Contradictory Experiences Research Articles

Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath's experience of depression.

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the 'lived experience' of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive patterns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other relevant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative corpus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more negative and more polarized than the norm. It is argued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.

Traveling Toward Distance: Italian Lessons

ABSTRACT Human beings are wanderers, although in another way we are more like trees, rooted in place, both physical and psychological. We cross borders, both internal and external, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, but often find ourselves seeing the new only in terms of the old or, more dangerously, not seeing the new at all. This article will explore through concrete instances pivotal philosophical and existential implications and lessons of the “fusion of horizons” exemplified in Montaigne's, Goethe's, Stendhal's, and James's reflections on their often contradictory experiences of Italy. Maybe Émile Zola's remark that a work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament applies to more than works of art.

The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards

594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a large control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt , “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations . Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the...

Postcolonial epic rewritings and the poetics of relation: A Glissantian reading of Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Derek Walcott’s Omeros

This article focuses on postcolonial anglophone engagements with classical epics in the light of francophone critical theory. It sets up a dialogue between contemporary Indian and Caribbean rewritings of epics using as its theoretical framework the “poetics of relation” formulated by francophone Martinican poet-critic Édouard Glissant. Classical epics epitomize what Glissant calls “root identity”, based on a distant, mythic episode of foundation. However, this root identity is profoundly destabilized by polyglossic postcolonial epic rewritings such as Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Such works are more attuned to what Glissant calls a “relation identity”, predicated not on the racial purity of mythic ancestral filiation, but on the conscious and contradictory experience of intercultural contact. This article argues that the specificity of such postcolonial epic rewritings lies in their shift away from the backward, rooted gaze of the immutable monument towards the possibilities of metamorphosis and relation identity, symbolized by the threshold and the gateway.

How field linguists have been investigating linguistic diversity: Commentary on Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson

How field linguists have been investigating linguistic diversity:Commentary on Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson Willem de Reuse I begin by congratulating Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson (DG&M; 2014) on this clear, eloquent, provocative, and insightful article. There are many points in this article on which the so-called ‘D-linguists’ and ‘C-linguists’ will wholeheartedly agree, regardless of their theoretical backgrounds. My comments focus on five areas where a more nuanced approach might have been helpful. I conclude with a substantial objection to the article. This objection has more to do with DG&M’s perception of fieldwork as conducted and defined by ‘D-linguists’ than with the investigation of linguistic diversity. I first consider the following statement in the ‘fieldwork methodologies’ section (p. e189): Of course, this [reliance on grammatical intuitions of native speakers—WdR] entails a methodological commitment to the validity of such intuitions. In our own experience, we have found that our consultants—many of whom do not read or write their first language, and almost none of whom have any formal training in linguistics—are remarkably consistent in their judgments of very complex structures, over literally years of elicitation. To evaluate this quote fairly, let me be clear that we agree on the validity of intuitions, and that intuitions are useful in semantic and syntactic elicitation, indeed in any sort of elicitation. What puzzles me in the quote above is the assertion that linguistically unsophisticated speakers are ‘remarkably consistent’ and are this way ‘over literally years of elicitation’. My own experience with speakers of two endangered languages of North America, Western Apache of Arizona (twenty years of fieldwork experience) and Hän Athabaskan of Alaska and Yukon Territory (seven years of fieldwork experience), is surprisingly different. Like the authors, I cultivate and value a close personal and collaborative relationship with the speakers of these languages, but I do not find this remarkable consistency at all. On the contrary, speakers change their minds over the years. Not only do they change their minds regarding judgments, but they even provide volunteered forms that directly contradict forms volunteered earlier. There is not only interspeaker variation, but intraspeaker variation as well. It is not unusual for the same speaker to volunteer a form and, a few weeks, months, or years later, reject it as something s/he would never say. So let me say that I am puzzled by DG&M’s report of the consistency of the Northwest Coast speakers. I must assume that the elders of this area are more native-language dominant and/or have much better language recall. It may be that the authors report more consistency because their focus is on syntactic and semantic elicitation, whereas most of my Athabaskan fieldwork involves morphological elicitation. But then again, I see no reason why syntactic or semantic complexity would be more amenable to consistency than morphological complexity. If anything, I would expect morphology to be more stable than syntax. In any case, our contradictory experiences are worthy of mention. Of course, the degree of language endangerment has something to do with it. Speakers of Western Apache, part of a community of c. 6,000 speakers, are not nearly as inconsistent [End Page e227] in their judgments as are the nine remaining speakers of Hän Athabaskan. It is well known that terminal speakers tend to increase morphological complexity and do so in inconsistent ways, as documented for a Scottish Gaelic variety by Dorian (1981). My second comment has to with §3.1, ‘Condition C meets Nuu-chah-nulth’. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the data or DG&M’s conclusion that condition C does not hold in the Nuu-chah-nulth language (or in other languages). What I am curious about is n. 13 (p. e191), reproduced in full here: As has been known at least since G. Evans 1980, these judgments can be affected by focus, or more broadly by a distinction between presupposed and asserted content. Focus has been controlled for in the Nuu-chah-nulth examples given here. But how does one reliably control for focus when eliciting data from elderly speakers of an endangered language? One has to find...

