Essential Identity Research Articles

The Times Should Be A-Changin’

As we begin the New Year, we look forward to some difficult times ahead. The excesses of unbridled capitalism, primarily manifested in Wall Street greed and high-stakes gambling in the housing industry, threaten the traditions and institutions of future generations. Although we should be poised to pursue the dreams and aspirations of increasingly well-prepared children, we face dismal prospects of ongoing recession and looming budget cuts in government. Budget cuts proposed by privileged men in high offices threaten the well-being of vulnerable children, women, and minority groups. Bailed out industries continue to profit and distribute obscene bonuses to those responsible for catastrophic decisions. Stakeholders were left with empty promises. In the aftermath, some are trying to balance the budget on the backs of children. The atrocities of the 9/11 disaster threatened our collective well-being and confronted our beliefs in a just world. Other nations embraced America and prepared to support us through difficult times of recovery. Unfortunately, men of privilege and greed seized on the disaster to promote a culture of fear. Fostering an illusion of imminent demise justified another generation of warfare with dead children in foreign lands and disabled veterans trying to find their way home. Next came the assaults on human rights and civil liberties. America narrowly avoided the loss of essential identity, which is simply expressed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in the rush to protect us from real and imagined enemies. We eventually traded international good will for enmity and suspicion. American leaders protected our future by violating the basic traditions and boundaries that define us as a people. The governor of the state of Mississippi, like the privileged executives in some other states, is seizing opportunities afforded by financial fears to restructure public services. Nationally, the American people invested billions to protect merchants of greed at the cost of health, education, and welfare for future generations. The Mississippi governor would like to balance the budget by consolidating historically Black universities, eliminating traditions and identities shared by those who struggled for civil rights and their families. He would eliminate the unique identity of Mississippi University for Women by making it a branch of Mississippi State University. Critics of consolidation argue that there would be little or no financial benefit. If there were savings, they will not be realized until 2012, when the recession is over (Lynch, 2009). Governor Haley Barbour, a former Washington tobacco lobbyist, who is being touted as a presidential hopeful, proposed reducing school districts in the state from 152 to 100: placing authority in the high-performing school districts and eliminating the troubled, underfunded, frequently poor and rural districts. These reductions call into question if all students will have equal access to academic and support services. Equity can be sacrificed in times of financial exigency. The Mississippi governor proposed eliminating state services and facilities for delinquents, blind and deaf children, disabled citizens, and others in great need during hard economic times. Governor Barbour wants to close four of the state’s Department of Mental Health facilities, six crisis centers, and two branches of the state hospital (Lynch, 2009). This budget saving would ensure that chronically mentally ill persons are imprisoned in harsh jail settings or released to suffer on the streets. Powerful men advocate ongoing industrial and technological developments with tax incentives. They would feed the children with the crumbs that fall from the table. Patriarchs retain their privilege through attempts to control scarce resources: subjugating women and children and other vulnerable populations in the process. By creating fear in the great middle class, it is possible to blame the victims for their distress and protect the interests of affluent White men who have not forgotten the old ways of getting things done. Fear and threat are the tools of the politician. If we assume the best case scenario that the proposed budget cuts are only shrewd political moves that are unlikely to be accepted by the Mississippi legislature, one is left with a painful awareness of how little some of our leaders care about those

Affecting Change in Architectural Education

Architecture concerns not so much an explicit body of transmittable knowledge and protocols as it does a set of implicit understandings, sensitivities and sensibilities. The education of an architect therefore concerns the mission of endowing candidates with those implicit traits. This is not to say that architects do not possess and wield prodigious amounts of explicit cognitive knowledge, because they certainly do. But that explicit component of architectural know-how is actually vested in and deployed by the architect not so much because the knowledge has been invented, discovered, or developed by architects; but rather because they have assimilated it from other disciplines in a special way that gives architects adductive and hermeneutic insight into vast, detailed, and complex design challenges. Engineers make better machines, artists make more meaningful artifacts, and psychologists provide better human environments; but architects are trained to see the underlying opportunity and potential celebration of how those constituent menus might become a feast. In any unresolved complex of space, material and form, architects grasp a unique essence in how they perceive the "happily ever after” of what it might be and how that vision might be made whole and concrete. By the time a student of architecture is fully indoctrinated, this grasp of an underlying ideal essence is so potent that it becomes the student's identity... and the purpose of that insight becomes an irresistible intention.

