Discursive Regimes Research Articles

Food security and the ma(s)king of indigenous peoples’ dispossession: the example of Inuit in Canada

ABSTRACT Focusing on constructions of food security in settler colonial contexts, this article demonstrates how its contemporary conceptualization is heir to long-standing schemes to reform Indigenous peoples and validate state projects. It highlights how discursive regimes of food security in the areas of health, conservation, and economics were conceived within frameworks that instruct Indigenous peoples as to correct behaviour, blame them for their misconduct, and ignore the role of settler states and populations in defining notions of right and wrong and in creating the conditions that promote and sustain those definitions. Ignorance, blame, and indoctrination are thus constitutive features of state interventions aimed at promoting Indigenous peoples’ food security. Using instructional publications directed at Inuit, the article demonstrates how, through the provision of services, and in the exercise of settler nation-building, Indigenous peoples have been subjected to programmes of indoctrination and ideological pacification whilst larger contexts of dispossession are bracketed out.

Sociopolitical Genealogy of Populist Conspiracy Theories in the Context of Hyperpolitics

The wide circulation of conspiracy narratives and their frequent intertwining with populist rhetoric is both an element of concern and a topic of intense scientific and philosophical debate. The depth of the link between conspiracy theories and populism represents a crucial issue whose comprehension can facilitate understanding their specific nature and the factors behind their diffusion in public communication. To this end, it is necessary to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach and great critical attention, eschewing monocausal explanations. This paper addresses the question of the essentially political nature of conspiracism, confronting the recent epistemological debate that, by putting the positivist paradigm aside, has sought to explore and understand the socio-cultural roots of conspiracy rhetoric, with its sceptical, antagonistic and hermetic traits. By integrating the reflections of epistemologists such as Cassam or Harris with the considerations of political scientists such as Taggart and with Schmitt’s radical reflections on politics, it is perhaps possible to reintegrate the different approaches to populist conspiracism into an overall social genealogical perspective, thanks also to recent demographic elaborations. Thus, we could ascribe the spread of conspiracism to the prevalence in societies of a hyperpolitical discursive regime, i.e., founded on the principle of opposition, without the possibility of compromise, between different groups and interests. At the basis of such Manichaeism, it is plausible to place in the first place the growing inequalities and related social disintegration, which hinder the circulation of trust and recognition between individuals and groups, thus ending up undermining democracy at its roots, as a political system that legitimises and thus peacefully regulates conflict.

Problematizing Managerial Militarization: Claims to Military Logistical Expertise in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

The Brazilian Armed Forces have had a prominent role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We take this participation as an entry point to confront traditional assumptions of studies on civil-military relations and militarization, investigating a particular claim used to justify the mobilization of the Brazilian military in health-related activities: their credentials in a managerial expertise in logistics. In doing so, we argue that there is an ongoing re-articulation in the discursive regime used to justify their expansion of roles—not one anchored on the efficiency in the use of violence associated with a “war ethos” specific to the military professional, but another, grounded on a managerial expertise to efficiently procure, manage and distribute resources across the national territory, especially in contexts of “crisis.” We claim that the historical transformation of such discourse is a particular expression of global processes that have historically vested “managerial expertise” with political authority to solve social problems in critical situations. We also contend that this managerial dimension has been largely neglected in the critique of militarization articulated in traditional and contemporary civil–military relations studies. In light of these processes, this article seeks to contribute to critical work regarding the conditions for and effects of the expansion of military roles under the regime of justification here analyzed, thereby stimulating us to rethink the assumptions upon which militarization can be problematized in the contemporary period.

