Judith Butler Research Articles

The Dark Side of Branding: Language and the Real in Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)

The protagonist, an unnamed African American nomenclature consultant, has been a victim of his own trade: his stroke of genius, the name and advertising slogan for a band-aid that fits the many skin tones of multicultural America, “Apex Hides the Hurt”, has ironically cost him an infected toe that he merely covered with the adhesive bandage instead of having it treated. When he is asked to arbitrate the rebranding of the town of Winthrop, the ad man faces both an onomastic and an existential challenge.This paper draws on specific aspects of the philosophy of language to discuss the motivation of signs in relation to naming strategies and analyzes the performatives, performances, and diverse conditions of felicity that naming implies. The former is indebted in part to the legacy of Plato’s Cratylus and branding manuals—strange bedfellows; the latter draws from J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, as revisited by Barbara Cassin and Judith Butler. In both conceptions the real comes to dwell in language, either as a determining factor or as a product of a world-shaping activity. Since Apex is a fiction of naming, it provides an imaginary “actual” context for this verbal act. It can also describe the failed encounters between language and the real, the attempts at euphemizing or repressing reality, as well as the shattering irruptions of the real within discourse. As a satire of corporate culture and its bearing on “race”, it also generates an interface with the reality of contemporary American culture.

Strangers in conversation: Judith Butler with gender, work and organization

Strangers in conversation: Judith Butler with gender, work and organization

Jenseits der Forderung nach Gewaltfreiheit: Würdige Wut und emanzipatorisches Handeln

Abstract In this article, Laura Quintana elaborates on a conceptual distinction between violence and rage. Along with this distinction, she recognises that while rage may possess a destructive potential, it can also be politicised in emancipatory practices that confront conditions of injustice and structural violence. Her analysis centers on contemporary political movements in Latin America, which she views as collective manifestations of rage. Within these movements, the manifestation of rage is intertwined with forms of care and communal labor. Quintana characterises such movements as embodying a “dignified rage” (digna rabia) that calls for an emancipatory transformation of the status quo. She contends that these practices can be understood in terms of the notion of “anti-violence,” as it has been coined by Étienne Balibar. In this she diverges from Judith Butler, since, according to Quintana’s analysis, such practices challenge the demand for non-violence that has often served to neutralise the disruptive force of such manifestations and movements.

Politics of photographs: construction and consolidation of identities during Assam movement

ABSTRACT Images could be understood as a medium that does not only reflect and represent the socio-political dynamics but diffuses and perpetuates ideas and perceptions. Images, as an integral part of media, play a huge role in this dissemination through their framing, contents, signs, and symbols. In order to comprehend this power of photographs, the paper will look into the frames, as expounded by Judith Butler, which determine the visibility and invisibility of subjects in a photograph. This paper deals with the Assam Movement, which happened in Assam, a northeastern state of India, as a reaction to the migration from neighboring Bangladesh. The paper will also delve into how the newspapers, as a production of the class structure, impress upon the symbolic environment in which peoples’ subjectivities are formulated. It is a study of how photographs published in newspapers can lay the foundations for the construction of an identity.

Crack, Transformation and Breakthrough of Heterosexual Matrix

This essay applies Judith Butler’s theory to analyze how characters shape the protagonist’s gender identity and awareness of marginalized groups, in Orlando: A Biography. Through Orlando's interactions with Sasha, the Archduke, and Shel, the research traces her journey from deviation from traditional gender norms to acceptance with a fluid gender identity. By examining the impact of these characters, this study aims to highlight gender equality as the theme and the constraints behind the heterosexual matrix.

