shot up during the Covid-19 crisis. Domestic violence has likewise rocketed. In the UK, prosecutions are so limited that rape is virtually decriminalised. Abortion rights are under attack, from the USA to Poland. And international ‘men’s rights’ networks like ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ attract millions of viewers to videos that dehumanise and pathologise women to an extreme extent.

This is a resurgent global system of exploitation and oppression targeted on women, a reaction against the many gains of feminism. The increasingly commercial nature of many of these deeply exploitative and oppressive practices - the porn industry, for one, makes billions every year, some of it from content involving rape, child abuse, non-consensual filming and the like - drives home the desperate need for a socialist analysis that exposes the roots of these ancient but enduring patriarchal oppressions. And we need an understanding and a language that enables that analysis.

But at the same time as this shocking acceleration of anti-woman attitudes, practices and policies, the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are being rapidly taken apart in response to a worldwide ‘trans rights’ movement. In a rush to embrace the new world of multiple genders, organisations and corporations as diverse as Amnesty International, Tampax, the stillbirth charity, Sands, the Harvard Medical School and many others are in a sudden rush to delete the words ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ from their vocabulary and replace them with a new, ‘inclusive’ language of ‘menstruators’, ‘gestational carriers’, ‘birthing people’, ‘cervix-havers’ and ‘people with uteruses’.

At the same time, the word ‘sex’ has progressively been replaced by the word ‘gender’, which is used to refer not only to reproductive class, but also to aspects of human life as disparate as individual psychology, personality, mannerisms, clothing choices and sexual roles. And the words ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are being repurposed to refer not to the sexes themselves, but to aspects of psychology, personality or clothing that are traditionally associated with one or the other sex.

Is this new language - and the renaming and breaking up of the category of people formerly known as women - the tool we need for the job of dismantling the worldwide discrimination, exploitation and abuse of women that is so often focussed on the female sexual and reproductive characteristics? I would argue not. These misguided attempts to dismantle the language used to describe women’s bodies and lives does nothing to reveal or dismantle the oppression itself.

This is because the conceptual framework that is driving the change in language - and stretching and distorting the categories of man and woman into meaninglessness - is fundamentally wrong. And badly so.

Sex as fiction

The political driver behind these linguistic changes is the ‘trans rights’ movement, which bases its arguments on the most extreme and illogical aspects of queer theory. Many trans activists insist that to even question the precepts that they advance is actively hateful, even fascistic in nature - witness the social media furore when any celebrity, such as JK Rowling, dares to say that the word ‘woman’ means a female person. But it is neither hateful nor fascistic to question arguments that have neither intellectual nor political integrity.

I will quote from Judith Butler’s book Gender trouble1 - first published in 1990, and often hailed as a foundational text of queer theory - and its 1993 follow-up, Bodies that matter2, to illustrate the thinking behind the current trans activism movement. Queer theory is an unashamedly post-modernist, anti-materialist and psychoanalytic school of philosophical thought that frames sex, sexual behaviour and sexual identity (being gay, bisexual or straight) as social constructs, and takes its arguments so far that it claims that the two sexes (not just gender, but the sexes themselves) are fictional. The phenomenon of intersex is thought to prove that sex is not ‘binary’, with only two possibilities, but exists on a spectrum between male and female (I, among many others, have debunked this notion elsewhere3). But in queer theory, gender is not just “the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture”.4 Queer theory goes much further, purporting that the two sexes themselves are social constructs, like money or marriage. Thus gender replaces sex altogether: “... if gender is the social construction of sex, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy.”5

Therefore, according to queer theory, male and female are not objective realities, but ‘identities’. Everyone is required to fit into one or other of those two ‘identities’ in order to enforce reproduction through “compulsory heterosexuality”:

The category of sex belongs to a system of compulsory heterosexuality that clearly operates through a system of compulsory sexual reproduction … ‘male’ and ‘female’ exist only within the heterosexual matrix … [and protect it] from a radical critique.6

It is therefore through the power of language, and the naming of male and female, that gender oppression is created; and it is by the power of language that it can also be defeated. In order to dismantle the oppression that has resulted from this categorisation, it will be necessary to implement an “insidious and effective strategy … a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves … in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic”.7 This feat is to be achieved specifically by “depriving the … narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’”.8 The category ‘women’ is particularly promoted as being ripe to be emptied of meaning. It should be

a permanent site of contest … There can be no closure on the category and … for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.9

It is evident that the programme of queer theory is working, in the sense that it is changing and dismantling the language. But does the whole of gender oppression across history really originate in the simple naming of male and female? Because, if it does not, then this new movement is a dead end that is ultimately doomed to failure as far as challenging the structures that bear down on women’s lives.

While it is true that human thought and culture must have developed in tandem with the particulars of our species’ sexual behaviour, reproductive biology and mating systems - such as menstruation, which, although not unique to humans, is unusual among mammals - it is futile to protest that sex did not exist prior to the emergence of the human race.

Queer theory, however, rejects any understanding of human sex or gender that involves biological sciences. Our evolutionary history simply disappears in a puff of smoke:

... to install the principle of intelligibility in the very development of a body is precisely the strategy of a natural teleology that accounts for female development through the rationale of biology. On this basis, it has been argued that women ought to perform certain social functions and not others; indeed, that women ought to be fully restricted to the reproductive domain.10

For those who believe that reproduction is the only societal contribution appropriate to the class of people that possess wombs, by virtue of the fact that they possess wombs, altering the use of the word ‘woman’ cannot change that. It is the reproductive ability itself, not the words used to describe it, that the argument is based on. Nothing materially changes - moving words around will not change the position of the uterus, or its function. It is as futile as rearranging the labels on the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or like renaming the Titanic itself after it has hit the iceberg - thus, miraculously, the Titanic will not sink after all.

Many of the abuses and exploitations that oppress women target the real sexual and reproductive aspects of women’s bodies - our materiality - so a materialist analysis is essential. Can any such analysis work, when its starting point is that sex is a fiction?

Applying Occam’s Razor - accepting the simplest explanation that can account for all the facts - queer theory’s conceptual framework does not cut the mustard. If sex is a fiction invented to enforce heterosexuality and reproduction, it leaves vast swathes of the picture unexplained. An analysis worth its salt would bring together multiple, seemingly different, inexplicable or unconnected aspects of social and cultural attitudes to sex under one schema. A materialist analysis that takes into account the reality that there are two meaningful reproductive sex classes fares far better, and explains far more of the problematic - and often bizarre - social and cultural practices and attitudes around sex.

Is it not a far better explanation that people became aware of the blindingly obvious early on in human development - that there are very clearly only two reproductive roles, and that the anatomical features associated with each are astonishingly easy to identify at birth in nearly all humans? And that the possession of those distinct anatomies resulted in them being named, in the same way that other significant natural phenomena are named - because, irrespective of any relative value placed upon them, they actually exist?

Leaving aside that blatantly obvious counterargument, there is a further problem with queer theory: homosexuality just does not need to be eradicated in order to ensure reproduction. Why? Because occasional heterosexual intercourse, at the right time, during periods of female fertility, is all that is needed. A woman could sleep with a man just once or twice a month, and have it away with another woman for 20-odd nights a month, with exactly the same reproductive outcome. While it is true that there would be no reproduction if every sexual encounter was homosexual, strict heterosexuality, or anything approaching it, is not required to ensure childbearing. Likewise, a fertile man can sleep with a woman a few times a year and be almost certain to father children. And since one man can impregnate many women, significant numbers of men could be largely or exclusively homosexual without any impact on the number of children born - so why persecute and punish homosexual behaviour so severely?

The ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ argument has no basis, once examined in this light, and thus a central plank of queer theory falls easily.

Queer theory proposes that the so-called ‘complementary’ aspects of masculine and feminine behaviour have been created by culture in order to justify the compulsory pairing of male with female. Genders, including the two sexes themselves, are understood to be performative: brought into being by repeated ‘speech acts’ that, through the appearance of authority and the power of naming, actually create that which they name.

Thus, each individual assumes - or grows into, takes on and expresses - a ‘gender’ that is encouraged, promoted, and enforced by social expectations. I broadly agree that many of the observable average differences in male and female behaviour are largely culturally created, and reinforced by oft-repeated societal expectations. The fact that the expectations have to be so often stated, and sometimes violently reinforced, is testament to the fact that those differences are in no way innate, but are driven by the requirement to conform. But the origin of the expectations of ‘complementary’ male and female behaviour is not, as queer theory suggests, to counteract homosexuality and force the pairing of male with female.

The specifics of masculine and feminine behaviour do not point towards such a conclusion. Why is feminine behaviour submissive, while masculine behaviour is dominant? Why not the other way around? Why must one be dominant and the other submissive at all? Wouldn’t a hand signal do instead? How do the particular, specific manifestations of gender serve the purpose of enforcing heterosexuality and eliminating homosexuality, when many of them, such as FGM, reduce heterosexual behaviour in heterosexual women? True, any enforcement would require bullying of some kind, but why is it that so much of the bullying related to sex focuses on (heterosexual) women, and so relatively little on heterosexual men? Why is virginity in women prized but of little account in men? Why is so much actual heterosexual behaviour, that could lead to reproduction, so viciously punished? Why are women punished, humiliated, shamed far more than men for sexual promiscuity - heterosexual promiscuity? Why is it girls, not boys, who are the primary victims of child marriage practices? Why, in so many cultures, are women traditionally not allowed to own property, and children are considered the property of the father and not the mother? What answer does queer theory have to all this? None. It is not even framed as a question that needs to be answered.

Patriarchy

All of these disparate cultural practices spring sharply into focus when we understand the simple rule formulated by Friedrich Engels, the primary and founding rule of patriarchy, which exists to enforce the rights, not of men in general, but specifically of fathers: when property is private, belonging to male individuals rather than shared communally, women must bear children only to their husbands.

Why? Because the mechanics of reproduction mean that, while a woman can be certain the children she is raising are indeed her own, a man cannot - unless he knows for sure that the children’s mother cannot have slept with any other man. Thus when private property is concerned, men have a strong motivation to ensure that the children to whom they pass on their wealth are their own offspring. Herewith the origins of monogamous marriage. And with it, as an integral part (indeed as a driving force), the origins of women’s oppression - or “the world historical defeat of the female sex”, according to Engels.11

The gender rules developed in order to ensure paternity and inheritance. This simple explanation takes us a long way to understanding the specifics of how gender oppression manifests itself globally, in the enforced submission of women to men, and specifically to their husbands, and in seemingly disparate cultural values and practices that prevent women from having heterosexual sex with multiple male partners, outside of marriage, or punish them if they do.

How do men, individually and collectively, stop - or attempt to stop - their wives from sleeping with other men? Promises are not enough, as we know. How do you stop anyone from doing something they want to, from expressing their own desires? You bully them. You humiliate, threaten, harass, attack and perhaps - occasionally - even murder them. In these multiple ways you seek to enforce compliance, through assuming social dominance and forcing social submissiveness and subordination. Society and culture evolve around these values, and develop in ways that satisfy the needs and desires of the socially dominant group. Meanwhile members of that socially submissive group are discouraged from banding together (they might mount a revolution), and learn to adapt their own behaviour to avoid harm. And, since conflict is costly, disruptive and traumatic, both groups develop strategies to signal their social position, to defuse and avoid conflict and possible injury, with social rules and expectations developing around these behaviours.

The global hallmarks of masculinity and femininity would be recognised in any other primate species as the unmistakable signs of social dominance and social subordination. Socially dominant primates (and other mammals, plus many other vertebrates) make themselves large, take up space, monopolise resources. These are the core components of masculine behaviour. Subordinate animals drop or avert the gaze, make themselves small, move out of the way, and surrender resources. These are typical feminine behaviours. In primates, attending to the needs of the dominant members of the group, by grooming, is also characteristic of social subordinates. In humans, grooming as such has been replaced by a far broader suite of behaviours that involve serving the needs of the dominant class.

Gendered behaviours and the social values attached to each sex reflect this pattern worldwide. Societies globally and throughout time promote and encourage these masculine and feminine behaviours - better understood as dominant and subordinate behaviours - as appropriate to men and women respectively. Western cultures are no exception.

The enactment of dominance (‘masculinity’) and subordinance (‘femininity’) can be understood as partly learned and partly innate. Innate, in the sense that the expression of these behavioural patterns is an instinctive response to a felt social situation, or social position - anyone will signal submissiveness in the presence of a threatening social dominant who is likely to escalate dangerously if challenged. Thus, nearly everyone signals submissiveness extremely effectively, and unconsciously, as soon as they have a gun pointed at their heads. And it is hard not to display these behaviours, when we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a socially dominant or subordinate individual or group.

So femininity is a stylised display of primate submissiveness - a behavioural strategy that reduces or avoids conflict by reliably signalling submission to social dominants. Members of either sex, when they find themselves towards the bottom of any social hierarchy, deploy different, but similarly ritualised and reliable, submissive gestures. Examples include bowing, curtseying, kneeling or prostration before monarchs; the doffing of caps with downcast eyes and slumping shoulders in the workplace; and the kneeling and bowing (in prayer) that is such a large part of patriarchal organised religions. It is easy to recognise such gestures as signals of submission to social superiors, and they should be opposed as manifestations of social hierarchies that need to be abolished as an implicit part of the project for universal liberation. Neither the bowing and scraping of the dispossessed nor the arrogance and high-handedness of the wealthy should be welcomed or celebrated. It is time to apply the same approach when it comes to gender.

Moving beyond their instinctive component, the specifics of so-called ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ behaviour are learned and then practised until they become habitual; and sometimes deployed consciously and strategically. People do what other people do; children start to mimic others around them, especially those they perceive to be like themselves, at a very young age, perfecting gestures, postures and vocal tones that may be cultural or, within each culture, gendered. Learned and practised from a young age, it is no wonder that these behaviours can feel like a natural part of a person’s core being - especially when they also incorporate an instinctive response that is deployed after rapidly gauging the level of threat posed by others. In addition, both sexes are explicitly taught to behave as expected - and so the dominance of males and the subordination of females is reinforced and perpetuated from one generation to another.

Anything that undermines the position of men as dominant and female as subordinate is a threat to the established order. Thus the second rule of patriarchy: men must not act like women, and women must not act like men.

This explains why homosexuality, cross-dressing and other forms of refusal to conform to gendered expectations are persecuted in many societies. For men to start acting ‘like women’, either sexually or socially – ie, submissively, which has come to include being penetrated sexually - would be to undermine and threaten the superior role of all men. Similarly, for a woman to act ‘like a man’ is a shocking insurrection - she must be kept down, and such behaviour has to be punished and made taboo. Since clothing and other behaviours are cultural markers that help to distinguish between the two sexes, cross-dressing breaks this law very blatantly. And further, to allow cross-dressing potentially allows the mixing of the sexes in ways that could undermine paternity rights.