“We are the ones who made this dam ‘High’!” A builders’ history of the Aswan High Dam

This article explores a workers’ history of the Aswan High Dam. The workers who built the Dam refer to themselves as builders—a title that includes workers, technicians and engineers, laden with the pride of having worked on the Dam and the kind of classless society it promised to create. Builders demanded that I understand the ‘language of the Dam’ in order to be able to grasp its experience. The language of the Dam included idioms that encapsulated the glory of the Dam building experience as well as bitter experiences that rupture that glory completely. The building of the Aswan High Dam becomes metaphoric for the nation building process of the time, drenched in rhetoric and the promise of an ideal society, whilst equally exposed to its failures. I explore these contradictory experiences and argue that forms of intimate language such as idioms, sayings and poetry that emanate from a communal experience at a particular point in time reveal the politics, emotions and intricacies of that experience in a way that a constructed narrative of the experience may not. Thus, I unravel the politics of Dam building through the politics of a promised future, in a contradictory present; all now a past that workers grapple with as they compare a dream they made many sacrifices for, to a reality they are living in.

The Classing Gaze and its Gendering Effects: (Dis)-Respectability, Emotional (in)-Competency, and the Counselling Experiences of Domestically Violent Taiwanese Men

Research on domestically violent men typically takes an oppositional logic of gender. While the significance of class in researching domestically violent men is identified, class and gender are often treated as separate entities that do not complicate each other. Drawing upon group observations and in-depth interviews, this paper identifies how intersections of class and gender manifest in the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men. From a Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the authors analyse (1) how class distinctions serve to (re)produce gendered hierarchy; (2) how contradictory experiences of gender reveal a relational understanding of class; and (3) how the gendered nature of domestically violent men is inscribed with a meaning of (working) class specificity for maintaining middle-class ‘purity’. In analysing men's multiple and conflicting experiences, this paper contributes to research on domestically violent men by showing how class and gender are actively constructed and not produced in a monolithic/invariant way.

The taste of freedom: commensality, liminality, and return amongst Afghan transnational migrants in the UK and Pakistan

This study follows UK Afghan migrants on a return visit to Northwest Pakistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip (chakar) as a little‐explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of Pakhtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, chakar map destinations left and not‐yet arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multi‐levelled constellations of political and economic insecurity on refugees living between the UK and Pakistan. The article argues that chakar are at once therapeutic and reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation, and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the ‘round trip’.

De stille refolutie

Several studies have been published about ‘silent (r)evolutions’ in different wings of Dutch Reformed Protestantism, such as synodaal-gereformeerden (Reformed Churches in the Netherlands), vrijgemaakt-gereformeerden (Reformed Churches in the Netherlands [Liberated]) and hervormd-gereformeerden (Reformed Bond within the Protestant Church in the Netherlands). They suggest slow shifts within partly ‘pillarized’ church groups from orthodox Calvinist beliefs to modern religious views. The so-called bevindelijk (pietistic) gereformeerden, reformatorischen (‘refo’s’) or Dutch Bible Belt communities seem to be a special case in point. Scattered among the mainstream Protestant Church in the Netherlands and various small and strict Reformed denominations, they are represented by the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij. This ‘Political Reformed Party’ was founded by G.H. Kersten in 1918 as mobilization of conservative, pietistic and anti-papist people, rejecting social assurance, vaccination and women suffrage, and developing into a minor pillar or reformatorische zuil in the 1970s. This essay builds upon contemporary observations of the SGP in its starting period and in its recent presentation as well. It argues for a development from a critical or ‘revolutionary’ positioning in the democratic scene during the 1920s to a constructive participation in the political process since the 1990s. However, the ‘silent revolution’ of the staatkundig gereformeerden or the social and cultural emancipation of the bevindelijk gereformeerden is accompanied by signs of ‘anti-government sentiments’ and serious resistances within certain ‘refo’ communities. The artificial word refolutie (refolution) plays on the suggestion of a delayed and specific way of emancipation, integration and ‘depillarization’ of this religious minority. Further research is encouraged in order to understand and explain the complicated and contradictory experience of these compromisers between orthodoxy and modernity.

