Ambivalent Representations Research Articles

Ethan Frome's Poly Pessimism

This article explores the theory and practice of non-monogamy at the turn of the twentieth century across a range of texts, including anarchist periodicals, mainstream newspapers, and literary fiction. Moving from utopian to ambivalent representations of multipartner relationships, it turns to a canonical novel to explore a perspective we might call poly pessimism, which not only critiques monogamy but exposes the systems that make non-monogamous alternatives equally unlivable. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) offers a blistering naturalist account of the constraints of monogamous marriage as the organizing institution of care work under capitalism, but the monstrous menáge à trois revealed at the novel's end suggests only the multiplication of domestic duty and the expansion of marriage and the private home rather than their abolition. Both in its sexual utopianism and its calls for the practical reconfiguration of home life and the economies of care, critical non-monogamy at the turn of the twentieth century holds an important position in a tradition of radical thought that connects antebellum socialisms to more recent liberation agendas.

Environmental conflicts in the mass media: insight from the media representation of ecological distributive conflicts (EDCs) in Italy

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing prominence of local ecological-distributive conflicts (EDCs) as subjects of social science research in recent decades, interaction between the media and territorial conflict has remained overlooked, still requiring further investigation. Indeed, there is currently a lack of systematic, up-to-date analysis of the relationship between the media and ecological-distributive protests that goes beyond the investigation of NIMBY narratives to provide a general overview of territorial protest representations and their implications for conflict. Based on the application of Political Claims Analysis to the national newspaper, la Repubblica, and its reporting of six Italian local EDCs, this article aims to discuss the ambivalent representations of territorial protest in the media, while also highlighting the implications of different narrative patterns for the values and perspectives embedded in public opinion. The twofold aim is to investigate the media’s narrative strategies with regard to local protests and their evolution throughout the mobilizations and to assess how the cultural context influences the likelihood that different messages will gain support. This investigation is crucial not only for filling the existing gap regarding the relationship between media and the ongoing spread of EDCs in Italy, but also for grasping broader dynamics concerning media management of environmental conflict, something that is becoming increasingly relevant to both the political and media spheres.

Favela, a Brazilian postcard? Ambivalent representations of national culture and identity in Anitta’s performance on a foreign stage

Resumo O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender como a cantora Anitta, na condição de estrela pop em ascensão internacional, promove a favela como cultura e identidade brasileiras e também discutir quais as implicações dessa abordagem ante as representações ambivalentes desse espaço, tratado ora como território da pobreza e da violência, ora como reserva de manifestações culturais autênticas. Para isso, descrevemos e analisamos uma apresentação da cantora no festival americano Coachella em abril de 2022 com referencial teórico baseado em estudos culturais (Hall, 1992, 2003, 2016; Martín-Barbero, 1995, 2015; García Canclini, 1998) e estudos de performance (Amaral; Soares; Polivanov, 2018; Pereira de Sá; Holzbach, 2010). Observamos que Anitta se apoia em referências consagradas da cultura e da identidade brasileiras, ao mesmo tempo que introduz o seu ponto de vista, relacionado a uma cultura urbana periférica. Consideramos que, ao explorar um espaço ambivalente como a favela, a artista provoca tensionamentos em torno dos símbolos nacionais e do que pode ou não ser considerado parte da cultura e da identidade brasileiras.

