Liberal Vision Research Articles

Queering community: The affect of visuality in the Sinosphere

How do Chinese queer artists respond to the hegemony of Han-centric, patriarchal, and heterosexual norms, and how do they imagine home through a queer and activist lens? This study explores the visual representation of the queer community by veteran artist/activist couple Shitou and Mingming through an analysis of the photographs and documentaries shot by the artists and their friends since the 1990s and the author’s (auto) ethnographic interactions with them since 2004. The article articulates the construction of an affective feminist vision and its transformation into a lifestyle practice with ethics of care. It highlights three aspects of the affect of visuality: a) as an approach to autoethnographic visual work and research; b) as an illustration of a visually and epistemologically distinctive way of life for women as opposed to the reduction of women to political and social subjects within the power structure of the nation-state; and c) as a movement toward the organic organization of daily life that enables community-making without the commercialization or monetization of resources, labor and way of life, thereby rejecting the ideologies of the authoritarian state and the empire-driven logic of globalization in imagining and constructing a queer community.

Julius Nyerere’s Vision of Epistemic Revival and Liberation: Implications for Contemporary Africa

Julius Nyerere’s Vision of Epistemic Revival and Liberation: Implications for Contemporary Africa

Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s ed. by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner

Reviewed by: Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s ed. by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner Elsa De Smet (bio) Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s Edited by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. 329. Hybrid Practices, which presents findings from a 2015 international colloquium, calls on scholars and artists to demonstrate the role of hybrid practices between art, science, and technology. It challenges arts and sciences issues by opening up new perspectives on a very symptomatic historical period. This work examines hybrid practices at the time of great 1960s and 1970s technological and scientific advances, namely the early Cold War, when the Western world advocated a certain idea of democracy and promises for the future were based on a positivist vision of scientific and technological progress. It is also the time when avant-garde visual artists in [End Page 264] the United States and Western Europe were challenging pictorial formalism, claiming that art should function as a counterpower or provide an alternative interpretation of the contemporary world. The editors have divided Hybrid Practices into three sections, with eleven essays by art, science, and design historians who thoughtfully explore projects at both the forefront and at the neglected margins of this unprecedented collaboration between the arts and newly emerging scientific and technological fields. The strengths of this collective work are that it is based on concrete case studies yet also suggests compelling conceptual notions. It begins with contributions explaining the historical and contextual relevance of collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientific institutions orchestrated by initiatives such as Experiments in Art and Technology, the Artist Placement Group, and the Arts and Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The book also showcases specific examples: Claes Oldenburg's collaboration with Disney, visual artist Carolee Schneemann's shows, Hans Haacke's photoelectric viewers, Stanley Milgram's psycho-cognitive laboratory using simulated shock generators, John Latham's land-art monuments, and John Cage's experiments. This book attempts to overcome the dichotomy between art and science/technology, using Michel Serres's idea that "all learning consists of a crossbreeding." The authors show that even though artists remained artists and scientists remained scientists, their collaborations produced real moments of cognitive grace. Some of the most interesting sections are about collaborations, for example between artist Robert Irwin and scientist Ed Wortz or engineer Billy Klüver with artist Fujiko Nakaya, who turned to meteorologist Thomas R. Mee to design Expo '70 in Osaka, where millions of people could "appreciate the natural beauty of fog" through artificial and artistic staging. Another good example is physicist Elsa M. Garmine, who invested a great deal in the Experiments in Art and Technology initiative, attempting to use technology "in a non logical, artistic way." These cases show how interdisciplinarity allowed each community to reflect and find its place in a changing world. It might have been relevant to point out the frustrations from less fruitful collaborations, even though these are understandably more difficult to source. While most of the contributions opt for an art history or art sociology perspective, historian W. Patrick McCray highlights the case of Frank Malina, an engineer and artist (the only one wearing both hats) who filed technical patents for aerospace and then for his artworks. This essay relies on the historiography of science and technology, demonstrating that when art, science, and technology intersect, the result should be examined in terms of fallout or spin-off. The book is well edited and allows a relevant understanding of all the case studies. The promise to connect these historical cases with contemporary [End Page 265] hybrid practices does not seem to have been entirely fulfilled, however. Negotiations between the arts, sciences, and technology's objectives therefore need further exploration. Elsa De Smet Elsa De Smet (Ph.D. in art history at La Sorbonne) is an associate researcher at Centre Alexandre Koyré, History of Sciences, Technology, and Knowledge (CNRS, France). She is the author of Voir l'Espace: Astronomie et science Populaire (1840–1969) (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2018) and the forthcoming Esth...