Identification of Amino Acids in the N-terminal Domain of Atypical Methanogenic-type Seryl-tRNA Synthetase Critical for tRNA Recognition

Seryl-tRNA synthetase (SerRS) from methanogenic archaeon Methanosarcina barkeri, contains an idiosyncratic N-terminal domain, composed of an antiparallel beta-sheet capped by a helical bundle, connected to the catalytic core by a short linker peptide. It is very different from the coiled-coil tRNA binding domain in bacterial-type SerRS. Because the crystal structure of the methanogenic-type SerRSxtRNA complex has not been obtained, a docking model was produced, which indicated that highly conserved helices H2 and H3 of the N-terminal domain may be important for recognition of the extra arm of tRNA(Ser). Based on structural information and the docking model, we have mutated various positions within the N-terminal region and probed their involvement in tRNA binding and serylation. Total loss of activity and inability of the R76A variant to form the complex with cognate tRNA identifies Arg(76) located in helix H2 as a crucial tRNA-interacting residue. Alteration of Lys(79) positioned in helix H2 and Arg(94) in the loop between helix H2 and beta-strand A4 have a pronounced effect on SerRSxtRNA(Ser) complex formation and dissociation constants (K(D)) determined by surface plasmon resonance. The replacement of residues Arg(38) (located in the loop between helix H1 and beta-strand A2), Lys(141) and Asn(142) (from H3), and Arg(143) (between H3 and H4) moderately affect both the serylation activity and the K(D) values. Furthermore, we have obtained a striking correlation between these results and in vivo effects of these mutations by quantifying the efficiency of suppression of bacterial amber mutations, after coexpression of the genes for M. barkeri suppressor tRNA(Ser) and a set of mMbSerRS variants in Escherichia coli.

Questiones sobre la representación audiovisual de la nueva Andalucía. De la amistad al amor: Campaña Andalucía te quiere (2008)

La Junta de Andalucía continúa su iniciativa de renovar la imagen de Andalucía hacia el exterior a través de sus campañas turísticas. La última de 2008 presenta novedades inteligentes e importantes en la construcción de una imagen de la Comunidad Autónoma exenta casi de tópicos, intentando mantener un equilibrio entre la modernidad y lo esencial identitario. Se analizan en este artículo los rasgos visuales y auditivos que contribuyen a dicha generación de un nuevo prototipo deseable basado en la emoción y el bienestar.

ON ‘THE NECESSITY AND THE “IMPOSSIBILITY” OF IDENTITIES’

This article assesses Stuart Hall's work on identity and ethnicity, principally the dialectic of ‘impossibility’ and ‘necessity’ within his understanding of the formation of identities. The article outlines Hall's extensively rehearsed arguments on the ‘impossibility’ of essential identities and his description of the ‘necessity’ of identities as historical and social ‘positions’ strategically adopted by individuals as a political and psychic resource. After suggesting that Hall approaches ethnic identities as a productive paradox in terms of its deleterious effects and progressive capacity for political representation, the article questions the sense in which ethnic identity can be adequately thought of as a ‘necessity’. The article takes this up within an analysis of three key insights within Hall's work: (1) that identities are to be understood in their specific conjuncture; (2) that identities are to be understood as constituted in politics; (3) that claims to collective identity are subject to principled political and ethical justification. In conclusion, the article asks whether Hall's apparent de-centring of identity in relation to politics means that we ought to think of identity less as a ‘necessary’ object form and more as a ‘vehicular’ concept and category that facilitates progressive political analysis and engagement.

Post-colonial identity in Greenland?