On this reading, then, the persecution of homosexuality, cross-dressing and all other forms of gender non-conformity originated secondarily from the enforcement not of compulsory heterosexuality, but of compulsory monogamy for women in the interests of ensuring paternity rights. This is an important distinction, for, while it accepts that gendered behaviours and values are cultural, it acknowledges the material existence of the two sexes as a real and significant phenomenon, with powerful influences on societal development.

Combating oppression

Understanding and placing ourselves as animals with real, material, biologically sexed bodies - rather than the smoke-and-mirrors erasure of sex and materiality itself that queer theory promotes - gives us a far more powerful tool to understand and combat the oppression of women, and homosexual and transsexual or transgender people, than queer theory’s baseless speculations ever can.

It explains not only the different social and cultural values and expectations around men and women, but it also explains many of the specifics of what they are and why the expectations are so strongly hierarchical. Women must be submissive to men (‘feminine’) because they must be controlled - from the male perspective, in order to bear children fathered by the man who controls them. From their own point of view, they must allow themselves to be controlled, and teach each other to be controlled, in order to avoid injury or worse. It also explains widespread cultural practices that control the sexual lives and reproduction of women - from FGM to child marriage, to taboos around female virginity and pregnancy outside of marriage. These things happen because sex is observable, and real, and known from birth. At birth, it is in nearly all cases blatantly obvious whether a person can be reasonably expected to be capable of bearing a child, or of inseminating a woman, and it is on this basis that the two sexes exist as classes. To suggest otherwise is to enter the realm of absolute fantasy, or at least of extreme idealism, which indeed queer theory does, since “to ‘concede’ the undeniability of ‘sex’ or its ‘materiality’ is always to concede some version of ‘sex’, some formation of ‘materiality’.”12

The current queer theory-led trans movement seeks to dismantle the second law of patriarchy - men must not act like women, women must not act like men. We do indeed need a movement against sex-based oppression that acknowledges and unites against that law. We need to work towards a world where qualities like strength, assertiveness, caring and gentleness are rewarded, encouraged and promoted in both sexes rather than mocked and punished when they are exhibited by the ‘wrong’ sex; where it is impossible for men to act ‘like women’, or women to act ‘like men’, because gendered expectations attached to each sex no longer exist and anyone can, without censure or even mild surprise, be an engineer or a carer, be logical or emotional or wear a dress or make-up or high heels or a tie or cut their hair short, irrespective of their sex. But to pretend that the sexes themselves do not exist is a nonsense. And it is a dangerous nonsense, when it obscures and denies the existing power relations between men and women.

Female oppression is not an inevitable consequence of the differences between male and female bodies. Yes, the fact that men are bigger and stronger on average can make it easier for them to establish social dominance through direct physical threat; while the risk of being left literally holding the baby and having to provide for it can put women in an economically vulnerable position, where social subordination is a likely outcome. But under different material conditions - and a different value system - there is no reason why we cannot shed these destructive, dysfunctional habits of gender that oppress and limit our humanity.

There is nothing inherent in being a man that makes men oppress women - it is their position in society that allows them to do it, and rewards women who collude with them. Power is the ability to harm without being harmed yourself, and therefore, with sufficient motivation, many people when they have power will use it to cause harm. Currently, men very frequently have that power in relation to women, and so they use it, resulting in very many harms. When, within any given social grouping or class, men occupy a position of power with respect to women, it is not an inevitable effect of human biology: it is a position gifted by property, by wealth, by tradition and by law.

We must seek to rebalance power to prevent harm. That involves, among many other things, abolishing both masculinity and femininity - no progressive cause should support or perpetuate a social system in which dominance is encouraged in one group, while social submissiveness is promoted in others. It is absolutely contrary to all ideas of human dignity and liberation. How could any liberatory movement adopt a position that posits an innate, inescapable hierarchical system at the heart of human nature, with close to 50% of humanity born inescapably into a submissive role?

But in today’s gender debate, the position of queer theory-inspired trans activists is exactly that. For them, to be a ‘woman’ is not to be female, but to be ‘feminine’- in other words, to be a ‘woman’ is to be submissive. It is here that we begin to see the true social regressiveness of this supposedly liberatory movement. For, while it is understood that biology does not determine the gender of trans people, the flipside of that argument is that most people’s gender is indeed innate, as social conservatives have always thought. Why? Because, according to trans activism, most people are ‘cis’ - they ‘identify’ as the gender they were born into. If 1% are trans, then 99% are cis; perhaps being trans is more common, especially if it includes the non-binary category, but still the vast majority of people are cis. So, since most people born with female reproductive systems are ‘cis’ women, they are supposedly innately feminine, which is to say, innately submissive, subordinate, and servile. Meanwhile a similar proportion of people born with male reproductive systems are considered to be ‘cis’ men: innately masculine, and therefore born into a socially dominant role. It is likely that many activists and well-meaning people on the sidelines of this debate have not thought it through far enough to understand that this is the logical and necessary conclusion of their arguments.

While most trans activists avoid definitions like the plague, such a conclusion is borne out by the attempts of some to redefine ‘woman’ and ‘female’. Definitions of ‘woman’ include such gems as: “a person who acts in accordance with traditional gender roles assigned to the female sex” and “anyone that culturally identifies and presents as the combination of stereotypes and cultural norms we define as feminine” or “adhering to social norms of femininity, such as being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable and concerned with appearance”. And femaleness is “a universal sex defined by self-negation … I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”13

This is what we are fighting. It is why we are fighting. We refuse to submit.

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brooklynmuseum · 4 years

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Upcoming 2020 Exhibitions

We’re pleased to announce a selection of upcoming 2020 exhibitions. This winter, we welcome back our iconic Kehinde Wiley painting Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), which for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum will be presented in dialogue with its early nineteenth-century source painting, Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801). We also look at our collection from new perspectives with focused exhibitions that present historical works through a contemporary, multifaceted lens. Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection examines nearly 50 collection works using an intersectional feminist framework. Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas is an installation of the Museum’s Arts of the Americas collection which reconsiders indigenous art from the perspective of the prolonged and ongoing impact of climate change and colonization. Contemporary artist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Jeffrey Gibson mines our collection and archives to examine collecting practices and reinterpret historical representations of indigenous communities. We also present African Arts—Global Conversations, a cross-cultural exhibition pairing diverse African works with collection objects made around the world, and Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt, which examines the damage to sculptures and reliefs in ancient Egypt as a way of also exploring twenty-first-century concerns and struggles over public monuments and the destruction of antiquities.

In March, we celebrate the iconic history and trailblazing aesthetics of Studio 54 in a special exhibition featuring never-before-seen archival materials, video, photography, fashion, and more. We will also present the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to Brooklyn-based photographer John Edmonds, winner of our inaugural UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist. And in the fall of 2020, we are proud to mount the first career retrospective of the work of Lorraine O’Grady, one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art.

“We’re thrilled to present a roster of exhibitions next season that are in conversation with our collection in fresh and exciting ways,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “As an encyclopedic museum, we’re always looking for new ways to examine our collection and open it up to include narratives that have historically been left out of the canon. In 2020, we’re committed to exhibitions that do just that: telling stories that are rarely told, through the eyes of contemporary artists.”

Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley January 24–May 10, 2020 Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor

This exhibition brings an iconic painting from our collection—Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005)—into dialogue with its early nineteenth-century source painting, Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801). The two paintings, displayed together for the very first time, are on view in consecutive exhibitions at the Château de Malmaison from October 9, 2019, to January 6, 2020, and at the Brooklyn Museum from January 24 to May 10, 2020. This focused exhibition questions how ideas of race, masculinity, representation, power, heroics, and agency play out within the realm of portraiture. The presentation at the Brooklyn Museum is the first time David’s painting is on view in New York, and Wiley marks this momentous occasion by consulting on the exhibition design. It includes videos incorporating Wiley’s perspectives on how the Western canon, French portrait tradition, and legacies of colonialism influence his own practice. The exhibition represents an intimate conversation between two key artists of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and illuminates how images construct history, convey notions of power and leadership, and create icons.

The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison and Bois-Préau. The Brooklyn presentation is curated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, and Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection January 24–September 13, 2020 Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor

This exhibition presents more than 50 works from across our collections. Following the 2018 exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Out of Place also explores collection works anew through an intersectional feminist framework. Out of Place features more than forty artists from remarkably different contexts whose unconventional materials and approaches call for a broader and more dynamic understanding of modern and contemporary art.

Examining how contexts change the way we see art, Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection showcases artists who have traditionally been seen as “out of place” in most major collecting museums. The exhibition is organized around three distinct cultural contexts for making and understanding creativity—museums and art spaces, place-based practices, and the domestic sphere—and explores significant histories that have been, until recently, overlooked and undervalued, despite their influence outside of the mainstream. Out of Place traces how cultural institutions are challenged and changed by the ways artists work. Over half of the works in the exhibition are on view for the very first time, including important collection objects as well as significant new acquisitions, such as highlights from the recent Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift of works by Black artists of the American South.

Artists featured include Louise Bourgeois, Beverly Buchanan, Chryssa, Thornton Dial, Helen Frankenthaler, Lourdes Grobet, Louise Nevelson, Dorothea Rockburne, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Judith Scott, Joan Snyder, and May Wilson, among others.

Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection is curated by Catherine Morris, Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Helene Zucker Seeman Memorial Exhibition Fund.

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks February 14, 2020–January 10, 2021 Arts of the Americas Galleries, 5th Floor

This exhibition presents new and existing work by artist Jeffrey Gibson alongside a selection from our extensive collection and archives. Gibson collaborated with historian Christian Crouch to organize this exhibition that examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum collecting practices, and the historical representations of indigenous communities, through a contemporary lens.

Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, often incorporates elements of Native American art and craft into his practice. He regards these aesthetic and material histories as modern, innovative, global, and hybrid. The presentation includes collection objects such as moccasins, headdresses, ceramics, and parfleche, and examples of beadwork and appliqué, displayed alongside Gibson’s contemporary works, which take material and formal inspiration from these traditional artistic practices. The exhibition also includes rarely exhibited items from our archives that shed light on the formation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Native American collection in the early twentieth century by curator Stewart Culin. The archival selections by Gibson and Crouch aim to return the focus to the indigenous individuals represented within the archives, recovering those individuals’ previously overlooked narratives and presence.

By presenting his own work alongside key selections from our collection, Gibson offers a different perspective on historical objects within a museum setting—one that is not static or stuck in the past, but ever evolving and modern. He encourages visitors to question long-held categorizations and representations of Native American art and challenges our understanding of tradition, practice, craftsmanship, and art-making.

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Crouch, Curatorial Advisor, with Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, and Erika Umali, Mellon Curatorial Fellow, with support from Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator, Arts of the Americas, and Molly Seegers, Museum Archivist, Brooklyn Museum. Major support for this exhibition is provided by Ellen and William Taubman. Generous support is provided by the Brooklyn Museum’s Contemporary Art Committee, the FUNd, and Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia.

Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas February 14, 2020–January 10, 2021 Arts of the Americas Galleries, 5th Floor

Climate change is having a severe impact on indigenous communities across the Americas, but this situation has an even longer history. The European conquest and colonization of the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century introduced ways of using and exploiting natural resources that clashed with indigenous ways of understanding and relating to the natural world. This exhibition draws upon the strength of our renowned collection to highlight indigenous worldviews about the environment, and the ongoing threat of ecological destruction.

The installation includes work spanning 2,800 years, and explores how indigenous beliefs, practices, and ways of living are impacted by the climate crisis, ranging from the effects of melting sea ice and overfishing for Native peoples of the Arctic and Pacific Northwest to illegal logging and deforestation for indigenous communities in the Amazon. This environmental perspective reveals the fundamental disparities between the misuse of natural resources over the past five hundred years and indigenous communities’ profound relationships with their ancestral homelands. In addition, the exhibition incorporates voices of contemporary indigenous activists to underscore the work being done today to counter the climate crisis and protect the planet.

Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas is curated by Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator, Arts of the Americas, with Joseph Shaikewitz and Shea Spiller, Curatorial Assistants, Arts of the Americas and Europe.

African Arts—Global Conversations February 14–November 15, 2020 Lobby Gallery, 1st Floor, and collection galleries on the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Floors

African Arts—Global Conversations seeks to bring African arts into broader, deeper, and more meaningful and critical conversations about the ways that art history and encyclopedic museums have or have not included African artworks. It is the first exhibition of its kind to take a transcultural approach pairing diverse African works across mediums with objects made around the world―all drawn from our collection. It puts African and non-African arts from distinct places and time periods in dialogue with each other in an introductory gallery, as well as in “activation spaces” in the galleries dedicated to European Art, Arts of the Americas, American Art, Ancient Egyptian Art, and Arts of Asia. Duos, trios, and other groupings of objects from a wide variety of locations worldwide prompt conversations about history, art, race, power, design, and more. Approximately 33 artworks are presented (including 20 by African artists), as well as a selection of historical books. Highlights include the celebrated eighteenth-century sculpture of a Kuba ruler, a selection of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Ethiopian Orthodox processional crosses, and a midtwentieth-century mask from Sierra Leone’s Ordehlay (Ode-Lay) society. Also on view are works by contemporary artists Atta Kwami, Ranti Bam, Magdalene Odundo OBE, and Taiye Idahor.

African Arts—Global Conversations is curated by Kristen Windmuller-Luna, Sills Family Consulting Curator, African Arts, Brooklyn Museum.

Studio 54: Night Magic March 13–July 5, 2020 Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor

Studio 54: Night Magic is the first exhibition to trace the groundbreaking aesthetics and social politics of the historic nightclub, and its lasting influence on nightclub design, cinema, and fashion. Though it was open for only three years—from April 26, 1977, to February 2, 1980—Studio 54 was arguably the most iconic nightclub to emerge in the twentieth century. Set in a former opera house in Midtown Manhattan, with the stage innovatively re-envisioned as a dance floor, Studio 54 became a space of sexual, gender, and creative liberation, where every patron could feel like a star. From the moment Studio 54 opened, its cutting-edge décor and state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems set it apart from other clubs at the time, attracting artists, fashion designers, musicians, and celebrities whose visits were vividly chronicled by notable photographers. In addition to presenting the photography and media that brought Studio 54 to global fame, the exhibition conveys the excitement of Manhattan’s storied disco club with more than 600 objects ranging from fashion design, drawings, paintings, film, and music to décor and extensive archives.

