Anti-essentialist Approach Research Articles

Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism

This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous thinking; the necessity of anti-essentialist approaches to male gender; the importance of understanding nonviolent and anti-sexist male perspectives on gender dynamics; and the potential queer investment that cis straight men might have in feminist politics, namely the freedom from heteronormative policing. I offer an intellectual genealogy of cis male contributions to feminist thought, followed by a close reading of Mike Mills's Academy Award–winning film Beginners (2010). The movie presents a visual account of straight male masculinity as it is positively impacted and influenced by feminist and queer perspectives, without necessarily becoming them. The film makes a powerful male feminist argument for the value of “beginning,” asking what feminist and left social justice projects might gain by splitting their gaze between a focus on failed relations across gendered difference—grounded in the seemingly endless betrayal of women and queers by straight cis men—and a productive openness to the inauguration of unexpected relationships between all gendered subjects.

When we couldn’t breathe. (Our) Stories from the Margins

ABSTRACT We begin our introduction by situating our special issue Our Bodies Breathe Resistance: COVID19 Stories From/In the Margins within the emergent academic debates around global inequalities, breathing and the body under COVID19 conditions informed by international relations, critical development studies, and anti/post/decolonial feminist scholarship. We do this while articulating our experiential approach to knowing as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice. In this way we practice enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western ‘contemporaneity’ and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking in times of COVID19. Guided by the following question: What happens when global inequalities, breathing, and bodies are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western critical feminist antiessentialist approaches we introduce each of the contributors to the special issue organized around the actions of Refusing, Healing, Caring, Eating, and Learning.

Messing up research: A dialogical account of gender, reflexivity, and governance in auto‐ethnography

AbstractThis paper aims to contribute to a growing critical and reflexive awareness of the implications of gendered assumptions about ontology, epistemology, and ethics in academic research governance and practice. It provides a retrospective account of the authors' shared experiences of an autoethnographic study of lap dancing clubs, focusing on critical or “sticky moments” encountered, and considering the implications of these for research more widely. It does so by highlighting the gendered power relations shaping academic research, showing how Judith Butler's critique of the heterosexual matrix can be applied to a critical, reflexive understanding of the impact of binary, hierarchical gender power relations. The analysis provides insight into some of the ways in which autoethnographic research on sexualized work may become messy, dirty, and sticky in ways that accentuate power inequalities but also open up moments of opportunity for gender binaries and hierarchies to be revealed, challenged, and resisted. Using a Butlerian lens to reflect on our experiences, we contribute to understanding how heteronormative assumptions shape perceptions of what makes “good,” “clean,” and ethically (formally) approved research that conforms to the governmental norms of the heterosexual matrix and, by implication, those contaminating forms of research that disrupt or resist its disciplinary effects. As ethnographic research is often messy by its very nature, and particularly so when situated within sex/sexualized work, we aim to show how gendered assumptions can inhibit reflexivity in academic knowledge production, resulting in research processes that are (paradoxically) unethical. In response, we suggest three ways in which gender reflexive research might be pursued, by: (i) identifying gendered assumptions reflexively and dialogically, (ii) adopting an anti‐essentialist approach that foregrounds experiential, embodied knowledge, and (iii) developing an anti‐hierarchical methodology. We do so in the hope of opening up ways that might enable others to avoid heteronormative assumptions having potentially detrimental consequences for their research and to offer a starting point for developing gender reflexive knowledge production in the future.

Performing Disidentification and Disrupting Neoliberal Multiculturalism in HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness

The HBO television series Random Acts of Flyness (2018) created, written and directed by Terence Nance along with a collective of young black filmmakers reconfigures tropes of the variety sketch comedy genre to critique dominant representations of blackness. This article examines how Nance and his team adopt novel and creative approaches to decentring the white gaze in order to hone in on the nuances and multi-faceted nature of blackness, thus challenging essentialist notions of fixed identities. I argue the show’s anti-essentialist approach can be understood through what José Muñoz (1999) conceptualizes as a performed disidentification on screen. In particular, Random Acts works on, with, and against the hegemonic representational economies and discourses of corporate media as a creative tactic of disidentifying with racist forms of misrecognition such as blackface minstrelsy as well as received ideas about heteronormative black masculinity and gender. Finally, I examine how the show employs intersectional politics and a black counter-gaze to challenge neoliberal and co-opted models of diversity within the television industry that fail to seriously engage with the subjugated knowledges and lived experiences of racialized groups.