Tapping on Collective National Trauma

Introduction Media and trauma cannot exist independently but are always caught in a cross-feedback loop. Depending on its mediating technology, trauma has always given rise to a different “technological unconscious” whereby the very conditions of trauma are tied to its form and technological dimensions (Johanssen 311). Our analysis explores this link, drawing on the case of the 2023 Greek TRAUMA podcast (Koukoumakas et al.), an audio documentary nested in iMEdD Lab, tracing seven disastrous events that have afflicted Greece in the last twenty-four years – from the Parnitha earthquake in 1999 to the Tempi train crash in 2023. This is a unique example of a quality news podcast that touches upon the ways collective trauma has built into the national identity of modern Greek people. There is a striking similarity in the way Amit Pinchevski describes how the Holocaust became a collectively shared trauma in Israel and how the TRAUMA podcast narrates the collective trauma in Greece. Without diminishing the experience of those directly involved and traumatised, TRAUMA weaves an audiography of a national body traversed with traumatic symptoms. Already from the title, TRAUMA bears a self-contradictory promise: to document that which essentially escapes documentation, or, in Amit Pinchevski’s apt words, to mediate a “failed mediation” (4). More specifically, trauma is being shaped by the technology through which it is mediated, and is tied to its form and technological dimensions (Johanssen 311). This is also the case in the present podcast, which (re)mediates seven stories of traumatic disaster in the acoustic language of voice and sound, and is necessarily bound and shaped by the very logics and limitations of the podcast medium. What concerns the present article is how, in the case of TRAUMA, podcasting logics tap on the existing media landscape of trauma coverage, negotiating and shaping trauma representation anew. Following current scholarship in the field, we read TRAUMA not only as a journalistic audio archive aiming to document and share traumatic narratives, but, rather, as essentially a(e)ffecting the way these stories are perceived. Far from aestheticising or sensationalising the “private drama of catastrophe”, as is often the perverse “lure” and the case with trauma coverage in traditional media, TRAUMA utilises podcast logics to create audibility platforms for otherwise lost voices, and thus, in an activist gesture, to draw attention to and raise concern about the painful repetition of tragic stories in the light of a non-(pro)active Greek state. Our analysis, framed in audio and content analysis of the TRAUMA podcast, minds a gap; there is little podcast-specific analysis of trauma mediation (Karathanasopoulou and Williams; Cardell and Douglas) even if the latter seems to flesh a recurrent thematic concern in podcast narratives (such as the podcast re-mediation of Holocaust narratives in 2019, titled “Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust”, or Greek podcasts From a Wonder to a Trauma and iMEdD’s Mute). Individual Voice Testimonies in the TRAUMA Podcast In light of its unique characteristics (lo-fi, low-cost, amateur-friendly, open-source, and relatively content-free), podcasting has been read as potentially challenging and even transgressing mainstream media discourse (Park; Rae; McHugh; Tiffe and Hoffmann). In her work on podcasting and political listening, Maria Rae sees in podcasts the ability to intervene in and disrupt existing media structures of attention that determine who is heard and how. Upending such “regimes of attention”, they may invite us, instead, to retune, un-hear, or hear differently. In the case of TRAUMA, the work taps on topics which have cross-fed a barrage of images on social media platforms, and fuelled 24-hour news cycles on traditional visual media. To this trauma-casting, it juxtaposes its own audio logics of multiple, yet unified, voicing and of slow, engaged listening. Literally “opening the mic” for those unheard or only heard little, TRAUMA makers aspire to host what they term as “the ‘unedited experience’ of the disaster”. This, they see as a gesture away from existing media coverage of disasters in Greece that may silence, voice-over, aestheticise, or selectively frame (and un-frame) individual voicing. The “voyeurism lure” is mindfully addressed as TRAUMA podcast makers have published – parallel to their documentary work – a journalists’ code of conduct in cases of trauma coverage, addressing issues related to “privacy, legislation, and journalist ethics” (Voutsina et al.). At the same time, the silencing or voice-over tactics, often employed in cases of trauma coverage, are also actively counter-balanced as TRAUMA utilises verbatim testimonies and offers opportunities for direct earwitnessing of what surfaces less as a private catastrophe and more as shared, public wound for Greek citizens. The notion of earwitnessing encompasses a form of listening attuned to the specific social, cultural, and political manifestations of sound and voice. To “earwitness” is to listen to the history that unfolds and to become responsible for what you