Studio 54: Night Magic is curated and designed by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum. Lead sponsorship for this exhibition is provided by Spotify.

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance May 1, 2020–February 7, 2021 Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art, 4th Floor

John Edmonds is the first winner of the UOVO Prize, a new annual award for an emerging artist living or working in Brooklyn. This is Edmonds’s first solo museum exhibition and features approximately 25 new and recent photographic works that include portraiture and still lifes of Central and West African sculptures. Best known for his sensitive depictions of young Black men, Edmonds uses photography and video to create formal pictures that challenge art historical precedents and center Black queer desire. He often uses a large-format camera to heighten the staging of his subjects and explore their sculptural potential, making reference to religious paintings and modernist photography. Highlighting markers of Black self-fashioning and community— hoodies, du-rags, and more recently, African sculptures— Edmonds’s works point to individual style and a shared visual language across time.

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance is curated by Ashley James, former Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, and Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum. Leadership support for the UOVO Prize is provided by UOVO.

Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt Opening May 22, 2020 Egyptian Galleries, 3rd Floor

This exhibition, which draws from our renowned Egyptian collection, seeks to establish a context for considering contemporary concerns and struggles over public monuments and damage to antiquities. Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt explores patterns of organized campaigns of destruction to sculptures and reliefs motivated by shifting ideologies, politics, and crime in ancient Egypt, over a 2,500-year period. Presenting approximately 60 whole and damaged masterpieces of Egyptian art, the exhibition explores the damage that occurred during and after the rule of Pharaohs, with particular focus on the contested reigns of Hatshepsut (circa 1478–1458 B.C.E.) and Akhenaten (circa 1353–1336 B.C.E.). Targeted damage to sculptures typically occurred around a figure’s nose, which ancient Egyptians believed would remove the sculpture’s supernatural ability to breathe and therefore prevent the deceased figure from interacting with the human world. The exhibition explores the notion of public approval of iconoclasm and poses the question, who has the power to bring down or destroy images? Opinions about iconoclasm hinge on questions of whose narrative dominates public space. Many of the same questions about public art that concern the contemporary world, such as the role that U.S. Confederate monuments should play in today’s publically shared spaces, are illuminated through the lens of ancient iconoclasm.

Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt is organized in collaboration with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and is curated by Edward Bleiberg, Senior Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And November 20, 2020–April 11, 2021 Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first comprehensive retrospective of one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art. For four decades, from the anger and hilarity of the early guerrilla performance Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, to the joy and complexity of Art Is… on Harlem’s streets, to the haunting alternations in her single-channel video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), O’Grady has delved fearlessly into a range of timely questions: Black subjectivity (especially Black female subjectivity), diaspora, hybridity, art’s guiding concepts and institutions (from modernism to the museum), and the intersection of self and history. By putting contradictory ideas into play—black and white, self and other, here and there, West and non-West, past and present—and allowing them to interact with each other without expecting a concrete resolution, O’Grady’s work aims to replace the dualistic, “either/or” of Western thought with a productive, open-ended “both/and.” The urgency of the ideas she explores is perhaps the reason that her work is being newly embraced by a younger generation of artists who find much to learn from a practice that upends the fixed positions of power that structure our culture—while bringing into focus the poignancy of the lives that have been lived within these frameworks.

The exhibition includes twelve of the artist’s fourteen major projects, accompanied by a selection of material from her rich archive. It is accompanied by a catalogue documenting the full span of O’Grady’s artistic career, the first publication to do so, with essays by Malik Gaines, Harry Burke, Zoe Whitley, Catherine Morris, and Aruna D’Souza, along with a conversation between O’Grady and Catherine Lord.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is organized by Catherine Morris, Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and writer Aruna D’Souza. Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation. Major support is provided by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust. Generous support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons.

We hope to see you at the Museum soon!

Illustrated, from top:

Rose Hartman (American, born 1937). Bianca Jagger Celebrating her Birthday, Studio 54, 1977. Black and white photograph. Courtesy of the artist. © Rose Hartman

Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977). Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Partial gift of Suzi and Andrew Booke Cohen in memory of Ilene R. Booke and in honor of Arnold L. Lehman, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, and William K. Jacobs, Jr. Fund, 2015.53. © Kehinde Wiley. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Lourdes Grobet (born Mexico City, Mexico, 1940). Untitled, from the series Painted Landscapes, circa 1982. Silver dye bleach photograph. Brooklyn Museum; Gift of Marcuse Pfeifer, 1990.119.12. © Maria de Lourdes Grobet. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972). WHEN FIRE IS APPLIED TO A STONE IT CRACKS, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, glass beads and artificial sinew inset into custom wood frame. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago. © Jeffrey Gibson. (Photo: John Lusis)

Eskimo artist. Engraved Whale Tooth, late 19th century. Sperm whale tooth, black ash or graphite, oil. Brooklyn Museum; Gift of Robert B. Woodward, 20.895. Creative Commons-BY. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Kuba artist. Mask (Mwaash aMbooy), late 19th or early 20th century. Rawhide, paint, plant fibers, textile, cowrie shells, glass, wood, monkey pelt, feathers. Brooklyn Museum; Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1582. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Guy Marineau (French, born 1947). Pat Cleveland on the dance floor during Halston's disco bash at Studio 54, 1977. (Photo: Guy Marineau / WWD / Shutterstock)

John Edmonds (American, born 1989). Two Spirits, 2019. Archival pigment photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Company, New York. © John Edmonds

Face and Shoulder from an Anthropoid Sarcophagus, 332–30 B.C.E. Black basalt. Brooklyn Museum; Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.1516E. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Lorraine O'Grady (American, born 1934). Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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kitmcroninillustration · 3 years

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‘An introduction to Sociological Art theories’ (2018)

ARTHUR DANTO - the idea of an art world

Danto (1924-2013) addressed the concept of an 'art world' in 1964 because he was looking for a way to understand the conceptual and abstract art of the 1950s and 1960s. What is the distinction between an everyday object and an art object of Marcel Duchamp? What is represented in pure abstract art? The changes that took place in art aesthetics made him realize more clearly than ever that "to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world" (Danto 1964: 577). An art world, for Danto, was literally that which makes it possible to define and view something as a work of art, focusing predominately on the visual arts. This ideology "deliberately aimed to shift the attention of art historians, critics and other professionals from the tradition idea that artworks have intrinsic value and typical features that make them art, to the view that works become art on the basis of their position in the (historical) context", i.e. position in the art world (Van Maanen 2009: 19). Danto's idea of an 'Art world' has since been replaced by the notion that "works can be identified as artworks because of their specific values and functions" (Van Maanen 2009: 9). This idea of value and function and the resulting 'art world' scheme can then, in theory, be applied to any art form.

GEORGE DICKIE - the institutional approach

While Danto was concerned primarily with what an artwork represents, George Dickie (b. 1926) is concerned with the "space between art and not-art" (Van Maanen 2009: 21). He explored this between 1964-1989 as institutional theory: "an attempt to sketch an account of the specific institutional structure within which works have their being" (Dickie 1984: 27). Dickie did not believe that what art works were 'about' determined their definition as an 'artwork'. And he believed that art could be defined by more than its intrinsic properties. He became determined to distinguish between 'art' (i.e. "this is art") and a 'work of art', or 'art work', and classifying the meaning of 'art work' became the entire basis of institutional theory.

The importance of 'artifactual' art was paramount for Dickie, defining an artwork to be the product of human activity, and generating this heavily used definition: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the art world) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation" (Dickie 1971: 101). Dickie considered that the art work, presence of an art world, and the general 'receiving' public all part of his institutional approach. This framework, and the rules for those occupying it, clarified the "significance of conventions in making the art world system operate" (Van Maanen 2009: 28). He was also one of the first to place the public within his system. Dickie acknowledged that his institutional approach does give room to theorize about what artworks do. Furthermore, his theory does not make suggestions about how art functions in society, nor how the art world produce art. What Dickie did, however, provide a theoretical definition of art that removed considerations of essence, value and function, separating the institutional and functional approaches.

MONROE BEARDSLEY- the essentialist

While Van Maanen only refers to Beardsley (1915-1985) in relation to the other theorists, I did want to add him to this list, briefly, because I feel that his philosophies on aesthetics are important to the development sociological art theory. His 1956 Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism is universally acknowledged by philosophers as one of the most important books in the 20th century addressing analytic aesthetics. Aesthetics focuses on literature, music and art, and Beardsley was quite interested in distinguishing between various forms an 'art work': an artifact, its production, a particular performance and a particular presentation (this perspective applies best to performing arts like dance, theater, and music). While he avoided defining art in Aesthetics, especially avoiding the term 'art work', in The Aesthetic Point of View, he said that art is “either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity” (1982: 299). Unlike Dickie, Beardsley was concerned more with what the arts do, not what they are: "there is a function that is essential to human culture (...) and that work of art fulfill, or at least aspire or purport to fulfill" (1976: 209). Beardsley was also one of the first to write against intentionalism; he did not believe that art was defined (or its aesthetic function was defined) by what an artist intended, nor did he believe that the artists intention is relevant to its interpretation.

HOWARD BECKER - the interactional approach

Sociologist Howard Becker (b. 1928) only addressed art in one book, Art Worlds (1982), and yet he has come to be viewed as a leading voice in the development of art sociology. It seems to me that Becker felt the institutional approaches of Dickie and Danto were 'first steps', from which he tried to expand and explain the 'art world' system using sociological analysis, rather than aesthetic theory, seeking a theorized system that answered questions 'who', 'what', 'how much' and 'how many'. He understood the art world to be a cooperation of participants, even if consensus amongst participants is impossible. Becker came from the 'Chicago School of Symbolic Interactionism', which was a school of social psychology that was concerned with how humans exist/struggle/react to the existing social structures in which they live. This thinking motivated Becker to look at the relationship between participants and the institutions of the art world.

By art world, Becker means "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joined knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for" (Becker 1982: X). This means, first, that there are multiple art worlds, depending on the 'kind of art work' produced therein. Becker established what he called collective activity, which drew together seven activities that Becker found necessary for making art: developing an idea, executing the idea, manufacturing the materials needed for execution, distributing, supporting activities, reception and response, and "creating and maintaining the rationale", of which there is no hierarchy (Van Maanen 2009: 35). Not only are artists not independent, but all participants are equally important for creating and sustaining the art world. Further, this means that artistic product is dependent on domains of distribution and reception: "artists make what distribution institutions can assimilate and what audiences appreciate" (Van Maanen 2009: 38). Becker proposes an economic model for the art world system:

(1) [E]ffective demand is generated by people who will spend money for art. (2) What they demand is what they have learned to enjoy and want, and that is a result of their education and experience. (3) Price varies with demand and quality. (4) The works the system handles are those it can distribute effectively enough to stay in operation. (5) Enough artistic will produce works the system can effectively distribute that it can continue to operate. (6) Artists whose work the distribution systems cannot or will not handle find other means of distribution; alternatively, their work achieves minimal or no distribution. (1982: 107)

While this seems very capitalist, very 'supply and demand', there is always the option for artists (true artists, according to Becker) to avoid this conventional system of distribution, either through self support, patronage, or a state subsidy (government support). The result, though, of being 'too' experimental/outside the norm, will be that the work will not be staged, published or exhibited (Van Maanen 2009: 40). And no matter what, Becker says, "artworks always bear the marks of the system which distributes them" (1982: 94). I, myself, wonder what this means for a field like contemporary music. While I do not believe in as cut and dry a system as Becker outlines, with only true artists breaking conventions but never being received, I wonder if its possible to quantify institutional effects on an artwork. There is a lot of new music, in Finland and in the US, which is created within the institution of academia, and it would be interesting to see if differences exist between 'academic' new music and independent new music (or if there is such thing as 'independent music'...).

While Becker provides a great deal more analytic tools than Dickie and Danto, without attempting inclusion of any sort of aesthetic theory, it proves impossible for him to explain further the who, what, why, etc., of art itself. He also cannot rectify his sense that artist have a higher place within the art world (importance, prestige, etc) within the system he has proposed. He also believes that true artists break conventions, which is not compatible in a system that excludes aesthetic value from the artistic world, and also one that views the art world as a fixed system within society (Van Maanen 2009: 42).

PAUL DIMAGGIO - new institutionalism

Paul DiMaggio (b. 1951) is categorized as a 'new institutionalist', because he, with Walter Powell, co wrote that "institutions begin as conventions, which, because they are based on coincidence of interest, are vulnerable to defection, renegotiation, and free riding" (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 24). Institutions have the power to form and sustain social relationships, but they also are subject to change with peoples' interests. DiMaggio is included here because he applied his new institutionalist theories to the art world, and in a quite analytic way. His well known study, "Why Do Some theatres Innovate More than Others. An Empirical Analysis" (Poetics 1985), co written with Kristen Stenberg, concluded that "artistic innovation depends on the behavior of formal organizations" and in order to "understand art, we must understand the dynamics of such organizations and the principals that govern their relationship to their economic and social environment" (1985: 121). DiMaggio and Stenberg thought that too often artists are viewed as the sole innovators, when really, the institutions/fields/organizations within which they work control, to a greater extent, the level of innovativeness. This notion is especially relevant to my research, in particular the orchestra reports, which reveal trends of orchestral programming and show the amount of contemporary music orchestras play (which is often considered a benchmark for innovation).

The second important point of the 1985 study was the move away from Max Weber's "Iron Cage" metaphor (humanity is imprisoned in an iron cage of bureaucracy and rational order) and to the view that bureaucracy and rational order are actually the result of 'organizational fields' (formerly identified as institutions). Unlike Becker, who was concerned with interactions between the people in a given 'field', DiMaggio and Stenberg examined the field as a whole and how the field acted upon its members. They did, however, use more traditional institutionalizing methods to define their fields, with a process of four steps based on DiMaggio, 1983: 1) "an increase in the extent of interaction among organizations", 2) "The emergence of inter organizational structures of domination and patterns of coalition", 3) "An increase in the information load with which organizations in a field must contend", and 4) "the development of mutual awareness among participants in a set of organizations that they are involved in a common enterprise" (Van Maanen 2009: 47). These steps will be useful in comparison to Bourdieu's steps below. Further, DiMaggio and Powell identified twelve factors that determine the processes within and structure of a field, two of which are particularly important for art study (1983: 76-77):

The greater the extent to which an organizational field is dependent upon a single (or several similar) source(s) of support for vital resources, the higher the level of isomorphism.

The greater the extent to which organizations in a field transact with agencies of the state, the greater the extent of isomorphism in the field as a whole.

This can be applied to a contemporary music study, not only to use the 4-step processes to determine the relationship between the contemporary music and classical music fields, but also how financial support sources, and whether they are through state agencies, shape the structure of the contemporary music field, and similarities between different contemporary music fields.