Women’s Dilemmatic Constraints in Emerging Second-Wave Feminism, Heideggerian Ambivalence and Oscillation between Authenticity and Inauthenticity

This paper adopts Heidegger’s philosophy, its authenticity and inauthenticity in particular, to analyze ambivalent or even conflictual representations of women in emerging second-wave feminism. During the consciousness-raising stage of second-wave, women’s consciousness-raising enabled their struggles for feminist ways of living, while patriarchal society’s struggles against feminism were commonly witnessed to impose enormous constraints on women with consciousness raised, who were thirsty for employment but cringed from leaving homes to enjoy rights in the public sphere. This problem of “getting out” and “getting back” is explained by Heidegger’s existential (in)authenticity, especially the oscillation, with reference to humans’ existential structures. Authentically, to strive for economic independence, women as Dasein with feminist consciousness raised were encouraged to speak up for themselves to reclaim the long-lost authentic “Self of one’s own” by confronting the patriarchal oppression of “The They”. However, due to social constraints which exacerbated women’s fear of confrontation, women chose to live by the inauthentic status quo in average everydayness with full absorption where women largely gave up on reflecting on assigned domestic roles and on taking responsibility for feminist life-planning. This paper argues that volatile and oscillatory transitions between authenticity and inauthenticity among women constituted the ambivalent representations of struggling women, existentially due to first the temporariness of authenticity and strong pulling power of inauthenticity in the less influential emerging second-wave to render authenticity ineffective, and second the unavoidable existence of the powerful influence of “The They” – as ontologically Being-with – as patriarchal those on women to draw them back to homes.

Law and emotions in The Split

ABSTRACT The representation of female lawyers in film and television has long been indicative of wider issues of patriarchal crisis. Seminal works by Cynthia Lucia (Framing Female Lawyers, 2005) and Orit Kamir (Framed: Women in Law and Film, 2005) have alerted us to the ambivalent representations of female lawyers as personifications of progress, embodiments of social justice and epithets of powerful career women. Women lawyers, Lucia contends, regularly end up on trial themselves for violating norms of femininity and rebelling against patriarchal authority. This paper analyses the representation of female lawyers in the BBC drama The Split (2018–2022) and suggests a more positive reading of female ambivalence. The paper is informed by law and visual culture theory, professional identity theory and community of coping theory to shed light on the emotional complexities, tensions and conflicts that divorce lawyers manage daily.

“I did as others did and as others had me do”: Postcolonial (Mis)Representations and Perpetrator Trauma in Season 1 of Taboo (2017-)

Neo-Victorian fiction has been concerned with historically oppressed and traumatised characters from the 1990s onwards (Llewellyn 2008). More recently, neo-Victorianism on screen has shifted its attention to the figure of the perpetrator and their unresolved guilt, as in the TV series Penny Dreadful (Logan 2014-2016) or Taboo (Knight, Hardy and Hardy 2017-present). However, perpetrator trauma is an under-theorised field in the humanities (Morag 2018), neo-Victorian studies included. This article analyses Taboo as a neo-Victorian postcolonial text that explores the trauma of its protagonist James Delaney, an imperial perpetrator who transported and sold African slaves in the Middle Passage for the East India Company. Although the series is not set in the Victorian period, neo-Victorianism is here understood as fiction expanding beyond the historical boundaries of the Victorian era and that presents the long nineteenth century as synonymous with the empire (Ho 2012: 4). Thus, I argue that postcolonial texts like Taboo should be considered neo-Victorian since they are set in the nineteenth century to respond to and contest (neo-)imperial practices. However, neo-Victorian postcolonialism offers ambivalent representations of the British Empire, as it simultaneously critiques and reproduces its ideologies (Ho 2012; Primorac 2018). This article examines the ways in which Taboo follows this contradictory pattern, since it seemingly denounces the imperial atrocity of the slave trade through Delaney’s perpetrator trauma, while simultaneously perpetuating it through his future colonizing trip to the Americas. Hence, Delaney is portrayed as an anti-hero in the series, given that he is both the enemy and the very product of the British Empire.

