Discursive Production Research Articles

(Not-So-) Radicals: Debating Moderate Salafism in Russia

ABSTRACT In the context of traditionalist tendencies in the Russian religious space in 2000–2010, Salafism became the object of intense discursive production. Interpretations range from explicit criticism to the identification of its modernizing potential. The article analyzes various approaches at both federal and local levels, using the regions of Dagestan and Tatarstan as examples. Despite the politically polarized character of the discussion, these actors share important fundamental assumptions. These trends are compared with the French debate by Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel and are analyzed in relation to secularization theories.

“I always say, it’s the icing on the cake”: the discursive production of fare-free public transport in Luxembourg

ABSTRACT Although the policy of fare-free public transport (FFPT) continues to gain popularity across diverse geographical contexts, the case of Luxembourg is unique in this global landscape. It is the first nation-state to have universally abolished fares, in a society characterized by high incomes and GDP, and a particularly high car ownership rate. In this paper, we analyze the evolution of political discourses on FFPT in Luxembourg surrounding the introduction of the policy. Using qualitative methods, we reconstruct the decision-making process and examine the competing ideologies that shaped it. We find that the idea germinated on the margins of the political spectrum, but was adopted by those in power because of the unique opportunity to combine territorial marketing with a form of socially-inclusive and sustainable policy that would not harm the widely valued car-based transport system. Hence, this process demonstrates both the post-political aspects of FFPT, illustrated by how its introduction helped to marginalize critical voices around fare abolition, and its political dimension related to the public debate and the contestation that FFPT engendered.

Upmarket boudoirs and red lights: the physical environment of sex workplaces in New Zealand

ABSTRACT The physical environment and location of brothels has been the focus of significant scholarship, although much of the literature focuses on the exterior of these businesses, leaving the interiors as yet under-examined. In New Zealand, there is a tension between decriminalization’s intention that brothels are treated similarly to other businesses, and the enduring stigma which sex work is subject to. To mitigate stigmatization and public condemnation of their businesses, brothel owners sometimes mimic the aesthetic and branding of more mainstream industries. Drawing on data from media texts and interviews with brothel owners and operators, this article examines how ‘mainstreaming’ narratives of respectability and acceptability are produced in the physical space of brothels, particularly their interior décor and design. Media texts were analysed using a critical discourse analysis approach, and interviews using a Foucauldian discourse analysis model, allowing for an understanding of the interplay between the discursive production of the brothel sector and the physical environment of these businesses. We suggest that brothels’ interiors are used as a way of indexing their class status, and explore how this may be used to communicate ideas about the workers employed there, particularly in relation to existing stigmas about prostitution.

Jak nawiedzają lesbijki. Homo-spektralność, tożsamość i trauma w niezależnych podcastach Midnight Radio (2018) i Weaver (2021)

The article presents the spectralisation of lesbian desire, i.e., the discursive production of the social invisibility of lesbians, through its presentation in two podcasts: Midnight Radio (2018) by Bobbie Parker and Weaver (2021) written and performed by Newton Sweeney. The issue of spectralisation combines uncanny studies with queer theory, developing the concept of the queer subject as a phantom emerging in heteronormative culture through the social repression of queerness (the process known as homo-spectrality). In this context, the podcast format is particularly interesting as a derivative of radio, a medium historically predisposed to telling ghost stories (or conveying the voice of a ghost). The analyzed titles illustrate the social mechanism of spectralisation and offer a significant reinterpretation, as they base the production of the spectre not on the psychological mechanism of repression but on the desire for preservation, maintenance, and love.

Actional Orientalism

Through an analysis of the 2014 video game Dragon Age: Inquisition, this essay brings two contemporary problematics into dialogue—the neoliberal gamification of society and the logic of queer liberalism—to suggest that they converge upon a common, long-standing animus: the figure of the massified Oriental. The massified Oriental haunts Asianness, and retains East and Southwest Asia as its primary cultural referents, but the deterritorialization of Orientalism as an epistemic apparatus locates Orientalism in the realm of affect rather than geography. Thus, this paper proposes a heuristic of “actional Orientalism,” which draws attention to the procedural and discursive production of agency and the consequent narrative validation of that agency, contrasting agentic players against their objectified, thingified, and massified gameworlds. Whereas in Tara Fickle's “ludo-Orientalism,” wherein racialization is premised upon the otherness of the type of risk-taking and play, actional Orientalism draws on whether the racialized figure is capable of agency at all, finding within the Oriental the complete absence of the bounded, liberal, choosing subject. Dragon Age: Inquisition deploys actional Orientalism on full display, offering liberal transgender representation contingent upon acceptance of an individualist affect, requiring the full abjection of massified, Orientalized, queer others to enable this representation to survive.