listen to (Rae et al.). Letting otherwise lost voices surface and having us listen to those accounts, TRAUMA actively gestures towards “acoustic justice”, defined by Brandon Labelle in his homonymous book as “the practices or gestures that seek to rework the distribution of the heard” (131). Such reworking of audibility norms is best served through emphasis on unheard testimonies. Testimonies are indeed the more extensive part of the text genres emerging in the TRAUMA podcast. A relatively large number of codes were created, and data revealed that two codes appeared more frequently: the codes referring to the Mati fires and the Tempi fatal train accident. There are a couple of reasons for this, as both accidents were severe: the Mati fires that took place in 2018 “would go on to become the second deadliest fire globally in the past 25 years. 104 lives were tragically lost in Mati”, as the narration script testifies. The train crash in the Tempi valley in February 2023 was the most recent tragic event, and one that involved the loss of very young people. In the case of both disasters, testimonies prevail, only carefully complemented by narrative voice-over, news clips, or accompanying music. The news clip chosen to inform listeners about the tragic accident in Tempi is short and sharp: “Intercity train collides with commercial train, resulting in three wagons derailing”. Most of the sparse news clips used to enhance the informative lens of the documentary adopt the same style: they are short, accurate, and show the core of the news story. They are like stamps of verification of what actually happened, without however overshadowing or emotionally framing the actual verbatim material featured in the piece. Narrative voice-over and music follow the same logic of only discreetly framing the testimonial material. The voice-over that is featured in the podcast, with an agonising tune playing in the background, carefully offers sharp and concrete information on disastrous facts, introducing testimonies or drawing links between voices. Music also plays a significant role, even if the focus of the audio documentary is on discourse and voice; the musical background sets a mysterious tone, adding to the audio experience of the listener when accompanying the narrative voice. Its notable absence when we move from the voice to the testimonies is also a clear documentation of the value that the TRAUMA podcast attributes to testimonies. With no accompanying music, testimonies retune us to the soundscape of the people involved, securing sharper focus on those voices and greater empathy on the part of the listener.    Testimonies flesh out engaging, emotive narratives that also harbour accurate information of the stories involved (Theodosiadou). A multitude of intimacies exist in podcasting, and this intimacy contains the possibility to materially connect the listener to a story (fictional or factual; Karathanasopoulou). In the quote below there is a possible connection between the listener and the factual story as the narration becomes very realistic and absolutely grounded in the tragic events; the listener has a chance to envision the situation at the hospital, and this acoustic illustration possibly connects them more tightly to the actual story. From the Tempi train crash, the father of a young student-victim describes the most difficult moment while waiting that first night at the hospital: I dubbed that day 'a game of poker with death': in the hospital, whenever an ambulance arrived, everyone would rush towards it, hoping to find their loved ones injured or anxiously checking if the body bag was sealed, all racing to discover if their dear ones were dead. Victim relatives are heard sharing their private trauma-scapes and reporting on how difficult it has been to cope with such a traumatic event, and how these tragedies have influenced all their lives. Our attention, as podcast listeners deprived of any visual stimuli, is actively drawn both to the content of their sayings but also to the vocal utterances per se, in all their individual acoustic register of gaps or hesitations, of voice colour, pace, and rhythm:  it was incredibly difficult to endure such a situation. Most of us struggled through five years without any medication. But there are so many others that rely on very strong medications to cope. Fig. 1: Visual installation 58 Nails in Tempi, by artist Georgios Koftis. Tempi Valley, January 2024 (photo by Georgios Koftis). “We believe that there are more and more of us people not having a voice, contrary to what is depicted in the media” — Georgios Koftis. From the Individual to the Collective TRAUMA hosts survivors’ and victim relatives’ testimonies, maintaining the force and intimacy of the individual witness, yet not letting them flesh out a singular, eccentric, private disaster drama. Not only are individual voices balanced out with other voices of the various field experts on whom the documentary draws, but they are also amplified in echoes as we listen on to more (and all the more similar) testimonies. In this sense, we move from the private to the collective, and the documentary escapes the risk of over-emphasising personal disaster or aestheticising the pain of those directly involved. On a similar note, we hear both a relative of a victim of the Tempi crash and a relative of a victim in the Mati fires become equally cynical and accepting of the inevitability of accidents in life: in the collective unconsciousness we exist within, it was inevitable. Whether it be a boat, a ship, a plane, or a power station, it was destined to occur somewhere, and undoubtedly, it will happen again. We have grown somewhat cynical. After the Tempi train crash, when we gather during court breaks, we quip, "What's next, a plane crash?" We even start placing bets. It may come across as cynical, but considering what we have experienced and what we are likely to experience again, that's just how it is.  