PIERRE BOURDIEU - field theory

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most well-known and influential art sociologist of the late twentieth century and his work focused predominantly on the dynamics of power within a society, particularly on cultural, social and symbolic forms of power. For the purposes of his study, Van Maanen focuses on Bourdieu's development of field theory, which was in many ways a direct rebuttal to Howard Becker's 'art world'. Rather than understanding works of art as the result of all the interacting activities of an 'art world', Bourdieu tried "to build a theoretical construct of concepts through which the working of a field can be analyzed" (Van Maanen 2009: 55). His result was -

An artistic field is a structure of relations between positions, which, with the help of several forms of capital, on the one hand, and based on joint illusio and their own doxa, on the other, struggle for specific symbolic capital (prestige). The positions are occupied by agents, who take these positions on the basis of their habitus. (Van Maanen 2009: 55)

To explain further, Bourdieu's position is one that is tied to the type of art produced, or artistic genre. These genres can be quite specific (21st century American musical theater or 1960s krautrock), or more general. There is also a presumed hierarchy between agents in a given field, and even between the positions themselves within the field, as determined by the division of capital. Like DiMaggio, Bourdieu establishes a set of 'laws', four defining how fields function and three which address how a field can be identified (Van Maanen 2009: 61-62):

Newcomers have to buy a right of admittance in the form of recognition of the value of the game and in the form of knowledge of the working principles of it.

One of the factors that protect a game from a total revolution, is the very investment in time and effort necessary to enter the game.

This lists bears resemblance to both the work of DiMaggio and Danto. The identification qualifications are surprisingly specific, and I wonder how they might be applied to contemporary music study. First, how can contemporary music be subdivided into subfields, for comparison sake. Can they be divided geographically, for instance a Finnish contemporary music field and an American music contemporary field? A Finnish contemporary music field would probably be possible, with this criteria, but I think an American contemporary music field would be much more difficult to identify and define.

Bourdieu also discusses cultural capital, derived strongly from Marx's theory of value, as a value that is the result of accumulated labor, no different than economic and social capital. Symbolic in nature, both social and cultural capital can only function if they are not explicitly recognized as capital (the way economic capital is). For cultural capital, this means it exists "as a form of knowledge that equips the social gent with appreciation for or competence in deciphering cultural relations and artefacts", and it is symbolic because the act of acquiring it is mostly invisible (Van Maanen 2009: 59). According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can be turned into material objects, which can then be transferred as economic goods (i.e., a painting), but this is only part of 'the story'. Cultural capital exists in three forms, embodied/incorporated (cultural knowledge acquired by the agent), objectified (material goods), or institutionalized. In this third form, cultural capital is confirmed by some sort of institution (university, government, artistic organization, etc), meaning that a persons cultural capital is both confirmed officially, regardless of a persons embodiment of cultural capital at any given moment, and also the official certification carries with it an economic value, guaranteeing perhaps a higher paid position within the field. Bourdieu says that these states of cultural capital, in conjunction with social capital, create hierarchy and competition between artists within an artistic field.

In The Rules of Art (1996), Bourdieu discusses at length the relationships between different fields and different types of capital. Lack of economic capital with more cultural capital results with in more autonomy (for example, small scale production and avant-garde art forms), while economic capital without (or with less) cultural capital creates the more heteronomous art (like musicals and Hollywood cinema). Van Maanen argues that aspects of Bourdieu's model do not necessarily hold for all art fields across all periods of time. For instance, the state has played an increasing role in providing economic support that is separate from Bourdieu/Marxist capitalist economic capital. And it is possible for autonomous art fields to attract economic capital (though no example is provided). What came to my mind is that most artistic production is quite economically demanding, therefore there must be some (likely more than some) economic capital present to produce art, especially avant-garde art. It would be interesting to try and apply Bourdieu's field theory and make an actual field map for aspects of my project, like American academic contemporary art, or Finnish contemporary music 1975-1990. While his writings do not define art aesthetically, and come off quite cynically, his analysis of cultural capital especially in relation to economic and political fields warrant further discussion (in another post...).

https://www.lucyabrams.net/news/2018/5/28/an-introduction-to-sociological-art-theory

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jonhoel · 4 years

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Barthes and the semiology of Poujadism

Pierre Poujade was elevated from human-interest piece to political celebrity in the 1950s. His influence was widespread in France, but in greater Europe and the United States as well. He appeared on the front cover of TIME magazine in March of 1956, painted by Boris Artzybasheff, and situated among the likes of Khruschev and Eisenhower. Given the still reigning popularity of then-French President Charles de Gaulle, a beloved war hero and conservative nationalist, the choice to feature Poujade upon the glossy New York magazine, speaks to his reach at the time. Poujade went from being an unremarked bookstore owner to leading his own political body Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans that went on to successfully secure positions of political power in the elections of 1956. However, Poujade and his movement are emblematic of the false consciousness of such movements, of what Susan Sontag often called “received ideas”—the mentality of the petit bourgeois. In this post I examine the breadth of Poujade’s populist movement, its decline and foreseen reemergence. I incorporate Roland Barthes’ criticisms and considerations of myth on the right and apply that lens to the Poujadists. While Poujade himself has been dead for more than fifteen years, his legacy persists in an era of political unrest in France. I argue the Barthes’ mythologized Poujade is still alive and well, embodied within surviving right-wing populist ideologues like Poujade’s prodigy Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen.

Poujade, in his first autobiography, Vous L’Avait Dit, describes the Poudjadist movement with a prime objective standard for far-right populist endeavors, and one not far from that of Minister Farrakhan: do-for-self. Poudjadism’s doctrine focuses on perspective, targeting the working-class: “not the ‘man’ of the philosophers, but living men; not an abstraction of men, but men who are quite real” (3). Poudjade asserts that the needs of the individual have been so co-opted by liberal rhetoric that to advocate for individualism is a positively revolutionary idea. (3).

Barthes, as both a public intellectual and an individual is a staunch opponent of Poujadism on principle. He designs two separate arguments against Poujadism in his assessment of the movement. His first analysis focuses on how the media operates to disseminate particular connotative ethics, classificatory indexes, and shades of representation. Together they constitute the dominant subclass of a culture, through an elucidation of ideology with a Gramscian slant. Dominant social forces always strive to frame other cultures and perspectives within their own horizons of thought. Thus, Barthes concludes, in the face of both residual and embryonic forms of dissent and disaffection, hegemony becomes actively secure. It is in this framework that movements like Poudjadism perform ideological labor through media in the selective construction of the cultural lexicon (the mythologies that Barthes’ anatomizes). Barthes’ second analysis focuses on Poujade’s staunch anti-intellectualist stance, and he dismantles the way Poujade defines and utilizes ‘the intellectual’ as a mythic being. Barthes concludes Poujade’s vision of society cannot do without ‘the intellectual’ because the intellectual embodies an unavoidable necessity in the formula that society must adhere to in the proposals Poujade himself puts forth (214-215).

In the first of his two essays on Poujade, Barthes focuses on the clichés and language of the man, how his speeches and writing reveals its projected intentions:

**Poujade’s language shows, once more, that the whole petit bourgeois mythology implies the refusal of alterity, the negation of the different, the happiness of identity, and the exaltation of the similar. In general, this equational reduction of the world prepares an expansionist phase in which the “identity” of human phenomena quickly establishes a “nature” and thereupon a “universality.” Monsieur Poujade is not yet at the point of defining common sense as the general philosophy of humanity; it is still, in his eyes, a class virtue, already given, it is true, as a universal reinvigorant. And this is precisely what is sinister in Poujadism: that it has laid claim from the start to a mythological truth and posited culture as a disease, which is the specific symptom of all fascisms (94-95). **

The steps from Poujadism to fascism are not difficult to conjure in one’s mind. There is no inherent value in the dialogized cult-of-the-self that spans from Poujade to Le Pen and Trump—and there is certainly no meaningful culture without collectivity, without communal altruism. The danger of this Randian radical individualism Poujade posits comes from its abandonment of history through the radicalized mythologizing of itself: the individualizing of history. From Marx we learn that ideology “boils down to either an erroneous conception of history or to a complete abstraction from it” (German Ideology) and Barthes agrees with Marx(1), as his myth semiology confirms. “Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. […] We can see all the disturbing things, which this felicitous figure removes from sight: both determinism and freedom. […] This miraculous evaporation of history is another form of a concept common to most bourgeois myths: the irresponsibility of man” (264-265).

Poujadism’s ahistorical conceptualizing of the “common man” is an extremely self conscious conception—the man propelled himself from a small-business owner to a self-aggrandized politician in an exponential time period. Barthes analogies Poujade’s intellect as a weight system, whereupon Poujade and his conception of the common man has a weight, the ‘normal’ intellect a person ought to have, is compared to that of the intellectual, which Poujade often sees as a polytechnican or professor, whose intellect is excessive and wasteful by comparison (208). Barthes suggests that the primary tenet of Poujadism is “That no one look at us” (212), a tenet that he suggests in relation to the resentment of the intellectual’s habits of observation, leading to the self-consciousness from the working man.

Barthes’ condemnation of Poujade—mostly in his second of the two essays on Poujade in Mythologies—highlights Poujade’s anti-intellectualism feels inconsequential as an argument. His objections and arguments of Poujade are more effective when they directly attack his language, a language Barthes decrees as objectionable, participating in a loathsome petit bourgeois mythology (94). This is the petit bourgeois mythology that Barthes expands upon heavily in “Myth on the Right,” the penultimate section of “Myth Today.” Barthes recognizes the Bourgeois ideology of the right that constructs and manipulates socio-historic objects into hegemonic devices. The project of this mythologizing seems to be essentiality, a scaling of essences. He continuously refers to this as the ‘bourgeois psuedophysis’, an “insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them, one day at a time” (270-271). This is a mythology far afield from the one Barthes declares, “Hides nothing,” earlier on in the essay (120). Barthes is frequently making the argument against submerged or latent meaning. Barthes’ mythologies demonstrate an aim of the structuralist mechanism: structuralism demonstrates how meaning is not a designation of the sign itself, but that the meaning comes from the sign’s difference from the other signs.

We can read Barthes’ mythologized depiction of Poujade with the descriptions Barthes’ gives us in “Myth on the Right,” applications of its insidious legacies. Poujadism takes on mythological proportions as a joint out of time, “infinity, like every negativity, which solicits myth infinitely” (262). Stuart Hall writes of Barthes’ semiology, in conversation with Levi-Strauss, and the dialogue between a sociolinguistic signification and its ideology:

[It is] from linguistics rather than from anthropology that Barthes derived the impetus for his work in semiology. […] Unlike Levi-Strauss, Barthes retained the concept of “ideology” as distinct from the general concept of culture, but it was the latter which constituted the proper object of “the science of signs.” Ideologies were only the particular (uses) of particular signification systems in a culture, which the dominant classes appropriated for the perpetuation of their dominance. […] Barthes’ contribution on “Myth Today”—despite its tentative nature—remains one of the few seminal treatments of the relationship between signification and ideology in what might be called the first phase of semiotics. Lacan made the break with the first phase of semiology and with its directly Levi-Straussean impetus (134-135).

Barthes’ semiology comes from Saussure, not from Levi-Strauss, who, unlike Barthes and Saussure, takes after Freud with his structuralism—although according to Hall, Levi-Strauss’ consideration of plotting the indices of cultural was central for Barthes elsewhere (140). With Barthes’ lens of that dialectic of signification and ideology, we can begin to underline the legacy of Poujade and how his rhetoric has remained effective for far-right ideologues.

In modern French politics, the Socialist Party members, and even the centrist La République En Marche Party members commonly use the phrase Poujadisme as a pejorative characterization for ideologies that embellish radical anti-establishment themes. This newer ideological sense of _Poujadisme _is one that antagonizes identity-focused liberal or leftist French political systems even when the anti-tax or anti-intellectual aspects of the original Poujadist rhetoric are absent. This is the mythologizing effect of sociolinguistic trends over time. Whereupon any organized argument is disregarded and what remains is the essence of the thing, the epistemic violence of Imperial nationalism at work. Even after the late 1960s, when Poujadism as a movement declined in both electoral strength and general membership, the enduring Poujadists saw themselves (according to Sean Fitzgerald) as an enduring force, biding their time to strike when anti-modernist rhetoric peaked in the public discourse again (190). Poujade himself, before his death, attempted to distance himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen, but Le Pen was irrevocably linked to Poujadism, having won a seat in the National Assembly in 1956 a time when Poujadism was in its prime, and Le Pen a proud advocate. If anything, the subsequent rise of Marine Le Pen and The National Front to significant political control confirms that the prospect of a Neo-Poujadist comeback is ever imminent, compounded in the disillusionment with La République leadership that will only continue to strengthen the populist arguments of the far-right in France.

(1)_ The departure here of Barthes from Marx and Engels here is that Barthes’ myth is itself an ideology particular only to the petit bourgeois. Myth is the operation of ideology relevant to the variety of culture that Barthes is interested in excoriating as his subject. The inversion he suggests is one where the petit bourgeois comes to be a synecdoche of culture—the French petit bourgeois for Barthes, the key demographic for controlling the country. This is why he is so apprehensive about Poujade, as a symbolic petit bourgeois populist.

Bibliography

Artzybasheff, Boris. Cover image, painted. TIME Magazine, Vol. LXVII No. 12. March 19,1956.

Barthes, Roland._ Mythologies_. Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013.

Fitzgerald, Sean. “The Anti-Modern Rhetoric of Le Mouvement Poujade.”_ The Review of _Politics, vol. 32, no. 2, 1970, pp. 167–190.

Hall, Stuart. “The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge.”_ Essential _Essays: Foundations of Cultural Studies, Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 111–142.

Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” The Portable Karl Marx. Translated Eugene Kamenka, Penguin, 1985, pp. 171–183.

Poujade, Pierre. Vous l’avait dit! Fraternité Française, 1958.

Shields, James G. “An Enigma Still: Poujadism Fifty Years On.” French Politics,_ Culture & _Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 2004.