Should moral commitments be articulated? An introduction

ABSTRACT This Special Issue questions a basic assumption in thinking about morality: the idea that the explicit articulation of moral commitments that usually remain implicit is the basis par excellence for dialogue and rapprochement between people of opposing views. Nicholas Adams shows in the main article of this Special Issue that there is a paradox behind this assumption concerning ethics itself: articulating moral commitments may end up undermining them. It inherently stands in tension with forms of life as people actually inhabit them. Adams associates this basic paradox of ethics with the problem of forced articulation in particular discursive regimes, such as interreligious dialogue. The practice of Scriptural Reasoning is introduced as an alternative mode of dialogue that is less vulnerable to the distortions of articulation. The five response articles (by Petruschka Schaafsma, Ariën Voogt, Rob Compaijen, Dominique Gosewisch, and Sophia Höff) address aspects of Adams’ challenge to articulation in relation to morality, rather than the setting of interreligious engagement. They point out the value of articulation in spite of its inherent imperfection, or constructively elaborate on how to deal with the paradox of ethics as analyzed by Adams. Finally, Adams responds by addressing the concerns of these replies.

Pakistani military’s rhetorical construction of an Indigenous civil rights movement

For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military’s discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement’s call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the context of South Asia.

#girls help girls#: feminist discussions and affective heterotopia in patriarchal China

ABSTRACT In June 2021, a girl named Du Meizhu revealed on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) of having been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier idol Kris Wu. The incident gained publicity over the month and climaxed in mid-July, when netizens started the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo. Rapidly topping the trending list, this incident led to heated discussions around the case and women’s social status in contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Yet unlike its #MeToo counterpart, the hashtag had been taken down hastily within hours, cutting its practitioners off from further engagements. In this paper we nonetheless propose a more positive interpretation of the incident. Combining Massumi’s affect theory with Foucault’s heterotopia, we argue that Weibo users constructed themselves an affective heterotopia in the hashtag #girls help girls#. Through an affective textual analysis of the posts in the hashtag, we argue that while vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia is ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, potentially leading to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we offer methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, adding to scholarship that transcends the global North orientation in feminist theory and politics.

Politics of Remembering: An Exploration of C D Narsimhaiah’s N for Nobody

Autobiography is an archive of memory. It is not a simple act of narrating all events of life, however, a politics of remembering. The writer has a variety of experiences and memories, but he selects certain memories and reconstructs them according to desired aesthetics in Michel Foucault’s words ‘discursive regime’ that is a political notion of the regime. It is a process of selective memory for the discursive formation of self. The self articulates not as a complete self but as a part of the whole. Each autobiography has a core motive, and the writer draws threads from the warehouse of memory which revolves around the desired self. To understand this conceptual underpinning, we do the contrapuntal reading of C D Narsimhaiah’s N for Nobody (2005).

From pity to fear: security as a mechanism for (re)production of vulnerability.

Vulnerability is not only a shared basic condition, but also a condition of potential. In the context of disasters and crises, the concept of vulnerability is frequently used to portray individuals and groups as 'weak', 'threatened', and 'in need of help'. Occasionally, though, a shift occurs and the 'threatened'-and therefore usually the pitied-become those who are feared and hated, that is, they become a 'threat'. This paper explores how apparently incompatible discursive regimes of 'threatened' and 'threat' intertwine, merge, and feed upon each other, and how vulnerability can be and is consequently securitised. It demonstrates that too often the freedoms and opportunities prescribed by the neoliberal state are impossible to actualise when 'normality' and hence 'otherness' are also defined by the state, where people are first and foremost subjects of a global market. These considerations are critical if we are truly to reduce vulnerabilisation by focusing on justice.

L’insostenibile spinta utopica dei bambini.

An indissoluble bond holds utopia and childhood together, not only because children are often at the centre of utopian narratives and imaginaries in which they embody salvific roles of corrupt societies – or, specularly in dystopias, that of perturbers of peaceful orders – but because they both evoke promises of radiant futures. Childhood is the symbolic place, the container of our hopes and desires for the future as a society, and utopia is simultaneously the 'place that is not there' and the 'good place' in which we socially project our aspirations for social change in an ameliorative sense. If this consolidated binomial appears self-evident and thus assumes the force of a "dominant discursive regime", it is true that by examining the production of the adult-centred discourse, and putting the children of the present and everyday life back at the centre of reflection, its explanatory tightness and projective force can become object of scrutiny and rethinking.
 By analysing the social construction of childhood and the role of children as social actors, this essay proposes a parallelism between utopia and childhood and between everyday utopias and children, showing the links that bind them, but also the repercussions of this link both in children's lives and in the prefigurations of ideal societies to imagine and to actualize.