In the gradual unravelling of Greenland’s colonial relationship to Denmark, an essentialist conceptualization of Greenlandic identity has played a significant role. However, both our scholarly understanding of post-colonial Greenlandic identity and the process towards independence for Greenland could be furthered by bringing politics back in. Based on a discourse analysis of the Greenlandic debate on language, this paper makes three claims: First, the identity projects promoted in Greenland are based on an essentialist conception of identity. Secondly, Greenlandic identity discourse combines elements of traditional Inuit culture and elements of colonial modernity. Thirdly, monolingual Greenlanders are those with the most to gain from abandoning the dichotomy of essentialist identities. Strategically, the paper suggests a post-post-colonial Greenlandic identity as a means of avoiding the exclusion of valuable human resources. One step towards relieving the relation to the Danish Other of identificatory weight could be a gradual shift to English as second language.

The Catalytic Flexibility of tRNAIle-lysidine Synthetase Can Generate Alternative tRNA Substrates for Isoleucyl-tRNA Synthetase

Bacteria decode the isoleucine codon AUA using a tRNA species that is posttranscriptionally modified at the wobble position of the anticodon with a lysine-containing cytidine derivative called lysidine. The lysidine modification of tRNA(Ile2) is an essential identity determinant for proper aminoacylation by isoleucyl tRNA synthetase (IleRS) and codon recognition on the ribosome. The ATP- and lysine-dependent formation of lysidine is catalyzed by tRNA(Ile)-lysidine synthetase. Using the purified recombinant enzyme from Escherichia coli and an in vitro transcribed tRNA substrate, we have confirmed that lysidine modification is both necessary and sufficient to convert tRNA(Ile2) into a substrate for IleRS. A series of lysine analogs were tested as potential inhibitors during the mechanistic characterization of tRNA(Ile)-lysidine synthetase. Gel electrophoresis revealed that many of these analogs, including some simple alkyl amines, were alternative substrates. Incorporation of these amines into alternative tRNA products was confirmed by mass spectrometry. The availability of tRNA(Ile2) with differential modifications enabled an exploration of the structural requirements of the anticodon for aminoacylation by methionyl tRNA synthetase and IleRS. All of the modifications were effective at creating negative determinants for methionyl tRNA synthetase and positive determinants for IleRS, although the tolerance of IleRS differed between the enzymes from E. coli and Bacillus subtilis.

Non‐exclusive exclusion (Commentary on Capello et al.)