#barthes #roland barthes #semiology #french politics #stuart hall #cultural studies #poujade #poujadism #german ideology

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justine-alingalan-uts-blog · 4 years

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Philosophical perspective of self

The philosophical framework of self was first introduced in ancient Greece particularly Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It Intends to give a wider perspective in understanding the self. Different views from different philosophers both old and new regarding the nature of self are discussed. Although there are a lot of disagreements on how philosophers view the self, yet most of them have one goal in mind, which is self-knowledge will result to a happy and meaningful life. Socrates believes that the self is synonymous with the soul which leads to his philosophy which is “An unexamined life is not worth living”, According to him man must live an examined life and a life of purpose and value. He invented the Socratic method which is known as introspection which leads to carefully examining Ones thoughts and emotions to gain self-knowledge. Plato however believes that a person has an immortal soul which is divided into three parts: Reason which enables people to think and make wise choices, the physical appetite which indicates to Humans biological needs, and the spirit or passion which includes emotions. Aristotle Describes that the rational nature of self is to lead a good and fulfilling life. Augustine believes that that the body is united with the soul, Descartes suggests that the act of thinking about the self or being self-conscious is proof that there is self, Locke believes that our conscious is awareness which can earn from our past experiences, To David Hume Personal identity is the result of a persons imagination and by carefully examining his experiences through introspection, which according to him will result a person to discover that there is no self, Kant describes self as a constructor of its own reality creating a world that is predictable and familiar, Sigmund Freud states that the self has three layers the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious. Gilbert Ryle believes that the self is a pattern of behavior which makes a person behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. Paul Churchland advocates the idea of eliminative materialism or the idea that the self is inseparable from the brain and the physiology of the body, and lastly Merleau-Ponty all knowledge about the self is based on “phenomena” of experiences. These are the philosophical and non-philosophical frameworks of self which will surely help you if you are still questioning yourself.

Social perspective: the self as a product of society

Introduced by Charles Horton Cooley the looking-glass self describes the development of one’s self and identity through interactions with others, If a person interacts with himself or herself he or she will start to create what Charles is calling self-identity or self-image. In order to achieve this one must go through this threefold event which begins by conceiving an idea of how a person presents himself or herself to others, Next is through analyzing how others perceive him or her, A person can change for him or her to fully accept oneself. And lastly by conceiving and analyzing oneself a person can finally apply those positive traits he or she can the create an image that is more likely accepted by Him or Her, if the person is criticized or judged he or she will develop a negative self-image. Rather than being offended by the opinion of others we must accept criticism and use it to make ourselves a better person. The "I" self as subjective and the "me" self as Objective. the "I" represents a Person’s physical appearance and attributes, It's the first thing that you see in a person. His or Her gestures, looks and how he or she dresses. The "Me" self describes the true personality of a person, once both of you get to really know each other you both will show your true selves to one another which means that both of you trust each other and will not be ashamed of your true selves. Mead also has three stages the preparatory, play and game stage, this stages indicates the development of the self where in the game stage the self is present. According to Lanuza our self-identity continuously change due to the demands of social contexts, a great example of this are new information technologies and globalization, In Baudrillard however is focused on self-identity to achieve higher standards and goals, examples of this are multimedia fame whores who constantly seek attention and fame even if it cost it their dignity and pride.

The Anthropological conceptualization of the self as Embedded in culture

The Self can be recognized or be viewed in two ways: egocentric and sociocentric, egocentric self is focused mainly on our basic and personal needs. yourself is your main priority when it comes safety and other factors that can help yourself flourish, some call it being greedy but before anything else we humans are hardwired on focusing on our self rather than others when it comes to life or death situations. In the sociocentric self we focus more on the social aspects of ourselves. we move more socially and we tend to think about others rather than ourselves, an example of these are group works, since I'm a college student we are always tasked to create a group or be grouped by our teachers. since we work with one another our sociocentric self is being used rather than the other one for us to fully communicate and help one another within our group. One of the most common when it comes to our cultural self is our names, each of us are given unique and wonderful names. Some of us even have meaning embedded in our names, names give us our identities and it serves as our trademark and defines who we are. Its up to you to give meaning to your names since we can improve it through achievements, a lot of people have achieved lots of feats in the past few years or so an example of this are Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, both of these people work hard to achieve what we call today as innovations, by setting up a major goal we can also give meaning to our names and thus encouraging us to work hard for our dreams in life for the better future. Our culture made us who we are today we give meaning to our lives hence the self is embedded in culture.

Psychological perspective of the self

This chapter focuses more on what we see ourselves, we will start it all with William James concept of "I" and "Me" self. the I self or also known as thinking self reflects the persons true identity. It describes the persons characteristics and explains a lot about the person with his actions and speech. the Me self however is Different from the I self, It develops overtime due to experiences and is divided into three sub-categories the material, social and spiritual self. Being materialistic can change a person, it gives us inspiration to strive more and aim for greater heights, Society can also change a person since being social can improve your charisma and talking skills and finally the spiritual self can help us to be a great and overall good person and it requires introspection to fully acquire. In Carl Rogers theory about the real and ideal self, Humans have major standards for ourselves whether it is personal or private. The ideal self represents what you want to be and your major goal in life physical or mental the real self on the other is your current state and status. Both of these needs to be balanced in order for us to be happy and contented in our live because if both of these are imbalanced you might end up being sad and depressed. We also have multiple selves hidden within us. The purpose of this self-variations is to help us cope up with the certain demands and criteria that our environment needs, when being with a serious friend that does not like jokes and horsing around you must treat them the way they want to be treated by you, same goes to your fun and loud friends since they want you to join them in their daily crazy activities you might as well participate with the self that you created for this kind of relationship. Ourselves can be affected emotionally and mentally so we must strive to be happy and learn to know ourselves better

The Western and Eastern concept of self

Western self relies more on proof rather than beliefs and unproven theories, both analytic and individualistic western people give an edge compared to other races. They think for their actions and prioritize their selves before anything else. Compared to others westerns are monotheistic, they believe in only one God unlike others, people of this kind are also materialistic. They need material proof to be given if you want them to understand things that you want to explain, a great example of this are supernatural creatures and witchcraft. Compared to the concept of western self the eastern one is filled with wonder and beliefs, four of its major religions the Hinduisim, Taoisim, Buddhism and Confucianism have a lot of different gods compared to its western counterpart. Hinduisim is based on karma which is their most important doctrine, doing bad things will lead you to nasty situations and events that resolves the awful things that you have done while doing good will bless you with all things beautiful that you deserve for doing what is right. Buddhism as founded by Siddharta Gautama means “To be awake” everyone can be a buddha even You and I by following the four noble truths and by practicing the eightfold paths. Suffering can be managed and eliminated by buddhism, given the right path can help he person greatly in his or her life by awakening them to what is right. Confucianism is based on the golden rule which is “Do not do to others what you don’t want others do unto you” it helps you to act kindly to others since you are thinking of the cause that will be contributed by your actions. Following the golden rule will help you greatly in life, by following it you will live a better and peaceful life without someone hating you. And lastly is taoisim, it is defined by nature which is according to this religion is the foundation of all that exists, we are just following the natural order which indicates to yin and yang. Western concept of self relies more on reason and indiciduality while the eastern concept of self relies more on emotion and a lot of people are involved.

The physical self

The physical self refers our bodies Since it defines who we are. when Seeing someone for the first time humans are hardwired to judge people by their physical appearance since we cannot know other peoples personalities in first sight, one of the major factors that affects us are our environment and heredity, the environment changes us as we grow older, growing in an environment where nutrition is top most prioritized will end up to a healthy person compared to those who does not get a lot of nutrition when they are growing, comparing both of this the well fed ones will look greater compared to those who are not taken care properly. Our body type also plays a major factor in our physical self, like being fat or what we call endomorph will result to an easy going and sociable person while being muscular will result to an energetic and courageous person and slim persons ends up being artistic, quiet and restrained. Our body image also plays a vital role, what we people think about ourselves will greatly impact our mood and perceptions, if we accept our body image we will end up happy and content while if we hate our physical appearance we will end up hating ourselves and will always be discouraged. Beauty also play a major role in our physical selves it helps us to attract others and look appealing to them, beauty is one of the major issues in our society today. Because of social media beauty is given a lot more criteria to be filled like in order for you to be beautiful you must have fair skin and a perfect face and nose, since this beauty trend is getting a lot of high standards people resort to cosmetic surgeries in order to look beautiful. Our physical self is first viewed when meeting someone. We must take good care of it and must not abuse it for our undesirable purposes.

The sexual Self

Our sexual selves are differentiated by our sexual organs, Males having a penis vagina for Females. The purpose of the male reproductive system is to produce dna infused cells to the females thus making a new form of life, in order to do such a feat one must find a partner for life, this is where attraction tags along. All of us are attracted to someone of course and this is the first of these three steps, second is love. because When you love someone you open up your heart and accepts that person as your love one. The third one is attachment. Once you are attached to the person and both of your feelings are mutual you can then plan on getting together soon. There are two types sex characteristics, the primary and secondary. Primary sex characteristics are present at birth mainly our reproductive organs while secondary sex characteristics are preset at puberty, girls breasts and hips grow larger while boys voice deepen and hair starts growing at most parts of our body. Sexual orientation is also a thing, where we have homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality. Heterosexuals being attracted to the opposite sex heterosexuals to the same sex and bisexuals to both sexes. Phases of sexual responses are also present during sexual intercourse first the excitement phase where arousal and increase in blood pressure rises second is the plateau phase where the breathing becomes more rapid and a sudden increase in blood pressure increases a lot during this stage the third one is the orgasmic phase this is where pleasure is achieved and can happen multiple times. And finally comes the resolution phase where both the male and female reproductive organs return to their normal state. Since having sex is quite common when reaching sexual maturity stage sexually transmitted infections and disease are also lying around the corner, these includes HIV/AIDS, Genital herpes and Genital warts, in order to prevent sexually transmitted diseases from entering our body we must focus on one partner. RH law or also known as Reproductive health act of 2012 focuses on sexually related problems. Given by God to reproduce and fill this world we must learn to control and protect our sexual self in order for us to flourish and avoid major complications.

Material self

Possessions are one of the major pride and joy of a person, it represents wealth, hard-work and status. Not getting what we want will incourage us to work hard so we can obtain the things that we want. Once we achieved what we want we will still strive to acquire even more greater feats much grand than the last one that we have just accomplished. A persons material possession is the manifestation of ones identity through his material possession, its like a different part of yourself that lives by gaining a lot more materials for your needs and bragging purposes. Mass media also influence young people to be materialistic. Great examples of this are new clothes and item trends that really catch the eye of modern teenagers, since adolescents worry about their bodies and physical appearance they tend to buy things that will make them look cool and awesome. One of the greatest example of this are clothes. Since we believe in the saying “dress to impress” we buy clothes just to impress others by how we dress. Pets are also included since it shows status, having an expensive breed of pets will surely make you famous since large amounts of money are used to buy such a thing. Materials also symbolizes the person owning it since it reflects to the persons dedication in life just to obtain a certain material. Consumerism is one of the greatest problem in our society, it makes a person buy more than what he or she needs even if its not necessary for them, this can cause dissatisfaction to a person since the state of needs and wants of a person tends to be endless, being a materialistic person can be good if we put it right. It can serve as a motivation for us to achieve such a goal that it will make us happy and content if we do. Yet we must not buy such extravagant things that we don’t need because it will be deemed useless and a waste of months hard work.

Spiritual self

When we talk about spirituality the first thing that will come to our mind are religions and having a good personality towards others. Taken from the Latin word spiritus meaning breath or life force spirituality can be defined as searching for the meaning and purpose of ones life. Since religion is one of spiritualities major contributor it helps us feel comfortable about ourselves since it includes prayer and forgiveness. It can be a source of hope love and affection. Linked through religion spirituality is a major contributor of ones kindness and goodness, since all of us search for meanings about our life spirituality will be there to guide us in a way of achieving what we want to learn about this mysterious and beautiful world of ours. Logotheraphy is linked to spirituality to explain our search for answers through suffering. Suffering can make a person feel down and depressed yet there are ways on finding meaning in our lives, first is by doing a deed, through achieving accomplishments we can see our use in this world were living it can be by helping your classmates with their school problems to bigger achievements like saving some from committing suicide. Second is to be loved, love is everything to this world once you experience love you will surely find meaning why you existed its to be loved and to love. And the final way is to suffer, there is a point in our lives that we suffer yet after the grueling pain there is always a rainbow in every rain, through dedication and not giving up we can overcome our own suffering and turn it into something more desirable. Animism also helps in spirituality. It is a belief that things and places are alive. Here in the Philippines we practice this kind of belief. We believed that supernatural creatures live on huge trees and we believe that places hold great secrets from their past. Spirituality overall gives us faith in finding the meaning of this so called life. It helps us accomplish good doings and helps us become a better person.

Political self

Politics start from us citizens, it starts as early as we are born. As a person we belong in a family and politics start from the family, we can compare the father as the president the mother as the vice president and the children as the citizen. Politics is made to make the world a better place and for us to have peaceful and well structured society, in order for that peace to be achieved we must need leaders that acquire power in order for all to follow the rules implemented by them. Politics is the central component of the self, you can help with politics all you want by joining student governments in your school and participating in voting for your leaders, According to the social learning theory, a person can acquire learning through observations, a great example of this is listening to the opinions of the people about the candidates for politics. By that way when you can vote you know who has more supporters and who is more deserving based on the work he had done his good deeds and all the capabilities that he can do once he acquires power. Mutual trust in the society must be achieved for politics to work, if everyone trusts the plans the politician are trying to provide then there will be no more problems acquiring the said plan. Any form of governance can be link to politics, examples of this are classroom officers. Five theories are present in the political self, first is social learning theory where a person can learn politics through observation, political socialization also helps with politics through barangay and schools, cognitive theory suggests the interpretation of the meaning of politics, symbolic interaction any symbols that represents politics can be used here and finally the theory of social participation where we participate in political events like voting. Politics means having the power to govern the only downfall of it is it can be abused rather than using it properly.

Digital self

The digital self is gained and shared through social interactions since technology is widely used in the world today, due to social media we start creating our own accounts so that we don’t get left behind. It’s the best place to share your achievements, likes and dislikes, important events in their lives and the places they have been through. Most of us love the feeling of being appreciated and liked by someone that’s why we post pictures on social media about ourselves or achievements so that we can be appreciated by our social media friends and followers, despite being loved by all there are still people who don’t like you, especially on youtube. You get hate comments every once in a while and sometimes it hurts but as time goes by you can start to accept your wrongs and try to improve them the second time. Digital technology is very important for us. Back in the old days when there is still no technologies you have to go places to find information like going to the library for your assignments, going to the theatre to buy tickets and going to resorts or beaches to reserve a cottage or hotel, after technology is added it makes a assignments a lot more easier, ticket buying and reservation are just one call away and you can browse for different beaches you can go to in order to save time and money. Even though it has a lot of positive contribution to our generation it still have a dark side. From black markets, cyberbullying and illegal sites these are just some of the bad sites when it comes to the internet. Although it has some good and bad contribution for us we must learn how to properly use it, since we know what is right and wrong and will make this world a better place.