Cut Piece: The Art of Yoko Ono and the Law of Rape in the United States

, In 1964, Yoko Ono performed Cut Piece in New York’s Carnegie Hall. This performance art involved Ono sitting on a bare wood stage wearing dark stockings, a dress, and a cardigan. She sat still while largely white male and female members of the audience approached her and one by one cut off a piece of her clothing with a pair of scissors. In the years since Cut Piece was performed, it has attained a nearly mythic quality among feminist art historians; while Ono herself has not always embraced Cut Piece's illumination of sexual and racial violence, many art critics have recognized its capacity to express important aspects of sexual and racial violation that go unrecognized in legal and civil discourse. In this paper, I limn Cut Piece's relevance to a gendered and raced problem that law often confronts when a woman has experienced a sexual violation, but did not resist, did not complain during or afterwards, appears to have "invited it," and otherwise does not conform to the stereotype of what Susan Estrich has described as a "real rape" victim. I study Cut Piece in relationship to mainstream legal responses to sexual violation that occurs in this context, as well as feminist and intersectional and anti-essentialist approaches. I also examine the important relationship that exists between law, art, and feminist legal theory. In the end, I conclude that Cut Piece is resonant with intersectional, anti-essentialist, and radical feminist approaches to sexual violations that exhibit Cut Piece's complex dynamics: While the law does not now recognize these violations as illegal, these theories and Cut Piece together offer a new pathway toward understanding the connections between race and sexual violation.

The Anti-Essentialist Poetics of Claude McKay’s Banjo

This article analyses Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo focusing on its anti-essentialist approach to black identity. Such prevalent anti-essentialism differs from the racial pride politics of the Harlem Renaissance, the literary movement with which McKay is usually associated. The rhizomatic poetics of this work will be explained through the fluid character which Glissant and other later Caribbean regionalist critics ascribe to the Caribbean text. This approach favours a hemispheric perception of the Americas which aligns with McKay’s ideas on black identity. Thus, it will be concluded that the prevalence of the American influence in Banjo despite its European setting reflects Quijano and Wallerstein’s model of Americanity for explaining the modern world order which saw its dawn in the Caribbean with the arrival of the Europeans.

Rethinking drugs

Discussions of drugs in international political economy tend to focus on the relative advantages and disadvantages of particular regulatory regimes and governmental policy approaches. While the particular regulation(s) and social context(s) differ, the drug literature is in this sense repetitive and neglectful of significant features of the global drug economy. Drawing on social economics, we argue that the neglect of broad and holistic, synthetic, integrative and comparative drug research in IPE stems in part from a research program in which the state is “essentialized”, resulting in drug research that is too narrowly cast. Borrowing from social economics, poststructuralist Marxism, and new materialism, we develop an anti-essentialist approach for thinking about the global drug economy in an effort to reveal aspects of global drug production, distribution and consumption, and the power relations entailed therein, that are currently obscured.

Manchester’s Post-punk Heritage: Mobilising and Contesting Transcultural Memory in the Context of Urban Regeneration

Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.

Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

ABSTRACTThis essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.

Between Text and Discourse: Re-Theorizing Islamic Orthodoxy

This article will examine the concept of orthodoxy as it appears in the work of Talal Asad and two of his interlocutors, namely Ovamir Anjum and Shahab Ahmed. In response to Ahmed’s critique of Asad which attempts to dislocate orthodoxy as constitutive of Islam, this article employs the distinction Anjum draws between local and universal orthodoxy and theorizes it from a discourse-theoretical perspective. Hence, it will be argued that universal orthodoxy is central to Islamic discursive tradition because it is the limit which preserves Islam’s singularity and allows it to exist as a unified universe of meaning. Furthermore, against Ahmed’s contention that orthodoxy cannot account for Islamic philosophy1 and Sufism as Islamic discourses because it is an inherently exclusionary concept, I will demonstrate that exclusionary limits are necessary for the formation of all discourses including Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Displacing orthodoxy effectively amounts to subverting the singularity of Islam and reproduces the pitfalls of anti-essentialist approaches.

Institutional Change in Social Structures of Accumulation Theory: An Anti-essentialist Approach

This paper argues for the need to recast Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) debates regarding the relevance of contradictions other than that between capital and labor, as well as regarding the terms of the political struggle in times of SSA decay, in the light of the concepts of overdetermination and hegemony. To that extent, it introduces the notions of “necessary social peace for surplus-value extraction” and “accumulation of unsatisfied demands over the accumulation process.”