Boredom: Mike Leigh’s Meantime and Working-Class Youth in Thatcher’s Britain

This article traces the socio-cultural effect of neoliberalism on working-class youths by analysing Mike Leigh’s cinematic portrayal of boredom in Thatcher’s Britain, Meantime. As a state of disenchantment that stems from a sense of inadequacy, boredom in his films afflicts unemployed young people living in London, whose everyday life is pervaded by the sense of being excluded by the dominant national narrative of free-market capitalism. In various locations, boredom emerges in the daily experience of the characters, who feel the disconnection between officially sanctioned national aspirations and their own private sense of failure. For Mark and Colin, the city is an empty place where the demolition of traditional working-class culture has left them no story to tell about themselves. Exploring how the affective value of the national fantasy influences the reproduction of a lifestyle that can be inherently damaging to those who invest in it, I argue that boredom in the film nonetheless possesses an unexpected utility that runs counter to Thatcher’s neoliberal vision of development and progress, and provides these young people with an opportunity to reimagine ways of keeping on living together in a time of crisis.

Testimony as Justice: An Anti-Carceral Transformative Feminist Response to Sexual Violence and Abusive International Marriages

Abstract: Sexual and domestic violence have long been a reality for Asian American women. This article examines the history and strategies of a Hmong American feminist social movement called Building Our Future (BOF) to understand how one group of Asian American women have devised creative methods to address sexual and domestic violence in their families and communities. Exploring the concept of “testimony as justice” against violence and enacting long-term social transformation, especially as it manifests through the exploitative practice of abusive international marriages, this article shows how BOF challenges dominant and carceral responses to sexual and domestic violence. BOF’s insistence on addressing the root causes of sexual and domestic violence through their strategic usage of social media, community dialogues, and personal testimonies reveals how Asian American feminist movement building can be sustained by engaging a wide array of constituencies. These strategies challenge the neoliberal female subject seeking justice through the criminal legal system and, instead, situates justice within the context of communal transformation. The article ultimately argues that BOF’s strategies of “speaking out” about abusive international marriages outside the context of the criminal legal system while seeking to transform the entire Hmong American community constitutes a unique site for understanding anti-carceral transformative feminist visions of testimony as justice for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

The Issue of Gender Sensitivity and Youth Feminism in South Korea

The concept of “gender sensitivity” serves as one of the political currencies for the emerging Korean MZ generation of women to censor a variety of words and activities of public figures from all walks of life. However, the imported term “gender sensitivity” has not yet been consolidated in the Korean socio-cultural practices, thereby causing adverse chain reactions among users. Given language is a social contract reflecting the history of the source language, this paper raises a necessity to examine how such concepts as “feminism,” “gender sensitivity,” and “woman-hatred” came to serve as key currencies among Gen. MZ’s women and/or feminists. While citing most of Adrienne Rich’s feminist perspective and poems, this paper also provides a Japanese feminist, Ueno Chizuko’s perspective, while giving a voice to Korean youth feminism. Further, it illuminates a senior liberal Korean feminist’s perspective, providing a historical continuum of smart, stong, and self-reliant women and the unique Korean language that provided some space for women’s autonomy. Finally, it suggests a future direction of Korean youth feminism, taking an example of Rich’s feminist vision of a doorframe, asking for the MZ generation of women to adapt it to the lived reality of ordinary women and envision an inclusive and constructive future for the entire generations rather than to exclude and shut down the rest.