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inside-aut-blog · 5 years

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Through the Learning Glass: Worldshaper

When you get right down to it, education’s really a pair of glasses. Not just any old pair, mind—your first pair. The ones you peer through when you first realize, my god, you can see the leaves on that tree, and, perhaps more importantly, when it hits you that everyone else has always been able to see them.

They press into the bridge of your nose as you stare, mentally recalibrating, because suddenly the world seems clearer in more ways than one—transformed, even. That feeling, green blur shifting to leaves, that recalibration, that sudden clarity where there was none—that’s the core of learning, the true value.

So educational experiences are glasses.

And each one is your very first pair, conceptually speaking. Each one is a lens, as it were, through which to view the world writ large; each grants you awareness of new details and concepts; and each serves as a catalyst for insights which bring more nuanced and clear understandings of the world, your community within it, and yourself.

After reading extensively about autism from autistic perspectives, for example, I found myself noticing autism-related things everywhere—among them, the prevalence of functioning labels in allistic, or non-autistic, discussions about autistic people. I’d been aware of the trend before, but with my blurry view had seen nothing wrong with it. After researching and strapping on my “autism glasses,” however, it became crystal clear, and I began to form connections between research and reality. The connection, in this case, allowed me to see that functioning labels are both inaccurate—autism is like a circular color spectrum, not a linear gradient from “tragic thing” to “basically normal”—and disrespectful—they are often used to dismiss autistic people’s voices on the grounds that they are either too low- or high-functioning to have an opinion.

On a broader level, I formed a connection between this inaccurate disrespect and the concept of ableism—and began to see, in this and many other ways, how ingrained it is in our society. I also came to understand that my previous perception of both it and disability had been fundamentally flawed—blurrier than a park in a snowstorm at ninety miles an hour—though it now seemed clear as day, my world transformed and its pervasive inequality laid at my feet.

In short, I developed a clearer, more nuanced understanding of both disability and its relation to society, and so my worldview shifted—explicitly because my increased awareness of recently-amassed facts caused me to see related concepts everywhere and interpret those with said facts in mind.

In this way, education gives people new frameworks which better enable them to understand the world around them by spotting patterns related to the education-subject and analyzing them on both narrow and broad conceptual levels.

Education doesn’t limit itself to only the world writ large, though; the frameworks it gives us are as applicable narrowly as they are widely, and can be used on smaller scales, to make further connections within, for example, one’s own community. These connections can be—and indeed often are—the same as the societal discoveries, but in miniature. When I looked at my personal community through my autism glasses, for example, I discovered ableism in places I’d never expected: my sister using the aforementioned functioning labels, my mother claiming that “everyone is a little autistic,” and my doctor supporting hate-group-disguised-as-charity Autism Speaks. Critical framework application revealed that each of these examples mapped onto ableist ideas in larger society; in this way, education enables one to see connections not only between what they have learned and their communities, but between said communities and the world.

Yet the new connections formed on this level need not be related to such overarching themes; they can occur on entirely new tracks, and are just as often based in individual details. Such was the case when I looked at other individuals through my autism glasses: I recognized echolalia in my younger sister—that being a fancy word for repeating things you’ve heard others say as a means of communicating, and often easier for autistics than creating novel sentences. Before I recognized it, I often found myself somewhat unsure how to figure out what my sister wanted. Afterward, though, it was easy to see that I just needed to take a more active role in the conversation, both to understand her and to give her new words to echo. In this way, I made a connection not only between the information I’d read about autism and my own autistic sibling, but between her experiences and my actions—specifically, the ways my actions could affect her experiences.

Thus, education as a framework enables people to form more nuanced understandings not only of the other people in their communities and said people’s relationships to the framework-subject, but also their own relationships to their communities and the ways in which they can interact with them.

This holds true regardless of the subject matter, because human nature demands that we apply new information to old, to compare and contrast, and above all to do so with the things which matter most to us.

Relatedly, and perhaps most importantly, the various frameworks education provides us with can be—and often are, consciously or otherwise—applied to ourselves. This is due to the aforementioned human tendency to personalize everything and interpret information through the doubled-up lenses of the framework in question plus our own experiences. Such application often results in new insights into ourselves, on a variety of levels ranging from minor to overwhelmingly significant.

For instance, while researching autism, I found myself applying the framework to my own life. In doing so, I discovered that autistic experiences—and indeed the official diagnostic criteria—mapped easily onto my own life, habits, and personality; among many other things, I discovered that I use echolalia like my sister, just in a more delayed fashion; that I favor repetition in all aspects of life; and that my social skills are learned. I discovered, in short, that I am autistic.

This discovery completely altered my self-perception and sense of identity as I went from a fuzzy sense that I was weird and somehow broken to the crisp realization that I am disabled, certainly, but need no fixing—am merely different, not less, as per the disability theory aspect of the framework. And so, as a direct result of my research, my sense of identity shifted utterly and for the better—perhaps in a more dramatic fashion than that of the average educational experience, but nonetheless in a manner exemplary of education’s potential to alter our understandings of ourselves.

This potential, it must be stressed, holds true even in more rigidly academic settings, as seen when history students grasp parallels between their own actions in the present day and others’ from decades past.

Education in all its forms and degrees of personal intensity, then, encourages us to examine ourselves as well as our various surroundings, resulting in insights which allow increased clarity, nuance, and connection to new concepts in our self-perception.

Said insights don’t end there, however—they often extend beyond ourselves and back to other perceptual shifts, to encompass our understandings of ourselves in relation to our communities and broader society.

For example, after I discovered that I am autistic, I proceeded to reexamine my interactions with others in this context. This reexamination revealed that my communication style is more different from most people’s than I’d realized, given my repetitive speech and difficulty saying what I mean; in this way, the educative framework allowed me to more accurately view myself in relation to others—and to accept this view as per the aforementioned disability framework. This combined realization and acceptance enabled me to discover how to better express myself in ways that are comfortable to me and understandable to others.

Thus education can influence interactions with one’s community, not just understanding of it and oneself. Likewise it can influence interactions with one’s world writ large by better illuminating one’s place within it—in my case, allowing myself to be visibly autistic in defiance of a primarily ableist society, but in other cases, of course, different interactions and roles.

In this way, education functions as a framework for understanding not just the world and not just ourselves, but our roles within it and the ways in which we interact with it.

Thus, in myriad ways, education serves as a framework, a positioner, and a pair of glasses to hold up to each subcategory of our personal universes and to the relationships between them, the better to understand them and their intricacies in ways we previously had not considered.

Education clarifies, it illuminates, it diversifies, and it does so with attention to the smallest detail, bringing our experience of life into a newer, sharper focus. And with every educational experience we have, we gain another framework, another pair of glasses, which we can consider separately or together, swapping frames and stacking them, continuously, to gain ever-more-nuanced understandings of our worlds and our lives and how they might relate.

This understanding, this nuance, this continual growth—it is, above all, why we should learn, why we must learn—because there is always more of it to be found, and it comprises, in essence, the true value of education: it is the eternal worldshaper.

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architectnews · 3 years

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Square Series #011 Apartment Project Tokyo

Square Series #011 Apartment Project, Tokyo Real Estate, Japan, Japanese Architecture, Accommodation Photos

Square Series #011 Apartment Project in Tokyo

6 Oct 2021

Design: Ryuichi Sasaki/Sasaki Architecture

Location: Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan

Square Series #011 Apartment Project

What were the key challenges? Some of the main key challenges of the Square Series #011 project were to create spatial sensations within the rooms, while limited to a small property.

This has been achieved by applying sliding doors as dividers of apartment rooms, resulting in widening the living room area and giving it a wider and spatial feeling. Similarly, in the smaller studios, a similar yet very different approach was taken. Instead of the sliding doors, the wall that separates the closet and the main room does not reach the ceiling — by being a self-supporting wall it gives a sensation of more space within the given size of the studio, which is less than 20m².

Key products used: One of the key products that have been used is reinforced concrete, the skeleton of the structure, holding it up and adorning the interior and exterior of the building with indenture openings design across its facade. In addition, some of the glass windows are framed by materials such as bronze-coloured stainless steel and cedar board forms — which assist in maintaining the square framework intended design, while also giving it an overall abstract composition.

How is the project unique? One of the unique features of this project is its overall balanced composition, connecting the rooms within the residential area by incorporation of a three-storey high enclosed atrium space between them as a divider of space. The uniqueness of it comes from the conceptual idea of the residents being aware and close to each other, while also maintaining their privacy, by the use of square-shaped opaque windows on the atrium’s walls facing each other.

Square Series #011 Apartment Project in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

Project size: 447 sqm Site size: 132 sqm Completion date: 2020 Building levels: 5

Building Name: Astile SINJUKU III Lead Architect: Ryuichi Sasaki/Sasaki Architecture Design Team: Gen Sakaguchi, Yuriko Ogura /Sasaki Architecture Client: Ascot Corp. Light Design: Natsuha Kameoka / Lighting Sou Contractor: Maeda Komuten Location: Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan Completion Date: November 2020 Building Purpose: Residential Housing

Photography: Nacasa & Partners

Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo Presidential Suite images / information received 050921 from DESIGNWILKES

Location: Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, eastern Asia

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House in Yamanashi Prefecture Design: Takeshi Hosaka architects photograph : Koji Fuji / Nacasa&Pertners Inc. House in Yamanashi

Slide House, Koto Ward Design: APOLLO Architects & Associates Co photography : Masao Nishikawa Slide House in Koto Ward

R・torso・C Residence Architects: Atelier TEKUTO photo : Jérémie Souteyrat、SOBAJIMA, Toshihiro R・torso・C Residence in Tokyo

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comrade-meow · 3 years

Link

The “world historical defeat” of the female sex continues apace.

Sex as fiction

Queer theory, however, rejects any understanding of human sex or gender that involves biological sciences. Our evolutionary history simply disappears in a puff of smoke:

The ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ argument has no basis, once examined in this light, and thus a central plank of queer theory falls easily.

Patriarchy

Combating oppression

This is what we are fighting. It is why we are fighting. We refuse to submit.

#Anglo.txt

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Margrit Shildrick, The Critical Turn in Feminist Bioethics: The Case of Heart Transplantation, 1 Int J Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 28 (2008)

Abstract

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an "authentic" representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context.

The critical turn in feminist bioethics

The question of what constitutes a specifically feminist bioethics is far from self-evident, and it is certain that no one definition could tie up all the avenues of approach that one could claim to be feminist. Indeed, broadly construed, one of the clearest signs of positive development within the field has been a growing recognition since the late 1980s—when the idea of a feminist bioethics was first mooted—that the requirement that such a bioethics should be exclusively about women's biomedical and health interests is an unnecessary restriction of potential areas of concern. Although there is every reason to continue to look in detail at such issues as access to and delivery of reproductive medicine, or the insufficiently recognized incidence of certain diseases, such as ischemic heart disease in the female as opposed to male body, other explorations that may not be directed to women, as such, are now seen as equally valid. Alongside the continuing stress on reproduction, new concerns with issues, such as aging or disability, have emerged in which the over-representation of women is often an artifact, but not a grounding condition. The power relations within the sphere of biomedicine remain deeply gendered, not simply on the material ground of differential bodies, but also with regard to the conceptual framework of bioethics itself, which dictates what is considered ethically adequate practice.

From its inception, feminist bioethics has challenged mainstream bioethical thought and practice, particularly its over-reliance on abstract principles that seem far removed from the material and often mundane context in which biomedical encounters take place. Nonetheless, consideration of such pragmatic matters as the requirement of consent to treatment, or the need for extended care, has raised theoretical concerns—with the meaning of autonomy or the nature of responsibility—that may take off from an analysis of the substantive inequities faced by women, but that have implications far beyond the gendered body. Given some real success in shaking up conventional bioethics, it is puzzling, then, that the feminist critique should not go further in embracing the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of our approach. Many of these resources have been productively developed by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. Where Gayatri Spivak or Liz Grosz or Judith Butler implicitly encourage us to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze, the outcome is not a turn back to the masculinist masters but a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an "authentic" representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. My turn to heart transplantation later in this paper intends to demonstrate such a move at work.

There are many reasons—which I have explored elsewhere (Shildrick 2005)—why the dominant discourse of feminist bioethics has remained largely uninterested in, or suspicious of, theoretical developments elsewhere, but the result is that our project can sometimes appear to lack ambition. When Hilde Lindemann Nelson surveyed our past and possible future trajectory in a highly perceptive critical essay, she noted that feminism "has the potential to enrich bioethical theory" (2000, 494), but went on to assert that in reality our extant contributions had done no such thing, precisely because "[t]he vast preponderance of feminist critique in bioethics has been directed at practices surrounding the care of women's bodies, and in particular the parts of women's bodies that mark them as different from men" (ibid.). Aside from the ethics of care—which despite its undoubted influence, has increasingly come under adverse scrutiny even within feminist bioethics (Sherwin 1992, Tong 1997, Bacchi and Beasley 2005)—Nelson was unable to identify any development that has made a fundamental difference to the way in which conventional bioethics is thought. Her own proposal—inspired by feminist epistemology—was a form of narrative bioethics. But that, too, simply disregards the bioethical work that leans heavily on postmodernism, as well as incorporating other earlier breaks with the philosophical mainstream that results in what I term postconventional theory. Although it is difficult to date the first feminist scholarship exploring the potential of postconventional thought in bioethics, texts have long been available without their significance being acknowledged. The bioethically inflected chapters by Diprose, and Vasseleu in Cartographies (1991) were coincident with what are now seen as the breakthrough works by Sherwin (1992) and Holmes and Purdy (1992) that offered a critical, yet fundamentally reformist approach to the liberal humanist nature of mainstream masculinist bioethics. Subsequent texts by Diprose (1994) and Shildrick (1997) develop a more fully considered post-conventional approach, and Komesaroff's postmodernist collection (1995) includes several feminists.

What is striking about the relatively isolated early dissenters from the emergent doxa of feminist bioethics is that the majority are Australian, who reflect an openness to non-mainstream perspectives—such as the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty—that was almost entirely absent from the equivalent Anglo-American context.1 The distinctive combination of developing body theory and an appreciation and utilization of recent continental theory is now more prevalent throughout Western perspectives but even in the avowedly postmodernist 2005 collection, Ethics of the Body (Shildrick and Mykitiuk), there is still a preponderance of Australasian scholarship.