The infant/toddler teacher as willful subject: A critical narrative analysis of gendered discursive regimes in US-based early care and education

Dominant narratives of teacher emotion in early care and education rely on historical discourses of white femininity and white maternalism to position early childhood teachers as naturally adept and selfless caretakers of young children. Missing from these narratives, however, is the reality that emotion-display rules and norms are often enforced on teachers through surveillance and social control, and that teachers whose emotion displays veer outside the bounds of the dominant narratives experience punitive professional and personal backlash. This qualitative case study utilizes critical narrative analysis and post-structural feminist perspectives to explore the emotional experiences of Lauren, a white, female infant/toddler teacher, as she navigated the emotional experience of teaching during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. The data is drawn from a larger study guided by the following research question: “What are the emotional experiences of early childhood teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The findings in this article leverage Michel Foucault's concept of the “docile body” and Sara Ahmed's concept of the “willful subject” to interpret themes of discursive enforcement and teacher resistance to teacher emotion-display norms and rules. These findings problematize the dominant construction of the idealized emotional landscape of early care and education and present in its place a portrait of surveillance and resistance in a discursive struggle of power against emotional will.

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds

<i>The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography</i>, by Mark Evan Bonds

Sources of knowledge and truth related to anabolic/androgenic steroid use among two-spirit, gay, bisexual, queer, and other men who have sex with men.

ObjectivesThis study sought to explore how two-spirit, gay, bisexual, and queer cisgender and transgender (2SGBQ+) men engage with information related to non-prescribed anabolic/androgenic steroid (AAS) use, and how discourses of risk surrounding AASs influence their AAS use practices. Two objectives were achieved: (1) Sources of information that 2SGBQ+ men consulted when considering using AASs were identified and (2) the ways in which discourses of risk shaped 2SGBQ+ men’s experiences of using AASs were revealed.MethodsParticipants were recruited for semi-structured interviews online and through word of mouth. A critical poststructural methodology and theories of risk discourse and biopolitics were used to identify themes and interpret data.ResultsSeventeen interviews were conducted with adult 2SGBQ+ cis and trans men. Three themes emerged: (1) Unauthoritative sources of knowledge and truth sought by current and prospective AAS users were inconsistent and difficult to evaluate; (2) Authoritative sources, including health care providers, reacted inconsistently; and (3) 2SGBQ+ men generated and shared lay knowledges as a form of community-led harm reduction.ConclusionThe complexities of seeking and evaluating information highlight the privileged nature of trustworthy, accurate information on the topic. Risk—as a discursive regime—places 2SGBQ+ male AAS users in the position to produce lay knowledge and cultivate their own “truths” on the topic, which can lead to preventable harm. Public health needs to address these biopolitical effects by considering these lay forms of knowledge as an untapped resource and design accessible and judgement-free AAS use harm reduction programs for 2SGBQ+ AAS users.

Politics of data reuse in machine learning systems: Theorizing reuse entanglements

Policy discussions and corporate strategies on machine learning are increasingly championing data reuse as a key element in digital transformations. These aspirations are often coupled with a focus on responsibility, ethics and transparency, as well as emergent forms of regulation that seek to set demands for corporate conduct and the protection of civic rights. And the Protective measures include methods of traceability and assessments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ datasets and algorithms that are considered to be traceable, stable and contained. However, these ways of thinking about both technology and ethics obscure a fundamental issue, namely that machine learning systems entangle data, algorithms and more-than-human environments in ways that challenge a well-defined separation. This article investigates the fundamental fallacy of most data reuse strategies as well as their regulation and mitigation strategies that data can somehow be followed, contained and controlled in machine learning processes. Instead, the article argues that we need to understand the reuse of data as an inherently entangled phenomenon. To examine this tension between the discursive regimes and the realities of data reuse, we advance the notion of reuse entanglements as an analytical lens. The main contribution of the article is the conceptualization of reuse that places entanglements at its core and the articulation of its relevance using empirical illustrations. This is important, we argue, for our understanding of the nature of data and algorithms, for the practical uses of data and algorithms and our attitudes regarding ethics, responsibility and regulation.

