Livable Life Research Articles

Homopopulism: A new layer of LGBTQ politics in India

This paper seeks to conceptualize homopopulism as a popular relationality in shifting contexts of inclusion/exclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) identified persons. A new layer of queer politics is visible in contemporary India. Hinged between older colonial discourses, current neoliberal systems, and promises by state actors to include LGBTQ concerns, sexuality is explicitly and implicitly mobilized to create, claim, and resist the present social. This consists of organizational left and liberal efforts to include and represent LGBTQ identified bodies in election promises, with effects that are titled heavily toward the middle to upper-middle class, able, caste-Hindu bodies. Alongside this, groups such as Queer Hindu Alliance are working to claim a stake in the Hindutva regime. Parallel to this, the bodies and voices of queer and trans* persons aim and struggle to connect with Muslim and Dalit individuals and groups around survival and citizenship. This paper attempts to comprehend these unique and tumultuous moments through the concept of homopopulism. I argue that homopopulism offers a useful reference point to understand how a complex democracy, consisting of right-wing, left-liberal, and centrist state practices, uses populist discourses and methods to gradually mobilize LGBTQ identities for thin centered ideologies without necessarily having to create a recognizable population group with affirmative action policies and anti-discriminatory guarantees, as facilitating conditions for a liveable life.

Female Gender Performativity Around Breastfeeding in Abusive Relationships

Women living in abusive relationships who choose to breastfeed their infants may do so for many reasons: bonding, health benefits for the infant and themselves, economics, and so on. Along with these benefits they are also choosing to engage in an activity that is often perceived as deeply gender performative. This study examines the gender performativity through breastfeeding of mothers living with intimate partner violence (IPV) and the ways in which these mothers use breastfeeding successfully (and unsuccessfully) to achieve what Butler (2004) terms a “livable life.” Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with thirteen mothers who lived with abusive partners while breastfeeding. Content analysis was used to examine the women’s accounts for gender performativity around breastfeeding. Gender performativity was used by these mothers successfully and unsuccessfully to attempt to stem the violence and chaos in their relationships. Mothers attempted to fulfill traditional female roles to appease abusive partners, used breastfeeding to protect themselves and their infants, and also drew strength from family, friends and medical/support professionals by fulfilling the ‘good mother’ role through breastfeeding.

A Livable Life? An Inhabitable World? Scheler on the Tragic

The question of what makes a life livable is linked with the question, what makes for an inhabitable world. This last was not Scheler’s question, but it follows from the world that he describes, the world that he claims is exhibited through the tragic. When the world is an object immersed in sorrow, how is it possible to inhabit such a world? What about the persistence of uninhabitable sorrow? The answer lies less in individual conduct or practice than in the forms of solidarity that emerge, across whatever distance, to produce the conditions for inhabiting the world.

Running Mascara: The Hermeneutics of Trans Visual Archives in Late Franco-Era Spain

Abstract This article traces the curation of visual archives of trans subjectivity by the Franco regime. It focuses specifically on the experiences of three trans women who were prosecuted in the early to mid-1970s. Based on the definition of photographs as “material performances,” the author reconsiders recent debates about the “ethics of turning away” from forensic documents. Since Spanish privacy laws forbid the full reproduction of defendants’ photographs, this study also delves into the ethics of research on trans visibility in contexts of criminalization. The examined evidence demonstrates the disproportionate targeting of poor trans women as well as the centrality of the paseo (stroll) in their daily struggle for belonging. The confiscated photographs show a community of trans women posing in natural or public settings using different techniques to highlight the eroticism of their bodies. Likewise, trans women’s representational strategies centered joy, sisterhood, and intimacy as tenets of a livable life.

For a “Livable Life”: From Gender Trouble to The Force of Nonviolence

이 글은 초기 저작 『젠더 트러블』부터 최근의 『비폭력의 힘』까지 주디스 버틀러의 사유가 밟아온 궤적을 살피며, 더욱 중요하게는 그 변화의 흐름 가운데서 일관된 문제의식으로 “살 만한 삶”의 조건들에 대한 질문이 자리하고 있음을 밝힌다. 이는 “살 만한 삶”을 규제하고 폐제하는 힘들에 대한 비판적 성찰이기도 하다. 초기의 젠더 이론에서 버틀러가 누군가를 인정불가능하고 애도불가능한 존재로 만드는 폐제의 권력으로서 규범적 젠더 체계를 비판하고 해체하고자 했다면, 윤리적 지향이 두드러지는 후기의 저작들은 그러한 문제틀을 확장하여, 인간과 생명, 삶의 의미체계를 규제하여 “삶 속 죽음”을 초래하는 상징질서의 조건들에 의문을 던진다. 이와 같은 점에 주목하고 이 글은 버틀러의 이른바 윤리적 선회를 단절로 보는 대신, 초기 젠더 이론의 문제의식과 나란히 후기 저작들을 독서함으로써 버틀러 사유의 연속성을 확인하는 동시에 그의 사유와 연계된 실천의 가능성을 살핀다. 또한 애도가능한 존재들의 “살 만한 삶”을 지향하는 버틀러의 비폭력 윤리가 취약성과 상호의존성의 대안적 인간관을 형성하고 있음을 밝힌다.

Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland

AbstractIR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.

Ethically (un)bounding camp research: Life histories within and beyond camp boundaries

AbstractThe changing enforcement and porosity of camp boundaries have implications for research in camps and their environs. Camp research is increasingly blurring their locational and categorical boundaries. However, in contexts where camp boundaries are being actively “hardened,” researchers must be attentive to possible effects of research across boundaries for those who are targeted by encampment. Research has an ethical imperative to challenge exclusionary boundaries and categories, recognising the many ways these constructed boundaries are already crossed and contested. It must also conscientiously negotiate and even defer to boundaries in research when participants may otherwise be at risk because of the underlying violence that maintains camps as discrete spatial technologies of power. In conducting life‐history research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania, I chose to “bound” my research with Burundian refugees to within camp boundaries, to reduce the risk to research participants. I argue that although research in camps may risk reifying camp boundaries, it can nevertheless conscientiously reach beyond and challenge camp boundaries through attentive methods. The stories recounted in this research reach far beyond camp boundaries, and include experiences of Burundian border‐crossers seeking liveable lives in diverse places and situations, not always of their own choosing. Life histories thus weave an imperfect, inchoate “minor cartography” of often‐invisibilised, diverse sites of refugee lives, bound up with the changing power and policing of camp boundaries shaping refugees' trajectories in the broader “campscape” over time.

“The whole point is that we're not supposed to look like anything”: non-binary (un)intelligibility and carving out space in gender's border-zones

Non-binary people exist in a world in which the conditions for their existence are foreclosed by the dominant cultural frames, a world in which the human can only be understood through membership of one of the two binary gender categories of male and female. This article explores the ways that non-binary participants articulated their experiences of non-binary gender identification through Butler’s concept of (un)intelligibility and Hale’s idea of gender’s border-zones. The participants exist within the discursive frame in which adhering to the binary gender system is a necessary condition for a liveable life. This article explores how those non-binary people who live within gender’s border-zones are forced to develop new discursive tools to carve out space for their inclusion within the realm of the intelligible. Drawing on interviews conducted with self-identified non-binary participants, this article explores the way that participants negotiated their non-binary gender, by exploring the ways they are both included and excluded from discursive spaces due to their non-binary gender. This article explores the way that gender unintelligibility opens up space for the multiplicities, contradictions, and ambiguities of non-binary experience, as well as how this same unintelligibility renders non-binary people vulnerable to violence. The violence articulated by the participants was specifically to do with their experiences of erasure—being included into the existing binary gender categories that do not adequately describe their experience—and physical or verbal abuse due to their exclusion from the binary gender system. This article argues that non-binary can be understood as a distinct gender category that has permeable borders, and that inclusion in this category through self-identification has material consequences for non-binary people.

Book Review: Rank, M. R. (Ed.). (2020). Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work

Archives > Volume 18 (2021) > Issue 2 > Item 12 DOI: 10.55521/10-018-212 Rank, M. R. (Ed.). (2020). Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work. Oxford University Press. Reviewed by Bishnu Mohan Dash, MSW, MPhil, PhD, ICSSR PDF, Associate Professor, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar College, (University of Delhi), Delhi Journal of […]

More Than Making Do: Towards a Generative Account of Getting by on Welfare Benefits

The narrowing eligibility and increasing conditionality of social security payments in Anglophone liberal democracies like Australia has been accompanied by growing attention to the ways benefit recipients navigate the personal and practical challenges of life amid welfare reforms. This article reorients the study of getting by on welfare benefits to focus on the material and affective investment in making life liveable. I argue that the generative dimension of getting by is suggested but submerged within the reactive orientation of much welfare scholarship on coping and resilience. This article takes up the challenge of telling sociological stories of hope in hardship without romanticising everyday struggle. It does so by focusing on the pleasures, pursuits and projects – however modest and muted – that sustain a liveable life in hardship but do not necessarily conform to normative ideas of ‘good resilience’.