Beginning with their discovery by Buck & Axel (1991), a series of significant advances mark our increased understanding of odor receptors (ORs) and their roles in both odor transduction and axon coalesence (Imai & Sakano, 2008). Somewhat unexpectedly, the family of 1200+ ORs (Zhang & Firestein, 2002) found in the main olfactory epithelium exhibit little homology to those found in the vomeronasal organ where two families, of over 300 vomeronasal receptors (VRs) (Touhara, 2008) mediate pheromone detection. They differ in many respects, including the downstream transduction cascade, but share the elegant property of allelic exclusion, which results in any one sensory neuron expressing one OR or VR from either the maternal or paternal chromosome, but not both. While the significance of allelic exclusion in processing sensory information in the olfactory and vomeronasal systems remains unknown, the mechanisms regulating allelic exclusion are of intense interest. In this issue, Capello et al. (2009) address the question of whether mechanisms of allelic exclusion are similar in both the olfactory and vomeronasal sensory systems. They approached the question using a mouse model in which the odorant receptor M71, normally expressed in the main olfactory epithelium, is now expressed in the vomeronasal organ. This was achieved by using the promoter region of the vomeronasal gene V1RB2 to direct the expression of M71 in vomeronasal sensory neurons in lieu of V1RB2 expression. It was advantageous that M71 has a low percentage of identity with V1RB2 protein, or with any member of the V1R family of vomeronasal receptors. Previous results showed that axons from new M71 > V1rb2 neurons target the accessory olfactory bulb where they coalesce to form homogenous glomeruli (Rodriguez et al., 1999). Here, Capello et al. (2009) show that these neurons do not express the endogenous V1RB2 receptor or any member of the V1R family of genes. Because members of the odor transduction cascade are important in axon targeting from the main olfactory epithelium (Chesler et al., 2007) and, because the transduction signaling molecules used by main olfactory and vomeronasal sensory neurons are different, the authors then ask whether the expression of M71 also changes the expression of members of the transduction cascade. Vomeronasal sensory neurons express Galphai2 and TRPC2, while olfactory sensory neurons express Galphaolf, AC3 and CNGA2. Interestingly, M71 > V1rb2 neurons continue to express markers characteristic of vomeronasal neurons; it appears that their essential identity or phenotype is unchanged other than the expression of M71 in lieu of V1RB2. Capello et al. (2009) show, for the first time, that allelic exclusion in vomeronasal receptor cells can occur through the expression of an exogenous receptor and, that exclusion of expression is not limited to the substituted receptor, but applies to all members of the family – exclusion which is not exclusive. It is tempting to speculate that allelic exclusion may be regulated by universal mechanisms, as suggested by Cedar & Bergman (2008) in considering antigen receptor expression in the immune system. However, the nature of the cascade mediating the one receptor - one sensory neuron rule in the main olfactory epithelium and the vomeronasal system remains elusive. While Capello et al. (2009) have shown that M71 effectively excludes expression of V1Rs, and that the axons coalesce appropriately into accessory olfactory bulb glomeruli, the reciprocal replacement is not effective; V1rb2>M71 does not result in viable olfactory sensory neurons whose axons converge in the main olfactory bulb (Feinstein et al., 2004). Contributing to the challenge of understanding these mechanisms in both of these sensory systems is the size of the receptor families and understanding other molecular determinants of differentiation and axon targeting in main olfactory and vomeronasal sensory neurons. Despite many unanswered questions, the current paper from Capello et al. (2009) provides a new perspective from which to address the mechanism(s) of allelic exclusion, odor/pheromone transduction, and axon targeting. To paraphrase Shakespeare, would a rose by any other receptor smell as sweet?

Rethinking Postcolonial Studies in the Age of Transnationalism

The need for (re)evaluation of postcolonial studies is currently on the intellectual scene at the cultural / postcolonial studies departments in Western universities. The eruption of cultural studies and postcolonial theories in the decade of the 1990s have not only brought a Tsunami in the humanities and social sciences programs across Western and non-Western universities, but have also changed our respective views on the orient and the occident. Certainly the West is forced to see what is wrong in its colonialism and imperialism, its slavery and genocide, its anti-Semitism and oppression of women, its suppression of minorities, homosexuals and the working classes, its destruction and insensitivity to indigenous cultural forms of life all over the world, and its cruel abuse of other cultural traditions and values. The surge goes on with a more vibrant ring in non-Western locations. People in the non-Western countries began to dig out their cultural pasts and to attempt to see the germs of colonialism and recent day's imperialism polluting their history, cultural and essential identity. From Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Foucault's History of Sexuality, from Darwin's The Origin of Species to Nietzsche's The Will to Power, they tried to trace the stereotypes and exclusive ideology embedded in the textual practices of the writers of colonial countries. All this development can certainly be understood as a positive phenomenon, which has not only challenged Western values as universal but has also set our identity in the decolonialized process in order to regain our essential identities and cultural values. Despite all these positive developments, the further initiative, as it appears to me, postcolonial studies ought to make (which it has not sufficiently done so far) is to encourage the people of non-Western countries in taking initiative for the nation-building and making them properly reread their cultural past more in self-referential terms--in terms of their own cultural achievements--striving towards their [true] identities. What we need more today is to rebuild our nations politically, economically, socially and culturally, rather than just decolonization. I mean, at least we cannot overshadow our former necessity with the latter. They can go together, but it is sad to say that we have not paid sufficient attention to nation-building. We preach for decolonization, but do not think about national (re)building. Our unstable political systems, superstitious belief systems, and cultural values are more responsible for our condition in some ways than the West's colonial exploitation. Therefore the causes of our backwardness are not wholly outside of us; they are more within us. Postcolonial studies now has to turn inward. So far it has more or less turned outward looking for causes of the impoverished situation and eclipsed identity of non-Western peoples. Also, our identities can be properly defined in self-referential values than by projecting them toward 'other.' We are not thereby good because others are evil. We are good (or evil) because historical testimonies establish and support our goodness--or do not. In this regard, I see an ingrained herd morality behind the postcolonial theoretical orientation, which is required to rethink after/beyond postcolonialism. As Nietzsche says, herds define themselves in terms of what others are: "You are evil, therefore I am good." To read it in terms of colonizer and colonialized for the present purpose we can say that it is our herd mentality that inclines us to say you are a colonialist, therefore I am a colonized (You are the cause, therefore I am the effect). I am what you made me. To elaborate with a popular illustration, I drink your Coca Cola and eat McDonalds, and the denounce it as an imperialist cococolization and mcdonaldization of me. But I cannot produce the drinks tastier than those you produce. I love to consume your drinks, emptying my pockets, and since your drinks empty my pocket you are an imperialist. …

