Ideological Configurations Research Articles

More than meets the eye … representations of black women in mid-19th-century french photography

Abstract This article looks at issues raised by some French photographs of black women taken in the mid-19th century. While standard readings of Orientalist painting describe representations of North Africa as constructing an imaginary Orient for the male white viewer, I argue that this oversimplifies a complex historical, cultural, and ideological configuration of factors relating to the transition between colonialism and imperialism in the mid-19th century and the embodiment of this configuration consciously and unconsciously in the representations of black women. Using photographs taken in France and in North Africa, I look at issues of gender, “race,” and class in relation to these images, locating some serious problems in attempts to read them as discourses of racialised femininity, which construct signs more real than the material circumstances and lived experiences through which they were produced and viewed. I offer a Marxist reading of these images as profoundly contradictory and unstable—embedded in modern historical and cultural processes rather than successfully fixing a clear and unchanging stereotypical view of North Africa and the racialised sexuality of black women’s bodies. This should in no way be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate these images.

The methodological meaning of the concept of the culture of National Liberation

The main task of this text is to prove two socio-cultural concepts: the culture of accumulation of the national and the culture of national liberation. These concepts are meant to define in all complexity the changes of rhetorical and ideological configurations of fictive literature and social communication of the XIX century in Lithuania. These theoretical constructions have developed after analysing the images of national identity in the Lithuanian poetical texts of the second half of the XIX century. The distinction between the culture of accumulation of the national and the culture of national liberation is presupposed by the opposition of static and dynamics - coming from different interpretations of the model - social reforms and authorities, and person and community. The proposed socio-cultural concepts allow a new systematization of cultural and psychological innovative metamorphoses of national idea, openness to nationalism, and the transformations it induced in the XIX century in Lithuania. The concepts are used to differentiate most general changes in culture, psychology, and awareness and, therefore, particular names or texts cannot be attributed to either. In the works of Antanas Baranauskas we can already find all the main elements of the culture of national liberation. Simonas Daukantas - in the structure discussed - must be seen as the one who carried out the maximal programme of accumulation of the national and the legitimation of the nation.

"Cybermaterialism" and the Invention of the Cybercultural Everyday

On the contemporary academic scene the dominant post-al1 logic for thinking about contemporary culture and the social has taken its cue over the last three decades from the (post) structuralist emphasis on pleasure, difference, desire, contin gency, signification, the body, and so forth, concepts which now consti tute the horizon of intelligibility in the (post) modern academy. More recently, and in accordance with the (market) logic of constant innova tion, newer articulations have come to supplement this discursive space, which has subsequently added to its range of concepts the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, invention. . . Whereas the earlier series can be understood as centered upon Derridean theories of the text and textuality, the latter series, while drawing upon the conceptual under pinnings of theories of the text moves beyond text-space and into cyberspace. Cyberspace is above all the trope for a new cybercultural imaginary which is reenergizing idealist social theory in its promise of a different (aesthetic) experience of culture in the form of technoculture: the high-tech digital wired culture which is increasingly informing, if not shaping, everyday life (for what bourgeois sociology calls the upper middle classes) in the advanced industrial nations. In this essay I argue that whether departing from text-space or from cyberspace the outcome of this ideological configuration is the contin ued suppression of those concepts?production, labor, need, necessity, historical materiality, and collectivity?which are necessary in producing historical knowledge of social totality as the enabling means to a transformative intervention into capitalist social relations. Although this suppression, which brackets the intelligibilities that will enable a politics of social transformation, is widely seen as progressive?not at all a suppression, but rather a sign of an advanced cognitive and political sensibility?it is, in actuality, symptomatic of the fact that the historical agenda of the ruling discourses continues to be the prevention of an interrogation into the causal conditions of material inequalities in class societies and a mystification of means by which these inequalities can be eradicated. In my analysis I will first outline the theoretical conditions of

Front national economic policy: From neo‐liberalism to protectionism

This article focuses on the changes in the economic policy of the Front National (FN) which have taken place in the last 3–4 years. It argues that the apparent switch from neo‐liberalism to protectionism by the FN must be treated with caution: protectionism per se is not new to the FN, nor can one state that neo‐liberal policies have disappeared from its economic agenda. I discuss whether changes in the field of economic policy reflect wider changes to the overall ideological configuration of the FN, arguing that such changes represent part of a wider move by the FN in the direction of a political programme espousing a ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and communism. Finally, it discusses the reasons behind the changes in both the economic policy of the party and its ideological configuration.

