Discursive Media Research Articles

Producing Power: Dennis Hume Wrong’s Perspective on Gender in Contemporary Indonesian Cinema

This article seeks to uncover some of the ramifications of Dennis Hume Wrong's perspective on power in contemporary Indonesian cinema. The cinema is considered as a discursive medium that comprises a series of relationships between the characters, according to this idea of power and gender relations. The targeted films are Ali & Ratu-Ratu Queens (2021), Generasi 90an: Melankolia (2020), dan Imperfect (2019). The three films were made as a screen adaptation of a literary plot in the drama-romance genre. The findings demonstrate that the power relations in the films are legitimized by two consequences: intended and unintended power. Intended power is legitimized by force, manipulation, persuasion, and authority. Meanwhile, the unintended power is legitimized via a process in which power domination is implicitly assumed because everyone is aware of their position. Through these power relations, gender is conceived as a fluid and unstable notion in contemporary Indonesian cinema. The male and female binary is constructed by the flexibility and hybridity of gender identity, which dictates how they should act, feel, and function in society. Women already have an equal bargaining position with men, particularly in the workplace, yet the stereotype of femininity persists due to Indonesian society's belief in ideal gender rather than the modern mainstream of feminism's practice of new stereotypes.

빌렘 플루서(Vilém Flusser)의 이론을 통해 본 가상현실 영화의 특성

This paper study on the commonalities between today's virtual reality films and the Lumière brothers' films from the late 19th century. This study found two similarities. The first is ‘information overload’ due to the absence of film grammar. This occurs in the process of trying to better understand a new medium to the audience from the perspective of film producers. The second is information overload about novelty. This occurs because of the satisfaction that audiences can gain through new media.
 Flusser's communication theory was introduced to understand the two similarities between these early films and virtual reality films. Flusser explained that discursive media and conversational media can be divided, and confirmed that the difference between the two depends on the characteristics of the medium, but also on how the medium is used or how the sender constructs the medium.
 In the end, it was confirmed that virtual reality movies have characteristics that are close to the characteristics of a conversational medium, such as interactivity, as an ontological characteristic, and at the same time, they also have the characteristics of a discursive medium due to the characteristics of theater-based films that tell stories. Virtual reality cinema, currently a new form of film, were similar to discursive media due to the characteristics discussed above. In order to overcome this phenomenon and create a grammar unique to virtual reality films, it is necessary to combine these two capabilities rather than emphasizing one of the two characteristics of virtual reality (discursive and conversational). In addition, early films and similarly, it would be a way to solve the phenomenon called ‘information overload’ that appears in virtual reality cinema.

Discursive struggles over the Turkish agricultural cooperative field: liberal vs etatist frames during the early republican era, 1930-1933

ABSTRACT Purpose - This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminate the failure of a discursive medium, the journal of Turk Kooperatifcisi, to realize its ambitious goals of disseminating liberal ideas into the field of agricultural cooperatives. Given the strong state influence on Turkish cooperatives for over a century, this article strives to articulate when and how the anti-etatist cooperative discourse experienced an absolute defeat in the face of state hegemony. Methodology – This historical case study carries out hermeneutical discourse analysis on the archival data collected from the National Library of Turkey. Drawing on the first Turkish cooperative periodical, namely the Turk Kooperatifcisi, the researchers have read 214 articles, amounting to 966 pages. After a systematic interpretation of the collected data, the researchers have further situated archival evidence onto a plot and accordingly constructed a historical narrative, thereby illuminating the underlying reasons for the short life span (1930-1933) of a liberal cooperative periodical in early Republican Turkey. Findings- The findings of this study suggest that towards the end of the 1920s, the sharp turn in the economic policy of Turkey triggered a series of events, leading the agricultural cooperatives to become state apparatuses. Correspondingly, the liberal frame regressed in the face of the etatist frame and became defeated in the discursive arena. Conclusion- The contest between frames both shapes and becomes shaped by the ideological shift in the Turkish state polity. However, this macro-level change yielded in the Turkish agricultural-cooperative field an open forum where opposing discourses challenge for the settlement of expedient cooperatives.

