Oppressive Discourses Research Articles

Cultural Pervasiveness or Objective Violence?: Three Questions about KOS as Cultural Arbiters

Knowledge organization and knowledge organization systems are pervasive in human experience, yet the effect of this pervasiveness is overlooked and little analyzed. Several authors have called for a theory of knowledge organization that embraces cultural and social realities alongside domain-centric ontologies. Examples of leading studies point to pervasive and occasionally oppressive discourses embracing race, sex and gender and economics. Three research questions are presented about how to study knowledge organization systems as cultural arbiters and how to incorporate temporality and atemporality into the methodology of subject ontogeny.

Cultural Pervasiveness or Objective Violence?: Three Questions about KOS as Cultural Arbiters

Knowledge organization and knowledge organization systems are pervasive in human experience, yet the effect of this pervasiveness is overlooked and little analyzed. Several authors have called for a theory of knowledge organization that embraces cultural and social realities alongside domain-centric ontologies. Examples of leading studies point to pervasive and occasionally oppressive discourses embracing race, sex and gender and economics. Three research questions are presented about how to study knowledge organization systems as cultural arbiters and how to incorporate temporality and atemporality into the methodology of subject ontogeny.

‘Capturing’ queer lives and the poetics of social change

In this paper, I highlight the ways that poetic inquiry can provide a space for marginalized voices and make movements in social change. By deploying Judith Butler’s theory of passionate attachments to analyse a poem crafted from interview text, I suggest that poetic inquiry can open up a space in which to challenge oppressive discourses and present different angles and new types of knowledge regarding what it is like to ‘be’ different (lesbian). In offering this alternative methodology for researching and representing ‘queer’ stories, I illuminate how important it is to provide a space for marginalized voices to be heard, documented and shared whilst simultaneously suggesting that such voices have the potential to resonate with the embodied experiences of all, thus generating a space for collective social change.

What is normal, true, and right: a critical discourse analysis of students’ written resistance strategies on LGBTQ topics

This study examines how students perform resistance to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer topics in their written reflections in a higher education diversity course. Using a three-tiered critical discourse analysis , this article maps students’ resistant textual devices in their written reflections, analyzes the institutional setting of the course, and examines how the larger social discourse plays an important role. Findings suggest that students engage in resistance and (re)produce oppressive discourse in part due to the institutional and larger social discourse of the course and the topic. Implications suggest the need to promote to course instructors how language can (re)position students in a place of privilege.

Gender and the surrogacy industry in India: An analysis of exploitation in the production of a child.

The aim of this paper is to discuss what moral and philosophical values determine the debate on surrogacy as well as to detect the racist, gender and class oppressive discourses that prevail the surrogacy industry and exploits the surrogates labour. The study examines gestational surrogacy, which is where a couple “rent” the womb of another woman to carry their child. This is a fast growing industry, especially in India, where surrogacy, according to a report from the Confederation of Indian Industry, is estimated to generate $2.3 billion this year.The study is divided into two parts. First, it looks at reproduction issues in Western society, where most clients in the surrogacy industry come from. Second, it focuses on the surrogate and the industry in India. The first part problematizes the way our society views reproduction and what stigmas surround the notion of the nuclear family and the “need” for a biological child. The study then examines why so many childless adults now choose to proceed with surrogacy, and why they do this in India, articulating practical issues as well as the discourses of race, colonialism, gender and class that become visible. The focus in India then lies on the surrogate as well as the role of the maternity clinic. The thesis explores the dichotomy that is articulated in the surrogacy industry where the surrogate is simultaneously viewed as an object, a womb with no feelings, and as a subject, a compassionate Madonna that is impossible to objectify.

Resurfacing Female Identity via Language in Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is a representative poet of American women’s poetry. The subject of female identity is a dominant theme of American feminist poetry and Rich plays the leading role in search of this identity. Rich couldn’t find herself as a woman writer in the language she uses because it is a symbolic masculine language; therefore she introduced a new possibility of actualizing the female identity through the restructuring of this language. Thus, the objective of the study is to trace the semiotic aspect of language in Rich’s Diving into the Wreck to see the role of this Semiotic aspect in subverting the fixed-meanings of the symbolic language, which in turn leads to the resurface of the buried female voices within this language. It explores too Rich’s poetic discourse concerning the restructuring of female identity by the means of language. The study employs Kristeva’s concept of The Semiotic and The Symbolic in analyzing Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) to regain the feminine elements within the patriarchal language through the signifying process. Since Kristeva thinks that language can be the means for the subject to gain identity, so the application of her concept of The Semiotic and The Symbolic is relevant here. Rich utilizes the image of ‘Diving’ into history to show the need for a language that resurfaces the long-silenced voices of women in order to help them prove their own female identities far of the oppressive patriarchal discourses. The study concludes that Rich in ‘Diving into the Wreck’ exhibits a transformative understanding of the status of women reclining on the restructuring and resurfacing of female identity through the way of using a unified unbiased language. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p245

