Critique Of Ideology Research Articles

The “Dream Weekend”: Feminism and the Domestic Interior at the Merchant Builders’ Display Home (1977)

ABSTRACT In 1977 the North American feminist artist Lynn Hershman conducted a three-day installation and performance piece titled “The Dream Weekend” at a Merchant Builders’ display home in Melbourne’s Vermont Park. The site-specific installation explored the aspirations and realities of the dream home through the staging of the life of a suburban woman in states of girlhood, confinement, and escape. Using new archival material, this paper documents Hershman’s project, exploring how a sharp feminist critique of the normative ideologies of the domestic interior was able to be staged and accommodated within the display home. Examining unpublished correspondence between the artist, the curators and personnel from Merchant Builders, this paper analyses the differing perspectives each brought to concepts of Australian suburbia and the progressive Merchant Builders’ home. It documents the conspicuously cosmopolitan and eclectically furnished interiors designed and styled by Nexus, a subsidiary interior design company of Merchant Builders. We argue that the Merchant Builder homes and interiors expressed new late twentieth-century subjectivities emerging from heightened environmental consciousness and individual identity. The complexities of the artwork’s siting drew out the complications, tensions, and collisions of this encounter between a progressive housing company and the feminist rejection of the suburban home.

Berebut Makna Lewat Dui’ Menre’: Analisis Mengenai Ideologi dalam Perkawinan Bugis

The rite of dui’ menre’ bestowal in Bugis marriage positions women as object of exchange. However, this rite generates contradictory effect. On one hand, it is perceived as burdensome because the broom parties have to give a relatively big amount of money to the bride parties. On the other hand, the Bugenese keep running the rite. Hence, the rite of dui’ menre’ is not only a ritual of giving-and-taking money, but also an ideological conduct. There is something powerful that forces people to keep doing the rite solemnly. This research lead me to conduct this research. There are two objectives of the reserach. First, it tries to find the form of ideology and fantasy which support the rite of dui’ menre’ be towal; second, it wants to expose the Bugenese sub ject position in the face of dui’ menre’ bestowal. The fieldwork was conducted in Pinrang district, South Celebes. To discuss the matter, this research utilizes Ideological Criticism and Sexuation developed by Slavoj Zizek from Lacanian concepts. Slavoj Zizek’s Ideological Crit icism is used to find out the fantasy which supports an ideology. Meanwhile, sexuation is utilized to show the impossibility of sexual relation defined by Bugenese through dui’ menre’ r ite. Dui’ menre’ is not only a language of tradition as it were in the era of traditional authority, but also a languageof economy which makes woman as an object of exchange. Dui’ menre ‘ is a challenge that must be conquered by a man to get a woman. In the contemporary era, several forces collide. Bugis feudalism, Islam, and capitalism interweave in the same issue. In the rite of ui’ menre’, woman is reduced to be object cause of desire for man. In this symbolic realm the Bugenese subjects present and take position. Generally, there are several Bugis subject positions in responding dui’ menre’, na mely psychosis, perve rse, obsess ive neurotic, and histeria.

The End of the World as We Know It

The End of the World as We Know It

‘If “Marxists” would only read Marx’: The significance of Simon Clarke’s Marxism

Simon Clarke was an original and consistent Marxist thinker. From an early stage in his career, he independently developed a cogent, non-dogmatic reading of Marx’s work that ran against the grain of the dominant variants of Marx of his day. In this piece, we delineate the main features of Clarke’s Marxism through a reading of an early essay, first drafted in 1970. We highlight his critique of ideology, his focus on the forms through which the social relations of production appear and his insistence on the unity of theory and history – the conviction that the class struggle is expressed in the concrete movement of history. These features would form the bedrock of his truly significant contribution over five decades.