Engendered ideologies and leisure policy in the UK. Part 2: professional ideologies

This article draws upon PhD research to examine the restructuring of engendered ideologies in leisure policy in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to consider the implications for leisure provision for women. The article is in two parts. In Part 1 the kinds of gender ideologies circulating in leisure policy were outlined; in this second part of the article, the articulation of gender and professional ideologies is examined in order to trace the historical emergence and predominance of particular configurations of ideologies from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. The research on which this article draws indicates that in the emergence of welfare reformist and community development ideologies in the late 1970s and the mid 1980s respectively, feminist ideologies made a significant impact, but that with the emergence of market ideology in the late 1980s, feminist ideologies were losing ground. It is argued that the predominance of market ideology at a time of economic restraint fuelled by the emergence of post-feminism, is likely to lead to a three-tier system of local leisure provision for women: niche marketed leisure provision for women with substantial resources; mass marketed leisure for women with fewer resources; and even less public leisure provision than previously for the most disadvantaged groups of women.

Engendered ideologies and leisure policy in the UK. Part 1: gender ideologies

I don't quite yawn when I see another project about the problems women face but I think to myself ‘This ground has been heavily walked over. We know it. It's been written about. It's been sung about. It's been acted about and it's been painted and performed about.’ It is very well worn territory and I'm now thinking ‘What next? How do you use that raised awareness and move on?’ (Keeper, arts and museums). This article draws upon PhD research to examine the restructuring of engendered leisure policy ideologies in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to consider the implications for leisure provision for women. The article is in two parts. In Part 1, a typology of ideologies is developed in order to outline the kinds of gender ideologies circulating in leisure policy. Part 2 of the article examines the articulation of gender and professional ideologies, and the configurations of ideologies which were emerging as predominant at a time of political and economic restructuring.

Has socialism a future?

Abstract The starting point of this article is the currently fashionable ‘death of socialism’ thesis. The article is sceptical of the inflated claims of this thesis, and seeks to develop a critique of its underlying assumptions. After an initial attempt to situate the thesis in an historical context, it moves on to examine the principal components of the thesis, namely, changes in the working class, globalization, the collapse of communism, and postmodernism. It argues that whilst there is some explanatory value in these factors, they do not amount to a plausible demonstration of the end of socialism, and rest upon a suspect methodology. This leads on to a consideration of the future of socialism, in particular the possible fate of the word ‘socialism’, the relationship between socialism and alternative ideological traditions, and the role of the socialist tradition in the ideological configurations of the future.

Women and Political Participation in China

X s she viewed the coming collapse of the really existing socialist tates of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Maxine Molyneux cautioned that there would likely be both gains and losses for women. The state's retreat from its self-designated role as emancipator of and its replacement by market forces, civil society and new ideological configurations placed social groups such as women, who had benefitted from state-sponsored affirmative action policies, in an unpredictable and vulnerable position. At the same time, would no longer be restrained in forming their own organizations to challenge the limited conceptions of citizenship defined under the old state structures.' Early returns suggest, however, that are being doubly disadvantaged. While the receding state offers little protection, the new groups moving into the vacuum left by the Communist party are redefining women's roles along idealized pre-Communist lines. One of the earliest visible signs that the transition from communism might be detrimental for appeared in the political arena. In the interests of democratization, obligatory quotas which had guaranteed a given percentage of the seats in (powerless) legislative bodies were removed, leading to a rapid decline in the number of holding political office. Moreover, it has been difficult to promote women's rights in the former Eastern bloc countries because such rights have been so closely tied to official women's federations or women's leagues. In their role as transmission belts these had faithfully carried out party policies toward women, which included the prevention of any independent feminist movement. Since in Communist party positions had no real political power but were merely filling a quota creating the illusion of equality and women's federations were viewed as being under the control of women who were making a career of communism, when the

Analysis of deviance and of social classes — the impact of methodological research

In an analysis of deviance and social classes, an original methodology is used as a means of progress in the theoretical domain, which seeks a resolution of the now traditional consensus vs. conflict debate by introducing two hitherto ignored aspects: (1) this debate cannot be clarified by reference to norms or values that are abstractly described, but only in relation to the legitimacy of the intervention of a particular social institution as the result of a particular problematic behavior; and (2) the comprehension of these phenomena and their social interpretation necessitates an understanding of their meaning and of the ideological configurations that are the framework in which these judgements of institutional legitimacy are made. Indeed, this second aspect constitutes the working hypothesis of the analysis, using multiple-choice questionnaire data (N=804) concerning the social representation of deviance which are analyzed by an original method of hierarchically ascending classification analysis, called cross-classification. This method, which crosses an automatic classification analysis of the individuals with a similar analysis of the variables, produces significant nodes within the data that determine and describe the five archetypes of social representation of deviance. These significant nodes or archetypes are then analyzed further with the application of a factorial correspondence analysis.