Book Review: Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work by Mark Robert Rank

Book Review: <i>Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work</i> by Mark Robert Rank

Book Review: Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work

Book Review: Toward a livable life: A 21st century agenda for social work

“I Am Queer Because I Am Armenian”: On the Queerness of Racially Ambiguous Diasporic Belonging

AbstractWhat does it mean to be of a diaspora, when you are displaced from the Black/Person of Color/white racial paradigm due to its inadequacy, at the same time as you are displaced from your diasporic ethnolocality due to your queer desire? Drawing on the discourses of queer Armenian American diasporic women, I argue that in order to understand queer ethno‐diasporic belonging we need to think of queer desire and racially ambiguous ethnolocality in tandem. Diasporic ethnolocality and queer desire simultaneously mark each other as (in)commensurable and animate each other, because for queer Armenian women the desire for ethno‐diasporic belonging emerges at the site of displacement from diasporic ethnolocality due to queer desire. Queer Armenian women’s diasporic belonging illuminates the fact that queer desire and diasporic ethnolocality are in an indeterminate relationship that is always dependent on the kinds of “open‐ended entanglements” (Tsing 2015, 83) that gather in place at a given moment and points to the unfinished and situational project of diasporic belonging in general. By engaging the discourses of queer women of different migratory generations I refuse multiple queer erasures—of lived experiences of racially ambiguous ethnolocality and of the livable lives disrupting diasporic normativities.

Driving retirement: melancholic geographies of car immobility in an Australian suburban regional centre

This article builds on Butlers’ concept of a ‘liveable life’ that pays attention to social power as constitutive of the psyche. I offer the concept of driving retirement melancholia to better understand why the future loss of a driving licence is often spoken of as living death. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2019 with drivers aged 65 years of age and over in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. I argue that retirement from driving is a form of social melancholia or blocked grief. The argument is that families, medical practitioners and transport authorities in car dominated western societies need to better understand the imagined loss of driving as constituting an ungrieveable and unliveable life.

First Response

The Covid-19 pandemic, which manifested itself during the early months of 2020, resulted in the activation of the expected official actors on a national and international level in policy, politics, the industrial military complex, pharma and medicine, among others. Being suddenly confined to a minimum of physical interaction, we found ourselves online among a concerned but enthusiastic group of artists, hackers, activists, scholars and other practitioners who organise themselves in informal settings to share, discuss and devise strategies of coping, care and action. They aim to apply their own artistic, activist or research competence to work through the complexities of continuously shifting information and circumstances. The pandemic is not simply an epidemiological crisis but a crisis of sovereignty. We refer here to the notion of sovereignty raised by Achille Mbembe to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. Also the question of liveability comes to mind as introduced by Judith Butler and which the pandemic spread out in a wide spectrum, starting from the bare form of Who gets to live? - when it comes to access to medical support and decisions of care - up to What is a liveable life during a pandemic lockdown? In this way the pandemic makes visible and amplifies what was already there, a systemic plurality of inequalities and oppression enacted by predominant hegemonies. As Divya Dwivedi pointed out, the pandemic reveals a different sense of crisis, that is how the processes that have organised life (and lives) are distributed across the world and how some components of this worldwide arrangement have arrived at their functional limits. Therefore, once again, what has been unveiled are the material conditions of structural and systemic violence. Throughout this issue, questions related to temporality, agency, care and scale are addressed from artistic practice(s) critically reflecting on the entanglement with the virus.

Feminist Vulnerability Politics: Judith Butler on Autonomy and the Pursuit of a "Livable Life"

This article contributes to ongoing feminist debates about the politics of vulnerability by attempting to clarify vulnerability's relationship to autonomy. Building from Judith Butler's recent work—specifically her precariousness/precarity distinction—I argue that vulnerability can both enable and limit autonomy, depending on the type of vulnerability in question. Specifically, precariousness accentuates the positive and generative dimensions of vulnerability on autonomy, while precarity indicates unjust constraints on one's ability to exercise some degree of self-determination. My hope is that this clarification can be of assistance in discerning whether vulnerability can be of practical value for feminist social justice movements. If we think about respect for persons as autonomous agents as a core feminist value, then the aim of political responses to vulnerability must be developed in a way that enables autonomy, lest the discourse of vulnerability be co-opted to legitimize and sanction reactionary politics.