Sporty Boys and Fashion Girls: Manoeuvring Between Dominant Norms of Gender Identity

The trigger for this article was the “Lévi-Straussian mythical formula” girls : boys = fashion : football, which came to the fore in the conversation with girls and boys aged 13 and 14 years. Amid the cacophony of ambivalent representations and meanings of modern masculinities and femininities which young people are facing, it schematically expresses traditional symbolic relations and gender differences. International studies at the crossroads of cultural, educational and gender studies, including critical studies of men and masculinities (Frosh et al., 2002; Zaslow, 2009; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2007) show that teenagers use clothing practices to assert an imaginary boundary in relational and binary self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The article analyses how teenagers deploy clothing practices, the strong attention they pay to their outfit and some other techniques of body self-regulation in order to negotiate social control and peer pressure related to the processes of the self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The analysis looks at the peculiarities of these processes in doing hegemonic or marginalised masculinities and traditional or alternative femininities. Comparison of boys’ and girls’ (in intersections with classed and ethicised social locations) attitudes to clothing and outfit demonstrates that both experience the pressure of performing normative gender identity through their body, however the techniques of body self-regulation are different for boys and girls and for specific social locations. In the conclusion, the author reflects on the implications of teenagers’ doing gender through body and their outfit for the pedagogical situation.

Friends or foes? Europe and ‘the people’ in the representations of populist parties

This article seeks to shine a light on the diversity of populist discourses about Europe and the European Union (EU). It is built upon the existing literature on populist Euroscepticism to elaborate on two underexplored aspects of the relationship between populist discourses and EU contestation. First, it explores the variable and even ambivalent representations of the EU and its main political processes exhibited by populist actors. Second, it focuses on the precise relationship between populism and the representations of the EU to determine whether there is a hierarchical relation, reciprocal influence, or they function as separated ideational ensembles. This research takes a corpus-assisted approach to discourse analysis that is based on the exploration of manifestos and party leadership speeches between 2013 and 2017 of Podemos in Spain, a left-wing populist party, and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, a right-wing populist party. The findings reveal that the populist discourse has variable effects on the forms of EU contestation depending on its centrality and that ambivalence is a crucial feature to capture the forms of EU contestation of populist parties. Finally, the article draws several theoretical implications for the research on populism and EU contestation.

Aporia

ABSTRACT Adopting a researcher-poet stance, this prose poem is a reflection on the consumption and marketing of French theory within American academia seen through a graduate student perspective. Following Cusset’s argument that French theory was essentially created and marketed in the United States ‘by American modes of reading French authors’ (35), this text represents the overlooked, minority voices of humanities students as ambivalent ‘theory-consumers’ and ‘critical academic spectators’. The Derridean concepts deployed in the poem, aporia/aporie, hauntology/hantologie, respectively characterised by uncertainty, doubt and temporal disjunction, are ironically mapped out against contemporary graduate student lives marked by poor employment prospects, vulnerability, performance anxiety, private consternation and mental illness. This contribution advances the role of prose poems in consumer research by underlining the innovative possibilities they allow for alternative, subversive, deeply ambivalent and ironic representations of consumer experiences in academia. This prose poem also offers novel conceptualisation on contemporary academic theory.

A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964

This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplomats. He was, conversely, also seen as a “Harrovian realist” or “transplanted Englishman” with an attendant air of “superiority.” Cold War imperatives gave these ambivalent cultural and psychological projections a special salience, particularly as each confronted the implications of Nehru’s non-alignment and his global profile as a proponent of Third World nationalism. The ambivalent representations of Nehru that we trace within U.S., Australian, and Canadian foreign policy-making also reveal a shared belief in the “Anglosphere”—the purported transnational unity of white, English-speaking nations—was sustained beyond the decline of the British Empire. Nehru’s “Britishness” demonstrates how he could be tethered to the English-speaking world while simultaneously being seen as its irrational, non-white Other. This ambivalent connection helped to re-draw the boundaries of the transnational Anglosphere in the era of decolonization and to define Cold War assumptions about race, rationality, and foreign policy.