The Book of Lamentations by John Goldingay

Reviewed by: The Book of Lamentations by John Goldingay Megan D. Alsene-Parker john goldingay, The Book of Lamentations (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022). Pp. xix + 288. $40. With his recent commentary, John Goldingay adds a valuable and timely voice to the conversation surrounding the Book of Lamentations. In this work, G. reads Lamentations in light of its literary and poetic features, textual witnesses, deeply "traumatic" backdrop (p. 2), intertextual links with the prophets, and likeness with certain psalms. In this way, G. portrays Lamentations as a text that teaches the believing community a kind of worship that asks hard questions of God and prompts God toward action when they feel as if God has abandoned them (p. 206). Lamentations, he writes, "is not just theory. … As the poem melds theology and spirituality, it makes key theological statements about God. But part of its point in doing so is to lean on Yahweh to be himself" (p. 139). Goldingay's exposition of Lamentations provides a balanced and well-researched textual analysis, steering away from what he terms "ideological criticism" (p. 30) and avoiding an oversimplification of Lamentations' complexities. One of G.'s key presuppositions about Lamentations is that "it holds together in an unstable unity a variety of theological themes and convictions" without resolving their perspectives or pain (p. 27). Goldingay's work itself contains two main sections, introduction and commentary. His thorough introduction covers matters such as the unity of composition, authorship and date, historical backgrounds, canonicity, theology, and main themes. The remainder of the work consists of verse-by-verse original translation and commentary. In each chapter's comments, G. focuses first on the broadest strokes, noting the overall similarities as well as differences between the poem at hand and Lamentations' other poems. Next, G. proceeds with a close translation of the Hebrew text, translating primarily from the MT but also incorporating and, at times, revising his translation based on other ancient witnesses (the LXX, Vulgate, 4QLam, etc.). G.'s original translations prove insightful, as he elucidates the literary and poetic features in the Hebrew text, including how careful attention to word order can influence the rhythm and emphasis of a given verse in striking ways (e.g., Lam 3:2 [p. 128]). G. also makes some novel translational decisions on particular words or phrases, for example, glossing (bat ṣîyôn) as "Ms. Zion" (pp. 59–60). Next comes the bulk of G.'s comments, through which he invites the reader to become more familiar with Lamentations; he does this by pointing out questions and tensions in the text, discussing its theological import, or painting a picture of a given verse's meaning in the time of the Judahites. At times, G. will embark on a theological excursus, discussing the nature of God's anger (p. 90) or Yhwh's nature (pp. 144–45). At others, he explores questions that help the reader understand the world of Lamentations, for example, the question, "What's so bad [End Page 335] about carrying a millstone?" that arises from Lam 5:13 (p. 200). Finally, G. provides a brief "Reader's Response" section, which reimagines and paraphrases the sentiment of each poem as an individual's reflection on Jerusalem during a worship gathering at Mizpah or Bethel. This imaginative space helpfully frames the thrust of each poem as it may have been received and processed by the generations following Jerusalem's fall, proving formative and fruitful for the reader in beginning to process both the emotional and spiritual import of each poem. When reading G.'s commentary, the great extent to which he has read, weighed, and integrated both old and new ideas from Lamentations scholarship quickly becomes apparent: he includes works from as early as 1546 to as recent as 2021, and everything in between. He distills this diverse breadth of voices into a succinct and nuanced reading of the text, making his commentary eminently accessible, despite, or perhaps, precisely amid his academic depth. There are only a few quibbles I have with this work. First, in G.'s extensive use of secondary sources, he does not always clarify his own position or attempt to draw opposing sources together. For...

The Politics and Psychology of the Literary Field: Revisiting Cultural Capital

Abstract This article explores the importance of psychoanalysis to John Guillory's literary sociology. The failure of scholars to recognize the canon wars as a symptom of the increasing institutional marginality of literary studies derives from their commitment to what Guillory calls an “ego-ideal” of the profession. In particular, the psychic investments of literary critics account, on the one hand, for their inflated claims to political relevance and, on the other, for the ability of professors of literature to strike an anti-institutional pose from within the privileged space of the university. The essay turns to recent developments in the field to consider how Guillory's analysis might respond to our present moment. If his sociological method neatly describes the failures of self-understanding among scholars with respect to the canon wars and the politics of literary criticism, it nonetheless fails to capture the importance of recent work in a more affirmative key, where ideology critique is joined to the study of lived experience.