In the case of the Mati fire tragedy, many testimonies similarly focus on the absence of care or action from the Greek state and the feeling of aloneness in confronting such a preposterous disaster. Around 18:00, my mother gave me a call and informed me about a fire... There was no mention of it on TV. If only my family had been alerted just 5 minutes earlier, they could have jumped into the car and taken the route through Marathon Avenue, just like many others who managed to survive. We're talking about a mere distance of 500 metres, and the authorities had a clear view of the scene. They witnessed people burning, yet made no attempt to rescue them. There was no fire brigade in sight, not a single siren reached out ears, no loudspeakers blaring "Evacuate" to warn us, nothing at all. From the intense heat and lack of oxygen, we were beginning to lose our strength, my entire family. The relatives of the victims report on how difficult it has been to cope with such a traumatic event and how these tragedies have influenced all their lives. What can I say… The boy is seeing a psychologist to cope with the trauma. Whenever he sees us about to light a match, he thinks there’ll be a fire and quickly jumps to put it out. It’s so sad. These scars will never heal – they don't simply fade away no matter how much we wish they would. Joining voices from disparate disaster events, TRAUMA captures the “return and repeat” logics of trauma temporality, but, more importantly, meddles with and away from the “shock and freeze” effect of the singular event to reveal threads, echoes, re-doublings, and flashbacks that flesh a silently ongoing, collective trauma. Individual narratives of disaster are thus both solidified and pluralised in a sonic space that merges the private and the public, the singular and the plural, the rupture and the thread, allowing personal stories to open up into informed public conversations. Moving on in echoes and counterpoint polyphony, TRAUMA ultimately effects a “hearing different” of individual trauma testimonies, enabling the latter to surface less as closed echo chambers and more as resonant channels of shared wounds. The movement from the private to the collective is also repetitively referenced in the podcast per se. Both in the expert talks but also in the narrative script the notion of collective trauma is insistently mentioned: “erosion of trust in the state and the absence of catharsis” are considered to be the two main characteristics of collective trauma, according to the experts on the podcast and the journalist-narrator. This profound lack of trust that victims felt personally but also collectively surfaces as a resonant feeling, threading the two decades of fatal accidents that the TRAUMA podcast touches on.  Collective trauma is what occurs when a community or society is stripped of its essential functions, such as democracy, institutions, social solidarity, and, most importantly, the preservation of social bonds. Negligence can never be equated with acts that are considered felonious. Felonies encompass acts where the outcome is a result of deliberate and conscious actions. It is not only the outcome that is condemned, but also the intentional and rational behavior of the perpetrator. Conclusion The TRAUMA podcast revolutionises auditory experience both in tapping to unmute individual voices and thus offering acoustic justice, but also in terms of activating political listening. The acts of podcast creation and “political listening” can reinforce the audience’s political opposition to unjust practices (Rae et al.). TRAUMA is an example of a podcast that attempts to raise awareness of the Greek state’s failure to take relevant action, thus sensitising and mobilising listeners in ethical responsibility. Re-tuning listeners to trauma narratives and turning them into earwitnesses may fashion a space of empowerment. Writing of post-9/11 trauma and mourning and the ways in which the latter was quickly dismissed by U.S. authorities to allow for militant action, Judith Butler questions the typical equation of grief and trauma with passive numbness or stillness, and aptly observes that “suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these can become resources if we do not resolve them too quickly” (149-50). Staying with trauma voices, as enabled in the case of TRAUMA, may help for “mourning otherwise” or for what Athena Athanasiou terms “agonistic