Accompanying Partners of International Students: Reflections on Three Issues

This paper reviews and critiques the existing literature on accompanying partners of international students (APIS), who are often an ignored population in programs and services for the internationalization of Canadian higher education. Particularly, we identify three issues. First, we argue that current research on this group overwhelmingly focuses on their social and cultural adaptation difficulties while ignoring their agency in dealing with life challenges in the host society. Second, we note that research on this population should go beyond an overemphasis on gender, to include a comprehensive analysis of how gender intersects with other unequal social relations, such as race and class, in contributing to the complexity and multiplicity of their lived experiences. Finally, we suggest that rather than conflating APIS with trailing partners of expatriates or immigrants and treating them as a homogenous group, researchers should do more to address their heterogeneity from an anti-essentialist approach.

Mediterranean Carnage: Heretical Scholarship and Public Citizenship in an Age of Eloquence

The shipwreck of October 3, 2013, when at least 366 Eritrean refugees drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa, points to ongoing border carnage in the region. As an anthropologist with research experience on Mediterranean migrations and as an Italian citizen, I seek to inform broader publics and policy discussions of this issue. My substantial contributions to the public sphere have, in turn, foregrounded analytical tensions involving anthropological knowledge, critical citizenship, and the politics of immigration and of representation. But is it even relevant to engage broader publics when our interventions risk inconsequential incorporation into the vortex of the corporate news cycle? Probing a densely occupied terrain of knowledge production, this article illuminates narrow interstices where anthropological knowledge can be publicly disseminated. Anthropological knowledge does not settle for a fatalistic chronicle of structural injustice, and yet it resists merely pleading for the world as it ought to be. It confronts a lethal status quo by conveying the transformative power of actually existing realities. In particular, the article makes the case for an unyielding commitment to a relational, anti-essentialist approach. This approach, encompassing anthropological knowledge from production to dissemination, constitutes a distinctive analytical and political asset. It challenges the entrenched reification of migrants and refugees, and allows for the public dimension of scholarship and of citizenship to come to fruition.

The dissimilarity representation for finding universals from particulars by an anti-essentialist approach

The dissimilarity representation for designing pattern recognition systems is analyzed for its ability to build new knowledge from examples using an anti-essentialist approach. It is argued that it may find universals (pattern classifiers) from particulars (training set of examples) but that the resulting knowledge can just be applied but not accessed. Consequently, its use for a conscious human decision maker is limited.

Informal social support in contexts of diversity: shaping the relationship between the public and the private sphere.

This paper aims to re-examine the social dimension of social support as the shared responsibility of social work and families in shaping social support rather than pressuring parents' individual responsibilities, as this has been a significantly under-theorised issue in social work research. In our qualitative study, we discuss parents' experiences of informal social support in Centres for Children and Parents (CCP) in two cities in Belgium. During 2012, six discussion groups were held with 29 mothers, three fathers and one nanny who visited one of the CCP included in the project. A broad topic list was used, investigating parents' first visit and motivations to return; their encounters with other children, parents and the professionals; and the actual role of the professional. Data were interpreted repeatedly using qualitative content analysis. The CCP focus on engaging with a wide diversity of parents of young children, not framed as 'at risk', reflecting the contemporary contexts of diversity in which these practices unfold. Our research shows that departing from an anti-essentialist approach to diversity and heterogeneity may be productive for the promotion of both social support and social cohesion as it captures social issues such as diverse and changing norms and values, diverse and changing family compositions, lifestyles and situations, and diverse and changing biographical, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of children and parents. As the CCP offer the opportunity of a confrontation between private issues and public concerns, social encounters between a diverse mix of families are experienced as supportive. While embracing parents' perspectives regarding equity, reciprocity, agency and social cohesion, it becomes clear that these processes of interaction require facilitation by a specific professional. In this article, we attempt to unravel and discuss the possible role(s) of social work in generating informal social support.

Becoming Ryan: lines of flight from majoritarian understandings of masculinity through a high school reading and mentoring program. A story of possibility

Within literature relating to the broad field of boys’ education attention is regularly drawn to the significant difference between essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of “the boy problem” and the limitations of gender-based educational reforms which rely upon deterministic notions of what boys are ‘really’ like and, by extension, what they ‘really’ need. While these deterministic interventions have been widely critiqued in academic literature they nevertheless continue to dominate school and media based discussions about how to best support alienated, disengaged and at risk boys. This raises questions about the extent to which anti-essentialist approaches can be made more accessible and meaningful to teachers in schools. It further suggests the value of developing detailed accounts of real world interventions that have had a demonstrably positive impact upon the boys involved without reinforcing essentialist notions of masculinity. Adopting an attitude of “educated hope” (Giroux, http://www.units.muohio.edu/eduleadership/anthology/OA/OA03001.html , 2003) and drawing upon the resources of (Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), this paper examines one such case of anti-essentialist reform involving three Australian schools. It explores one particular boy’s experience of an intervention known as Boys with Books and argues that Ryan’s journey can be conceptualised as a line of flight away from traditional forms of masculinity: a journey in progress that has impacted positively upon his relationships with peers and teachers and changed his beliefs about his possible future options. The paper, therefore, illustrates the capacity for teachers and schools to display anti-essentialist understandings about masculinity while responding in practical and ‘do-able’ ways to the needs of at risk, alienated and underperforming boys in schools.