The “foxes” outfoxed: contestations between Koreans and Jews in South American textile industries

This paper is an analysis of the complex and contradictory experiences of Korean immigrants in South America. It critically analyzes the political economy of development and neoliberalism in South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina, while highlighting Korean immigrants in the apparel industry and analyzing their interactions with Jewish clothing manufacturers. The different position of Jews and Koreans in relation to the state apparatus, national belonging, global capitalism, and transnational networks and resources tends to create sociopolitical barriers which contribute to ethnic contestation and obstruct an otherwise meaningful social relationship. This paper will present and examine how these differences were formed and affected by global capitalism and neoliberalism.

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

This article examines negotiations of school education in a mountainous rural region of North India. I show how such negotiations are a part of broader cultural politics of development differentiated by class, generation and gender. In doing so, I address the utility and limitations of governmentality as a framework to understand how education and development shape young people’s relationships to changing terms of social reproduction. My analysis draws on ethnographic studies of the micro-politics of development and education to highlight how they work through both disciplinary and governmental forms of power to re-entrench existing inequalities and boundaries, yet also involve negotiations and contradictory experiences by teachers, parents and youth. I argue that such experiences and articulations on the part of ‘subjects’ of development signal the limits of governmental power, and counter notions of inevitable outcomes and choices for the futures of rural youth and their communities.

НАСИЛЛЯ І МАС-МЕДІЙНИЙ КОНТЕНТ

НАСИЛЛЯ І МАС-МЕДІЙНИЙ КОНТЕНТ

The Joseph Brant Miniature

93 Documents and Interpretations The Joseph Brant Miniature Christian Feest, Independent Scholar The many portraits made of Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), the loyalist Mohawk leader at the time of the American Revolution, have earned him the reputation as “The Most Painted Indian.”1 They are a reflection of Euro-American perceptions of his importance and notoriety and, at the same time, through innumerable copies and derivatives published since 1776, have contributed to his fame. Despite the fact that he had not been born into a Mohawk chiefly lineage , Brant rose to political prominence among his people as a staunch ally of the British Crown. His career was partly due to the active encouragement he received from Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies. Johnson was the father of eight children with Brant’s sister Molly and a powerful figure on the eighteenthcentury New York frontier. Brant also gained access to the political favors of the hereditary chiefs through his third marriage to a clan mother of the Mohawk. As a student in Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School from 1761 to 1763, Brant was introduced to the basics of European culture and acquired the skills necessary for his translation into Mohawk of the Gospel according to St. Mark, jointly undertaken with the Anglican missionary John Stuart in 1772–1774. After the League of the Iroquois abandoned , under his influence, its intended neutrality in the struggle between England and the thirteen colonies, the majority of the Iroquois ended up fighting on the side of the British. Supported by Sir William’s nephew and successor as Superintendent of Indian Affairs of the Northern Colonies, Sir Guy Johnson, Brant went 1. Milton W. Hamilton, “Joseph Brant—‘The Most Painted Indian,’” New York History 39, no. 2 (1958): 119–132. 94 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY to London in 1775–1776 to represent the Mohawk in land claims. He was lionized by the upper class and had his portrait painted by famous painter George Romney and a less spectacular likeness drawn by an anonymous draftsman working for James Boswell, the writer. During the American Revolution, he gained the epithet “Monster” Brant because of surprise attacks on border settlements from New York to Ohio by a body of Mohawk and Loyalist settlers known as “Brant’s Volunteers.” In 1785– 1786, he returned to England. In London he was painted twice by Gilbert Stuart (one portrait was for Hugh Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, and another for Lord Rawdon). During this period, American politicians also courted him, seeing Brant as the most important Iroquois leader of his time. Spurning them, he moved with his supporters to what is now the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River in Ontario. Brant spent the last years of his life in a magnificent mansion on his private off-reservation estate at Lake Ontario’s Burlington Bay.2 The portraits of Brant painted in England as well as those produced later by Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia in 1797, William Berczy in Ontario between 1794 and 1807, and Ezra Ames in Albany in 1806 have long been recognized and discussed extensively in the historical and art historical literature.3 In 1958, the State of New York acquired another portrait 2. For the life of Brant, see especially the monumental biography by Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984) and the pioneer work by William L. Stone, Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea, 2 vols., (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1838), who transformed the “Monster Brant” into a statesman of the “Noble Savage” type. Christian Feest, “Thayendanegea [Joseph Brant] and Mary Jemison [Degiwe’nis],” in Sylvia S. Kasprycki, ed., On the Trails of the Iroquois, exhibition catalog, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (Berlin: Nicolai, 2013), 156–159 places Brant in the spectrum of contradictory experiences of what it meant to be Iroquois in his time. Contemporary Iroquois intellectuals take an ambivalent view of Brant. See, for example, Tom Hill, “Brant: A Six Nations Perspective,” in Portraits of Thayendanegea, Joseph Brant (Burlington, ON: Burlington Cultural Centre, 1993). 3. In addition to Hamilton, “Joseph Brant,” see, e.g., J. R...