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!

Listening to Radiation

How does interactive media articulate what is fundamentally beyond human sensory capacity? The paper asks this in the context of Fukushima and radiation. Interactive informational media might itself hint at the answer given they run at speeds beyond human perception while nonetheless interfacing and therefore conditioning that perception apparatus. Thus, while much has been said about radiation and “silence,” this paper refuses that discursive regime, instead analyzing radiation through what Brinkema calls “the regime of near inaudibility,” a discurso-pragmatic approach to intensive relations, rather than a commitment to “being or not being.” That is, as an object restricted from immediate knowledge, radiation nonetheless becomes embodied knowledge as its existence and effects are navigated as a social force. To that end, the paper, based on field work, analyzes the way the Fukushima Commutan Center, a state-sponsored center sharing information about radiation and recovery, utilizes interactive media to produce particular embodied knowledges of radiation. I offer two examples: first, an interactive game in which children’s bodies are projected onto a screen to stop oncoming “radiation” with “blockers” (representing radiation-resistant material) mapped to their hand; and second, a spherical theatre dome covered entirely by screens and fit with surrounding speakers in which visitors stand suspended on a bridge, turning to watch the moving multi-directional video focal point. In each case, the media intend to communicate “radiation information”—the former case, “radiation protection is possible,” and the latter, “Fukushima has recovered despite radiation.” And yet, there is also, as Cecchetto puts it, an incommunicative aspect of these medias, an aesthetic, a structuring of the sensible that subtends the informational intent. This structuring, it is argued, encounters a context in visitors/users that has the potential to provoke a vaguely felt stress, anxiety, even trauma. This context irrupts in painful and fearful sensations in the otherwise celebratory media. What appears affirmative interactive media, then, manifest as a form of control conditioning the embodiment of radiation that serves the capital-nation-state. In other words, the social contract to live among radiation functions through an affective aporia where citizens are hailed to feel comfortable in that which makes them uncomfortable: the knowledge of radiation. Rather than strictly an analysis of the content of the game or dome video, the paper forwards listening to ask how formal relations in the techno-movements constitute the paradoxical (non)lived reality of radiation. How is listening, then, not a form of attention, but a form of attunement in which a resonant logic is taken up between intra-acting subject/object? This demands another question: is attunement not then also implicated in capitalism’s interactive techno-logics. Listening must be attuned to its own reality as an attunement machine for the hope of investing in the world otherwise.

When “Development” Became News: How JFK’s Alliance for Progress Reshaped Journalistic Narratives of Progress in Venezuela

ABSTRACT This article analyses the impact of President John F. Kennedy’s (JFK) flag initiative for Latin America, known as the Alliance for Progress, on journalistic narratives in Venezuela’s media. It contextualises this analysis within the broader efforts of political communication and propaganda. In so doing, it argues that this program helped to establish the discursive regimes that would come to define journalistic narratives and, consequently, public perceptions of the economy and development policy. The research is based on an examination of historical archives from the JFK library and conducting a content analysis of one of the most influential daily newspapers in that country. The research shows the effects that this initiative had upon journalistic narratives and how it helped change discursive regimes.