On Rescuable and Expendable Life: Bioavailability, Surplus Time, and Queer Politics of Reproduction

This article questions the political branding of settler Canada as a place of sanctuary. I examine two seemingly paradoxical processes: “private-public partnership” in queer refugee settlement programs and migrant detention centres in Canada. This article argues that rescue and capture are not contradictory, but dialectical features of human bioeconomy. Such an economy renders the reproduction of life, vitality, and time bioavailable for extraction. In this sense, the queer refugee as rescuable and the detained as expendable are both the subject of value extraction. Although human bioeconomic processes do not promise life vitality, queer refugees and migrants do find ways to assemble a liveable life. Taking cues from Saidiya Hartman’s “innovators of life genre,” I discuss community building as processes of queer reproduction of liveability, countering bioeconomic violence.

The role of islamic economy in reduction of social injustice and sustainable development goals

“Sustainable Development” is a development model that can meet the needs of today's generations without sacrificing its ability to meet the needs of future generations, has taken its place in the world’s agenda towards the end of 20th century and with the International agreements signed in the 1990s became a worldwide implementation plan. Today, the most serious problems faced by people are the income injustice and increase of poverty. During the rapid change process that began in the 1980s, the problem of income distribution was no longer perceived as an ordinary economic problem, but as a political and social problem. Economic and social policies implemented since the 1950s have not been able to solve the problems and have made many problems more apparent. In short, in today's world, an unbalanced structure has emerged, where financial prosperity is increasing and social welfare is gradually diminishing. Using a socioeconomic approach and environmental relations together, development strategies can be efficient in responding to today's needs, but can lead to serious harm in destroying the needs of future generations. Moreover, since there is no clear approach to the limits of economic growth, the dynamics of this growth are uncertain. Therefore, all humanity needs sustainable development strategies. This study addresses three main problems (i) what are the answers to a more livable life expectancy that will meet the needs of everyone and every sector based on the understanding that the Islamic economy has a future-oriented understanding, (ii) what are the strategies for eliminating injustices in income distribution in terms of Islamic economy? (iii) what are the perspectives of Islamic economy that will be put forward in order to develop the concept of Sustainable Development? In this study, considering the fact that the Islamic economy has an understanding of the future, it will address the inequalities in income distribution and the strategies that will be put forward for the formation of sustainable development understanding, which will meet the needs of everyone and all segments and will provide answers to a more livable life expectancy. In order to approach the injustices in income distribution and sustainable development strategies from the perspective of Islamic economy, it is necessary to put forward political stability on this issue, to revise the ideas put forward to date, to present complementary proposals by identifying missing aspects of current developments and to identify the current threats and opportunities. This study will reveal the social vision of the Islamic economy by addressing all aspects of income injustice and sustainable survival strategies.

The Postcolonial Bare Life: Reflections on Agamben and the Coronavirus

The ongoing pandemic has undeniably propagated an atmosphere of paranoia and discontent in both the West and the East, and it is in this context where Giorgio Agamben wrote a brief but controversial article where he argues that this pandemic enables governments to opportunistically decree a state of exception that will lead to tyranny. Critics have generally responded negatively to Agamben’s views, given that this is not the case in the West. It is becoming apparent, however, that the very thing Agamben feared is happening in post-colonial states. In this paper, I look at how the current pandemic enables a postcolonial state like the Philippines to define (or redefine) the notion of life through authoritarian measures as it claims a strong democratic mandate. My reflections on Agamben takes off from Rodrigo Duterte’s national speeches during the pandemic. I aim to show that his manifestly militarized response is a manifestation of the sovereign exception that politicizes and separates zo? (which is mere biological life) from bios (which is livable life that can participate politically), as Agamben might put it. Finally, I offer reflections on how the postcolonial legacy of the Philippines could potentially complicate how we might think about the notion of bare life—a figure that is neither zo? nor bios.

The ethical-political potentiality of the educational present: aristocratic principle versus democratic principle

This paper will explore a Sophist tradition of educational thought, which is concerned with the world and not a sphere of ideas as distinct from the world, and to suggest some central distinctions and concepts following from such tradition today. The distinctions which are discussed are between; upbringing, schooling and education; aristocratic versus democratic principle of education; aristocratic versus democratic conception of nature; and, culture as static versus culture as praxis. Equality is highlighted in the paper as a central concept for democracy as well as education and are discussed through Jacques Rancière. The distinctions established will also make clear what is at stake if we consider educational thought as conditional for democracy and a liveable life for anyone. The contrast between the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle for education will centre on conceptions of violence and nonviolence, in accordance with Judith Butler and Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s analyses. In a final paragraph the paper discusses how equality play out in relation to teaching, and the discussion is extended by exploring Judith Butler’s conception of ‘grievability’. The paper concludes by suggesting that education is the ethical-political potentiality of a new beginning within the present order of things, and therefore the very praxis of change of this order, and therefore what makes paideia possible in the first place.