Ambivalence Of Discourse Research Articles

Can Feminism Think Black Incapacity? On Resistance, Ambivalence, and the Ungendered Reading of Blackness and Sexuality: Revisiting Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers

Abstract: The article explores claims of resistance and ambivalence in discourses of feminisms. By contemplating these two terms as they are positioned in different feminist articulations (as well as in black critical theory, psychoanalysis, and literary studies), it argues that Blackness's negativity of the real gives rise to representations of race, gender, sexuality, and the body. Closely examining central works by Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers, the article further ruminates on how the incapacity of Blackness might yield an ungendered reading of these differences. In doing so, it pursues questions such as what might be the implications of such readings concomitant with the effects of trans - and Blackness's (non-)appearance in language and writing. The article visits meditations by Frantz Fanon and recent interventions in Afro-pessimism to consider an aporia that underlines the triangulation of Blackness, sexuality, and ungendering.

The Politics of Hope and Disappointment: Ambivalence in the Post-1989 Homeland-Related Discourses among Hungarians in Australia

In this article, I look at the ways in which the homeland-related discourses among Hungarians in Australia have shifted as a result of the political and social transformations in Hungary around and after 1989. In order to disentangle this question, I place a specific emphasis on the dynamics between identification, emotions and politics. I demonstrate that the aftermath of regime change produced a sense of ambivalence in discourses about Australian-Hungarians' relationship with the homeland. The desire for inclusion into the new democracy became dialogically intertwined with the simultaneous feelings of distrust and disappointment, producing what Bakhtin calls ‘double voiced’ homeland-related discourses. I examine how these contradictory emotions are evoked and expressed in the post-1989 Australian-Hungarian discourses. I argue that they became powerful moral forces which affect diaspora members' understanding of their selves and enable and constrain the diaspora's political actions towards the homeland.