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

There is no metalanguage; or, Truth has the structure of a fiction: The Žižekian system, between post-ideology and post-truth

This article examines Slavoj Žižek’s overall approach to the critique of ideology. His Hegelian-Lacanian approach to ideology criticism is addressed by looking at the historical shift from the problem of post-ideology to that of post-Truth. In the process, this article explains simply Žižek’s brand of ideology criticism.

The Viewer-As-Detective: Big Little Lies and the Productive Liminality of Complex Mystery Television

This research utilizes aspects of narrative and ideological criticism to analyze complex mystery television and representations of women. Using the first season of Big Little Lies, the authors argue that the disruption of narrative conventions creates a productive liminality in which the viewer takes on the role of detective. This positioning of the viewer-as-detective encourages viewers to attempt to solve the mystery but also to interrogate their perceptions of the main female characters depicted, ultimately helping to question rather than reinforce stereotypical representations of women.

A Jihadi Critique of the Modern State: Abū Qatāda in Conversation with Decolonial and (neo-)Marxist Thought

This paper analyzes the reception of decolonial and neo-Marxist thought in a jihadist critique of the modern state. The author argues that a study of Abū Qatāda al-Filisṭīnī, a prominent theorist of modern Jihadism and Salafism, reveals his nuanced interaction with theories of hegemony, ideology, and decolonization. An examination of Abū Qatāda’s critique of modern state institutions and ideology shows that he engages with philosophical critiques of sovereignty, hegemony, capitalism, and the nation-state and utilizes both neo-Marxist and decolonial thought. This paper explores how Abū Qatāda theorizes the modern state as a colonial project, leading him to rationalize jihad, or violent resistance, as the only solution to realize paradigmatic change. It further shows how Abū Qatāda justifies opposition to the modern state and hegemony with seamless deployment of scripture and Islamic jurisprudence and insists that his political project builds on premodern Islamic theories of knowledge and government necessary for decolonization, albeit often without offering details. This study reveals a feature of jihadist thought that has remained largely unnoticed in the literature and is the first to explore the interactions between Salafism and critiques of the modern state.

Editorial Note

Editorial Note

Extinction Panic: C. S. Lewis and Planetary Nihilism

AbstractToday figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have become high-profile evangelists for private space exploration, arguing that interplanetary colonization is necessary to save humanity from extinction. Although they may have the sheen of innovation, however, these ideas are not new. A century ago a coterie of British novelists, scientists, and social theorists writing during the interwar period became preoccupied with the possibility of human extinction and believed that such a fate might be avoided by taking human civilization to the stars. Watching these intellectual developments with a wary eye, a young C. S. Lewis was increasingly skeptical of both the “extinction panic” that gripped his contemporaries and the utilitarian and environmentally exploitative imagination of planetary conquest they championed. In response Lewis penned Out of the Silent Planet (1938), a novel that imagines three sentient species that have the means to prevent their own extinction but choose not to do so. Reading Lewis’s novel as a critique of the rapacious ideologies that defined this strain of interwar speculation, this article suggests that the novel models how the humanities might effectively respond to the extinction panic and cosmic adventurism that grip our own imperiled twenty-first century.

The Kindness of Strangers: Eugenics and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

This article argues that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire offers a broad critique of eugenic ideology, epitomized in Williams’s choice to end the play with Blanche DuBois’s forced institutionalization. By comparing the published 1947 play with eight distinct draft Streetcar scenes archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I recover Williams’s dramatic critiques of the cruelty of twentieth-century American eugenic social policy. Over the course of Streetcar’s drafts, Williams accentuates Blanche’s increasing loss of reproductive and bodily control, emphasizes the stigmatization of her mental health, exposes pervasive eugenic assumptions articulated by Blanche herself, and explores the eugenic potential of a DuBois-Kowalski child born to either Blanche or her sister Stella. This article thus proposes a feminist, anti-eugenic reading of Streetcar attuned to the impact of the sexist, ableist, racist, and classist rhetoric of the American eugenics movement on the play and then-contemporary US social policy.

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction

Abstract: What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular "metagenre" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation.