Blurring belongings: navigating Indian and Adivasi identities in an area of protracted violence in India

ABSTRACT This paper is based on empirical research on the discursive production and marginalisation of Adivasi identities in an area of protracted violence and civil unrest in India. We examine the historical naming of the Adivasis in national and local discourses and the ways it is circumscribed contemporarily by the regulative Indian state and its efforts to document all citizens. We highlight systematic exclusions related to the location, livelihood and cultural practices of the Adivasi Gond community and the associated difficulties this presents for them to identify and be identified with the dominant symbols of ‘Indianness’. We then attend to the framing of the civil unrest in India, as one between the state and Maoists, with the Adivasis as ‘victims’ of Maoist violence. We highlight the implications of such a polarised construction of conflict for the Gond community and for the navigation of their multiple belongings locally. We argue that in categorising the Maoists as anti-India/national and thereby deploying more force, surveillance and strong coercive language, the state is normalising violence and actually fighting the community it is purportedly trying to save and protect. We shift away from the macro accounts of conflict, which situate the Adivasis in deficit, by addressing the particularities of contemporary local social relations and the complexities this presents for the everyday lives of the Gond Adivasis. We illustrate how the discourse of polarised conflict does not respond to the Adivasi position and the daily struggles of the Gond community for the assertion of their Indian identities.

Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Pursuit of Modernity: British Biopower and Female Sexuality in Domestic and Colonial Practice

This paper explores how female sexuality became a primary site for the exercise of British biopolitical regulation as illustrated both in colonial Hong Kong and Singapore, and in domestic practice within the metropole. The application of biopolitical regulation on the subject of female sexuality was based on a discursive production making indissociable the success of the imperial project and the survival of the imperial race and the control of the female body. This discursive production mobilized intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality through the Victorian cult of domesticity, resulting in a racialization of female sexuality with implications transcending the permeable frontier between the metropole and the colonies. Making “the prostitute” the exemplar of deviant, dangerous, and immoral sexuality had discursive repercussions for female sexuality more broadly; explained in contrast to “the prostitute,” the construction of sexual deviance had implications for understandings of sexual conformity and acceptability both in Victorian society and abroad.

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE REGIME OF TEMPORALITY: THE FOUNDATIONS OF ARCHITECTONICS

The aim of this work is to investigate and conceptualize the ‘temporality regime’ as a socio-cultural phenomenon, primarily analyzing its impact on social processes and social transformations. This study characterizes the concept of ‘temporality regime’ by employing heuristic resources of sociological theorization, particularly the socio-cultural approach, discourse theory, P.Bourdieu’s principle of double structuration of reality, and specific provisions of practice theory. Two levels of inter connection in the architectonic soft he temporality regime are established: static and dynamic. It is determined that the static level includes the inter connection of the objective background (culture) and the subjective plane (interpretative activity of subjects). The objective background is defined by cultural postulates that have imperative power, where as the subjective plane includes the activities of actors who interact with the products of cultural production. It is noted that the dynamic level of the temporality regime concerns the inter connection of social changes and the discursive field of the temporality regime through the pragmatic dimension. Social changes act as factors of transformation of the temporality regime, and conversely, temporality regimes influence social dynamics. It is found that this double interconnection forms a new level of discursive production, where social practices transform into discursive practices and vice versa, affecting the formation and development of social changes. The theoretical significance of the study lies in a deeper understanding of the temporality regime as a socio-cultural phenomenon, enabling the analysis of the interaction between culture and social practices in the context to social changes. The practical significance of the studies that understanding these inter connections will allow form or effective management of social changes and prediction of their consequences. The scientific novelty of the research is associated with the identification of static and dynamic levels of interconnection in the architectonics of the temporality regime, allowing for a concrete analysis of the impact of culture on the activities of actors and social changes, and vice versa. Limitations of the study include the need for additional empirical data to confirm theoretical conclusions. Therefore, future research prospects involve the collection of additional empirical data.