The October revolution as a global media event: Connective imaginaries in 2017

This article analyses the proliferation of imaginaries of ‘revolution’ present in global media around the October Revolution’s 100th anniversary in 2017. The October Revolution stands alongside the French Revolution as a model that has guided sense-making about revolutionary moments since. Yet this anniversary fell against a backdrop marked by a set of highly contested recent revolutions, notably the post-Cold War Colour Revolutions in post-Soviet countries and Arab uprisings, and voluminous public analyses of contemporary Russian politics. Taking media as resources for informed citizenship, analysis of 114 English language news stories of the centenary from 26 countries demonstrates that audiences were offered varied and ambivalent representations of both revolution and its mechanisms and of Russia and its relations with other countries. Following Moretti I argue that, together, these formed a textual ‘world effect’ of 1917 as an event that constituted a global experience entangling all societies – and that 1917 is unfinished, either due to continued direct effects on migration, geopolitics and economics, or by continuing to inspire visions of political transformation beyond the West.

Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850-1920, edited by Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Reviewed by: Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850–1920 ed. by Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy Carolyn Betensky (bio) Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850–1920, edited by Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy; pp. xiii + 255. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, $85.00, $35.00 paper. Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850–1920 comes with rather too much wrapping. Not only do the editors, Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy, supply an introduction, but there is also a preface (written, presumably, by the editors) to that introduction. Not only is there a conclusion by the editors, but there is also an interesting but not entirely relevant afterword (by Kathleen D. McCarthy). The effect of all this framing is compounded by the excessively strong claims the introduction makes for the coherence and significance of the collection. Arguing for the existence of a transatlantic "discourse of philanthropy" (3) that took on a distinctive character in the period from 1850 to 1920, the editors see it as no less than "a central modernizing agent in the [End Page 526] development of Anglophone culture on both sides of the Atlantic" (5). It almost seems as if the editors felt they had a hard case to make for this book. If so, it is too bad they did, because this volume is full of strong, provocative essays for which no such efforts need have been made. Apart from the final essay, Sarah Ruffing Robbins's "Sustaining Gendered Philanthropy through Transatlantic Friendship: Jane Addams, Henrietta Barnett, and Writing for Reciprocal Mentoring," which meticulously tracks the mutuality of influence of Henrietta Barnett and Jane Addams over each other's careers and reputations as philanthropists and settlement house pioneers, there is little in this volume that can properly be considered "transatlantic." Lori Merish's "The Poverty of Sympathy" does read fiction by American working-class women writers through Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and compares attitudes toward the poor in the U.S. and Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The gestures Merish makes toward synchronous transatlantic conditions are less valuable, however, than her claim that American factory-women's fiction of the period posed a challenge to dominant modes of bourgeois sentimentality. In the hands of writers such as "Miss J. A. B. from Manchester" (Manchester, New Hampshire, that is), she argues, sympathy for the poor gets transformed from a philanthropic affect that had come by this time to diminish its object and validate American laissez-faire individualism into a defense of solidarity and feminine subjecthood. Several essays in this collection, including Merish's, view the nineteenth-century philanthropic project in a critical light, or more accurately, show the ways in which nineteenth-century authors were themselves critical of the philanthropic enterprise. Daniel Bivona's fine "Self-Undermining Philanthropic Impulses: Philanthropy in the Mirror of Narrative" undertakes to demonstrate the shift from ambivalent representations of philanthropists into outright suspicion in British novels from the middle of the century into the late-Victorian period. Bivona's compelling reading of John Jarndyce in Bleak House (1852–53) makes clear that if Charles Dickens is known for his rejection of philanthropy of the "telescopic" variety, he does not unreservedly endorse the local, "good" kind of philanthropy, either, as it is founded on cryptic self-interest. But Dickens's suspicions of philanthropy and philanthropists pale next to those of the next generation of Victorians, in Bivona's telling. By the time we get to George Gissing's Thyrza (1887) and The Nether World (1889), he shows, the philanthropist has become a veritable monster of disguised narcissism, a sinister degenerate. In combination with his dire assessment of the poor themselves, Gissing's skepticism regarding the motives of the philanthropist ends up underscoring his bitter conviction that there is no saving the poor. Also exploring the darker side of philanthropy is Francesca Sawaya's "Patrons, Philanthropists, and Professionals: Henry James's Roderick Hudson." Sawaya reads James's 1875 novel through a reconsideration of its theme of patronage in relation to philanthropy and free-market capitalism. Patronage may seem to be a remnant of older times, but in the novel it blurs, in...