What I am suggesting is that the dominant strand of feminist bioethics has been slow to take seriously any challenge to or critique of its own orthodoxy. The most significant move over the last decade has been a well-considered turn toward situating feminist bioethics in a global context (Salles and Bertomeu 2002; Tong et al. 2004), where the voices and specific concerns of non-western women are increasingly prominent; but that change represents more a broadening of the material contexts of bioethical thought than any openness to different conceptual systems. Anne Donchin's claim that "feminists have participated in scholarly discussion of virtually all the major topics in bioethics" (2004) may now well be true—although engagement with non-reproductive, high-tech medicine remains limited (Shildrick 2005). My concern, however, is not with topics at all; it is the apparent lack of theoretical enterprise that is worrying. As Donchin notes, most contemporary feminist bioethicists question the value of abstract universal norms, but there seems to be little follow-through on the implications or potential extensions of such a position. Despite briefly noting Mary Rawlinson's (2001) turn to continental feminism and the wider challenge to universality inherent in poststructuralist approaches, Donchin's article swiftly returns to more familiar ground where "a growing contingent" of feminists claim that bioethics should incorporate universalist principles, as long as they are non-exclusionary and relational, rather than individually based. It is not that I devalue that move—postmodernism is not a successor theory, and proponents should be comfortable with pluralistic approaches—but for all the refinement of existing concepts, nothing much appears to have changed. In particular, the concept of autonomy, which is central to liberal humanism in its masculinist formulations, gets kicked around a bit, only to reappear in revised forms that extend agency to previously oppressed groups—women, patients, global others—without any thoroughgoing inquiry into the efficacy of any formulation of autonomy as a privileged bioethical concept. I am not suggesting that Donchin has misrepresented the overall tenor of feminist bioethics; on the contrary she is always measured and observant, but that is precisely the problem; the more disruptive critique is left on the sidelines.

In contrast, I want feminist bioethics to show some concerted commitment to shaking up our most familiar and privileged concepts—autonomy, gender, consent, and the nature of embodiment—by availing itself of the resources of postconventional philosophy, of unapologetic postmodernism, of contemporary takes on the body, and of queer theory and cultural critique, to see if those perspectives might offer new ways forward. It is a risky strategy in which some pathways will be dead-ends, and others will lead to positions less inclusive and equitable than those we currently have. And as my own exploration of transplantation shows, it will be uncertain, slippery, and sometimes frustratingly immaterial at precisely the points where substantive concerns demand our attention. None of this should deter us, however, from the effort of rethinking what bioethics could be about. We are not obliged to abandon other more immediate responses to the situation at hand, such as those that Donchin (2004) outlines, but rather subject them to an unending critique that acknowledges their limitations and opens up alternative ways of proceeding. No one system can provide all, or perhaps any, of the answers, but—precisely for that reason—there is a responsibility to keep reviewing the options and to multiply the questions that must be asked. If bioethics is only about providing putative solutions, then postmodernism—in which uncertainty and provision are intrinsic elements—is unlikely to play any significant part. If, on the other hand, the project is to explore all the dimensions of both embodied well Being2 and the disruptions to that state, then the perspective has much to offer. What is called for is not a rigid set of women-friendly bioethical principles and rules to replace the masculinist options of the convention, but a flexibility and fluidity that is always open to the possibility of change. As body theory focuses increasingly on the fragility and vulnerability of embodiment, should we not be prepared to seek out theoretical approaches which reflect that model rather than the autonomous, invulnerable, sovereign subject assumed by traditional bioethics? Similarly, as high-tech biomedical science moves inexorably into realms—xeno-transplantation, cryo-genesis, advanced prostheses, genetic manipulation—that until recently were considered fictive, it is clear that the boundaries that have previously marked the predictability and uniformity of human form and function are ambiguous and unstable. The ethical implications of such developments are profound and are unlikely to be adequately resolved by recourse to a bioethical system grounded in modernist notions of the embodied subject. We must be both more adventurous and more modest.

If the drive for resolution and answers is not the only, or even the most appropriate, way forward, then how is feminist bioethics to proceed? Before outlining a provisional and exploratory application of a postmodernist approach to the substantive area of heart transplantation, I want to briefly revisit some contentious areas of critique. First, the illusion that postmodernism is unable to deliver ethical content, due to its acceptance of uncertainty, speaks to an expectation that ethics should resolve substantive dilemmas by fitting them into a limited range of templates that have settled in advance questions of right and wrong, good and bad, permissible and impermissible. For feminists, it is precisely this reliance on an abstract, universalist approach that has generated a distinctively different bioethics that stresses the specificity of every situation, in which notions such as "face-to-face care" take on ethical significance (Tronto 1993; Groenhout 2004), and the mutual striving for a relational ethics replaces the focus on the singular moral subject. It is somewhat strange, then, that the mainstream feminist turn to the interconnectedness of moral action has not more fully challenged the notion of clear and distinct pathways that the moral subject should follow. For postmodernists, in contrast, the very absence of laws, absolutes, and guiding rules and principles necessitates a high degree of personal responsibility in the face of the demand for response.3 Without any generic template for judgment, my ethical decisions must devolve, not on a care-free, "anything goes" approach, but on a profound engagement with the issues at hand. And given that multiple influences shape and reshape every situation, my provisional decision to act in this way, now, has no status beyond the immediate context, such that expectations of what can be achieved are transformed. In short—and this is a second point of contention—ethics is no longer coincident with morality, which I take to be the application of systematized rules and principles of conduct.

At the same time, the problematic is no longer centered on the disembodied singular subject, but on a flesh-and-blood context of multiple and differential actors that refuses to privilege rationality above all else. Instead, ethics, and by derivation I resituate bioethics in the same way, concerns itself with the unpredictable encounter or relation between one embodied subject and another where there is no clear distinction to be made between them. Again the feminist turn to relationality goes some way toward the more interwoven contextuality that I envisage as the basis of bioethics, but it fails to radically disengage from the image of the bounded liberal humanist subject, who acts, consents, and makes moral choices as an individual. Moreover, there is little or no sense in the dominant feminist version of the interconnectedness of subjects that extends to an appreciation of intercorporeality, still less concorporeality, or to a recognition that the boundaries of the human body are part of a cultural, and indeed, biomedical imaginary, not a representation of how things really are. It is surprising that the early Australian turn to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968)—which speaks of our being-in-the-world-with-others and of the "flesh" of the world as the medium in which self and other are mutually constituted—was not seen as a way of developing that intuition within the sphere of feminist bioethics more generally. The phenomenological approach is now more widely utilized, but other equally significant links between a theoretical take on intercorporeality and the mainstream feminist notion of relationality remain virtually unexplored. When Derrida speaks of the other within the same or of his concept of hospitality, or when Deleuze outlines his theory of rhizomatically linked assemblages, they seem to me to offer something valuable to our understanding of bioethics. It is not that they, or Merleau Ponty before them, would spell out the implications (although Derrida's work is always strongly inflected with an ethical dimension, and toward the end of his life, he begins to engage with recognizably bioethical issues), but that they provoke us to rethink what it means to be embodied and what that infers for the engagement of differential bodies.

For the most part, bioethics in both its traditional and feminist forms has centered itself in the arena of biomedicine and related bioscientific research. Such disciplinary boundaries are, however, merely conveniences that fail to give full expression to the range of concerns that might come under the rubric bioethics. Although in my own development of some of the possibilities outlined previously, I shall ground my observations on a strictly biomedical procedure—that of organ transplantation—I take it as axiomatic that bioethics is about the processes of life and the well-being of the living body, whether they are medicalized or not. To accept, as the postconventional canon demands, that the body is intrinsically vulnerable—that embodied vulnerability is indeed the condition of life—is to understand that the well-being associated with medically delivered and maintained health does not offer settled stability. Moreover, the traditional emphasis on the human body will no doubt continue, but that is not to say that concerns about and the interests of non-human organisms should be dismissed as irrelevant. Both environmental ethics and animal ethics are forms of bioethics, and in any case they often impinge on precisely the biomedical ethics that devolve on the human. In my own current research on organ transplantation, for example, the primary concern with human transplant recipients can scarcely avoid consideration of xeno-transplantation and all that that implies for both the humans and animals involved. Our encounters with human and non-human others and our interdependencies, as well as modes of exploitation, speak to the need to fully explore the ethics of all kinds of embodied relationality, whether already existing or newly materialized. A truly productive feminist bioethics will countenance, therefore, no rigidity about disciplinary boundaries.

Heart transplantation: A troubling (of the) subject

The turn now to the area of my major research, which focuses on the experiential dimensions of heart transplant recipients,4 is particularly apt because not only does it readily lend itself to an exploration of the significance of theoretical paradigms not usually associated with bioethical thought, but the very procedure itself is more or less coincident with, and may have mobilized, the emergence of the discipline of bioethics in the second half of the twentieth century (Belkin 2003). Although other forms of transplantation have a significantly longer history, the first heart graft was not successfully completed in human beings until 1967. Under the auspices of the now famous South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the proto-recipient, Louis Washkansky, survived his ordeal for a mere eighteen days before succumbing to the effects of pneumonia brought on by the immunosuppressant drugs taken to counter rejection of the alien tissue. That outcome could scarcely have been unforeseen as the auto-immune rejection process was and remains the major obstacle to post-transplant recovery, and the drug regimes that now effectively stave it off—but never remove the threat—were not fully developed at the time. Nonetheless, the continuation of Washkansky's life during his final days was hailed as a major breakthrough that was widely publicized throughout the world, unconstrained it seems by publicly voiced questions of ethics.5 The requirement of confidentiality that plays so large a part in most biomedical procedures today and is central to the management of transplant cases, was simply not in play. Both the recipient and the transplant team were photographed, televised, and interviewed, and the name, biographical details, and pictures of the deceased donor were made available. In retrospect, it is quite clear that for all the hype, Washkansky could not have survived for long and that the transplant was of little or no therapeutic benefit to the patient himself. At best he was a willing research subject, though it is unclear from the material available today to what extent he understood himself as such.6 The whole episode bears a weighty resemblance to the world's first successful face transplant in France in 2005. Again, the media hype was extensive and highly obtrusive, centering on the named recipient of the transplant, her reasons for needing one, and avid speculation as to her state of mind both prior to and after the procedure. And as in the South African case, the attendant physicians were widely interviewed and quoted, not simply on the strictly medical aspects of the case, but on the character of the recipient. Given the present day context, one imagines that the woman had waived confidentiality but at the very least, it raises serious questions as to the status of consent in such a scenario.

For bioethicists, working at the most basic level of what constitutes their parameters of concern, both examples are replete with worrisome issues concerning not just confidentiality and consent, but also the status of research subjects, the allocation of scarce resources, the power of medical professionals, and perhaps, the right to extraordinary treatment. In addition, there are questions about what limits, if any, should be set on the use of cadaveric material and the problematic matter of how to determine the moment of death in the case of the donor.7

Each of these issues could and should be debated, and the capacity of conventional bioethics to facilitate such deliberation is both effective and necessary, as well as increasingly sophisticated. Although considered ethical reflection on the heart graft case was relatively muted—overwhelmed perhaps by the media's insistence of an heroic triumph over nature—with regard to the face transplant, there already has been considerable bioethical commentary.8 And there is work, too, for mainstream feminist bioethicists, concerned with the gendered allocation of resources and the gendered dimensions of recipient suitability.9 It is at present too early to know if there will be persistent gender elements in the face transplant procedure, which, though contentious, looks set to become a regular biomedical practice. It is irrefutably the case, however, that heart transplantation is heavily skewed toward male recipients. Heart disease in general has an extensive history of being considered an almost exclusively men's issue—despite plentiful evidence that women also are at significant risk—and the emergence of transplantation as a treatment option has largely perpetuated that gender imbalance.10

What is notable about all these various ways of grounding bioethical inquiry and analysis is that each of them could be pitched in a fairly detached and abstract way that cites precedents, applies the principles and rules, calculates the numbers, and arrives finally at some determination of the rightness or wrongness of the given procedure. In contrast, what I want to look at is far more nebulous in terms of what can be grasped and secured in the interests of bioethical knowledge, but which at the same time expresses something about the substantive and material nature of embodied lives. In short, what interests me in my research in the field of heart transplantation, are the deep-seated anxieties about what constitutes life or death and about the integrity of embodiment.

I shall not pursue here the complexity of that first question, except to note that it is the critique borrowed from poststructuralism that allows us to approach the ambiguity of the life/death distinction as yet another binary that fails to set out incontrovertible boundaries. It was not until several months after the initial surge of heart transplants, following Barnard's pioneering effort, that the notion of brain-stem—as opposed to cardiac—death was developed to move back the point at which a dying patient could become a cadaveric donor. The new definition, however, has failed to satisfy the demand for certainty, not least because although the donor may be declared dead, his or her organs are clearly still alive and functioning at the cellular level. Many biomedical professionals remain deeply un-settled by the lack of an absolute distinction, and the issue is one of the most debated in bioethical journals.11 The boundaries have always been somewhat slippery and if recent reports are credible, another disturbing development lies ahead with some transplant professionals calling for a return to the concept of cardiac death to facilitate the provision of viable transplant organs. At the same time, the usual procedure in which the donor heart is temporarily stopped for removal and transport, may well be superseded by the so-called beating heart transfer, which again maximizes the chances of a successful transplant. Clearly the technical capacities of biomedicine, both to putatively prolong life by keeping a potential donor breathing by artificial means and to maintain in the interim the dynamism of an individual organ outside of the body, raise significant questions about the nature of human life. That, however, is not often the center of debate. In view of the unease generated by transplant practices, both clinicians and the lay public turn to bioethicists for answers, almost as though a convincing rationale for nominating this, rather than that, moment as the point at which the impermissible becomes permissible would settle more profound uncertainties. In other words, bioethicists are asked to establish a binary system of right and wrong, as though a clear distinction between life and death were still possible.12

The alternative that postmodernists would favor is to start precisely from the point of acceptance of uncertainty, and then to explore what might constitute an ethical negotiation of the relation between the no longer "living" donor and the potentially recoverable would-be recipient. Moreover, the Western predisposition to value life as something held by individuals, which is extinguished at their own deaths, might be rethought in terms of Deleuze's philosophy of becoming other/ imperceptible (1987), which opens up the idea of zoe13 as a non-personal vitalist force that exceeds the unique interests of each individual (Braidotti 2006). As such the affirmation and generative power of life rests on connection and sustainability. And as Braidotti understands it, "[ethics] is a mode of actualizing sustainable forms of transformation. This requires adequate assemblages or interaction: one has to pursue or actively create the kind of encounters that are likely to favour an increase in active becomings" (2006, 217). Both Deleuze and Braidotti are clear that such an approach is apposite for a highly technologized society, and I would go on to suggest that it may be particularly appropriate for a rethinking of such issues as cadaveric organ donation.

