Oppressive Aspects Research Articles

Remaking the Mainstream: The Case for Activist IR Scholarship

What should international relations (IR) academics do in relation to activism, both in principle and in relation to Britain foreign policy? In this article I argue that, while British IR academics do a significant amount of valuable theoretical and empirical research, we produce very little primarily empirical work which documents the record of the British state in creating human misery abroad – be it hunger and illness through comprehensive economic sanctions or repression using British taxpayer-subsidised arms sales. I use ‘British’ in this article as shorthand for ‘British-based’, and I use ‘British state’ as shorthand for the highly networked but heterogeneous political and corporate elite which holds concentrations of power and money in Britain and beyond. In addition, British IR academics engage in very little research exposing the deceptions and self-deceptions deployed by the British state to deny its responsibility for that human misery, and directed towards contributing to education and activism which challenges the right of the British political-corporate elite to act in these ways. The important work of exposing and challenging these oppressive aspects of British foreign policy has been carried out very predominantly by non-academics, principally journalist John Pilger, independent author Mark Curtis, and political satirist and campaigner Mark Thomas.1 Using my own past record of neglect of these issues as an illustration, I argue that most IR academics tend not even to be aware of making a choice in failing to carry out such vitally necessary work. In such cases, we have what physicist Jeff Schmidt called in his brilliant book of the same name ‘disciplined minds’, that is, minds which operate within elite-serving ideological bounds, doing innocuous, weakly challenging or directly elite-serving work.2

Hospitality and its discontents: Beyond bowling alone

According to Georg Simmel, commensality, the act of eating together, is fundamentally about the affirmation of social relations, where sharing food becomes a means of cementing ties. Food operates as a discursive field through which people construct boundaries of similarities and difference, and becomes an extraordinarily versatile vehicle for examining people's ambivalences about modernity, as well as the persistence of class and gender inequality. In my research on people's domestic hospitality, I explored the pleasures and burdens of feeding work in contexts beyond the family. What does food work look like when people invite friends, neighbors, and others into their homes for a meal? Potlucks, dinner parties, and barbecues operate as sites where the oppressive and liberating aspects of food labor come together in interesting ways. Quite simply, people invite folks into their homes and offer them food. They cook for them. These occasions are both pleasurable and problematic, for it is with no small effort that appropriate foods and social arrangements be constructed. The effort of hosting and feeding non-kin is considerable. While the outcomes are often pleasurable, many events provoke difficulties and conflicts, revealing people's fears about close social relations. Indeed, cohesion often involves a certain amount of coercion, manifest through menu, manners, and reciprocity. In my research on people's sociability beyond family meals, I found a consistent undercurrent of discomfort. This cultural tension between civilized behavior and comfort is not new to American culture but it has a particular configuration in contemporary times.

Freedom, Dehumanization and Welfare: An Asian Perspective

This article has pursued a new strategy in developing theories for the study of social development, by focusing on a two-fold paradigm for social development – aspects of freedom and oppression, that is, dehumanization. Instead of focusing only on the progress of social development (the “quantitative aspect” of social development), this paper also introduces the issue of existing different qualities of social development. With the use of the Freedom Oppression Matrix, which is presented in this paper, both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of social development can now be measured, and countries/regions can be compared to each other and over time. This new dual approach focusing on both aspects of freedom and aspects of dehumanization/oppression enables us to compare, measure and evaluate, different paths of social development and hence, different strategies and policies applied in the realm of social development. Also, this new approach opens up the possibility of comparing degrees and direction of change with regard to the quality and quantity of social development. The paper employs empirical data to substantiate the new theory developed, and concludes that in most cases freedom precedes humanization, and puts emphasis on the necessity to safeguard all aspects of social development at the same time to the same degree.