The BDS Campaign against Israel: Lessons from South Africa

ABSTRACTThe Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel is animated by a pragmatic strain that views external sanctions as effective pressure against a small democratic state and by a moralistic Manichean strain that portrays Israelis as oppressors. Both strains hearken back to the earlier campaign against apartheid in South Africa. We argue that doing so misreads the lessons of South Africa. Sanctions may have contributed to ending apartheid, but they operated in conjunction with improved security and interpersonal trust among negotiators. Key contenders moved from a discourse of oppression to one that humanized one another as partners with legitimate concerns. These conditions are missing from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Both sides consider their security to be precarious and they are locked in competing narratives of victimization, which further erode mutual trust and security. Measures to improve the parties’ security and trust would contribute to mutual concessions and greater justification for sanctions if the Israeli government is intransigent.

Remembering and Restoring the Republic: Star Wars and Rome

This essay argues that one of modern Western culture’s most-watched film series, the Star Wars double trilogy, derives much of its meaning by tapping into the age-old discourse of political freedom versus dictatorial oppression, which is at the core of early imperial reimaginings of the Roman Republic. Yet George Lucas’s films reveal that the longed-for era of freedom was hardly that at all, just as the era of libertas longed for in the Roman Principate was similarly illusory, particularly for lower echelons of Roman society.

Virginia Woolf’s Maternal Narrative

This article argues that Woolf serves as an exemplary model of women’s writing; a kind of writing through which patriarchal language is subverted. She explores the nature of oppressive male discourse and the conditions necessary to create alternative women’s discourse. In her text, unconscious desires manifest themselves through different languages. Through meticulous analysis of characters’ language in Woolf’s selected works, it becomes evident that so far, patriarchy has repressed the feminine element of the articulations of these unconscious desires. Therefore, Woolf’s text lays bare a language which does not repress pre-symbolic elements, since they are considered as crucial determinants in the process of the construction of subjectivity. Such a language is possible by merging masculine and feminine elements, or in other words, by merging symbolic and semiotic elements. Characters, under an ever-present maternal power, realise the inadequacy and limitations of the patriarchal (symbolic) language and therefore, transcend the rigid boundaries of patriarchal language.

"Relinquish the reins": persuasion and consensus in the discourse of pregnancy and childbirth advice literature.

Popular pregnancy and childbirth advice books constitute an important source of information for pregnant women. These texts shape women's perceptions of pregnancy, childbirth and the medical care they will receive during this time. This article reports on a study of the enactment of power relations between pregnant women and their medical caregivers in the discourse of pregnancy and childbirth advice literature and its implications for practice. The study focuses on the discursive positioning of women in relation to medical personnel through a critical discourse analysis of two popular advice books, one in English and one in French. The article suggests that through the use of a number of key discursive strategies, pregnant women are constructed as under the control of the medical institution in these texts. However, this control is not achieved by an overt oppressive discourse, instead it is achieved through persuasion and consensus by generating the consent of pregnant women to comply with medical norms. The medical institution is represented in these texts as a dominant force while women are constructed as powerless recipients of medical care. Medical professionals should firstly consider whether the power relations represented in these texts correspond to those enacted in clinics and delivery rooms. Secondly, caregivers should be cautious about recommending popular pregnancy and childbirth advice books to women as the relationship between pregnant women and their caregivers may be undermined by the negative power asymmetry enacted in these texts.

