The Place of ‘Place’ in Intersectionality: Developing a Critical Place Theory

Getting Personal: The Art of Autoethnography

Rooted in Marxism and Critical Theory, identity politics upended traditional philosophical anthropology about personhood, and argues that identity is wholly manifested through economic group, social class, gender, or racial categories. Humans are ontologically viewed through their status as victims, not as fully integrated moral persons. Touted as a political issue, identity politics is at heart a philosophical and anthropological problem, and to address it one must return to a better understanding of the soul and human dignity. The resurrection of the classical Natural Law tradition is the remedy for finding common ground and rebuilding civil society, for at the heart of Natural Law is the belief in human dignity which imbues every human being with worth to be honored and respected regardless of race, sex, age, or different culture or religion. Classical Natural Law provides the theological, philosophical, and definitional background for human dignity and only if it is resurrected can “the discontent” in American culture be fully human again.

After the American Civil War, several movements for ethnic separatism and political self-determination significantly shaped the course of Reconstruction. The Union Leagues mobilised African Americans to fight for their political rights and economic security while the Ku Klux Klan used intimidation and violence to maintain the political and economic hegemony of southern whites. Founded in 1858 as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Irish American Fenians sought to liberate Ireland from English rule. In Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, Mitchell Snay provides a compelling comparison of these seemingly disparate groups and illuminates the contours of nationalism during Reconstruction. By joining the Fenians with freedpeople and southern whites, Snay seeks to assert their central relevance to the dynamics of nationalism during Reconstruction and offers a highly original analysis of Reconstruction as an Age of Capital and an Age of Emancipation where categories of race, class, and gender -- as well as nationalism -- were fluid and contested. After the American Civil War, several movements for ethnic separatism and political self-determination significantly shaped the course of Reconstruction. The Union Leagues, which began during the war to support the northern effort, spread to the South after the war and mobilised African Americans to fight for their political rights and economic security. Opposing the Leagues was the Ku Klux Klan, which used intimidation and violence to maintain the political and economic hegemony of southern whites. Founded in 1858 as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Irish American Fenians sought to liberate Ireland from English rule. Mitchell Snay provides a compelling comparison of these seemingly disparate groups in Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, illuminating the contours of nationalism during Reconstruction. Despite their separate and often opposing goals, the Fenians, Union Leagues, and the Klan, Snay reveals, shared many characteristics. To various extents, they were secret societies that sought to advance their mission through both political and extra-political means. Both the League and the Klan employed elaborate rites of initiation and secret passwords common to nineteenth-century fraternal organisations. They also shared a similar political culture of secrecy, conspiracy, and countersubversion. All three groups were quasi-military in structure and activities and shared a desire for the control of land. Among the three organisations, Snay shows, the Fenians provide the clearest case of nationalist aspirations along the lines of ethnicity, though the rise of racial consciousness among both southern whites and blacks also might be seen as expressions of ethnic nationalism. According to Snay, the political culture of Reconstruction encouraged the nationalist ambitions of these groups, but channeled their separatist impulses along civil rather than ethnic lines by focusing on questions of freedom, citizenship, and suffrage. In addition, the Republican emphasis on colour-blind equality limited overt expressions of national identities based solely on ethnicity or race. Unlike southern whites and blacks, Irish Americans are seldom mentioned in Reconstruction histories. By joining the Fenians with freedpeople and southern whites, Snay seeks to assert their central relevance to the dynamics of nationalism during Reconstruction and offers a highly original analysis of Reconstruction as an Age of Capital and an Age of Emancipation where categories of race, class, and gender -- as well as nationalism -- were fluid and contested.