Influences on relationship-based health visiting, part 2: Discovering the need for balance through a new epistemology

In the second part of a two-part article, the personal, professional and organisational influences on relationship-based practice clarified in part 1 are explored further, with the author reflecting on experiences and discussions with parents, colleagues and researchers. Using living theory methodology, in part 2 the author begins exploring influences of practitioner personality, fears, anxiety, autonomy, training, evidence building and organisational climate. Balance emerges as an additional value in the author's ‘alongside’ practice for managing these tensions. She calls for a wider shift towards the same qualities of relationships expected in families to be practised across organisations with children's wellbeing in mind. Further, she concludes by calling for a new epistemology of practice that is capable of integrating the practising, training and researching of health visiting by embracing contradictory experiences occurring in living relationships.

Black and White: Applying Derrida to Contradictory Experiences in an Art Therapy Group for Victims of Torture

This article applies the thinking of Jacques Derrida to contradictions raised in an art therapy group for victims of torture, in which the therapist was white and the group members black. It draws parallels between the hierarchical binaries of talk/art and white/black, understanding these pairs as both stemming from a mind/body binary. The paper explores whether Derrida’s deconstruction of the talk/art binary might facilitate the deconstruction of the white/black and colonizer/colonized binaries, with the purpose of preventing us repeating patterns of domination as well as in keeping us open to the ‘other’.

Egocentrism in Judging the Effectiveness of Treatments

Four experiments examined projection and egocentrism in people's expectations about how a treatment they tried would impact others. In Experiment 1, people's expectations and recommendations for others aligned heavily with their own experience even though they directly witnessed a co-participant's contradictory experience. Experiments 2 and 3 examined potential mechanisms for the egocentrism. In Experiment 4, egocentrism persisted even when participants saw two co-participants have experiences that contradicted their own, except when the dependent measure about expectations was statistically framed. Implications for the literature on false consensus and for understanding the persistence of beliefs in ineffective treatments are discussed.

Okinawa as an Intersection of Colonialisms: Toward Creating a Place Open to and Interconnecting with Asia

The aftermath of 9.11, along with the Fukushima disaster, has once again highlighted the continuities of colonialism and of Cold War political culture in East Asia, shedding light also on the peculiar economy of simultaneous annexation and exclusion prevalent throughout modern Okinawan history. Integrated for many years into the Japanese Emperor state and assimilated to Japan, Okinawa was nevertheless sacrificed for the sake of Japanese sovereignty and was surrendered to US control—the flipside of post-war Japan's demilitarization and democratization. The assimilationist movement within Okinawa, supporting the 1972 reversion to Japanese administration, merely resulted in the perpetuation of US military occupation and of subordination to Japanese nationalism, thereby undermining the formation of Okinawa as a historical subject. This essay revisits the “anti-reversion” ideas that emerged at the time as a critique of this history of (re-)annexation and assimilation. It is argued here that because of Okinawa's contradictory experience and ambivalent position as an “internal border,” implying the notion of resistance as well as encounter, the island may constitute a site connecting those Asian peoples who have experienced colonialism and occupation. Okinawa's experience may therefore point toward an alternative decolonization of Asia that transcends the anti-colonial struggle for independence and the idea of sovereignty.