Facebook as Space of Resistance for Indonesian-Postcolonial Identity

This paper aims to answer the problem of how Facebook functions to re-construct the Indonesian-postcolonial identity by means of narrative in marking the transition from colonized subjects to liberated beings. The reason why colonial discourse still dominates modern society is due to its ability to possibly re-generate the feeling of inferiority in native culture and perpetuate the patterns of behaviour even after the era of colonialism was over. Evidently, the coming of Internet in Indonesia is significant and highly relevant to postcolonial study only if it is grasped in relation to the preceding history of Indonesian ‘old’ media. If Internet is socially imagined as a powerful tool of opposition to authoritarianism, I will show how Facebook makes room for a voice of disapproval of the dominant systems and create an independent surveillance over state, opening up unconstrained participation of people who are used to live under authoritarian regimes. My analysis will be focused on the way Facebook provides a mechanism to formulate a ‘new’ community that hold power to form a collective struggle of those who were considered as the ‘other’ – the ones formerly excluded or marginalized from the oppressive discourse. Certain ideas are liberally spread out in Facebook, creating an unstoppable flow of resistance toward the dominant discourse and changing the face of the nation. I see narrative as the ideological apparatus that seeks to liberate marginalized subjects by giving them the power to interpret their own experience and subjectivity without conforming to the dominant discourse. The medium is now giving a sense of pleasure and fascination in designing the conception of being a free agent. The process of self-identification produces acts of contestation by making clear the fact that identity is historically unstable and an object of change and reconstruction. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n22p82

Anticolonial Methodologies in Education: Embodying Land and Indigeneity in Chicana Feminisms

The author examines how anticolonial approaches in conversation with Chicana feminisms is a useful tool in education research. She proposes that anticolonial perspectives should be central to Chicana feminist projects if we are to take seriously the move towards decolonizing projects in education, arguing that the strength of Chicana feminist scholarship is its ability to be responsive to the multiple subjectivities, indeed colonial histories, that Chicanas embody. She concludes by showing how such a perspective can help uncover oppressive discourses and mechanisms of colonialism in education, offering social studies curriculum as an example.

Círculos viciosos: intersecções de gênero e espécie em A Fonte da Vida, de Darren Aronofsky

O filme de Darren Aronofsky, A Fonte da Vida (The Fountain, 2006), se oferece a uma leitura produtiva das formas em que discursos de opressão se interseccionam ao serem codificados cinemática e/ou ideologicamente. Este artigo analisa as diferenças de gênero, espécie e raça/etnia no filme e o modo em que são constitutivamente articuladas para possibilitar a "imanência" do Outro em cada um desses discursos, produzindo assim o sujeito "transcendental". Parto de uma compreensão filosófica do papel essencial da diferença de espécie (e do privilégio do status do humano) na constituição interseccional de outros vetores de diferença, como o gênero, o sexo, a raça e a etnia. Articulo, enfim, esse modo amplo de abordagem interseccional com uma discussão da relação com a morte que é supostamente exclusivamente humana e que permite que a humanidade seja construída como oposta à animalidade.

How student teachers (don’t) talk about race: An intersectional analysis

This study explores how student teacher talk about their students illuminates the identities ascribed to these same students. It uses a hybrid intersectional framework based on Disability Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Latino Critical Theory and methodologies (like examining majoritarian stories, counter-storytelling, coded talk, and post-civil rights race talk) to uncover how student teacher talk reveals oppressive discourses of race, disability (and language status). This article focuses on how the medicalization of disability facilitates student teachers not identifying the racialization of disability in school. It demonstrates the need for educational research to employ an intersectionality lens when exploring educational issues related to students’ identities.

Anti-Nazi modernism: the challenges of resistance in 1930s fiction

Mia Spiro's Anti-Nazi Modernism marks a major step forward in the critical debates over the relationship between modernist art and politics. Spiro analyzes the antifascist, and particularly anti-Nazi, narrative methods used by key British and American fiction writers in the 1930s. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, Christopher Isherwood, and Virginia Woolf, Spiro illustrates how these writers use an anti-Nazi aesthetic to target and expose Nazism s murderous discourse of exclusion. The three writers challenge the illusion of harmony and unity promoted by the Nazi spectacle in parades, film, rallies, and propaganda. Spiro illustrates how their writings, seldom read in this way, resonate with the psychological and social theories of the period and warn against Nazism s suppression of individuality. Her approach also demonstrates how historical and cultural contexts complicate the works, often reinforcing the oppressive discourses they aim to attack. This book explores the textual ambivalences toward the Others in society most prominently the Modern Woman, the homosexual, and the Jew. By doing so, Spiro uncovers important clues to the sexual and racial politics that were widespread in Europe and the United States in the years leading up to World War II.

A Wicked Sense of Humor

The purpose of this article is to investigate the way that Jesus’ sense of humor would have functioned in a first-century Galilean political and religious context. Drawing on both rhetorical and social-scientific criticisms, as well as form-critical reconstructions of the sayings of Jesus, it explores the possibility that neuolinguistic research into the phenomenon of linguistic genius may shed some light on the historical Jesus. It therefore proposes that many of the sayings of Jesus, which have traditionally been taken “seriously” might be better understood as humorous subversions of oppressive discourses by a Galilean peasant with a wicked sense of humor.