Seventeenth-Century North American Travel Narratives: Nation-ness and Self-Reflectivity

Much critical analysis has been dedicated to exploring the relationship between European and foreign societies to expose the often oppressive aspects of European imperialist expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as these develop into a consciousness of colonialism. For example, Nabil Matar discusses the 'superimposition' of England's American identity upon un-colonizable Muslims. Matar notes, 'Unable to defeat the Muslims, as [the English] had the American Indians, and unable to situate them in a world view convenient to their colonial and millennial goals, as they had done with the Americans, writers and illustrators applied constructions of differentiation from the American Indians to the Muslims.'1 In order to maintain a sense of national superiority, the English would superimpose 'the moral constructions they had devised to legitimate the colonization and ... the destruction of the Indians on the Muslims'. This superimposition of identity serves an important role in the English consciousness of strengthening English people's conception of themselves and figuratively weakening the Muslims. Matar continues, 'Superimposition provided them with a strategy to confront the non-Christian Other, and helped them redress their colonial and cultural inadequacies before other European countries such as Spain and France.'2 The English would overlay a constructed Amerindian identity upon the Muslims as a means of enervating the political, cultural, and colonial power inherent in the spread of Islam.While I agree with Matar's assertion that this superimposition provides a means to orient the English in experiencing Islamic society, I maintain that he neglects an important aspect of this interchange: the reciprocity inherent within one culture's interaction with another. Not only does England's imposition of an identity provide an orienting means to bring the cultures together, to experience one another, it serves concurrently to subvert and alter the home culture's very notion and conception of itself as it experiences the foreign culture.3 I will use Benedict Anderson's concept of nationness and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to detail how European travel narratives by representative and influential travel writers at chronologically decisive points in the seventeenth century document the alteration of the European consciousness as it experiences the foreign. Specifically, early seventeenth-century travel accounts by Adam Smith and Samuel de Champlain point to the influence of universalism within the mindset of the Europeans as they moved into North-American frontiers: whether in viewing the land or the peoples, Europeans regarded all through the lens of Christian and European virtues. Later seventeenth-century travel narratives by John Josselyn and Baron de Lahontan, however, point towards recognizing and accepting particularism: that is, particular cultural differences validate certain foreign cultural practices in European minds.4As the Europeans first encountered the foreign, they thought of themselves as a people belonging to a loose association of communities that subscribe to one religion and set of values: Christendom. This universalizing notion of Christendom orients Europeans to the experiences of the foreign.5 For example, in 1600 on his journey to the West Indies, James Lancaster carried letters of diplomacy written by Queen Elizabeth. In one letter to the King of Aceh, she writesThe eternal God, of his divine knowledge and providence, hath so disposed His blessings and good things of His creation for the use and nourishment of mankind, in such sort: that notwithstanding they growe in diuers kingdomes and regions of the world, yet, by the industrie of man (stirred up by the inspiration of the said omnipotent Creator) they are dispersed into the most remote places of the universall world; to that end, that euen therin may appeare unto all nations His maruellous workes.6In this letter from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Aceh, the Queen couches her diplomatic rhetoric in very medieval, Christian-universalizing terms. …

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re-scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity-based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re-focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.

The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 3: The Enlightenment as the Theory and Practice of Improvement

The second in this series of articles traced the transformation of Scottish agriculture during the period between 1747 and 1815. The Scottish Enlightenment is usually seen either as a passive expression of these and related economic changes, or as a local variant on European-wide intellectual trends with little direct connection to economy or society. In fact, it was directly involved in the transformation in three ways: as a theory of socio-economic development (‘political economy’), a programme for agrarian change and the movement for its implementation (‘Improvement’). The Scottish Enlightenment theorists were always conscious of the oppressive aspects of the division of labour which were inevitable under their own model of ‘commercial society’. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, they became increasingly aware of how ‘actually existing capitalism’ concentrated power in ways that the model had not predicted. Faced with the counter-revolutionary onslaught on British radicalism which occurred in response to the French Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment shattered under the weight of these contradictions into its component academic disciplines. The economic aspects of the Scottish Revolution accomplished, political economy increasingly shed all elements of critique and became reduced to an intellectually rigorous justification for the now capitalist landowning classes and the emergent industrial bourgeoisie.

Final Fantasies

In the last decades videogames have become very popular. In this article I argue that they establish a new relationship between bodies and identities. In videogames, the storylines are based on a mixture of other types of media fiction, where women's bodies are overrepresented and stereotypical, because of the market logic underlying these new media productions, which target a wide audience. Nevertheless, videogames' interactivity shapes new experiences of acting through other bodies. The erotic gaze on virtual bodies is shaped by the elements of exoticism and the grotesque. The virtual spaces and actions are characterized by exoticism (the recurrent presence of death, fear, surprise, thrills) and the realism necessary to involve the user's senses. I also argue that interaction in games is a process of imagination and action. The game user acts through another body, which he/she controls. This process opens possibilities for a resisting oppositional gaze and subversive practices, beyond the commercial aims of the games' designers. Of course, there are oppressive aspects of the virtual bodies; a female body becomes a mathematical series of polygons, out of space and time, and, only as such, the object of desire of invisible cyberteenagers. Nevertheless, as gendered subjects, to have a virtual body to play with is a liberating appropriation of a space not designed for us.