The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. By Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. By Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.In their most recent book, anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff consider how and policing have transformed modern societies around world and colonized our imaginations. The Truth about Crime offers a powerful account about crime, policing, and modern state. The book is a anthropology that guides reader towards understanding what precisely is different or new about and punishment in modern societies. Recognizing how and policing have become constitutive of our everyday lives, Jean and John L. Comaroff trace how crime-in particular policing as a core function of criminal justice system-are constitutive of contemporary life. With special attention on United States and South Africa, book is theoretically sharp and expansive, and consolidates their previous work on law, disorder, governance, citizenship, and postcolonial state. It is an important contribution that offers scholars across fields of law, criminology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and human rights a clear understanding about social production and increasing fear of lawlessness and criminality in societies.While book focuses on contemporary political events, authors offer a rich unorthodox historical angle and classic texts of crime, policing, violence, and power to examine how human societies in modern era became preoccupied with crime. Focusing on nature of policing, book traces relation between sovereignty (read authoritative order) and criminality, and addresses how became an integral part of societies. Stressing importance of connecting crime, policing, and criminal justice system with existing social compositions of class, race, gender, and (in case of South Africa) ethnicity, authors offer significant insight about shifting relations and triangulation of capital, state, and governance.The book is divided into two parts. Part One is titled Crime, Capital, and Metaphysics of Disorder: An Overview, in Three Movements and undertakes to offer big picture. Delving into historical processes in era of capitalism, authors trace shift in foundational elements of our social, economic, political juridical, ethical, and cultural universe with an aim to trace shift in functions of crime, policing, and, governance. The three subsections 1.1-1.3 weave in contemporary experiences of and policing in United States and South Africa. Focusing on privatization of correctional institutions that render telecommunication and financial services to generate profit and businesses for corporations, authors argue that these developments in era of high capitalism indicate the rise of penal state (45), with a turn toward managerial model of enforcing authority and order. Taking South Africa as an example to understand how structures of contemporary and policing is a global experience, authors explain public fixation on crime (49) and how this has become discursive medium (52) to speak about limits and excesses of government. …

Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History

This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre—her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft—through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her ‘archives’, documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft—interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.

America’s Doll House: Casting Nora Helmer and other Transgressive Monster-women in Reality Television’s The Real Housewives Series

Capitalizing on the frivolous activities of affluent housewives who occupy the million dollar dollhouses of America’s landscape, The Real Housewives reality television series provides a compelling case to chronicle a fabricated world of sexualized excess, where housewives perform within the consumer imperative of media’s libidinal economy. Within these discursive media spaces, female communities are superficially constructed casting personalities similar to Henrik Ibsen’s Nora Helmer—housewives driven by shades of female hysteria. In this essay, I explore the myriad ways The Real Housewives’ media franchise fashions notions of “housewife” and how women subvert and resist this construction for yet another patriarchal construction of sexualized post-feminist consumer. I argue that these artificial performances of sexual desirability and liberatory feminism act as a substitute for gendered justice and political and social transformation. Keywords: Henrik Ibsen, Feminism, Post feminism, Gender Studies, Gender Performativity, American Television, Reality Television.

Masculine Bodies, Selfies, and the (Re)configurations of Intimacy

This article is part of a research about the use of selfies in two different apps, Grindr and Instagram. We are interested in exploring how selfies relate to masculine bodies and produce different negotiations of intimacy. Selfies are personal, bodily centered, and highly visible. Understanding their production can contribute to the discussion on the digital exposure of intimacy and on the (self) management of masculine bodies. We consider selfies as discursive media that merge the visual and the discursive. Through their practice, users actively negotiate their masculine bodies and their intimacies and question and/or affirm hegemonies. Based on visual analysis and qualitative data obtained from observation and structured interviews, our results point out to the active production of selfies in relation to the different apps and to different styles of bodies that (in)visibilize different body parts and/or emotional traits. Selfies (re)present hegemonic, resistant, and emergent bodies with different understandings of intimacy.