BIOÉTICA Y RECIPROCIDAD EN EL RECONOCIMIENTO DE DERECHOS Y DEBERES

From a hermeneutic perspective, this article analyzes the statute of medicine as a healing art, considering its particular technical characteristic and its differences with other technical knowledge that delivers goods. This difficulty is compounded by the eruption of technical implementations and moral changes of modernity, which threaten effective practice and places its essential identity at risk. Currently it is understood that Medicine is more than the mere application of techniques and specialized knowledge, and that all responsible medical interventions should adjust their definition to the complex and essentially multidimensional nature of human beings, which is not realized by mere technical explanations or techniques that attempt to envision its vastness and plurality.

Face-to-face negotiations: Portraits of leaders at three South African universities

Through a focus on Rhodes University, the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, the author explores the priorities that are normally at play when institutions commission portraits of chancellors, vice chancellors and chairs of council, and the ways in which artists have responded to these priorities.An emphasis on mimesis amongst those commissioning portraits of this type posed a challenge to artists operating in modernist paradigms, i.e. frameworks in which it was believed that ‘truth’ is to be found by reworking rather than replicating perceived reality. Also, the emphasis on ‘mirroring’ reality was complicated through the making of posthumous portraits—ones in which painters sought to convey a sense of their encounters with sitters when no sittings had, in fact, taken place.Even greater challenges have been presented in a contemporary context, however. Postmodernist and poststructuralist theories about representation challenge traditionalist understandings of the kinds of insights about individual identity that representations are able to yield. If a conception that the portrait might reflect hidden ‘truths’ about the individual implies that, in addition to being unified and coherent, the self is knowable, discourses with contemporary currency invariably question the notion that there is an essential identity within the individual subject. The author explores works by Tanya Poole, Reshada Crouse and Frikkie Eksteen in light of such questioning, revealing ways in which they undertake a critical engagement with histories of portraiture and unpack conventions that have been deployed.While originally acquired to enable institutions to suggest that they have distinguished pedigrees, portrait collections at universities in post-apartheid South Africa have in fact begun to read as testaments to histories of exclusion or inequality on the grounds of gender and race. As indicated in the final part of the article, institutions have endeavoured to negotiate this difficulty by seeking new contexts in which to display their portraits.

John Wyclif and the Theory of Complexly Signifiables

AbstractJohn Wyclif claims that there are relations of essential identity and formal distinctness connecting universals, complexly signifiables, and individuals. In some respects Wyclif's position on complexly signifiables coincides with what I call the advanced res theory, the view that complexly signifiables are really identical with but formally distinct from worldly individuals. But there is no question in Wyclif's treatment of a reduction of complexly signifiables to individuals. I argue that Wyclif populates his most fundamental ontological level with propositionally structured entities both individual and universal, and that this approach is superior to that of its nominalist rivals. But Wyclif shares with other versions of the advanced res theory an implausible theory of identity, and this affects the coherence of the claimed real identity between individuals and complexly signifiables.