mourning”, opening quietly militant spaces of ethical response-ability and caring, and even re-orienting trauma rupture and paralysis in actively “contending with dominant and prevailing systems that make and unmake bodies” (LaBelle 564). In the case of TRAUMA, letting listeners linger in the aural intimacy of the private trauma transforms listening into active earwitnessing and political contestation. The originality of the documentary lies in the weaving of the personal to the collective trauma, as well as in how this pain intertwines and defines the national collective trauma. Maybe this is also a hidden message that TRAUMA conveys: a silent ‘activism’ to make listeners participate in the personal and collective trauma and activate them in a positive and empowering way towards taking responsibility and work in line with the collective good (Theodosiadou). This brings the podcast genre to a new epoch, an epoch that transcends from audio blogging to silent activism. This concluding remark aligns with Karathanasopoulou & Williams's findings that non-visual media can provide a safe environment to reveal deeply personal experiences and, in some cases, form an example of “quiet activism”. Future research should enlarge the lens of podcasting on traumatic events, through comparative research on podcasting in other countries, as well as through sustained analysis on how narration, sound, and music elements in podcasts (re)negotiate media representations of trauma.    Acknowledgment Georgios Koftis made his visual memoriam in January 2024, almost a year after the Tempi accident, for the 57 people who tragically died in the Tempi train crash in February 2023 (also adding one more nail for the missing and injured people). He generously granted us the copyright both for the visual art and for his photograph of the 58 Nails in Tempi. We sincerely thank him for this as well as for making our voice heard.  References Athanasiou, Athena. Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Cardell, Kylie, and Kate Douglas. “Okay to Laugh? Trauma, Memoir, and Teaching the Podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 37.2 (2002): 299-315. DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2136826. Johanssen, Jacob. “Amit Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 46.3 (2022): 311-315. Karathanasopoulou, E. “Audio within Audio: Story-Telling and the Evocation of Emotion in Podcasting.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio, eds. K. Mc Donald and H. Chignell. Bloomsbury, 2023. 226-242. Karathanasopoulou, E., and H. Williams. “Podcasting as a Feminist Space for the Disclosure of Trauma and Intimate Embodied Experience: The Heart as a Case Study of Quiet Activism.” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 21.1 (2023). Koukoumakas, Kostas, et al. Trauma. iMEdD Lab, 2023. <https://lab.imedd.org/en/trauma/>. LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity and the Work or Reorientation. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.   ———. LaBelle, Brandon. “Towards Acoustic Justice.” Law Text Culture 24.1 (2020): 550–72. 9 Feb. 2024 <https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol24/iss1/21>. McHugh, Siobhan "Truth to Power: How Podcasts Are Getting Political." The Conversation, 31 Aug. 2017. <https://theconversation.com/truth-to-power-how-podcasts-are-getting-political-81185>. Park, Chang Sup. “Citizen News Podcasts and Engaging Journalism: The Formation of a Counter-Public Sphere in South Korea.” Pacific Journalism Review 1.1 (2017): 245. DOI: 10.24135/pjr.v23i1.49. Pinchevski, Amit. “Archive, Media, Trauma.” In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 253-64. ———. Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. Pinchevski, Amit, and Michael Richardson. “Trauma and Digital Media: Introduction to Crosscurrents Special Section.” Media, Culture & Society (2022). <https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221122244>. Rae, Maria. “Podcasts and Political Listening: Sound, Voice and Intimacy in the Joe Rogan Experience.” Continuum 37.2 (2023): 182-93. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2023.2198682. Rae, Maria, et al. “Earwitnessing Detention: Carceral Secrecy, Affecting Voices, and Political Listening in the Messenger Podcast.” International Journal of Communication (2019): 13-20.   Scomazzon, Giulia. “Amit Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.” Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal 22.39 (2023): 157–8. <https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461x/19081>. Theodosiadou, Sofia. “Review of TRAUMA Audio Podcast: 24 years, Seven Tragedies: The Experience of Survivors and the Collective Trauma of an Entire Country”. RadioDoc Review, forthcoming 2024.   Tiffe, Raechel, and Melody Hoffmann. “Taking Up Sonic Space: Feminized Vocality and Podcasting as Resistance.” Feminist Media Studies 17.1 (2017): 115-8. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1261464. Voutsina, Katerina, et al. Reporting on Traumatic Events: A Journalist’s Code of Conduct. iMedD, 2023. <https://lab.imedd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/iMEdD_Trauma_Toolkit_for_Journalists_EN.pdf>.