Revisiting the violence of Machiavelli

In this essay I focus on the conceptualization of political violence in Machiavelli’s The Prince and explore the extent to which the appropriation of his ideas on the role of violence by the discipline of International Relations (IR) does justice to the complexities, nuances of his discussion on the theme. Despite deep ontological, epistemological schisms among various approaches in IR, I suggest, one can discern an implicit consensus among scholars concerning Machiavelli’s political language on violence, in that, they remain wedded to an instrumental ontology of violence. Taking as my starting point this implicit consensus and probing its limits, I draw on the works of scholars who explore the rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli’s political theory and argue that his theorization of political violence both complicates and remains in excess of such an ontology: a surplus constituted by the symbolic, affective dimension of violence. On such a reading, Machiavelli emerges not only as a political theorist who grasps the violent foundations of modern political authority, but also as a thinker, whose perceptive account figures political violence as a discursive medium.

Khōra: An Inquiry Into Polytopian Philosophy and Cosmopolitan Governance

This article conducts an inquiry into polytopian philosophy, which is contrasted with classical utopia. It contends that classical utopia, in its exclusionary reliance on a single vision of a perfect society, faces the risk of becoming dystopian. The article conceives of polytopian philosophy as a discursive medium that remains open to the reception of diverse utopian impulses without restricting itself to a single vision. The article connects polytopia to Kristeva’s discussion of Plato’s khōra, which is interpreted as a rhythmic receptacle that receives subliminal desires and transforms them in a signifying process that both subverts and produces a symbolic order that gives meaning. The article concludes that polytopian khōra is a cosmopolitan social medium for inclusion of the uncanny “strange.” Polytopian khōra points the way to a more inclusive public administration that can serve as a catalyst in the transformative process of reception and co-creation.

Clarity in Philosophy

AbstractSome philosophy – Wittgenstein's would be an example – is written in clear sentences, yet most people find it obscure at a first reading. This is because the prime location of clarity in philosophy is not sentences but structures. Only if a reader can relate what he is currently reading to a wider framework does he know where he is. Coherent utterance in all discursive media – not only language but mathematics, for example, or music – possesses two kinds of structure at the same time. In this article these are distinguished, and their radically different relationships with language shown. In the process, the commonest causes of unclarity are also identified.

Refiguring Narrative Reception: The Challenge to Ricoeur's Theory of Narrative Closure by the Open Text

Refiguring Narrative ReceptionThe Challenge to Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative Closure by the Open Text John Arthos (bio) If Paul Ricoeur had not developed a narrative theory for hermeneutics it would have to have been written at some point, so necessary is narrative to rendering the discursive character of hermeneutic being (see Arthos 2011). Yet although welcomed from many corners, it was also immediately controversial (Carr 1986). Since metanarratives were the target of postmodern theory as a strong signifier of the ideological face of hegemony, Ricoeur’s construction of narrative as a discursive medium of coherence and identity in the tradition of the hermeneutics of faith sat itself up like a bull’s-eye.1 But as Haydn White’s serial reviews of Time and Narrative show, the work was too good to dismiss out of hand (1987 (2007). In fact, it is possible to affirm much of what Lyotard, Foucault, and others laid at the feet of narrative and still welcome Ricoeur’s constructive theoretical contributions. To be sure, even friendly critics have noted that Ricoeur’s exposition is circumscribed [End Page 1] too narrowly within an Aristotelian framework and tailored too closely to canonic texts. At the same time, feminist and other critical perspectives suggest the theory itself may be able to transcend these limitations.2 My goal in this essay is simply to ask whether new and less homogeneous narrative forms than those Ricoeur worked with can be comprehended through the lens of his concept of narrative. Ricoeur’s narrative theory describes the porosity of the boundary between the artifice of the story and the contingent materiality of life, and their complex movement back and forth. The particular aspect of this movement I want to focus on is Ricoeur’s shift in the theory of reception over the course of the three volumes of Time and Narrative from what he calls “transcendence within immanence” to something called “transcending immanence.” This happens as Ricoeur passes from the reception of literature to a full-on ontology. By the end of his analysis, his tripartite model of mimetic prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration is conceived as a process that expands outward in a growing circle beyond the literary text to the construction of the phenomenological life-world. In the conclusion to volume 2 he affirms categorically that “the boundary between configuration and refiguration has not yet been crossed, as long as the world of the work remains a transcendence immanent in the text,” and only “after a theory of reading has been proposed in one of the concluding chapters of volume three will fictional narrative be able to assert its claims to truth, at the cost of a radical reformulation of the problem of truth” (1985: 160). This final version of reconfiguration ties its anchor posts over the course of volume 2, part 3, and then acts as the resolution of the major problem in volume 3 (part 4, section 2), which is to know how to draw narrative history and fiction into the same circle. Ricoeur’s final vision is that, to the extent that we can, we construct a life through the narrative capacity to fashion the materials of the interpreted past and the possible future. Mimesis has even more agency than I think Ricoeur accounted for, and I want to see if I can expand its range a bit further. I am going to explore one dimension of narrative pleasure that is not developed in Ricoeur’s narrative theory per se but which is not a correction to the theory either. This example will illustrate how Ricoeur’s theoretical model is robust enough to stretch well beyond its somewhat narrow grounding in conventional [End Page 2] Western literature. It is because of new forms of storytelling, such as interactive fiction, fanzines, and cyberperformance, that we can see new possibilities for the work of refiguration. The Two Fields of Refiguration Ricoeur’s theory of fiction conjoins three traditions: the phenomenological concept of life-world, the Kantian concept of productive imagination, and the hermeneutic idea of interpretation as projection. This combination yields a concept of narrative fiction that he describes as “a world capable of being inhabited,” a habitable...