The Social Constructionist Challenge to Primacy Identity and the Emancipation of Oppressed Groups: Human Primacy Identity Politics and the Human/‘Animal’ Dualism

In a recent issue of this journal Mike Homfray asserted that social constructionism challenges emancipatory politics based in essential conceptualisations of identity. Thus for Homfray the concept of identity as associated with the pre-deconstructed subject is central for the emancipatory goal of oppressed groups like the lesbian and gay movements. In this paper I offer a distinction between radical identity politics that seeks to liberate oppressed groups, and what I have called primacy identity politics in which primacy identity is used to preserve the subjugation of those who are oppressed. In so doing I put forward a challenge to Homfray's somewhat wholesale rejection of the capacity for a critique of identity to work for emancipatory politics by focussing on primacy identity politics rather than on radical identity politics. In making an argument for the deconstruction of identities for emancipatory purposes I refer to my work on the human oppression of nonhuman animals. In this work I turn my attention away from those who are oppressed to the oppressors because this transfer of attention shows how useful the deconstruction of identity could be for the emancipation of oppressed groups. My examination of discourses used by the pro nonhuman animal experimentation lobby group Pro-Test shows how primacy identity politics can effectively be challenged by a social constructionist critique of essential identities and thus, contra Homfrey, I conclude that the deconstruction of identities can strengthen emancipatory causes.

The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction Reena Sastri The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. Daniel Morris. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 274. $42.50 (cloth). “Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken,” begins Louise Glück’s “The Untrustworthy Speaker”; to a flower in the title poem of her poetic sequence The Wild Iris (1992) are given the words, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice”.1 The voice of Glück’s poems arrests and engages, offering what Glück has said she seeks in poetry: “the sound of an authentic being,” an “immediacy, [a] volatility” that gives poems that achieve it “paradoxical durability.” Such authenticity is wholly distinct from “sincerity’s honest disclosure”: “Poems are [End Page 583] autobiography,” she concedes, “but divested,” not just of “chronology” and “anecdote,” but of “personal conviction”; in the work the poet “strives to be free of the imprisoning self.”2 The first single-authored book on one of America’s most important contemporary poets (a collection of essays edited by Joanne Feit Diehl appeared in 2005), Daniel Morris’s study of Louise Glück commands attention. As the title indicates, its aims are nonetheless modest. Quoting generously, reading sympathetically, and providing pragmatic critical terms, Morris has written a useful introduction. Although the book does not proceed chronologically, the introduction offers a brief overview of the poet’s work, from the Plathian Firstborn (1968), through ten ambitiously evolving collections including the oracular Descending Figure (1980), the plainspoken Ararat (1990), and the myth-saturated Triumph of Achilles (1985), Meadowlands (1996), and most recently Averno (2006). Morris sees Glück as primarily autobiographical, investigating, analyzing, and revising the self. He compellingly highlights her revisions of myth, religion, literature, and her own work. Reading Glück as “postconfessional,” he rightly links her with both modernist and so-called confessional precursors. Consistently keeping the poems in the foreground, he carefully avoids claiming too wide an interpretive reach for his critical paradigms, some of which persuade more fully than others. The most central paradigm—autobiography—proves the most problematic, but also the most suggestive for future work. Readers will benefit from Morris’s thorough bibliography and generous citations of others’ articles and book chapters. And they will be served well by his inclusion of the poems, many entire. Morris approaches Glück’s work through several related themes: “desire, hunger, trauma, survival, commentary, autobiography, nature, spiritual witnessing” (2). These “keywords” govern chapters in Part One. The first usefully introduces “desire” and “hunger,” emphasizing not just the link between anorexia and writing in the now familiar “Dedication to Hunger,” but more importantly the “spiritual hunger” (Glück’s phrase) driving her work (36). Although he invokes theoretical models, desire in Morris’s account is primarily a relatively straightforward narrative of longing: for the beloved, for recognition from others, for poetic achievement. The chapter on “commentary,” perhaps the most original, argues that Glück’s poetry practices a form of textual interpretation, or “creative commentary,” corresponding with the Jewish tradition of midrash: “a reading process, an interpretive activity, [and] a creative cast of mind” (61). “[A]s an interpretive practice rather than as an essential identity formation,” Judaism provides “a model of revision” (97). Sustained readings of poems that rewrite Biblical stories, including the haunting “Lamentations,” trace different revisionary strategies. Reading Glück next as a “trauma artist” and poet of “witness,” Morris calls her untrustworthy speakers “paradoxically reliable witness[es] to trauma, precisely because unreliable” (102); the poems “produce authenticity” through “unreliable narration” (112). While those paradoxes persuade, more frequently the trauma theory feels at odds with the poetry. The next chapter, “Challenging Trauma Theory: Witnessing Divine Mystery,” is brief but suggestive, addressing poems engaged with the Christ story. Its argument—that they challenge, or modify, trauma theory—doesn’t speak to the poems’ resonance, to which Morris clearly responds; he might have further developed links with central themes discussed elsewhere: prayer, god as fiction, the conflict between spirit and flesh. In Part Two, four chapters focus on individual volumes. The chapter on The House on Marshland (1975)’s revisions...