Hindu Patriarchal Society and the Rise of Modern Female Characters: A Contextual Reading of Selected Modern Nepali Plays

This paper explores the way the first-generation modern Nepali playwrights Balkrishna Sama (1903-1981), Bimnidhi Tiwari (1911-973) and Vijay Malla (1925-1999) responded to the existing values of the Hindu patriarchal society by creating female characters. It mainly focuses on Indira from Mukunda Indira (1939) by Sama, Sushila from Sahanshila Sushila (1940) by Tiwari and Urmila, and Pratima from Jiundo Las (1955) by Malla. With the insights taken from Western feminism, mainly the ideas of Judith Butler that gender is ‘scripted’, the paper interprets these female characters by contextualizing the plays in Nepal’s social history. It concludes that Urmila and Pratima represent the pain and suffocation of the first-generation educated female youths of the nation who were yet to recognize the harm its patriarchal values have done to its female members. Indira and Sushila are comparatively docile and do not feel the need to break the grand scripts. Malla by projecting the pain and frustration of female characters who live psychologically complex lives shares the message of the urgency of addressing women’s issues with his audiences.

EXPLORING THE DAILY HORRORS OF LIFE IN IRAQ THROUGH FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD

Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi's 2014 International Arabic Fiction Prize–winning book Frankenstein in Baghdad is the subject of this article. I contend that Saadawi identifies the origins of the terrorism.Since the United States took over the country. Rooted in terror is apprehension. Judith Butler describes the current state of affairs as "a precarious life," where the threat of violent death is ever present, and the breakdown of central authority has released the monster of fear.Furthermore, new Iraqi actors' power struggles breed egotism, demagogy, and exploitation. Recognizing that everyone is responsible is an essential theme throughout the book. A possible escape from the horrors of the civil war and slaughter would be possible if people would only accept responsibility for their actions and recognize that no one is ultimately a victim or a perpetrator.

Towards a ‘vulnerable co-presence’ for hybrid ways of working: Recasting the nexus of co-presence and vulnerability with Merleau-Ponty and Butler

While hybrid working offers many benefits, its individualizing inclination creates ‘new vulnerabilities’ by making social ties and work collectives more precarious. A growing number of studies have referred to co-presence to examine how hybrid work arrangements reshape sociality and togetherness at work. However, most consider co-presence as fundamentally distinct from vulnerability, creating a common divide between the two phenomena. This conceptual article posits a normative argument that recasting how co-presence relates to vulnerability should help to address the ‘new vulnerabilities’ at stake in hybrid working. After briefly exploring how the literature examines the interplay of co-presence and vulnerability, I draw on existential phenomenology – in particular, the ontological arguments of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler – to develop the notion of ‘vulnerable co-presence’ before introducing three points of attention, namely how it is (1) ‘intercorporeal’, (2) ‘temporo-spatial’ and (3) ‘ethico-political’. I then outline the two main implications of this framework. First, it lays the groundwork for repoliticizing the hybrid workforce. Second, it offers practitioners a perceptual basis for imagining and learning new skills to ‘hold the collective together’ in hybrid organizational contexts. Finally, I present this article’s methodological contributions and suggest some avenues for future research.

What World is This? On Judith Butler's Ethico-Politics of Breath and Touch

What World is This? On Judith Butler's Ethico-Politics of Breath and Touch

The concept of unlivability: A reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952)

AbstractFrom a close reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952), this article draws out Fanon's understanding of “death in life” to suggest that a concept of unlivability in the present must account for the temporal duration of racialized and colonized experiences of pain and trauma. It is thus critical of Judith Butler's and Frédéric Worms's discussion of unlivability in The Livable and The Unlivable (2023) for not centering a phenomenological study of the testimonies of the oppressed. I argue for a greater engagement with Fanon on the longue durée of racial and colonial violence enacted on the bodies, psyches, and histories of racialized and colonized peoples. This article concludes by pointing to possibilities for a shared unlivability in a shared temporality, with potential to move beyond refusal and toward resistance to the colonial control over time.

Language, responsibility, and agency: How UK's immigrant‐background young adults navigate linguistic heritage

AbstractThis study explores the intersection of agency and responsibility in navigating linguistic heritage among immigrant‐background young adults (18–29 years old) in the UK. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorisation, it provides a nuanced understanding of how individuals engage with and respond to the burdening aspects of heritage language maintenance within the complex context of globalised power structures and privileged dynamics. The research employs a qualitative approach, integrating journal entries, interview transcripts, and co‐analysis to elucidate participants' experiences. Through grounded theory development, the study identifies key themes such as: negotiating responsibility across temporalities; the sense of guilt, shame and indebtedness embedded in the process of language maintenance; and finding agency through renarration. The paper contributes to geographical thought on migration and language by going beyond discussions of family language policy and proficiencies and drawing attention to the multifaceted implications of navigating linguistic heritage within immigrant families and monolingual Britain across the instabilities of social and temporal relations and power‐laden positionings. It also highlights the repertoires of narrative and interrelational approaches to reframing heritage that immigrant‐background young adults may access as they formulate their identities with and against language expectations, norms, proficiencies and hegemonies.