States and Collective Action: The European Experience.

It has become something of an orthodoxy of contemporary sociology that modern democratic industrial societies are essentially alike, and that they are confronted by uniform challenges, whether industrial (strikes and demonstrations), social (the 'crisis of the welfare state'), or political. In this important collection of studies Professor Birnbaum asserts, however, that the very existence of differentiation, challenge such a hypothesis. Linking historical and sociological investigation, Birnbaum argues that it is only through divergent state-formation that regional and national state variations in, for example, industrial conflict, policing or ideological configuration can be explained. His analysis of the influence of each type of state upon the development of various collective action and mobilisation processes establishes the crucial importance of the state as a quasi-independent variable.

Introduction: From Popular Narratives to Popular Images

Wh A 1en I began to conceive of this special issue almost two years ago, V V my initial point of departure was a thesis for which individual contributors cannot be held responsible, but which determines design of issue. I am referring to my assumption that emphasis in popular storytelling and imagery has moved over past hundred and fifty years from clear-cut narrative configurations spanning a whole story and depending upon ideological configurations of socio-historical context, to an emphasis on images and situations whose ideological value is overdetermined by representation of basic human desires of community and love. This premise no doubt underlies my decision to complement essays analyzing traditional narratives with others dealing with videos, rock music, and images in general. Many contributions to this issue address aspects of this presumed development-from Ebert's ideology-critical readings of more traditional narratives to Budd and Steinman's analysis of capitalization and corresponding dematerialization of TV-images, to Grossberg's accumulation of evidence that in contemporary mass culture the narrative is less important than images. Yet, decision to

A Literary Vision of History: Marxism and Positivism in Terra nostra by Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

Introduction to Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time"

Previous articleNext article No AccessFrench Feminist TheoryIntroduction to Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time"Alice JardineAlice Jardine Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 7, Number 1Autumn, 1981 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493854 Views: 73Total views on this site Citations: 12Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1981 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Erica Burman Lockdown Vistas: Time, Space, Solidarity, Action, (Nov 2021): 189–212.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76939-0_9Ann Burnett, Nancy DiTunnariello, Becky L. DeGreeff “I’m on a Rollercoaster”: Women’s Social Construction of Time, Communication Studies 71, no.11 (Dec 2019): 148–166.https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2019.1702073Heather H. Yeung Zones of Maximal Translatability: Borderspace and Women’s Time, (Nov 2017): 61–81.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_4Erica Burman Fanon, Foucault, feminisms: Psychoeducation, theoretical psychology, and political change, Theory & Psychology 26, no.66 (Dec 2016): 706–730.https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354316653484Soumia Boutkhil In their front yard: deconstructing masculinities in Bahaa Trabelsi's novels, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no.11 (Sep 2015): 81–89.https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1084772Kjetil Fallan, Grace Lees-Maffei It's Personal: Subjectivity in Design History, Design and Culture 7, no.11 (Apr 2015): 5–27.https://doi.org/10.2752/175470715X14153615623565Felicity Colman Notes on the Feminist Manifesto: The Strategic Use of Hope, Journal for Cultural Research 14, no.44 (Oct 2010): 375–392.https://doi.org/10.1080/14797581003765333Lisa Cosgrove Feminism, Postmodernism, and Psychological Research, Hypatia 18, no.33 (Mar 2020): 85–112.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00823.xMary Louise Hill Women's time/radio time: Time, translation and transgression, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 9, no.22 (Jan 1997): 25–51.https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709708571271Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Ph(r)ase Time, Time & Society 4, no.11 (Aug 2016): 91–110.https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X95004001005Kelly Oliver Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions, Hypatia 8, no.33 (Mar 2020): 94–114.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1993.tb00038.xJulia Kristeva Women’s Time, (Jan 1981): 860–879.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_49