Benches as Materialisations of (Active) Ageing in Public Space: First Steps towards a Praxeology of Space

In its promotion of “active ageing” through Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) and the Global Network on AgeFriendly Cities and Communities (GNAFCC), the World Health Organization has developed a vision of ageing that links socio-spatial environments to personal lifestyles and community support. Approaching age-friendly environments from a “doing” perspective shifts our focus from such ideals to social practices, materialisations, and representations produced. Regularly referred to in AFCC discourse, public benches offer a great illustration for such materialisations. This article asks: what do benches tell us about the way ageing is framed and shaped in the AFCC discourse? How do benches themselves exhibit agency in it? Theoretically based on Lefebvrian social theory and critical gerontology, our reflexive article explores promotional/policy documents supporting AFCC worldwide, “good practices” shared by GNAFCC, and a series of European field observations around AFCC and benches and, finally, personal observations of ageing in public space around benches. Drawing on the Lefebvrian differentiation between representational benches, representations of benches, and social practices of benches, we show how benches can be considered as a socio-technical “assemblage” able to: 1) forge ambivalent representations and solutions for “active ageing” in public space, 2) illustrate, beyond the symbolic of space, the symbolic difficulties of “real” participative and multi-stakeholders governance promoted through “age-friendliness”, and 3) explore everyday life practices of “spatial expulsion” of “ageing in public space” for older adults. In conclusion, we suggest a major shift for the AFCC program by finding inspiration in African practices of “ageing in public space”.

Forests and health: Discourse and practises from the 18st to the 21stcentury

The relations between forests and health carry ambivalent representations anchored in a long history. The dangers of deforestation and the usefulness of woodland to counter the "miasmas" and later the "pollution" are consistent with a Hippocratic approach that was reinterpreted at the end of the 18th century in the light of new knowledge in chemistry and biology. As of the 1970's, biodiversity was taken into consideration for the purposes of protecting and preserving forests seen as indispensable factors for public health. Conversely, the threats coming from tropical forests, that had been recognized for at least three centuries, and forest zoonoses that have been better identified all over the world in recent decades, are the negative side of this health-oriented representation of the role of forests. The analysis conducted in this article focuses on showing how these seemingly opposite views are actually complementary: once the mechanisms behind the diseases are better understood, the conservation of forests and their renewal become major goals for the populations concerned and for public authorities on the local, national and international scales, acting through numerous scientific studies and the establishment of public and private organisations. In this area, the role played by France is still too limited. A scrutiny of the last three centuries provides a better understanding of the essential character of social demands, cultural representations and medical expertise in the implementation of forest therapy and health-oriented environmental policies.

L’Amérique et la mise en abyme dans trois polars francophones contemporains

It is very much in style these days in France to write American-style detective novels or thrillers. However, what does this rather vague terminology really refer to? Are we dealing with simple suspense and horror stories which take place in the United States, with situations and scenes echoing those of popular TV series? Or are these hybrid novels, combining highly complex detective plots and thorough sociological investigations about contemporary America? Taking as examples Joël Dicker’s La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (2012), Carole Allamand’s La Plume de l’ours (2013) and Antoine Bello’s Roman américain (2014), we will examine three rather ambivalent representations of America based each time on a contrast between two generations and two key periods: the 1960s and the 2000s. We will also examine three striking devices of mise en abyme and see how they allow the authors to comment on the detective thriller as a genre while playing on the traditional opposition between high-brow literature and popular literature.