Introduction: Gender and work in twentieth-century Italy: new approaches

Abstract This introduction to the special issue ‘Gender and Work in Twentieth-Century Italy’ draws on key strands of historical scholarship on gender and work, including women workers’ experiences, labour market discrimination, domestic work, the impact of gender norms, and ideas of masculinity and femininity on work identities. It traces the development of feminist influence within this scholarship, from making women workers’ experiences visible to challenging essentialist notions of gender identities. Drawing on post-structuralist and intersectional perspectives, particularly influenced by Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler, the scholarship on which this special issue is based understands gender as a system of power signified through language and social constructions, and builds on the critique of the dichotomies and essentialisations of traditional labour history, proposing a systemic and structural approach to understanding gendered experiences of work. By exploring the intersections of gender, work and power, this collection offers insights into wider European developments and challenges established historical concepts and narratives. It highlights the importance of understanding gender dynamics in shaping labour relations and social structures, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of labour and power dynamics in twentieth-century Italy and beyond.

Say Nope to the Pope: performance and resistance in the creative interventions during the 2018 papal visit to Ireland

ABSTRACT In September 1979, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, made a historic pastoral visit to Ireland where he celebrated an open-air mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to an estimated 1,250,000 people, a third of the country’s population. In August 2018, Pope Francis returned to Ireland, though the second papal visit was met with a series of protests and a lower-than-expected turn-out at the public mass in Phoenix Park. In the intervening years Ireland underwent broad social changes and the credibility of the Catholic Church, once the bedrock of morality in Ireland, was eroded by scandals revealing the depths of clerical sex abuse and abuse in Catholic-run institutions. This article considers the creative protests and interventionist actions that marked the 2018 Papal visit, using Judith Butler’s Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) to think through these public actions. Focusing specifically on Say Nope to the Pope and the associated events of Stand 4 Truth, it explores these public performances of protest grounded in solidarity and resistance.

Narrating Self, Depicting the Other

The American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler believes that 'our capacity to reflect upon ourselves, to tell the truth about ourselves, is correspondingly limited by what the discourse, the regime, cannot allow into speakability' (Giving an Account of Oneself). This review analyses how Shamissa Hassani (b.1988), the first female graffiti artist of Afghanistan, and Keyvan Shovir (b. 1985), the first postrevolutionary graffiti artist of Iran, manifest Butler’s view of giving an account of oneself. I argue that Hassani and Shovir have used their arts as a means of speakability and self-reflection in the restricted discourses of their home countries. I conclude that art manifests the possibility of self-revelation and reclaiming one’s voice beyond the restricted social discourses or diaspora.

Wage Theft, Secrecy, and Derealization of ‘Ideal Workers’ in the Bangladesh Garment Industry

This study addresses how violence is mobilized through wage theft in feminized workplaces thriving within the global value chain. Guided by Judith Butler’s concept of derealization, this longitudinal case study on the Bangladesh garment industry advances the current debate on violence in organization studies. First, it re-conceptualizes the notion of an ‘ideal worker’. Empirical evidence reveals that, unlike in Western societies, young and childless women in the Global South and their vulnerabilities woven into poverty, inequality, climate change, patriarchy, social stratification, and limited employment opportunities make them ‘ideal workers’. This status remains valid as long as they remain vulnerable and demonstrate no agency in resisting the discourse on dehumanization, dispossession, and displacement. Second, this study illuminates the practice of wage theft, which has emerged as a dominant form of violence in feminized workplaces. Organizations also deploy secrecy to continue theft, thereby inflicting further physical and psychological violence. This study highlights the fact that socioeconomic vulnerabilities and unresisted violence oppress a docile workforce to become ‘ideal workers’. It is a neoliberal myth that helps powerful actors shore up their power and privileges through derealization.