Within the field of communication studies, critical cultural scholarship examines the interarticulation of power and culture. Drawing from critical theory and cultural studies, this research offers analysis of texts, artifacts, practices, and institutions in order to understand their potential to promote or preempt equality and social justice. Critical theory, which has Marxist origins, uses theory as a basis for critiquing and challenging systems of domination or oppression. The field of cultural studies focuses on social formations with a particular emphasis on media texts and the reception practices of audiences. Both critical theory and cultural studies emphasize the important interrelationship between ideology, or structures of belief, and the material conditions in which people live. Critical cultural research examines discourse and representation, including language and visual culture, as well as social relations, institutional structures, material practices, economic forces, and various forms of embodiment. Central to critical cultural scholarship is attention to the construction, regulation, and contestation of categories of identity, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. A significant branch of critical cultural studies examines how ideas about gender and sex develop and circulate, asking how and why some constructions of gender and sex become normative and gain hegemony—or, cultural privilege—in a particular context. For example, such scholarship might critique the idealization of certain performances of masculinity and the attendant devaluation of femininity or other subordinated masculinities; or, this research might consider how particular iterations of masculinity or femininity may be counter-hegemonic, operating in opposition to prevailing ideologies of gender and sex. Critical cultural approaches also emphasize the intersectionality of gender and sex with other categories of identity. For instance, ideas about masculinity or femininity can rarely be separated from assumptions about race and/or sexuality; as such, prevailing ideologies of gender and sex often reflect the presumed normativity of whiteness and heterosexuality.

Objective Humanities, Reflexive Humanities

<strong>TYPOLOGICAL NOTES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER</strong> <em>Summary</em> In the article the linguistic universal is observed, according to which the appearing of the category of gender is connected with the development of the morphological opposition of nomi­native : accusative. In those systems, where the special form of accusative is attested, the category of gender does exist. It is stated, that the appearing of gender is the morphological phenomenon connected with the changes in the very structure of the language, and an attempt is made to show the development of this category out of the previous category of the grammatical classes. The prin­cipal difference between them is that the category of gender is defined purely morphologically, its relation to semantics being mere a non-categoreal relic, while the category of classes has the indis­pensable semantical definition. As an illustration to the development of gender, the appearing of the Afro-Asiatic marker of feminine <em>-a </em>(+<em>t </em>as a glide by joining the case inflections) is explained to be the fossilized ending of the absolutive case. This <em>-a </em>is a morphologized variant of the conso­nantal morpheme ending, resp. of that of the bare stem form of absolutive, where the alternation of <em>-Ca </em>‖ <em>-C </em>is attested. The analogous morphologization of the components <em>-Ca, -C →</em><em> -a ‖ -ø </em>must have produced the thematic <em>(-a, </em>traditionally- *-<em>o</em>) and the athematic (-ø) markers of the corresponding types of the Indo-European declension. The latter idea is illustrated by the analogous possibility in the Kartvelian pairs of the dat./loc. <em>adgilas &lt; *adgila +s : adgilsa &lt; *adgil + sa </em>type.

Traditional theories are concerned with understanding and explaining what is happening so their agenda goes no further than discussion. Critical Theory, however, is different because it not only critiques but it seeks to make changes. It is political. Critical Theory seeks to emancipate and transform those who are oppressed and marginalized through functional steps:Critical theory is politically committed in the sense that it aims to achieve emancipation and transformation of individuals and society through human action. Theory and practice form a single process and philosophy is 'put to work' to provide analysis and critique of society and leading to social change (Jessop 2010: 3).It was Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School who initially coined the term Critical Theory. The Frankfurt School which was also known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally located in Germany but then moved to New York when the Nazis forced its closure and exiled its Jewish members (McLaughlin 1999: 110). Key developers of Critical Theory include Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and later Habermas who formed the second generation. Critical Theory emerged from a group of men who saw the atrocities inflicted by humans on humans. The scholars from the Frankfurt School wanted to understand how people could act the way they did but also how such behaviour could be stopped. Although the scholars were Jewish, Kellner (n.d.) states:The Frankfurt School had a highly ambivalent relation to Judais . . . They were also, for the most part, secular Jews who did not support any organized religion, or practice religious or cultural Judaism. In this sense, they were in the tradition of Heine, Marx, and Freud for whom Judaism was neither a constitutive feature of their life or work, nor a significant aspect of their self-image and identity.Despite the Frankfurt scholars being religiously detached, their focus in developing Critical Theory was 'nothing less than the discovery of why mankind, instead of entering a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism' (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997: xi). The function of Critical Theory is empowerment, it seeks to encourage transformation for those 'whose voices are silenced or marginalised' (Bercaw & Stooksberry 2004). After critiquing society and understanding 'what is', it then asks 'what should be' to create a 'better life' (How 2003: 9). Developers of Critical Theory saw how mass media or the culture industry 'played a highly manipulative role in modern society and served to control or subvert oppositional consciousness, thus removing any threat to the dominant capitalist class' (Strauss: 2012). The demonization of the Muslim masses is a good example of subverting 'oppositional consciousness'.According to Habermas, 'critical knowledge was conceptualized as knowledge that enabled human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection and took psychoanalysis as the paradigm of critical knowledge' (Huttunen 2011). Habermas developed the theory of communicative action. This was a way that people could work together and produce positive social transformation. The theory of communicative action refers to interpersonal communication geared towards mutual understanding. Mutual understanding leads to mutual civility and this works to exclude barbarity. I will discuss the Islamic equivalent of this theoretical perspective later in my introduction to Islamic critical theory:Actors do not primarily aim at their own success but want to harmonize their action plans with the other participants. Opposite to communicative action is the concept of strategic action, which means calculative exploitation, or manipulation, of others. An actor who acts strategically seeks primarily his or her own ends and manipulates other people either openly or tacitly (Habermas 1984: 285).Critical PedagogyCritical pedagogy was initially based on Marxist theory (Lyles 2008: 38). …