A Comparison of Feminist Term Translation Practices in Academic Journals of Gender and Women’s Studies in Turkiye

Feminist term translation brings both linguistic and pragmatic sides of translation together and turns the act of translation into a function-driven process rather than a solely form-based transfer. Translators, who join it under different roles such as academics, activists, or field experts, sometimes all at the same time, try to make up for the information loads and contextual definitions regarding the source terms in the target language and culture system with various translation strategies during the process of translation. This study aims to reveal practical tendencies in the feminist term translation activities in academic journals of gender and women’s studies in Turkey. In this respect, feminist term translation practices in selected texts from three journals, namely Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics [Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar], Kaos Q+, and Feminist Imagination: Journal of Academic Studies [Feminist Tahayyül: Akademik Araştırmalar Dergisi], which have published the most recent translations in the field, will be discussed from a comparative perspective, starting from Istanbul University Journal of Women’s Studies [Istanbul Üniversitesi Kadın Araştırmaları Dergisi], the first academic journal of gender and women’s studies in Turkey. In the analysis, the main focus is on feminist term translation strategies, while an evaluative framework will be drawn on the connections between journals’ areas of focus and feminist term translation practices applied under them.

Curtailing freedoms to protect freedom: regulating against behavioural-informed infringements on a fair exchange

ABSTRACT Behavioural public policy is a relatively new, but already substantial, subfield of public policy. To date, paternalistic frameworks have tended to dominate this subfield, at least in terms of the rhetoric, but attempts at informing public policy with findings from behavioural science set within a liberal framework are emerging. In this article, I argue for a liberal vision for the field, and yet recognize that when one places a high premium on individual freedom it is inevitable that some will act upon their egoistic instincts to attempt to obtain advantage at the expense of others. Since some of those attempts will, in essence, use the findings of behavioural science in order to manipulate others in an exchange relationship, harms – or negative externalities – will be imposed upon the manipulated. This therefore provides a behavioural-informed justification to regulate against what might be adjudged as excessive harms, regulations that are defined here as budges. Budges sit well within a liberal behavioural public policy framework.

And the Mural Came Down: Race, Removal, and Reckoning in the Sunshine City

In 1966 Joseph Waller and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee removed George Snow Hill’s Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille (1945) from St. Petersburg, Florida’s, City Hall. For more than two decades, the mural had hung alongside its pendant, Hill’s Fishing on the Pier (1945). Together, the paintings offered a vision of civic progress that denied Black audiences full participation in public life. Yet even in its absence, Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille troubles the present. The Sunshine City’s deferred reckoning with its public artworks and urban projects of racial oppression is a local history with national resonances.

“Sometime in the future”—The technology entrepreneur as utopian market hero

In this conceptual article, we outline a process through which some technology entrepreneurs come to be viewed as heroes in the public’s eye. We argue that market heroism relies on top-down narratives of imagined future utopias that combine with bottom-up consumer desire for those utopias. While extant marketing theory has typically focused on imagination of products and consumption, we expand the conversation by highlighting the importance of consumer imagination for an idealized future time. The relevance of our process to consumer behavior lies with the potential for products and services to indirectly represent that imagined future time. Synthesizing work in and beyond marketing, we map out a process by which technology entrepreneurs attempt to enlist the participation of consumers, media, and the state into their visions of social and market progress. In doing so, we bring critical attention to the effect of heroic discourses of technological utopias and the ideological ground that supports and enables such discourses.