Artist's statement

I am of the generation when my daughter, now in her late twenties and soon to marry, talks with me about what it might be like for her to become a mother for the first time. She knows that I think it is a life changing, profound and contradictory experience – an identity upheaval – for which no words nor training can prepare us. Yet becoming a mother is also commonplace (including high levels of post-natal depression) and women are expected just to get on with it, preferably with others’ support, especially that of the new mothers’ mothers, whose own maternal experience runs like a thread through the generations, whether recognised or not.

Men's Contradictory Experiences of Power in Nada Awar Jarrar's <em>Dreams of Water</em>

Nada Awar Jarrar was born in Beirut in 1958, and left Lebanon to go and live in Australia when the war broke out in Lebanon (1975-1990) She eventually came back to Lebanon in 1995 and has been living there ever since. She writes in English and belongs to both the Lebanese women's writing tradition on the subject of war and to the literary corpus of Anglo-Lebanese women's literature in exile. So far the critics have focused on themes of exile, repatriation, memory, belonging, home, and homesickness (Mirapuri, 2009; Hout 2005, 2012). This paper analyses her novel Dreams of Water, which is set during the civil war in Lebanon, and attempts to look at this text from another perspective. novel revolves around a young man who gets kidnapped and goes missing. Anissa, leaves Lebanon for London because of the civil war and seeks a new life. Her mother, Waddad, stays alone and finds Ramzi who she believes is Bassam's reincarnated spirit drawing on her religious beliefs. Anissa befriends Salah, who is an older Lebanese man who reminds her of her homeland. Anissa cannot forget her brother, so she goes back to Lebanon to look for him. She falls in love with Samir, Salah's son, who works and lives in London, but Samir is not willing to sacrifice his work for her sake. Ramzi's mother claims her son back from Wadad's family and the novel ends. Though Jarrar focuses on women in her novels, it is crucial to examine how and masculine identities are represented in women's writing to understand the role play in women's lives. This paper draws on Kaufman's theory of men's contradictory experiences of power (1994) in his article Men, Feminism, and Men's Contradictory Experiences of Power to analyze masculine identity in Jarrar's novel. It argues that in Dreams of Water show signs of contradictory experiences of power because they cannot live up to the hegemonic definitions of masculine identities of the Arab world. When cannot conform to the masculine ideals, they blame themselves and are shown as insecure, anxious, weak, afraid to be emasculated, afraid to show their emotions, alienated, feel self-hatred, and suffer from an identity crisis. Nevertheless, to a certain extent they have a choice to reject the subject positions offered to them.MEN'S CONTRADICTORY EXPERIENCES OF POWERWhen analysing masculine identity it is important to note that masculine identity is not permanent and masculinities vary from one person to another. Kaufman supports the theory of learning that we become or women. Gender is a product and influenced by many socializing factors. The importance of the sex-gender distinction in this context is that it is a basic conceptual tool that suggests how integral parts of our individual identity, behavior, activities, and beliefs can be a product, varying from one group to another and often at odds with other human needs and possibilities (Kaufman, 144). Kaufman does not see gender as static and that acquiring gender is not a linear process, but he argues that the gender work process is ongoing and is created and recreated constantly. Masculine identities are influenced by endless factors such as religion, sexual orientation, class, patriarchy, and powers. Kaufman contends that, normally, is associated with power, even though not all might have it and they learn to exercise control. Although most cannot possibly measure up to the dominant ideals of manhood, these maintain a powerful and often unconscious presence in [their] lives. They have power because they describe and embody read relations of power between and women and among men (144-5). Men grow to bank on this power and their masculinities are glued to the patriarchal world. They feel their sense of self-worth when they have this power; however, he claims that this power is tainted because of the strange combination of power and powerless ness, privilege and pain (142). To illustrate, in every society have to behave according to specific social definitions of manhood or codes of masculine behavior; if they do not follow, they would be labeled as unmanly. …

Accommodations: staff identity and university space

Space has been of growing significance in social theory in recent years, yet, explorations of it in the scholarship of higher education have been limited. This is surprising, given the critical role space has in shaping staff and students' engagement with the university. Taking a practice-based approach and focusing on academic identities, this article analyses the spatial experience of an institution by defamiliarising spaces encountered in everyday work. We identify formative pressures upon institutional space, and how space then shapes experience: university spaces are designed for one purpose but come to be used for many, so that working within them can be a diverse and contradictory experience. The identification of academics with spaces is complex, and there are no simple experiences of belonging; rather, there is a constant project of identity-formation and change within mutable spaces.