Impractical Criticism

Abstract On 25 October 2017, the Daily Telegraph falsely accused an undergraduate student of demanding that the University of Cambridge ‘drop male authors’. This essay takes the polemics around this episode as jumping-off point for a wider discussion of pedagogical method. It argues that the defamiliarizing procedures of practical criticism, which have been the subject of much ideological critique, can be extended and amended in a manner that reveals implicit bias, re-habituates cognitive routine, and restores the body to critical response. It concludes with one instance of such pedagogical method.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN SALAFI SCHOLARS AND ISLAMIC BOARDING SCHOOL SCHOLARS: THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE PRACTICE OF FIQH HADITH IN ACEH AND NORTH SUMATRA, INDONESIA

The Da'wah of the Salafi School aims to purify Islamic teachings by eradicating all kinds of deviations from Islamic practices that have mixed with non-Islamic cultures, giving rise to bid'ah. The salafi school invites them to return to the Al-Qur'an and hadith, where hadiths are only understood textually and in their sermons the salafi scholars openly attack Islamic boarding school scholars. ? How is the resistance carried out by Islamic boarding school scholars to salafi preaching, especially in understanding hadith? What is the influence that occurred on the implementation of Fiqh by the people in Aceh and North Sumatra Medan? This research is qualitative, namely a way of research and understanding that is based on how to investigate environmental conditions and community problems. The method of qualitative research is usually stated as a naturalistic research method because the research is carried out when the circumstances are as they are, also known as the ethnographic method. The approach used is an anthropological approach. To get the data, structural analysis, historical analysis, and ideological criticism were carried out. Based on the results of the research, it can be seen that the proselytizing of the Salafi sect which is carried out by attacking Islamic boarding school scholars openly, aims to really practice shari'ah which has the basis of Rasulullah SAW. Because they think that the Islamic boarding school scholars have left the Sunnh of Rasulullah SAW, so if it is not sunnah, don't do it because it will enter into bid'ah acts. However, the method adopted by the Salafi sect has actually departed from the provisions of the Koran itself, which wants da'wah to be carried out gently. Islamic boarding schools/dayah scholars should show their resistance to the salafi school (wahabi), because the salafi school is wrong in understanding hadith, because it only relies on textual understanding. Whereas hadith as the second source of Islamic law must be understood correctly, both textually and contextually, so that the messages of the Messenger of Allah through hadith, especially in interpreting the verses of the Koran which are still common, reach the community correctly. Salafi da'wah carried out both in Aceh and in North Sumatra has not had an impact on the community in practicing fiqh as expected by the salafi sect, because the community still commemorates Islamic holidays and understands hadith based on the Shafi'i school of thought. It is hoped that the salafi sect will carry out da'wah in ways that are gentle and willing to communicate in two directions, so that the messages to be conveyed can be accepted by the community. It is hoped that Islamic boarding schools/dayah scholars will maintain communication with the Salafi school, so that divisions can be avoided in an effort to maintain unity among fellow Muslims. It is hoped that the community will always maintain conditions so that they remain conducive even though they face ridicule and insults in practicing fiqh in everyday life.

Can narratives about sovereign debt be generally ideologically suspicious? An exercise in broadening the scope of ideology critique

Can narratives about sovereign debt be generally ideologically suspicious? An exercise in broadening the scope of ideology critique

A Review of Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness

A Review of <i>Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness</i>

A Cross-cultural Feminist Analysis of Dominant Discourse on Modern Chinese Marriages: Is the personal still political?

In view of China’s deepening engagement in Africa, I consider progress with regard to gender roles as a valuable measure by which to comparatively gauge the emancipatory feminist potential of Chinese and South African marriage practices. By way of cross-cultural feminist analysis, I thereby attempt to evaluate the institutionalised master discourse on gender dynamics within marriage in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In particular, this ideological critique will employ second-wave feminism’s “personal as political” theoretical lens, as well as both Jacques Lacan’s theory of discourse and Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between orthodox and heterodox discourses. Additionally, the dominant discourse on marriage in the post-Maoist PRC is argued to be both oppressive (same-sex marriage remains illegal) and progressive (divorce by agreement is an administrative act). If therefore, the twenty-first century is indeed to be a time of Chinese global dominance, such investigations are pertinent to questions of global gender equality, as well as to cross-cultural social justice discourse in general.