Signifying “Hillary”: Making (Political) Sense with Butler and Dewey

Judith Butler’s influential work in feminist theory is significant for its insight that sexist discourse in popular culture affects the agency and consciousness of individuals, but offers an inadequate account of how such discourse might be said to touch, shape, or affect selves. Supplementing Butler’s account of signification with a Deweyan pragmatic account of meaning-making and selective emphasis enables a consistent account of the relationship between discourse and subjectivity with a robust conception of the bodily organism. An analysis of the popular discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential campaign demonstrates why this hybrid pragmatic/poststructuralist account is necessary. Popular political discourse tends to represent sexism and racism as encapsulated in isolated events with clearly demarcated victims and perpetrators – as in the case of a demonstrator at a 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign stop who held up a sign reading “Iron My Shirt.” Many feminist theorists, on the other hand, maintain that sexism, racism, heterosexism and classism are institutional phenomena for which responsibility and consequences are less than simple to pinpoint. Much recent work in feminist theory has maintained that even when sexism is considered as a matter of discourse, it functions as more than simply hurtful language. Oppressive discourse, feminists have maintained, shapes lives, consciousnesses and bodies – it may even constitute subjectivities. Indeed, it has become commonplace in feminist theory to claim that language choices matter – whether the concern is with gender-neutral pronouns, or flagrant hate-speech – precisely because words have tangible effects on individuals and populations who are harmed or benefited by them. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to account for such a relation between linguistic or signifying phenomena on the one hand, and material bodies on the other. In order to explain how language might have effects on individual bodies, it would be necessary to offer an account of the ways in which such discourse operates both to dominate and privilege – and to do so in a way that does not reduce selfhood to textuality, or oppression to a type of utterance. My purpose in this paper is to offer an account of the relationship between discourse and selves with a robust conception of the materiality of the bodily organism, which, at the

Negotiating within Whiteness in Cross-Cultural Clinical Encounters

Despite awareness in social work and related literatures that sociocultural power dynamics are reproduced in practice, there is little research on how whiteness manifests as an oppressive discourse in clinical settings. This article analyzes audio-recorded therapy sessions between white therapists and racialized immigrant clients from an urban community mental health center in Canada to explore the ways in which whiteness shapes clinical encounters. Using poststructural theories of discourse and conversation analysis, the authors examine how discursive strategies that therapists and clients use in therapy sessions produce and reify whiteness as a prominent feature of cross-cultural communication. The findings illustrate how therapists maintain whiteness as an unmarked norm in their assessment of individual development and the family life cycle and how clients respond to, negotiate with, and resist whiteness, which positions them as subordinate others in Canada. The authors conclude with a discussion of implications for practice and future research.

Reflection and Reflective Practice: Creating Knowledge through Experience

Reflection and reflective practice are popular concepts in the health professions that have yet to be rigorously addressed in audiology literature. In this article, a select summary of the theoretical bases of reflection and reflective practice are presented, highlighted with practical examples. The potential for reflection and reflective practice to benefit audiology education and practice is discussed. A nondichotomous approach to including a reflective epistemology of practice in audiology is recommended. Also highlighted are the centrality of experience to knowledge development and attention to reflection-in-action as a way of being professional practitioners. Also, critical reflection is identified as crucial to uncovering assumptions that underlie our practices and challenging oppressive discourses and systems, toward moving the profession forward in a spirit of optimized patient/client care. Although this article is conceptually focused and not a broad literature review, some early research in audiology related to this topic is reviewed briefly and practical approaches to fostering reflective practice also are considered. Reflection and reflective practice offer generative possibilities for the rigorous development of knowledge based in practice and experience, crucial to balancing other practice approaches such as evidence-based practice.

Counterstories of college persistence by undocumented Mexicana students: navigating race, class, gender, and legal status

This paper draws from four sets of four in‐depth interviews and one subsequent focus group to examine how undocumented Mexicana students navigate identities and the meanings of race, gender, class, and legal status. We mobilize a critical race theory framework to center and explore the content of students’ counterstories. While majoritarian stories perpetuate stereotypical narratives that portray communities of color as culturally deficient, counterstorytelling creates a space for exposing and resisting hegemonic narratives in the home, community, and college settings. We argue that, through counterstories, Mexicana students are able to develop a positive self‐image that allows them to hang on to their academic aspirations, to persist in college, and to envision and pursue the possibility of success. We look at how undocumented Mexicana students’ narratives also reproduce and/or reinscribe elements of oppressive discourses of race, class, and gender in the contemporary USA. We consider some implications of our discussion of counterstories for educational theory and policy.