Life inside Logos: Discourse, Anthropogenesis and World-Effects in Cassin and Sloterdijk

This article performs a ‘logological’ and ‘spherological’ reading of globalization to critique the topical generality of spatial rhetoric. Posited respectively by Barbara Cassin and Peter Sloterdijk, these seemingly distant theories both show how ‘world’ is created by discourse — that being is an effect of saying. An appropriately equivocal translation of the Greek logos, discourse is here read as the rhetorical forms of ‘inning’ that make space sensible. Cassin's ‘counter-philosophical’ reading of the ancient Greek Sophists challenges post-Parmenidean philosophy's ‘ontopological’ generalization of space into topics, instead attending to the worlds opened by the different ways space is described. This is read alongside Sloterdijk's spherology and its emphasis on transference and ‘inning’, arguing that space is a discursive product, a shared ‘canopy’ under which we make worlds to share meaning. Throughout ‘human’ history, these meanings have, as both Cassin and Sloterdijk argue, determined human life as the ontological being that can be represented under these discursive atmospheres. The article suggests that this can be thought less exclusively by taking up the Sophists’ rhetorics of time and kairos, which reimagines the discursive production of space through contingency and particularity — the sense of reality as the autonomy of the political.

Communication, Manipulation, Seduction. The Pragmatics of Transparency

Communicative interaction is never totally transparent. A definition in terms of pure information transfer constitutes an impoverishment of the semantic content of a message. Other emotional connotations of linguistic interaction are deeply rooted in the depths of the subjects' psychology. This means that interaction is often manipulative and even seductive. This article attempts to present more systematically the conditions of manipulative and seductive discursive production. Speech act theory (Austin, Searle) and conversational logic (Grice) offer some tools to more or less formalize these subtle conditions of production of non-transparent “communication”.

Maniera and the education of a painter: iterations of Mannerist art theory in academic classicist doctrine and its critique

ABSTRACT This article seeks to discuss narratives underlying the debate on artistic training and (self)education of artists in two distinguished moments: the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerism and nineteenth-century artistic movements which opposed academic instruction. Mannerist treatises were the first to encompass aesthetic and pedagogical concerns in the context of newly established art academies – providing a fundamental, albeit essentially unrecognised, conceptual background for the subsequent discussions on art education. The goal of this article, therefore, is to examine how the rich discursive production of Mannerist authors provided the frame of reference and delineated the limits of this debate until the late nineteenth century – by setting forth the perennial question of the polarity between imitation and individuality. For the conceptual treatment of empirical sources, we adopted an archaeological approach, which enabled us to identify how the derivations and appropriations of Mannerist concepts provided the theoretical base for both the firm establishment of Academic dogmas and, in parallel, their critique. By this methodological choice, we hope to make apparent how these narratives continually revolve around the same ideas in a binary logic of delivering critique and suggestions of reform and change, contributing thus to the deeper understanding of the debate on art education.

Investigating the role of identity versatility in the discursive production of working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have sought to address the historical and cultural embedded (gendered) practices which influence the identity work of working-class boys. This conceptual article contributes to the study of working-class boyhood and education through first synthesizing key themes present in the historic and contemporary literature before adopting a feminist post-structural stance to consider how these themes are informed by our understandings of the discursive production of masculinities. Then, in the second half of the paper, we make visible what has been at the margins in the scholarship – identity versatility – which we define as contextual and agentic adaptation. Attention to versatility, we feel, offers the potential for a nuanced analysis regarding working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement.

Curriculum policies for brazilian high school education: the discursive production of the state education network of Mato Grosso do Sul (2012)

The analyses presented aim to problematize the discursive nuances (both political and curricular) of the identity constructed for high school education in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. To this end, we examine the 2012 High School Curricular Reference Document (MATO GROSSO DO SUL, 2012) in its primary condition, that is, as an “official” text and, therefore, bearer of authorized language, product, process, and producer of interested power relations. Official discourses have the capacity not only to influence but also to regulate fundamental aspects of education, such as the production and distribution of legitimate pedagogical texts, the social relationships underlying the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, and the organization of educational contexts. In summary, given the complexity that the curriculum presents to the educational field, the analysis of official discourses becomes more than necessary; it becomes urgent. Contrary to what was initially hypothesized, the curricular proposal for the network was made, in the midst of a reform movement, as one of the “innovative” educational actions operationalized by the state agent. The organization of the document, which is part of the efforts to inaugurate and reformulate the curriculum, reaches different levels of power (from national to local) and is guided by principles from the economic field, especially those of a neoliberal matrix, which in the educational field assume specific contours, translated in the incorporation of Competence Theories.