Working Out the Contradictions

Although feminist researchers have critiqued aerobics as an activity that maintains ideologies of female inferiority, many women, including feminists, attend, participate in, and enjoy aerobics classes. This research provides a preliminary exploration of the extent to which women can exercise agency within the gendered constraints of aerobics. The 10 feminist exercisers interviewed use strategies for participation that both downplay oppressive aspects of and enhance personal empowerment in their aerobics classes. These strategies include distancing, rejecting the critique, asserting agency, and making do. The women’s ability to enjoy a practice while constantly remaking it to suit their own purposes is indicative of the way women often must live their lives within a misogynistic, patriarchal culture.

The End of Erendira's Prostitution

Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent. (Frank Kermode 175) HE criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works usually accomplishes the difficult task of considering both his formal innovations and his criticisms of Latin American society and politics, but in the secondary literature on La increible y triste de candida y de su abuela desalmada (1972), the magical, fairy-tale elements have been analyzed much more thoroughly than its main theme of oppressive child prostitution. For example, Joel Hancock discusses Erendira and the Brothers Grimm (1978); Barbara B. Aponte examines el rito de initiation (1983); Marta Morello-- Frosch analyzes the funci6n de lo fantAstico (1984-85); Efren Ortiz gives the story una lectura mitica (1980); Antonio Benitez Rojo calls la Bella Durn-dente de Garcia (1987); Roberto Reis writes that the estructura de Poder is questioned through the use of the fantastic (1980); Jasbir Jain calls it Reversal of a Fairy Tale (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa places his comments on within a chapter titled the Hegemonia de lo imaginario in his 1971 biography of Garcia Marquez, Historic de un deicidio. The social problem that La increible historic addresses deserves a more frontal treatment. (I will use this short form of the story title to distinguish it from the film, for which I will use the character's name within quotation marks: Erendira). Overlooked in comparison to genre and myth, the story's social themes and realist strategies reveal Garcia Marquez' early interest in criticizing aspects of women's oppression. In this article I first remind readers of the Colombian author's insistence on the autobiographical origins of the Erendira-Abuela pair, and then discuss prostitution in several other texts by him. Finally I seek to explain the controversial ending of La increible historia by highlighting its faithfulness to its genesis and analyzing where the fiction diverges both from those origins and from literary norms. My contention is that Erendira!s prostitution is comparable to the massacre of the banana workers in Cien anos de soledad in that they are narrathemes based on real events which are treated by the fictions as unreal. In Cien anos, the historical massacre is represented, but then the sole survivor cannot find anyone to believe his testimony. All deny his tale and declare him mad. Hyperbole and improbability weight the evidence in the fiction in favor of the massive coverup, the Big Lie in which a massacre on such a scale never could have happened. Yet history has witnessed such an event. Similarly, the nature of Erendira's slavery is couched in the language of fable and fairy tale, giving the appearance of fictionality, of its impossibility or untruth in any literal sense. Hyperbole and improbability have led to reader incredulity. Yet Erendira!s barbaric treatment by her grandmother and the huge number of men who have paid-sex with her in fact could happen and does happen in reality. According to published interviews with the author, La increible historic is based on an experience when, as a sixteen-year-old, Garcia Marquez saw an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute. She was accompanied by a woman whom he presumed to be a relative. At a decisive moment in the fictional story, the text similarly anchors itself in the reporters look, in personal testimony, rather than the omniscient authority of a storyteller. The episode with the bordello prostitutes is witnessed by a first-person, participant narrator who enters the text on the page before (126), interrupting the third-person omniscient narration. Like Garcia Marquez' newspaper account of seeing the young prostitute abused by a relative, this unnamed participant narrator is a young man. In this segment, a group of sex workers from the local brothel are angry because has attracted all their customers to wait in lines at her tent. …

Liberalism, equality, and cultural oppression

Liberal political philosophy emphasizes the benefits of membership in a cultural group and, in the opinion of this challenging book, neglects its harmful, oppressive aspects. Andrew Kernohan argues that an oppressive culture perpetuates inegalitarian social meanings and false assumptions about who is entitled to what. Cultural pollution harms fundamental interests in self-respect and knowledge of the good and is diffuse, insidious, and unnoticed. This cultural pollution is analogous to environmental pollution, and though difficult to detect, is nonetheless just as real. The book's conclusion is that a liberal state committed to the moral equality of persons must accept a strong role in reforming our cultural environment.

Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man

In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euro-American warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the 'feminized Jew' as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today. Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.

The Gaze In The City: Video Surveillance In Perth

The gaze is a technique of power/knowledge that creates and exploits a new kind of visibility, of organising people so that they can be seen, known, surveilled and controlled. There is a complex interaction between the gaze and power, power and space, space and social subjectivity. Examples from Perth, Western Australia, illustrate how techniques of surveillance are used to gaze on the public, inviting consequent redefinition of what is public and private in the city. The possibilities of resistance to the gaze are outlined. There is a need to rethink the apparatus of the gaze, to debate publicly its enabling and oppressive aspects.

The Politics of Multicultural Art Education

Giving depth and definition the more general movement toward multiculturalism in American society and its schools, various liberation groups have challenged the dominance of the Western, white-male cultural tradition, finding it guilty of sexism, racism, classism, ageism, elitism, essentialism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism. Postmodernist thinkers warn, however, that movements which select and contest oppressive aspects of a dominant tradition may inadvertently reinforce or perpetuate other, equally oppressive aspects of that tradition; in this way contribute dominance in spite of our liberatory intentions (Lather, 1991b, p. 15). The problem of discerning the reproductive dimensions of our efforts (Lather, 1991 a, p. 154) is both obscured and complicated by the fact that within any liberation movement, there are those who opt for integration, those who argue for separatism, and those who choose pluralism as the best route liberation (Collins, 1981). Finding the integrationist vision of the melting pot and the specter of the separatist ghetto intellectually naive and/or ethically repugnant, most multiculturalists in art education subscribe pluralism not only as an accurate description of what is, but as a prescription for liberation and a model for teaching about art from other than the dominant culture's point of view. If pluralism would seem be an intellectually and ethically safe position, it is nevertheless politically problematic. Indeed, its apparent safeness in these regards might well stem from the fact that, although it provides a basis for criticizing political action, it is a position without a clear-cut political agenda of its own. If a pluralistic approach multiculturalism in art education is realize its promise of liberation and social justice, those advocating this approach need explore and address the political ambiguity inherent in this approach change. Toward this end, we have chosen review those tendencies within cultural pluralism that will need further critique if programs embodying them are not perpetuate oppressive values, attitudes, or structures of the dominant culture. We will then conclude our discussion by briefly suggesting the continuing importance of integrationist and separatist impulses if pluralistic approaches multicultural art education are be effectively implemented. Multiculturalism and pluralism are peculiarly Western ideas ideas not altogether unrelated the colonialist history of our dominant culture. In a postcolonialist context, the idea of studying other cultures (or one's own culture as if one were a visiting anthropologist) might yet entail a subtle form of intellectual expansionism: a desire know about the world and in that familiar Western sense, to be on top of it. Although the paradox of a Western bias in the notion of cultural pluralism is not intolerable, it should encourage us question whether the concept of cultural pluralism carries the same connotations or is equally valued in the diverse cultures multicultural pluralists intend recognize, understand, and appreciate. In an initial attempt anticipate the more particular values of the dominant culture that might be perpetuated in a pluralistic approach multiculturalism, we have identified several different responses among pluralists the oppression of Western mainstream culture. These responses, found alone or in various combinations, are: attack the dominant culture; escape it; repair (or control) the damage it inflicts; or transform it into a common culture. We will take a quick look at each, suggesting which attitudes of

Oppression and Liberation

This study explores the psychodynamics of oppression and liberation. The author draws on the Jungian theory of the complexes to elaborate the psychological insights of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator. The convergence of Freire's insights and Jungian concepts is presented point by point: duality and dissociation; adherence, selfdepreciation, and split bipolarity; dehumanization and projection; horizontal violence and projective identification; objectification and the withdrawal of projections; humanization and the integration of complexes. The author intends to make this interdisciplinary resource more accessible and emphasizes the need to understand both the "inner" and "outer" aspects of oppression and liberation.