Poststructuralist Theory and Sociolinguistics: Mapping the Linguistic Turn in Social Theory

Poststructuralist theory has been broadly influential throughout the humanities and social sciences for two decades, yet sociolinguistic engagement with poststructuralism has been limited to select subfields. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for richer cross-disciplinary work involving sociolinguistics and poststructuralist social theory. I begin by describing the place of social theory within sociolinguistics, paying attention both to the possibilities of interdisciplinarity and the resistance to it. I then introduce the basic tenets of poststructuralism, focusing primarily on its two main constructs, ‘performativity’ and ‘discourse,’ and briefly discuss the discontentment with structuralism that resulted in ‘the linguistic turn’. I outline the sites in the literature where sociolinguists have already made use of poststructuralist approaches, and conclude by suggesting new possibilities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Though the paper focuses primarily on variationist sociolinguistics in the U.S. academy, I also make reference to other fields that work with non-static, anti-essentialist approaches to sociality, such as critical discourse analysis. I contend that poststructuralist approaches to social theory are useful for sociolinguists, especially variationists, in that they resist the false dichotomy between agency and structure and provide a comprehensive way of thinking about identity that ignores neither practice nor subjectivity.

Developments in religious studies: towards a dialogue with religious education

The early days of non-confessional, multi-faith religious education in Britain benefitted from close collaboration between academics in universities, teacher educators and teachers. This article attempts to initiate a revival of such a dialogue, by summarizing some developments in religious studies at university level and suggesting possible implications for religious education in schools. After a brief retrospective of phenomenological and ethnographic approaches in religious studies and religious education, it examines feminist, queer and postcolonial theory as well as the changing religious landscape in contemporary Britain and the wider world. Themes emerging from this analysis prompt the following proposals: to take an anti-essentialist approach to ‘religion’ and ‘religions’; to stress diversity within and between traditions; to recognise complexity and change in religion and society; to acknowledge both local and global contexts; to focus on real people and seldom-heard voices; and to criticize dominant discourses, whether as patriarchal, heteronormative or colonialist.

Practicing food justice at Dig Deep Farms & Produce, East Bay Area, California: self-determination as a guiding value and intersections with foodie logics

This article describes Dig Deep Farms & Produce, a food justice organisation and urban farm working to stimulate local economic development, create jobs, and improve the quality and accessibility of food in Ashland and Cherryland in California's Bay Area. Their practices are based on self-determined values although they take a flexible, anti-essentialist approach to foodie logics, which are prominent and problematic in the Bay Area. The case study then examines specific practices and strategies, as well as intersections with foodie logics, in three arenas – values determination, strategic partnerships, and foodways – that help to cultivate food justice and highlights key characteristics of food justice work: emphasising self-determination and working to fundamentally change the economic and social conditions of food apartheid.

“I’m just aware they’re labels”

This article discusses fieldwork in two research projects on Buddhists in London. It explores issues involved in researching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning and/or intersex (LGBTQI) Buddhists. It also considers issues around heterosexual identities in Buddhist communi-ties. In researching dynamics of gender and sexual identification of participants it was observed that at times participant narratives treated these identities for these axes of difference as provisional and contingent rather than essential, fixed and a basis for socio-political organization. This contrasts with much of the work on religion and sexuality in mainstream theistic traditions, where their LGBTQI members often argue a “reverse discourse” asserting their place in a “Divine Order” in which their sexual/gender identity is a key part of “who they are.” It is argued that theoretical approaches based on queer theorizing could be particularly applicable to research on Western Buddhist perspectives on gender and sexual identities. This is attributed to the anti-essentialist approach Buddhism takes to questions of subjectivity and identification and its non-hegemonic status in the West. Such queer theorizing would, however, need to acknowledge the constraints to “border crossings” between identity positions arising from oppressive forces from gender minoritization, class status, minority ethnic origin, and so on. It is also suggested that research on the heterosexual majority can elucidate ways in which faith communities are gendered, racialized and stratified by class.