Democracy as a floating signifier: The struggle for legitimation of programming in Swedish schools

The concept of democracy is a central component in education policy at all levels, yet its meaning can be interpreted in a number of ways. This paper examines how democracy is conceptualised and utilised as a legitimising force driving education policy reform. More specifically, attention is given to the use of democracy in the process of promoting programming’s inclusion in the Swedish compulsory curriculum. A number of mass-media articles published in Swedish are analysed using the concept of floating signifiers. The context of Sweden is of particular interest, since the notion of democracy has been a driving force in Swedish society for the legitimisation of education policy changes. In this paper, we chose to approach the link between democracy and education from a critical perspective and ask how the concept of democracy is being utilized as a part of political struggles to hegemonize and legitimize educational changes. It is argued that democracy, as a floating signifier, was central to the discursive production of the educational agenda of programming and its legitimisation. This article aims to function as a critique of the promotion of programming in education as a means to democracy.

Platform-based diffusion-proofing: Digitally mediated discursive practice and China’s prevention of protest spillover during Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement

Based on the example of mainland China’s online diffusion-proofing practices against Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, we identify a platform-based tactic of diffusion-proofing. We argue that this tactic manifested the orchestration of top-down statist governance and bottom-up grassroots practices, as well as within-border and cross-border discursive dynamics. Facilitated by the technical affordances of social media platforms, a faction of netizens both from mainland China and Hong Kong followed the state and its agents online to co-construct discourses for preventing the potential spillover of the Movement to mainland China. We further suggest that this tactic was enabled by the hybridization of both technical logic and discursive logic. The platform affordances, especially different types of hashtags, allowed the state and its agents to practice digitally mediated discursive production, reacting to the momentum of the Movement. As a result, a discourse was constructed, which delegitimatized protest actions and ignited nationalistic sentiment for the purpose of diffusion-proofing.

THE DISCOURSE ABOUT THE INDIGENOUS: DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF POSTS AND COMMENTS ON FACEBOOK IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC IN IPIXUNA-AM

This work falls within the field of Materialist Discourse Analysis (AD) and its general objective is to analyze posts and comments made on the social network Facebook about the Kulina indigenous people of the municipality of Ipixuna-AM, during the Covid-19 pandemic, more specifically in the period in which the first cases of the disease were recorded in that municipality, in order to identify which discourses are materialized in these texts and the effects of meanings produced there on the aforementioned subjects. To this end, we consider it necessary to describe the conditions of discursive production of these texts, in addition to verifying the subject positions assumed there, with the aim of identifying which discourses appear in the significant materiality of the texts, that is, in the posts and comments published on Facebook. With a view to achieving these objectives, we present the theoretical bases of AD, based on Pêcheux (2009), Althusser (1974), Orlandi (2013) and others, concerning the concepts of language, ideology, subject, discourse, among others, such as are understood in the theory of materialist discourse. We also present the analysis procedures, a brief historical contextualization of the space and the research subjects and finally we undertake the analysis itself, which pointed out the prominent presence of a discourse in the analyzed speeches: the discourse about the indigenous from the colonizer's perspective , responsible for an official version of Brazil's history that has been told and reproduced discursively. These traditional narratives told by official History about the historical presence of indigenous people in Brazil contribute to the maintenance of this calcified imaginary about them and which came to the surface in the texts analyzed here.

Some bilingual couples speak lingua francas: personal pronoun indexicality in the light of positioning theory

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the communication of three bilingual couples, each speaking a different lingua franca (LF). Positioning theory offers a methodological framework to explain language choice in interactive positioning within personal contacts. A comparative view of the couples’ storylines benefits from the differences between them. The analysis herein shows how the speakers are positioned in the subtle interplay of self-positioning and the positioning of the partner. The couples draw on their language resources and specific linguistic features which index language ideologies. Reasons for the choice and maintenance of a LF in the couple are informed by attitudinal factors which contribute to the discursive production of interpersonal positions. Findings outline multidimensional perspectives on LF couples by showing how different positions are created and how positioning is connected to the negotiation of a common language. This paper advances the debate on LF communication in intercultural relationships by demonstrating that positioning helps to investigate the ways in which diverse language resources intertwine to create different linguistic constellations and eventually improve our understanding of the performance in a third language.