The same kind of radical shift to new modes of understanding is equally important in the ethical exploration of the other major issue I have raised: the question of the integrity of embodiment. Within the post-Cartesian Western system in which the sovereign subject is the center of ontological and epistemological perception, the body, insofar as it is acknowledged at all, is seen as unique and inalienable property. Its bounded integrity and self-completion is largely taken for granted and only disrupted in cases where there has been some clear breakdown, as in disability or ill health. Although it would now be unusual to find any adherence to the rigid separation of mind and body, and particularly within feminist theory, which has long insisted on the materiality of embodiment, there remains a strong disinclination to recognize that all forms of embodiment are inherently vulnerable and open to their others. As I discussed previously, mainstream feminist bioethics has a clear commitment to relationality, but that does not necessarily translate into challenging the propriety of individual bodies. Issues such as organ transplantation, then, are difficult to conceptualize outside of conventional paradigms that either insist that the transferred organ is no more than a spare body part or enter into the rhetoric of "the gift of life," which is the term widely used in donor scenarios to signal the altruistic nature of the process.

The project in which I am involved seeks to problematize both of these models by working through a quasi-phenomenological approach that stresses the interconnections of embodied subjects and their mutual constructedness. Above all, it dispenses with the notion of a core self that persists unchanged over the period of transplantation (effectively a life-long process) and instead investigates the strategies by which the "I" of each recipient both denies and accepts changes to an embodied sense of self. For many, who might be characterized as adhering to a machine model of the body, the operation, although relatively risky, is a time-limited experience from which they expect to eventually resume life more or less unchanged. The practical realities make that unlikely, but such recipients—who understand the transplantation process as having no implications for personal identity, but simply as the exchange of a faulty organ for a more competent replacement—are perceived in clinical terms to have good rates of recovery. The difficulty—and so far this remains untested—is that anecdotal evidence would indicate some possibly existential crisis that has secondary effects for the continuing progress of a recipient's health. In other words, those who start out well, fulfilling all the biomedical markers of recuperation, may unexpectedly deteriorate, and most will show signs of psychological disturbance (Dew and DiMartini 2005).

The attempt to understand what is going on for such recipients is guided by two intuitions—derived originally from Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968)—that changes to the form of the body inevitably transform the self, and that self and other are in a chiasmatic relationship. And as Merleau-Ponty insists: "the world of each opens upon that of the other" (1968, 141). For people who have received the heart of another, the machine model of the body may provide temporary relief from vexing questions provoked by the breach of bodily integrity and by the incorporation of alien material that can be tolerated only by a life-long regime of immunosuppressants. Whether, as feminist phenomenologists might anticipate, such a self-given model is more characteristic of male than female recipients, has yet to be ascertained, but whatever the gender dimensions, signs of anxiety may break through in the inconsistent use of possessive pronouns. All recipients are encouraged to think of the graft as their own organ—"my" heart—but most remain aware of the claim on ownership due to the donor. Indeed, it could scarcely be otherwise as the insistent discourse of "the gift of life" makes clear.

Before turning to that problem, however, let me consider how a different understanding of the ethical relation between self and other might better prepare potential recipients for their operations. The starting point must be to acknowledge that however much a recipient may wish to assert that the graft is now her own, the reality is that her body now hosts alien DNA that will never lose the specificity of its otherness, and that will be the proximate cause of an unremitting bodily response to reject the transplant organ. Responses from the pilot study of the PITH (Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart) project indicate that very few recipients have grasped that scenario or have been given adequate information about it.14 In short, they are implicitly encouraged to see the process as one of a medically complex transfer, but without implications for what constitutes their self-identity. The ontology, however, is quite different: the other is both integrated within—and indeed essential to—the life of the self, while remaining irreducible to that self. The embodied self is, then, inevitably transformed, not perhaps in any externally dramatic way, but more clearly in the modes by which recipients reflect on their own being.

The many anecdotal accounts of recovering transplant recipients who express feelings of strangeness, which they may attribute to the differential tastes and values of their donors, should not be too easily dismissed.15 The point is not to pin down the truth or falsity of such unsettling intuitions, but to understand their significance to those who narrate them. The PITH pilot uncovered few florid examples of such experiences, but it became increasingly apparent that the majority of the research study group was heavily invested in popular literature and cinematic representations of such phenomena. Not surprisingly, the response in the clinic to the question, "How do you feel?", rarely elicited much beyond the anticipated listing of biomedical symptoms, but for the study respondents, along with non-clinicians, other more affective anxieties rapidly emerged. With more time allocated in the future project to each individual, it seems likely that such anxieties will be amplified. The pertinent question for bioethicists is surely, how should those effects be acknowledged and addressed? Given an existing indication that it is the emergence of unsettling ontological issues that may displace an initial conformity to the machine model understanding of the body and cause clinical problems as a result (depressed patients are, for example, less drug compliant), there are proximate reasons for taking the task seriously. At present, recipients are well aware that what is expected of them does not include reflection on problems of personal identity and accordingly, although many enter into informal exchanges of interests with others like them, they have no structured support for what may be disturbing thoughts. On a very basic level, one might question to what extent consent for a heart transplant has been fully informed if potential recipients are given no indication of the distressing ontological aspects that may lie ahead. Nothing in the extensive explanatory manual given to each pre-op patient makes any mention of psychic changes, though we may assume that no one comes to the clinic unaware of the pertinent stories circulating in the wider socio-cultural context. My own approach, however, is more concerned, not with satisfying the criteria for consent, but with opening up a new understanding of what it means to incorporate the heart of another. Would it not benefit intending recipients and, indeed, the transplant professionals themselves, if the intimations of otherness within were openly accepted and integrated into a model of embodiment that already stressed intercorporeality and the mutual construction and dependency of self and other? Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is one good starting point that can be developed to more fully account for the visceral aspects of organ transplantation. There is no reason to suppose that intercorporeal "effects" should end at the skin, and the examples of pregnancy (Young 1984) or conjoined twins (Shildrick 2002) already provide productive ground for thinking about the incorporation of self and other in a single body.

The gift of life

The aptness of a phenomenological approach is already making headway in bioethics as a rich resource that finds resonance with earlier strands of feminist thought. My further suggestion for exploring the complexities of organ transplantation is somewhat more surprising and may appear initially to take a step away from the appreciation of differential embodiment—which I believe is crucial for bioethical thought—toward greater abstraction. My turn to Derrida, however, will swiftly return to the substantive experience of incorporating a donor heart. Within the discourse of transplantation, the rhetoric of the gift, or more pointedly "the gift of life," is deeply entrenched. It signals that the transfer is an altruistic act on the part of the donor or her proxy, and in the case of deceased donors, an act that most clearly has no expectation of return. In reality, as anthropologists and philosophers alike have made clear, the gift has no such simplicity. Where Mauss (1990 [1950]) sees it as in effect the occasion of continuing obligation in the structural relation between self and other, others have attempted to reconfigure its significance (Derrida 1992, Diprose 2002, and Wyschogrod et al. 2002). The gift of a heart may well fit Mauss's observation that "to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul" (1990, 12), but that alone—while it chimes with recipient experiences of otherness—does not ease the recipient's sense of internal alienation. In contrast to Mauss, both Derrida and Diprose reject the notion of the sovereign self, whose singular identity and integrity is compromised by acceptance of the gift unless remitted by reciprocity, and set out an openness to the other that is not reliant on exchange. Diprose's development (2002) of the idea of corporeal generosity—where the very materiality of giving is excessive to the notion of the bounded body—is mobilized precisely by the event of difference, which must be both preserved and responded to. As she puts it: "intercorporeal generosity maintains alterity and ambiguity in the possibilities it opens . . . generosity is only possible if neither sameness nor unity is assumed as either the basis or the goal of an encounter with another" (2002, 90–91). What this suggests is that the transplant recipient's intimation of otherness should not be denied—the organ is not mine to assimilate—but celebrated as an instance of giving as a non-personal life force. Diprose is quick to acknowledge that such generosity has no predictable outcome—it may be intolerable to the donor or proxy to know nothing of the identity of the recipient for example—and that uncertainty is risky at the very least. But the (bio)ethics of encounter cannot be otherwise, and it is precisely here that Derrida's intervention proves the most useful.

For feminist ethics, the appeal to reciprocity is highly privileged and even within the mainstream concerns of bioethics, it is seen as an important corrective to the potential one-sidedness of the ethics of care. For Derrida, however, as with Diprose, the gift is not a commodity that entails an obligation: "For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift or debt" (Derrida 1992, 12). Again, the ambiguity of the unpredictable opening to the other is a matter both for recipient and donor, but where Derrida goes further than that which Diprose calls the act of generosity is in his understanding of the significance for the one who receives. Now, this attentiveness to the receiver seems to me to be complemented in Derrida's later work (1999, 2000) by his focus on the host and hospitality, and once more the analogies with organ transplantation are clear. The transplant recipient is indeed host to the graft—itself an intriguingly ambiguous word that opens up the question of the directionality of support: "the guest becomes the host's host" (Derrida 2000, 125)16—which in Derrida's terms entails just that openness and uncertainty that marks the gift. Moreover, as Derrida understands the ethical dimension, the host must not set limitations on what crosses the threshold of the body but must offer an unconditional welcome, which devolves not on the claiming of a right, nor on the expectation of assimilation and possession, but on an openness to a difference that will never be an object of knowledge. What this might mean in material terms is that the heart recipient must acknowledge that when she accepts the living organ of another, she can neither claim it as a right nor expect that it will become a comfortably integrated part of her self. Given the irreducible difference of the other's DNA, she must willingly accommodate the unknown other within. This is a form of hospitality that owes nothing to the comfort of homogeneity or stability, or even certain benefit, and is prepared to expose the individual self to the risk of the unknown and unforeseeable. What is crucial for Derrida is that hospitality is something given before any identification— in material terms, the provenance of the heart remains unknown—such that undecidability persists in the irreducibility of the other to the same. And moreover, as soon as the threshold is crossed, the boundary of the body is displaced, and the host herself is irrevocably changed. As Derrida notes, the arrival of otherness is "enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity" (1993, 34).17 The encounter cannot resolve in assimilation, for the other is both constitutive of the self and remains excessive: in material terms, the alien DNA persists. Nonetheless, the relation is transformative. In opening to, and incorporating, the irreducibly different, the rigidity of bounded being gives way to the becoming of an intercorporeal self. The gift and hospitality, then, are two sides of the same coin, and together they signal the promise, not of an ultimately self-centered altruism and benefit, but of a corporeal ethics of response and responsibility.

As always, the ethical task set by Derrida is to dismantle the oppositional relationship between self and other and to disrupt the putative self-sufficiency of either. His approach—and its materialization in the heart graft—is a profound reminder of both the vulnerability of the embodied self and the irreducible persistence of the other within the same. Feminist bioethics, with its own commitment to reconfiguring the distinctive sovereign subject of morality, can fruitfully engage with the Derridean project—among others—to further open the critique of the bounded and autonomous self and to extend the notion of intercorporeality to embrace concorporeality: the point at which bodies cross over into one another. Moreover, in developing strategies that encompass rather than circumvent the intrinsic uncertainties, both ontological and epistemological, of the postmodern era, feminist bioethics would be—paradoxically—strengthened. Derrida himself clearly understands the acute links between an ethics of the undecidable and the "matters of urgency" that assail us: "It is often techno-political-scientific mutation that obliges us to deconstruct; really, such mutation itself deconstructs what are claimed as . . . naturally obvious things or . . . untouchable axioms" (2000, 45). Given that the longstanding remit of feminist theory has readily embraced a questioning of what has been taken as given, we should not hesitate to take on uncertainty, however risky it appears. Indeed, to dispense with the comfort of principles and precedents mobilizes an ethics that necessarily becomes a matter of high and specific responsibility. At the very same time, in choosing to sketch some elements of my own preferred postconventional approach through the contemporary problem of heart transplantation, I want to signal the adventure of a possible and future feminist bioethics.

Notes

I intend here to mark a trend, not to ignore the powerful work of U.S. scholars such as Iris Marion Young (1984, 1990) whose take up of phenomenology was highly productive, but notable for its relative intellectual isolation.

I use the term "well Being" to denote an ontological flourishing rather than the simple health associated with wellbeing.

The move is usually attributed to Derrida (1999) but also has strong links to the work of Levinas (1998).

The PITH project (Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart) is a U.K. Canadian collaboration between Dr. Heather Ross and Dr. Susan Abby of Toronto General Hospital, Professor Pat McKeever of the University of Toronto, Dr. Jen Poole of Ryerson University, and myself. The main theoretical direction of the joint research is guided by an application of phenomenological models to the observed and reported responses of recipients to their newly embodied states. As such, the further turn in this essay to more strictly poststructuralist and postmodernist insights are my own and are at this stage highly—but I hope, productively—speculative.

The muting of ethical considerations extended also to the edition of the South African Medical J. (1967, 41) that ran a series of twelve articles commenting on the case without advancing any ethical objections.

It was reported in Barnard's obituary, however, that his fifth heart transplant patient, Dorothy Fisher, operated on in 1969, survived for an extraordinary twenty-four years.

See Wright et al. (2005) for a conventional approach to the bioethicist's task with regard to organ transplantation.

The discussion of face transplants includes a dedicated issue of the American J. of Bioethics (2004, 4.3). See also Powell (2006).

Washkansky was famously photographed in the days after his operation surrounded by six apparently adoring and pink-robed young nurses. In the more recent case, the female recipient was characterized—at least by the media—as a mentally unstable and somewhat foolish woman who might not be deserving of the resources lavished on her.

Garrity et al., reporting on heart transplantation in the United States in the ten years to 2005, report a more or less stable 75 percent of hearts going to men (2007: 1392).

See Boniolo (2007), or Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (34.1) 2002 for a recent example of a themed issue.

That a person should be declared dead does not of course exhaust responsibility toward her body, but that is another matter.

This is a very different concept from Agamben's notion of zoe as "bare life" (Agamben 1998). Braidotti (2002, 2006), in particular, is an excellent example of a feminist philosopher who has taken ideas from her masculinist counterparts—like Agamben and Deleuze—and transformed them through and for feminist ways of thinking.

It is not our intention to publish results from this small-scale observation.

In addition to personal reports such as that of Sylvia (1997), see also Kaba et al. (2005) and the interviews conducted by Pearsall et al. (2002). The interview material is described, but not assessed.

A graft splices foreign tissue into the very structure of the existing body. I am grateful to Pat McKeever for first noting the ambiguity of the term.

See Jean-Luc Nancy (2002) for a highly Derridean account of the identity-disturbing effects of his own heart transplant.

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