‘What’s in a name?’ The discursive construction of gender identity over time

ABSTRACT In recent years the concern with gender diversity fuelled by the rapid expansion of transgender studies highlighted multiple possibilities for constructing gender through discursive enactments. As the self-declaration of gender identity gained legitimacy, personal narratives became increasingly relevant. Verbalizing gender identity is instrumental for extending the very notion of gender as belonging to the domain of individual subjectivity and amenable to as many names as people’s non-transferable experiences allow. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in Portugal, the article examines the multiple terms used to self-describe and affirm gender identity over time. Reconstituted step-by-step through longitudinal lenses, each semantic journey illustrates how individuals appropriate different lexicons and self-describe at the intersection of multiple categories, resist biomedical codifications of gender transition and reinvent the terms of binary discursive regimes. Through their discursive practices, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in the Portuguese context challenge one-dimensional readings of gender identity. While combining narrative approaches with regimes of power, the paper mobilizes Foucault’s notion of discursive formation and Bourdieu’s concept of field. ‘What’s in a name’ is more significant than Shakespeare ever imagined. The more the nexus-bodies-names-identities is disarticulated, the more individuals gain semiotic agency for self-describing their gender identities.

Upheaval and reinvention in celebrity interviews: Emotional reflexivity and the therapeutic self in late modernity

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas.

In Foucault's Wake

In Foucault's Wake James I. Porter (bio) With his elegant new study, Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, Paul Allen Miller offers a comprehensive and much-needed guide to Foucault's views of antiquity down to his last lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault was a prolific writer, lecturer, and thinker during the final half-decade of his life when he made his abrupt turn, or rather return, to Greece and Rome.1 We are only now beginning to digest this complex legacy. The question I want to raise in this essay is what it would mean to reassess, reincorporate, or move beyond Foucault's approaches to self-care, the self, and the human in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity at the moment we find ourselves in today. The question, in my mind, has three parts. First, how can we situate Foucault's work on antiquity in the context of his other prodigious accomplishments in the field of modernity? Second, is there a way to historicize Foucault—to place him in his moment in time, and above all his own sense of the historical present that he found himself in? And third, what use can be made, in future studies of the premodern past, of Foucault's writings prior to his final shift to antiquity? I see a contrast and a tension here. Foucault's focus in his study of antiquity—the history of sexuality tied to questions about practices of the self—was narrow even by his own standards. It cannot match the brilliant sweep of his previous projects, which mapped out huge historical critiques that analyzed some of the ways in which modern culture in the European West organized itself on an institutional level by establishing normative structures in the areas of the human sciences, medicine, psychiatry, surveillance, incarceration, security, governmentality and law, neoliberalism, and the biopolitical. Perhaps more than that of any of his peers and contemporaries, his work was not just transformative. It was generative. It gave rise to whole new fields of inquiry in the humanities broadly conceived, not just in the interstices and forgotten margins but across their reassembled surface. Unlike with these other intellectual trends, to be a Foucauldian today is not to have a preestablished method. It is to work in Foucault's deep wake and to break new ground. Can the same be said of his work on antiquity? I am not sure it can. [End Page 395] The rupture with his earlier projects occurs after the first volume of The History of Sexuality from 1976 (La volonté de savoir), which established how discursive regimes, intertwined with regimes of institutionalized power, positivize what they repress; they produce desiring, sexualized subjects. Returning to antiquity in 1980–81 with his lectures on Subjectivity and Truth while preparing the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (1984), Foucault looked for the same kind of phenomenon, discursive regimes that produced desiring, sexual subjects. But it is here that things go a bit off the rails. With no institutions to target (there were none comparable to the clinical or administrative environments of the nineteenth century when sexuality was produced by sexology), Foucault had to come up with something to take their place. And what he settled on were individuals, bodies, pleasures, anxieties, and problematizations that were, so to speak, suspended in mid-air, belonging as they did to an eclectic mix of practices that were private, public, and philosophical but were overseen by no institutional frameworks. In a telling moment in volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, he teases out a notion of "the subject's 'style of activity'" that, he suggests, is more telling and powerful than any system of rules, codes, or conduct: it operates independently of any "natural structure" or "positive regulation" (Foucault 1986, 35). This kind of self-stylization Foucault calls a "form of experience" (1986: 36). Its agent and object are said to be the ancient "self," le soi, always understood as a first-personal moi. In taking this approach, Foucault was abandoning his strong suit: institutional and cultural critique. He was occasionally explicit about this precise set of...