Experiment und Exzess

Besides the context of l’affaire, which is imbedded in the history of medical research, the author also engages with de Sade’s key writings for a comprehensive analysis. It becomes apparent that the discourse indeed anticipates central, rhetorical elements of the debate on vivisection in the 19th century. Yet these elements merely function as a discursive medium: For it is not the ethics of medicine but those of the Marquis that are negotiated.

Embodying the Tragic Father(s): Autobiography and Intertextuality in Aristophanes

This paper examines the role of the generation gap in Aristophanes' construction of his persona throughout Wasps, Clouds, and Peace. It contends that in Wasps and Clouds Aristophanes defines the relationship with his audience and his rivals by presenting himself as the figure of a paternal son. The same stance shapes the comic poet's generic self-positioning in the initial scene of Peace, where the parody of Euripides' Aeolus and Bellerophon evinces a corrective attitude in relation not only to the troubled images of fatherhood offered in the two tragic plays, but also to Aristophanes' unsuccessful performances as a paternal son in his earlier comedies. Euripidean intertextuality thus serves as a discursive medium through which Aristophanes dramatizes the turning points of his poetic autobiography.

First Impressions of Sarah Palin: Pit Bulls, Politics, Gender Performance, and a Discursive Media (Re)contextualization

This study examines and compares discursive constructions and performance of gender in Sarah Palin's media portrayal during the first week of her nomination to the Republican vice-presidential candidacy. Using a discourse analysis of online video clips posted by 5 U.S. network news websites, the authors found a discourse rich with complexity in both Palin's gendered performance and the resulting discursive media (re)contextualization of Palin. Her gender performance serves as an example of how masculinity and femininity are performed in a complex blend and how Palin's “masculinity” is accepted and celebrated, while at the same time also firmly rooted in more traditional notions of femininity.

Pater Rules Best: Political Kinship and Party Politics in Tanzania's Presidential Elections

In 2005 Tanzanians elected Jakaya Kikwete to the presidency with 80 percent of the popular vote. Like his predecessors, Kikwete emerged from the ranks of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party (CCM). CCM also secured 96 percent of mainland parliamentary constituencies. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Singida region between 2004 and 2006, I examine the production and performance of a political rhetoric in Tanzania that centers on notions of fatherhood and filial obedience. I explore how, in the realm of contemporary Tanzanian multiparty politics, paternal metaphors offer a discursive medium for weaving a seemingly unified narrative from the strands of competing and contradictory structures of authority – structures that turn on local conceptions of age, lineage, and kinship. This narrative serves to gloss over political and socioeconomic disparities, to confirm rural Tanzanians’ sense of themselves as citizens of a gerontocracy, and to produce a sense of historical continuity in a time of radical political and economic transformation – even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Urbanisation: Discourse class gender in mid-Victorian photographs of maids – reading the archive of Arthur J. Munby1