The Language of Pain: Punishment and Intelligibility at the Medical Border

ABSTRACT Borders require subjects to give an account of themselves so they can be formally “recognised” by the State. This recognition determines whether the subject can cross the border, and any conditions placed upon crossing. By tying mobility – which is so often essential to life – to the capacity to get recognized in the “right” way, borders reveal what is at stake in what Judith Butler calls intelligibility. This article explores the problem of intelligibility with respect to the medicalization of borders, where medical knowledge is co-opted to establish border-crossing criteria. Using Australia’s “Medical Evacuation” legislation as a case study, I show how medical borders place an impossible demand on those that come before them: namely, to provide “evidence” of pain and trauma so border crossing can be facilitated, and punishment avoided.

Demons Seeking Identity? The Psychic Life of New Testament Exorcisms

Abstract An important but largely unrecognized feature of well-known New Testament exorcistic pericopes is the eagerness with which demons and spirits engage their respective exorcists. Why might narratives like Mark 1:21–26 and 5:1–13, or Acts 16:16–18, depict spirits as intensely keen to engage—and even to provoke—exorcists like Jesus and Paul? By reading these stories through Judith Butler’s nuancing of Louis Althusser’s interpellation theory, I argue that the demons seek and gain recognition of their identity through their interaction with Jesus. At the same time, I contend that ancient exorcism stories themselves (in concert with the work of Saba Mahmood) helpfully nuance Butler’s application of interpellation. In so doing, I illustrate a way of reading these pericopes in a manner that moves beyond simplistic, binary accounts (e.g., Jesus vs. Legion) to reveal the much more complex processes of identity and agency, negotiation and collaboration woven throughout the narrative action. Such interspecies collaboration, moreover, underscores the overlooked relevance of these texts for contemporary posthumanist philosophies, in how the motives, goals, and choices of humans and nonhumans—made in light of one another—dominate the action of these exorcism stories.

Sex, Gender, and Devotional Desire: Refiguring Bodily Identities in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Discourse

AbstractMany of the debates among theorists of the body in feminist and gender studies center on the gendered body and its relation to the sexed body, with the validity of the sex/gender distinction itself a topic of contention. On the one hand, feminist advocates of social constructionism tend to distinguish between sex and gender, in which sex (male or female) is identified with the biological body as a “natural” datum and gender (masculine or feminine) is a second-order sociocultural construction that is superimposed as an ideological superstructure on this “natural” base. On the other hand, feminist advocates of sexual difference such as Judith Butler call into question the sex/gender distinction and insist that the sexed body, like gender, is socially constructed. This article brings these contemporary feminist interlocutors into conversation with sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authorities who developed a distinctive discourse of embodiment in which they frame the categories of sex and gender in relation to devotional desire in their ontological theories of bodily identities. The Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment explodes notions of the relationship between embodiment, personhood, materiality, and gender on both the human and divine planes and challenges prevailing body theories by positing bodies beyond matter, personhood beyond matter, and gender beyond sex.

Nandanar: Visibilizing Caste in Bharatanatyam Performance

What are the implications of a bejeweled dancer in fine silk on the proscenium stage performing a piece that undeniably centers caste? As the Bharatanatyam field reflects on the art form’s appropriation from the hereditary dance community, analyzing choreography reveals different bodily representations of caste. Many Bharatanatyam dancers globally perform excerpts of the Nandanar Charitram, by Tamil composer Gopalakrishna Bharathi. The plot traces Nandanar, a Dalit saint who is not allowed in many temples and ends with his immolation, allowing his “purified” self to unite with the Hindu god Shiva. I study performances of the Nandanar Charitram comparing two Bharatanatyam showings and the 1942 film “Nandanar”. To recognize how caste is both articulated and understood, I analyze choreography, interviews conducted with dancers, and forums where audience members share their responses to the works. I use Judith Butler and Dwight Conquergood’s theorization of performativity, acknowledging that while Bharatanatyam choreography is often “iterative”, it has the potential to “disrupt” dominant norms on caste and politics. Nandanar remains the most prominent Dalit figure seen in the Bharatanatyam repertoire. By studying representations of his story, I highlight the relevance of bodily caste politics in the South Asian diaspora today.