Concluding remarks: a feminist perspective.

Consideration of women's health leads us to examine the whole scope of the political agenda so that the appropriate links can be made. Concerns with health take us far beyond the health care delivery system, and we must be mindful of the broad perspective necessary to our goal of increasing women's control over matters affecting our health. Feminism is a movement to free women from all aspects of oppression, whatever form it takes: sexism, racism, poverty, national exploitation, disability, age discrimination, or a combination of forces. Women's health is inevitably connected with women's place in society, and will not be fully addressed until women are empowered as a collective force worldwide.

Sexuality in “Red Vienna”: Socialist Party Conceptions and Programs and Working-Class Life, 1920–34

The study of the place of sexuality in working-class culture is still in its infancy. The most noteworthy investigations stop short at the threshold of the twentieth century, on the eve of full-fledged industrialization. The sparseness of data on all periods has made sexuality a particularly intractable subject. The reticence of both memoirists and oral history subjects to reveal the most intimate aspects of their private sphere has forced historians to work with very fragmentary evidence and to rely on inference and contextual reconstructions. If this is so, then why study the subject at all? Because our understanding of working-class culture would be very incomplete without some glimpses of intimate life. There, at the core of the workers' private sphere, lie the emotional resources that have made it possible for them to express their selfhood at the workplace and to respond to the most oppressive aspects of wage labor. There, also, are embedded a variety of subcultural forms and associations which, acting both as disabilities and strengths, have made it possible for workers to resist exploitative manipulation and reformist schemes for self-improvement.

Gender and Imperialism in British India

Rama Joshi The British used the particular form which gender divisions.took in India as a vehicleforproving.their liberality, as a demonstration of their superiority, and as a legitimation of their rule. They signally failed to understand the particular form of male supremacy in their own culture, or to analyse how they created and reirforced aspects of male oppression within Indian culture, seeing no parallels between the different culturalforms of male dominance in the two countries. The women's movement in India did not concentrate on male supremacy to the exclusion of foreign domination as the cause of their inequality, for in India male domination alone did not account for women's subordination. The colonists both improved women's position and worsened it in particular ways, but their actions were dictated, not out of concern for women, but out of the desire to maintain their financial inlterests and political power in the foreign country. Equally, it is clear that women's inequality was not identical with foreign rule, for the men in the nationalist movement opposed the women's demands when these threatened male privileges in the family; and despite the gains made at Independence, women's subordination did not disappear with the ending of political domination. The women's movement recognised this, constructing their demands around women's domestic, as well as political oppression, and organising autonomously for the emancipation of women rather than simply absorbing themselves into the freedom movement. So the Indian women's movement attacked both male supremacy and foreign domination. What inhibited them from emphasising male supremacy as one cause of their oppression was the use thait would be made of such a focus in Britain. This concern itself supports the movement's analysis that neither male domination nor imperialism alone accounts for women's subordination, but that both act upon the gender division, and are linked in perpetuating women's oppression.

Black Newspapers and the Black Protest Movement: Their Historical Relationship, 1827-1945

BLACK NEWSPAPERS in the United States historically have been closely related to the black protest movement. The black papers began in the context of the abolitionist movement and their continuance has been dependent on their presentation of the situation of black people, and advocacy of changes in the oppressive aspects of that situation. However, a great many changes have occurred in the black setting, the black protest movement and the black press. This article is a study of the changes in these three phenomena and their interrelationships with particular attention to the responses of the black press to the black protest movement from the founding of the first black paper in 1827 until the end of World War II. Pre-Civil War and Civil War Periods. Even during slavery some black people agitated for change. The black press itself began during this period with the establishment of Freedom's Journal in New York City. From the beginning, it was associated with northern urban blacks and, in this earliest period, the press was aimed toward whites. At this time the literate population among blacks was so small and its financial resources so slim that the support of whites was necessary.' The bestknown black papers during the Civil War and pre-war period were those associated with Frederick Douglass, the militant black abolitionist: the North Star and later Frederick Douglass' Paper. Even Douglass had a difficult time keeping the press operating; neither of his papers were self-supporting. During this period most blacks were enslaved, illiterate and unable to take advantage of a black press or to participate in a social movement to protest their situation. The little activity that did occur in the way