This article investigates the relationship between discourses held in early photography and the negotiation of new urban class and gender-based identities in the mid-nineteenth century in England. It will do this by examining part of the early photographic archive compiled by Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910). I will examine a previously overlooked part of Munby's photographic archive, the large number (around 70) of photographs (ambrotypes and carte-de-visite) of working-class women who lived or worked in central London taken between 1859 and 1865. The article considers Munby as a flaneur and examines the relationship between the voyeurism of the flaneur, the formation of class-based identities and these photographs of working-class women. Munby's diaries offer invaluable information on the early appearance of a new type of discursive medium, the photograph, and a new subject matter, the new working-class (women) in the urban environment of mid-Victorian London. I suggest that, by rebuilding the visual discourses held within these photographs, critical discourse studies can begin to appreciate the complex relationship that existed between realism, painting, photography and discourses of class. The article proposes that Munby's ‘use’ of these photographs, as a flaneur, allows us to consider the complex symbiotic relationship between class authenticity, photographic realism and shifting visual discourses.

Ethnolinguistic Racism

In late modernity, where the making of social worlds is governed by new media technologies, flexible systems of exchange, and an unprecedented traffic in money, markets, and people across sovereign borders, the problematic concept of the nation has been recuperated to fasten subjects to political space. In this context, the projected frontiers of the nation are increasingly mapped out through the medium of language, thereby producing new mechanisms for membership and exclusion. With a focus on German cultural politics, I examine how regimes of nationality and imaginaries of citizenship are forged by a racialization of language. Under the impact of global capitalism and European unification, ethnolinguistic racism emerges as a discursive medium for reconstituting subjectivities and sovereignties.

Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on Holland

This article challenges the use of British seventeenth-century travel writing on Holland as historical evidence, especially with regard to passages concerning Dutch women's independence. Two British travelers' accounts illustrate the complexities of employing travel literature to fill out the historical record: Fynes Moryson's Itinerary and Owen Felltham's Brief Character. Stuart royalist ideology and patriarchalist gender assumptions inform both texts. In addition, Moryson's Itinerary consists of intertextual pastiche; Felltham's Brief Character invokes the conventions of the Theophrastan character. Failing to understand travel accounts' status as discursive medium leads to acquiescing na�vely to their strategies of mimetic literary representation.

Multimedia and the changing experience of the learner

AbstractThis paper argues for a pedagogical analysis of what the new multimedia systems can offer that will impose on them a more ambitious objective than they currently have. It begins by summarising a framework for analysing educational media, in terms of how well they each support the teaching‐learning process. The different types of media are then related to different ‘modes’ of learning: via the narrative media which support learning through acquisition, the discursive media which support learning through discussion, the interactive media, which support learning by discovery, and adaptive media which can be used to support ‘guided discovery’. Multimedia is sometimes seen as a way of re‐purposing material originally developed for narrative media. Because it can be (even should be) an adaptive medium, this requires the learning objectives to be re‐constructed if the new medium is to achieve its pedagogical potential and offer a new kind of learning experience to students.

Arguing with Songs

This article seeks to problematize the anthropological tendency to view music as an autonomous force, suggesting that it may be better viewed as a discursive medium. It draws on existing anthropological, sociological, and musicological literature to argue that analogously to language and sound, the locus of the power of music lies less in its form and more in the various ways in which it is produced, circulated, consumed, and performed in culturally specific ways. Gendered ideology is located in these concrete, material actions of musical production, circulation, consumption, and performance; hence these musical activities serve to constitute the gendered subject in relation to dominant ideological power structures. Ultimately, by suggesting a way in which anthropologists could think productively with issues of music, gender, power, and agency, the article highlights the need to narrow the perceived disciplinary distance between anthropology and ethnomusicology.