A Response to Philip Culbertson's Presentation.

The author responds to a paper by Philip Culbertson which focuses on the topics of sex, gender and sexuality presented at a seminar held in the University of Auckland in New Zealand on July 18, 2008. The author believes that sexuality, like gender, is not about the discovery of an innate or essential identity, existing independently of language. The author contends that counselling and psychotherapy are called to be counter-cultural.

Get Over Your (Legal) ‘Self’: A Brief History of Lesbians, Motherhood and the Law

Law and legal judgments tell a story. However, this article is not about the story of the litigants. It is, rather, an exploration of how legal judgments are an act of discourse and thus are about an identity creation of the legal ‘self’. Legal discourse continues to create categories of legal relevance that are used to arrive at essentialist identities which construct the body of the subject. This article argues that this continues to be the case, notwithstanding certain aspects of law reform, recent case law, and resistance to assimilative discourse (Butler 2004). In some small way, the aim of this article is ‘to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality’ and to do something ‘other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms’ (Butler 2004, pp. 27). It asks law to give an account of its ‘self’. I will do this within the context of family law, by examining some of ‘old’ case law from the early 1970s and comparing those judgments with more recent case law. I want to ask: what has changed in the intervening years?

Process and Product in Theology and Musical Aesthetics: Improvisation as InterdisciplinaryTopos

In the course of the development of Western culture, the ideas of Plato have wielded enormous influence. One of Plato's most influential ideas is his particular conception of truth. For Plato, truth exists in a different realm of reality from ourselves, a realm unlike the things we see around us in space and time. Truth consists of ideal being or ideal essences, subsisting in what he called the world of the forms.

Connolly's Democratic Pluralism and the Question of State Sovereignty

This article will explore William Connolly's notion of democratic pluralism—his attempt to develop a notion of agonistic democracy that is compatible with pluralism and difference, and that does not found itself on totalising ideas and essentialist identities. As part of the pluralisation of democracy, Connolly hints at the possibility of a democratic politics no longer confined to the nation state. However, this point is not sufficiently developed and contains a number of ambiguities. Here I will explore what I see as a central tension between the principle of democracy (collective autonomy) and the principle of state sovereignty. I will draw on the radical tradition of classical anarchism, as well as Jacques Derrida's notion of the democracy to come, to try to think democratic ethics and politics outside the framework of the nation state.