Alfabetização e cultura: por possibilidades outras de significação dos processos de aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita

ABSTRACT In this essay, we propose thinking about teaching how to read and write as culture (Bhabha, 2007), in dialogue with the theoretical references we have used to think about the curriculum (Lopes; Macedo, 2011) and the functioning of teaching how to read and write policies that we read as curricular texts. In this sense, we present a reflection that focuses on the tensions over the process of learning to read and write in the arrangements of recent education policies, which mobilize the discussion about learning how to read and write in childhood. To this end, we delve into the reading of policies that deal with the teaching how to read and write as discursive productions, understanding that they produce meanings and significations in the curriculum. Our methodological choices are based on problematizing the idea of a single answer, adequate at a national level. What does it mean to think of a single curriculum for teaching how to read and write? The attempt to establish a single meaning for teaching how to read and write underpins the production of the most recent policies, which bring with them a compensatory and salvationist character, reducing other possibilities for the meaning of reading and writing processes beyond what is currently being proposed. Therefore, our intention in this essay is to discuss teaching how to read and write as culture/enunciation, in order to problematize aspects that involve the attempt to establish meanings for what is meant by being someone who knows how to read and write in recent policies, pointing out that establishing a single national policy for teaching/learning how to read and write is impossible.

Голубь Курчатова: фигурации (пост)советского ядерного миролюбия

The article discusses the rhetorical, political and ethical entanglements of the atomic age, embodied into a new understanding of the world, as well as into new fragilities and responsibilities. The author notes the episte-mological challenges of exploring the discursive production of the peace in the USSR, which is identified as one of the most indoctrinated practices of late socialism. Through the lens of a single slogan, the author analyzes the indirect transitions between ethics and propaganda. The statement “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier”, which appeared on the banners of demonstrators in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was attributed to the atomic supervisor Igor Kurchatov, became a Soviet atomic imperative and a key figure in the discourse of (post)Soviet atomic peacefulness. The author describes the figuration of the slogan in the context of the confron-tation between two systems, nuclear diplomacy and the establishment of a global agenda for the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The USSR participated in this struggle by promoting the significance of the peace-ful atom and defending its moral priority in the propaganda of this brand. The author focuses on the authorship of the statement and reveals its entanglement with the genealogy of morality and the development of an ethical position for a Soviet nuclear scientist between nuclear war and the peaceful atom. The article pays attention to the contribution of the science journalist Vladimir Gubarev to the retrospective restoration of the authorship of the Soviet atomic imperative. By creating this discursive fiction, one of the main chroniclers of the Sredmash project simultaneously engaged in both propaganda and ethical work.

Que “Macho” é Esse?: “Anormalização”de Subjetividades em Videoclipes de Bregafunk

Abstract The entertainment industry is featured by discursive productions of ideological nature. Accordingly, different music genres work as identity vectors; thus, it is possible perceiving the representation of male individuals as the dominant gender in some of them. Bregafunk music stands out among these genres, since its music videos highlight straight and virile men, by showing women, LGBTQIAPN+ individuals and fat bodies in a stigmatized way. Based on the Foucauldian theory, the current study addresses the subjectivity “abnormalization” process carried out by another socially dominant subjectivity as way to defend and maintain its position. In order to do so, the current research presents the following investigative question: how do bregafunk music video productions represent alterities to male subjectivity? In total, 777 bregafunk music videos posted on YouTube between September 2012 and September 2020 were herein investigated, based on the foucauldian discourse analysis, in order to answer this question. Results have evidenced the dominant discourse of “male bregafunk music artists”, which is anchored in a strategy focused on perpetuating stereotypes and chauvinism. Thus, it was possible concluding that this subjectivity is a variation of the alpha male, who resorts to his cultural repertoire and social context to consolidate himself as the dominant identity by subjugating other identities through a double move comprising self-affirmation and denial of others. In addition, it was possible inferring that targeting women, LGBTQIAPN+ and fat individuals may be a defense strategy to address the growing political space gained by these identities in recent decades.