“Buen migrante” versus “mal migrante”: construcción nacional, gobierno de lo social y retóricas meritocráticas en las políticas de integración italianas

Este artículo analiza las políticas italianas de integración de inmigrantes, profundizando en los discursos sobre la identidad y los valores “italianos” versus aquellos atribuidos a las personas definidas como migrantes. La discusión empírica pone de relieve: 1) la existencia de representaciones ambivalentes, que oscilan entre un llamamiento a la participación activa en el proceso de integración y la problematización del migrante como sujeto otro, caracterizado por carencias culturales ligadas a la procedencia; 2) un discurso moral y meritocrático orientado a diferenciar constantemente entre “buenos” y “malos” migrantes. El análisis resalta la persistencia del pensamiento de Estado y argumenta que tanto las representaciones contradictorias fomentadas por dichas políticas como las lógicas de inclusión diferencial que estas generan, lejos de constituir elementos dicotómicos, se refuerzan recíprocamente. Las conclusiones apuntan a una transformación de las racionalidades acontecida no solamente en este ámbito político, sino en el conjunto del gobierno neoliberal de lo social.

“Something Outside of Ourselves”

Documentary film has traditionally perpetuated damaging cultural understandings of disability. However, Astra Taylor’s Examined Life (2008) and Bonnie Sherr Klein’s Shameless: The Art of Disability (2006) utilize documentary techniques to problematize the culturally constructed boundary between disability and able-bodiedness. Spectators are dragged into simultaneously traditional and innovative relationships with the spaces, bodies, and lives inhabited by the documentaries’ disabled subjects. These relationships encourage connection and intimacy even as they contain moments of distance and alienation. The films’ ambivalent representations foster an appreciation of disabled bodies as a reflection of valuable human diversity and a denaturalization of disability’s Otherness. As examples of new disability documentary cinema, the documentaries reflect the political potential of complex and affective representations of disabled subjects.

The digital labor of queering feminist Web TV

Episodes in two queer and feminist Web TV programs, Orange Is the New Black and Her Story, feature ambivalent representations of labor and social reproduction. These narratives suggest implications for digital economy, particularly its algorithms and its connection with the disruption of conventional social and economic categories. This comparative analysis mobilizes theories from feminist media studies and cultural studies to present the viewing of queer and feminist Web TV as forming networks of care and, potentially, resistance in addition to producing economic value.

Ridiculing the working-class body in post-socialist sitcom

ABSTRACTTelevision comedy has rarely been studied from the perspective of class in a post-socialist context. This paper analyses representations of class, body, gender and nationality in the three most popular sitcoms of the last two decades in Slovenia, focusing especially on their role in working-class discourse and its transformation. Ambivalent representations of working-class characters are highlighted and put in the context of the egalitarian ideology which prevails in Slovenian popular culture. Drawing on the difference between workplace and domestic sitcoms, the paper concludes that the appearance and performance of working-class characters may be interpreted as a reworking of class boundaries in the post-socialist context. Sitcoms are thus considered as contributing to a process of re-demarcating class boundaries, yet with a subtle mockery at the level of their bodies rather than by explicit vilification of the lower classes in general.

Romani (Im)Mobility, between Camps, Evictions and Ambivalent Representations of 'Nomads' in the Eternal City

Abstract This paper explores the trajectories of Bosnian Romani families who migrated to Rome between 1970 and 2000. These families were involved in the Italian and Roman authorities' attempts to govern 'Gypsies/Roma/ Nomads' through different combinations of inclusion and exclusion, and forced to face the radicalisation of xenophobic and anti-Gypsy discourses within Italian society. This paper unravels the complex relations between Romani practices and ideological elaborations of mobility and stability; different and ambiguous ideas of 'Nomads' as constructed and deployed by the Roman authorities; and the consequent sedentarisation and nomadisation processes of the Romani population living in the Eternal City.