Rejoinder to “Muslimwoman” Responses

Rejoinder to “Muslimwoman” Responses Miriam Cooke (bio) There are many situations, conditions, and identities that we recognize but cannot name. The lack of a name does not matter until it does; at that point, it becomes urgent to articulate succinctly what before had been dimly felt and poorly expressed. The process of naming is fraught: Does the name really explain anything? Does it have analytical value? Is it worth the effort of adopting a new name for what had long been nameless? Neologisms are routinely distrusted because they compel a rethinking of the familiar. Once coined, however, the name expands understanding and allows for new discursive structures. Take, for example, the designation of countries with sizeable Muslim populations or a history shaped by Muslims as Islamic. The term highlights religion at the expense of other factors. Tackling the problem linguistically, world historian [End Page 116] Marshall Hodgson invented a new word—Islamicate—that would question the centrality of religion in the identification of such societies but would not eliminate it. In so doing, he separated religious from cultural and social effects even while holding on to their imbrication with one another. Hodgson’s neologism enabled an epistemic shift; it redefined the ways in which knowledge about Muslim societies might be produced.1 In an attempt to make sense of a growing problem confronting Muslim women, I too have coined a neologism—Muslimwoman. My concern was to find a way to draw attention to the post–9/11 collapse of religion and gender into a singular and imposed political category. I wanted to highlight the ways in which non-Muslims and Muslim religious extremists alike deploy this newly entwined religious and gendered identification. The Muslimwoman is useful also for those Muslim women who recognize a strategic utility to this essentialist identity. The test of the effectiveness of neologisms like Islamicate and Muslim-woman is that they are so relevant that they impose themselves. My goal in combining Muslim and woman into one was to emphasize how these two words have collapsed into each other. Muslimwoman is both a noun and an adjective that refers to an imposed identification the individual may, but generally does not choose for herself. In the Derridean sense, it is an iteration whose repetition does not simply “produce a replica of the first original usage and its intended meaning: rather every repetition is a form of variation, . . . a linguistic, legal, cultural and political repetition-in-transformation.”2 The Muslimwoman is not an “archetype”; nor is it an “ontological status,” as Zine asserts. It is not a description of any kind of reality that should be inflected by class or ethnicity; it is the ascription of a label that deliberately and strategically reduces all diversity to a single image, generally that of the veiled woman. The veil, real or imagined (because the unveiled woman is often thought to be the exception that proves the rule that all Muslim women are veiled), functions like race, a marker of essential difference that many women in both Muslim-majority and -minority societies find hard to escape. Although Badran questions my claim that 9/11 had a significant impact beyond the West, I maintain that it did. The tragedy of 9/11 and the catastrophic “war on terror” it unleashed have reached Muslim populations from the Middle East to Central, South, and Southeast Asia. It was 9/11 that allowed Western states to other their Muslims so that many now live in their birth nations as guests at best and parasites at worst. In the United States and Europe, the surge in Islamophobia since 9/11 has redrawn boundaries of citizenship. Second- and third-generation Muslims find themselves having to justify belonging to places and communities into which they were born. [End Page 117] “I am as American as you are,” said one of the panelists at last summer’s Aspen Institute seminar on Muslim women. The white audience smiled indulgently: “How articulate she is! How smart these Muslim women are!” When I pinpointed 9/11 as a turning point in attitudes toward Muslim women, my intention was not to claim that their stigmatization is new. Not at all. The point, rather...

Ontological Assumptions of Psychiatric Taxonomy: Main Rival Positions and Their Critical Assessment

The scientific classification of human psychopathology raises a host of important philosophical issues ranging over all major areas of philosophical inquiry; logic, semantics, ontology, epistemology and ethics. The paper focuses on the major views of the ontological status of our psychodiagnostic constructs; idealism, nominalism and finally, neoaristotelian realism. Idealism holds that our psychodiagnostic constructs represent ideal essences, instantiated imperfectly by individual mental patients of the same psychodiagnostic class. These ideal essences are construed either as abstract forms dwelling in an autonomous realm of eternal abstract objects – platonistic idealism – or as ideal objects emerging in and grasped directly by a pure or absolute consciousness – husserlian idealism. By contrast, nominalism claims that our psychodiagnostic constructs are nothing but conventional common names of sets of individual mental patients, invented and adopted on purely pragmatic grounds such as their practical utility, especially in predicting their clinical course and outcome under various types of treatment. Finally, neoaristotelian realism holds that, though our psychodiagnostic constructs are concepts, and thus of our own making, they are not arbitrary ones but grounded in objective features shared by individual mental patients of a given psychodiagnostic class. It is argued that both idealism and nominalism are flawed and thus untenable – though for different reasons – and a refined version of neoaristotelian realism defended.