Review: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, by Roger A. Sneed

Review: <i>The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought</i>, by Roger A. Sneed

The gendered motives and experiences of Canadian women farmers in short food supply chains: Work satisfaction, values of care, and the potential for empowerment

In many industrialized countries, there is a strong presence of women farmers in alternative food networks, including within short food supply chains. Studies attribute this phenomenon to the values of care underpinning such initiatives, the possibility for participating women farmers to pursue their own projects (empowerment), and the development of a feminist vision of agriculture. Based on a survey administered to 613 direct-market farmers across Canada (302 women and 311 men), we examine whether women farmers in short food chains have different motivations, beliefs, and occupational experiences than their male colleagues and the extent to which caring values, empowerment, and feminist perspectives explain these differences. Our results show that, in many respects, women farmers have a unique experience and understanding of short food chains, grounded in a desire for caring relations and a belief in the empowering benefits of such marketing arrangements. However, while surveyed women farmers strongly adhered to social and ecological values, these beliefs coexisted alongside economic views more synonymous with conventional farming. Short food chains, despite their potential for empowerment, also continue to present multiple barriers for women, as highlighted by a growing body of feminist scholarship. These barriers include stereotyped perceptions of the role of women in agriculture and struggles balancing work and family life.

The Sociology of Utopia, Modern Temporality and Black Visions of Liberation

This article focuses on the relationship between the sociology of utopia and Black visions of liberation. Influential figures from Karl Mannheim to Ruth Levitas have effectively demonstrated the value of a utopian perspective for sociology. However, the African American tradition of utopianism has been largely overlooked in this literature. I argue that the Black standpoint forces a rethinking of the sociological understanding of utopia. More specifically, while most sociologists of utopia straightforwardly associate the desire for a better world with the future, the Black tradition proposes a more expansive understanding of utopia’s temporality. Building on visions of new worlds advanced by WEB Du Bois and the movement for reparations for slavery, I suggest that Black utopia involves a glance backwards to the past, such that the image of a better future is accompanied by the memory of the catastrophe of slavery.

The promise of beginnings: Unpacking ‘diversity’ at Oculus VR

This paper presents a case study of the inaugural year of Launch Pad, a diversity initiative by Meta’s virtual reality (VR) subsidiary, originally known as Oculus. As industry-led discourse presented VR as a vision of opportunity and change in the tech industry, Launch Pad presented a vision of social progress through improved diversity. However, a variety of contextualizing factors within that first year complicate these visions of progress, including the gendered and racialized norms of the tech industry, the politics of Oculus’s co-founder and the mixed feelings of the first beneficiaries of the program. I argue that even if Launch Pad is a good faith effort to address historical and current forms of marginalization and underrepresentation in the tech industry, such efforts must go much further than mentorship and tokenized inclusion, requiring a genuine recognition of the need for systemic change.

Toward an Anti-Caste and Feminist Vision of Transformative Justice: Analyzing Social Media Activism Against Sexual Violence

This article attempts to understand how ideas of justice are conceptualized within social media discourses around gender and sexual violence in India through an intersectional analysis of two case studies: the case of the rape and murder of a Hyderabad veterinarian and the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia, or LoSHA, which generated many conversations on sexual violence and justice on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. While a cursory reading of these two social media responses might see both as a rejection of due process and as seeking justice outside the structures of the judicial system, we argue that a closer reading of both is necessary to understand the different contours that these calls for justice have taken. In addition, we study how these two different social media conversations on sexual violence have centered the victim/survivor of sexual violence differently to understand how they engage with carcerality and anti-carceral politics. We conclude by attempting a definition of transformative justice based on anti-caste feminist interventions on social media, specifically drawing on the work of Dalit feminists, including those who created LoSHA.

Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker

Reviewed by: Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker Dana Logan David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Railroading Religion describes Brigham Young not only welcoming the Union and Central Pacific railroads but also giving them one hundred and thirty-two acres of land and access to cheap Mormon laborers. This description is also an argument: Mormons built the railroads and the railroads built Mormonism. The narrative of these two institutions' mutual construction reveals that the term "western religion" obscures the substantial material and discursive labor that went into making Americans think of Mormonism as western and the West as sublime. Latter-Day Saints and railroad companies worked together to build these narratives because they felt a fundamental mutual recognition as corporations that were not strictly private or public, that built economies and culture, and that wielded a vertical form of power. In the last chapters of the book, David Walker speaks to historians of religion more broadly, providing a critical case study of humans constructing the sacred. The sublimity of Mormons' geographic settlement and the train's conquering of space and time were both laborious projects undertaken by humans in unlikely partnerships. These partnerships are the subject of each chapter, beginning with the failed partnership of railroads, the United States government, and anti-Mormon settlers in Utah. Focusing on a town called Corinne [End Page 134] that was settled by anti-Mormons in chapter one, Walker uses the town as a way to describe anti-Mormon fantasies (both local and national) of Mormonism's demise through economic development. Trains would bring more Americans to Utah, and Mormons would not be able to maintain their peculiarity in the face of progress. Walker spends quite a bit of time with these anti-Mormon dreamers, not as a study of anti-Mormonism, but as a study of failed visions of progress. Initially railroads were anti-Mormon allies, but in a surprising turn Brigham Young saw the coming railroads as an opportunity for Mormon expansion. Walker builds on scholarship that grapples with Mormonism as a socio-political formation that was both theocratic and communitarian. Young saw opportunity in the extension of federal land laws in 1868–1869 (passed in anticipation of the Transcontinental Railroad), and he directed high-ranking churchmen to file preemption claims and then act as trustees and parcel out land to their fellow congregants. The Saints thus beat the railroads to land claims, developed those lands, and then gave them to the railroads in exchange for making Mormon Ogden (rather than anti-Mormon Corrine) a major hub of the Transcontinental Railroad. If Mormonism is a "western religion," we should think of that category as inherently defined by land grabs, industrial development, and resource hoarding. Walker's point here is broader: how would we reread our definitions of any religion if we asked more about how that religion related to resource control and less about symbolic invocations of sacred space? In the second half of the book, Walker describes Mormonism as a form of spectacle that defies our typical definitions of the religious other. Mormon leaders utilized the train as a vehicle for tourism, inviting outsiders to come and see their services, admire their industry, and revel in their peculiar institutions. Leading American intellectuals clamored to meet with Brigham Young, who hosted approximately 615 visitors the first year after the Transcontinental Railroad was built and 1,700 visitors in the second year. Walker is not denying the stakes of anti-Mormon vitriol in nineteenth-century United States, but he is describing how Mormons were able to use attention in a way that differentiated them from other practitioners of so-called bad religion: namely, Native Americans and Muslims. Walker shows that both church leaders and railroad agents created spaces, museums, and observation cars on the trains, which allowed tourists to view Mormons as uniquely linked to the landscape of Utah. These displays also encouraged spectators to compare Mormons with Native Americans, Muslims, and other "pagan" religionists. By encouraging tourism, Mormons asked their detractors to gaze upon their difference, compare Mormon difference...

Struggles at the 'peripheries': Situated knowledge production and feminist visions for post-extractive environments

Struggles at the 'peripheries': Situated knowledge production and feminist visions for post-extractive environments

In the flesh

The author incorporates her creative writing to share her untold experience of what Carole J. Sheffield would identify as sexual terrorism. She then engages in a candid dialogue with co-editor Patricia Richards, demonstrating the power of conversation as a feminist method. Inspired by their feminist imagination, they explore ways to construct meaning and produce knowledge beyond conventional, mainstream frameworks in sociology. In this intellectual praxis, they explore themes such as the aesthetics of resilience, poetry and creativity, non-mainstream epistemologies across disciplines (including but not limited to Anzaldúa’s theorizing on el corazón con razón and Fals Borda’s sentipensante sociology), authenticity and intellectual vulnerability.

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Conspiracies and the Liberal Imagination

Conspiracies and the Liberal Imagination