Welfare provision is distributed based on determinations of recipient worthiness, commonly assessed by racial‐ and gender‐specific characterizations of the poor as constructed through policy discourse. Social constructions of the poor contribute to the construction of welfare policy discourse and subsequently welfare policy. Welfare drug testing policy raises questions of the co‐constructions of race, class, and gender and welfare drug testing discourses. This case study of state legislators’ discourse on welfare drug testing explores these ideas. Using an intersectional perspective, we examine how categories of race, class, and gender give meanings to policy discourses concerning drug testing of welfare recipients, and conversely, how policy discourses concerning welfare drug testing give meanings to categories of race, class, and gender. We find a move away from explicit racialized and gendered discourse, and toward implicit constructions of race and gender, with a predominant explicit focus on constructions of social class in the characterization of an unworthy, suspect, and deviant poor population. The constructions of race, gender, and particularly social class effectively co‐construct welfare drug testing discourse, which justifies welfare drug testing policy in order to manage the derelict poor.

Reviewed by: Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontierby Honor Sachs Thomas J. Balcerski Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier. By Honor Sachs. Lamar Series in Western History. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 193. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-300-15413-9.) In this exciting new book Honor Sachs explores the fundamental contribution of the household to the expansion of the eighteenth-century Kentucky frontier. Written in clear and compelling prose, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontiereffectively reframes the story of early Kentucky, which has too often been shoehorned into a strictly political narrative, to include the critical scholarly categories of gender, race, and class. In chapter 1 Sachs traces how early settlers hoped to improve their economic and social conditions by settling in Kentucky. She looks at cases of widows and settlers’ petitions to the government in Virginia and finds that white male settlers most feared becoming “‘tennants to private gentlemen’” (p. 40). In so doing Sachs centers the relationship of landownership and conceptions of white manhood at the heart of patriarchal anxieties in the region. In chapter 2 Sachs turns to the “highly unstable society” at Bullitt’s Lick saltworks to illuminate the growing concerns of white patriarchs over questions of gender and race (p. 70). The widow and store owner Annie Christian—a pivotal figure in the book—emerged as a strikingly successful example of the threats posed by unattached women to the gendered, social, and racial order. Similarly, in chapter 3, Sachs investigates the legal response by the government toward a population that increasingly consisted of only a minority of adult white men. By looking at court cases addressing the care of orphaned children, Sachs contends that the government attempted to [End Page 148]regulate a particular version of white patriarchy into the basic social fabric of the household. In chapter 4 Sachs further challenges the traditional account of Kentucky’s frontier history through the category of the household. Through a focus on soldiers and their dissatisfaction with military service, she reveals how men’s commitment to defend and protect the household often superseded their attachments to the larger American nation. Subsequent divorce petitions made on the grounds of abandonment show gendered patterns of discontent that—along with the continued presence of Great Britain and Spain in the region—threatened the western experiment itself. Similarly, in chapter 5, Sachs turns to the debates over Kentucky statehood to reveal the essential role played by white manhood in creating a “‘new race of men’” (p. 143). This identity necessarily excluded others in gendered and racialized terms, a codification that the author argues operated symbolically more than practically. The author’s notion of “home rule” helps explain the contested meaning of the first territory to seek statehood under the Constitution. In a fitting conclusion, Sachs reflects on the Kentucky example, follows the rhetorical importance of the household in future years, and ends with a timely wish for a “more inclusive democracy” in our own times (p. 150). In both the text and the endnotes Sachs adds to numerous debates in frontier and southern history. She does not ignore, but rather incorporates, the views of Frederick Jackson Turner with more modern conversations about the relationship of the periphery to the core, and to race, gender, and class. The study also expands the breadth of southern historiography by positioning frontier Kentucky alongside earlier developments across the South. Moreover, the case study of Bullitt’s Lick provides a fascinating example of an early business on the new western frontier. A slim volume, Home Ruleis a model of how a scholarly monograph can incorporate the categories of gender, race, and class into a coherent history of the colonial frontier. Thomas J. Balcerski Eastern Connecticut State University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The question of difference raised by postmodernism has challenged the premises of both systematic theory and critique. As feminists have demonstrated with the category of gender, difference cannot be incorporated into existing theoretical models without reconfiguring the way analytical categories are organized, which in turn bears on the structure of theory itself (Nancy Fraser's (1987) critique of Habermas serves as critical theory's case in point). Difference, as cultural specificity, has also raised the possibility of multiple standpoints for critique and exposed the contingent nature of the aesthetic or ethical categories on which critique has traditionally been based. In short, the theoretical problem that difference poses is that it destabilizes existing critical categories. Nevertheless, the reports that critique is dead or that systematic theory is antithetical to postmodern conditions of knowledge have been greatly exaggerated. The way to accommodate difference within systematic theory is to use its form as a basic structural principle of theory itself; that is, to rebuild critical theory from the ground of difference up. What this suggests is that an aesthetic approach, one that engages the problem on the level of form, is particularly suitable. While the content of analytical or critical categories is also at issue, difference speaks directly to the form of critical theory in that: (a) most analytical categories are structured as distinctions, and (b) alternatives are conceptualized as a difference from what already exists. I will argue that the form of difference is both dynamic and contingent, and generates its own complexity. This conceptualization signifies a departure from the dialectical models on which critical theory has until now relied.

Critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry to identify and critique oppression and inequality to animate more socially just human relations and conditions. First articulated by German sociologists and political scientists in the 1920s, feminist studies, critical legal studies, cultural studies, media studies, gender and queer theory and critical race and tribal critical race theory are among the many contemporary offshoots of critical theory within academia. Critical theory’s capacity to allow researchers to uncover and interrogate power dynamics within diverse human contexts and imagine or evaluate interventions based on their potential to create a more just human order, constitutes its main strengths.

The purpose of our research was to compare how participants weighed age, gender, race, and career categories in recognizing and grouping tasks. In Study 1, we used a category recognition task to compare participants’ speeds in recognizing information from different categories. The results showed that participants recognized the gender information most quickly, followed by career, race, and age information. In Study 2, a categorization task was used to compare participants’ category preferences. The results showed that the career category had the greatest weight, and the gender category had the lowest weight. Two targets who had different career identities were more possible considered as belonging to different groups than two targets with different gender, race or age identities. Our results have implications in understanding the weight of different categories, with gender and career category are the most important category that affects perception and evaluation.

This chapter builds on the understandings of constructivist and critical International Relations theories laid out in the book so far to make an argument that constructivisms and critical theories are not the same thing, naturally aligned, or necessarily productive bedfellows. Furthermore, there are both analytical and political downsides to the constructivist/critical theory nexus, which are evident in work in international relations that pairs the two unreflectively. In fact, many of the intersections between constructivisms and critical theories in the current International Relations theory literature are contrived at the expense of some or even most of the core tenets of either theory. This chapter suggests that the “end of International Relations” and the lost, confused nature of International Relations theory (particularly progressive International Relations theory) can find their origins in the underspecification and overreached application of pairings between constructivisms and critical theorizing in International Relations. These implications make it necessary to critically evaluate figurations of constructivist and critical International Relations.

Critical theory has potential application to several points of interrogation within the critical disability studies canon. While some disability theorists have made use of the analyses offered by critical theory, possible areas of contribution remain. In this article, following an historical overview which traces some of the fundamental developments in the critical theory canon, three areas of analysis are examined in light of their potential to broaden and interrogate current critical disability theory. These include the sense of moral obligation characteristic of early contemporary critical theorists, particularly from the Frankfurt school; materialism and the link between disability and economic means of production, including materialist links to socio-psychic explorations of disability; and connections between current understandings of disability and cultural aesthetic concerns.

This paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.