Livable Life Research Articles

This girl’s life: An autoethnography

This essay seeks to add to a growing awareness of transgender lives and narratives in management and organisational studies. It presents an often visceral and emotive autoethnographical account of the experience of being a non-binary transsexual in the United Kingdom to question whether it is possible to think gender without invoking the heterosexual matrix and being held to account by it. It also asks what may need to be done so that the abject and marginalised in society may have liveable lives rather than an otherwise unliveable life resulting from that matrix. It argues that transgender is often conflated in management research theoretically as queer or queer’s evil twin where the latter concept reduces trans lives to rigid, polarised positions in the matrix and stereotypes. The essay concludes by asking an open question, how we may organise so as to make lives liveable?

Sharing Space and Liveable Life in Singapore Practices

In recent years, the revolution brought by sharing economy has significantly shaped the urban space and lifestyles. Cities face both huge challenges and great opportunities in the rapid urbanization and population aggregation, which depends on a well-planned and-governed human society. Singapore is one of few high-dense cities that are able to achieve high liveable standards in the Asian context. The authors reveal the Singapore practices on urban liveability and sustainable development via strategy review and case study, which addresses three key issues in policy-making, spatial arrangement, and site management. This research contributes to facilitating the implementation of public health promotion and quality life improvement in the new era of sharing city.

The Politics of Livability: Tutoring “Kinwork” in a New Delhi Women's Arbitration Center

This article provides an analysis of dispute adjudication in a women's arbitration center, or mahila panchayat, in New Delhi, India. In analyzing two exemplary cases from my fieldwork, I argue that mahila panchayat adjudication tends to tutor kinwork as a means of producing livable lives within a context of material and ideological constraint. Successfully adjudicated cases culminate in contracts that explicitly enumerate the demands of marriage and the requirements of reconciliation, thereby rendering disputants responsible subjects who are accountable to the contracts’ terms. This formal conclusion to the adjudication process reflects the mahila panchayat's politics of livability, which entail teaching women to live with and through kinship norms by recognizing and rationally relating to them.

Reframing learning to teach diversity: multicultural curriculum within a cosmopolitan context

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study explores the possibilities of reframing multicultural teacher education in the context of critical cosmopolitanism. I examine the ways in which 34 pre-service and in-service teachers learn to teach diversity and multicultural issues in their curriculum. I use three sets of coursework materials, including course discussions, small group presentations, and midterm and final papers to investigate their conceptualisations of diversity and equity issues in education. I present two salient themes as they reframe to teach diversity by reviewing both local and global conflicts: (a) analysing the frame of recognition and (b) revisiting the notions of self-other and interrelationality. Butlerian theory of recognisability provides an important theoretical and pedagogical approach for exploring the conditions of recognition as liveable life, rather than focusing on what works best for increasing teachers’ cosmopolitan awareness. Teacher education programmes could benefit from critical cosmopolitanism when implementing a theoretical and pedagogical strategy for teaching diversity within a global context.

The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal

The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal Johanna M. Wagner (bio) In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily “something of a rebel” (783), while Benjamin D. Carson and Elaine Showalter place her as “intruder” (707) and “outsider” (138) in her society, respectively. Ruth Bernard Yeazell admits at least “the faltering pulse of resistance” in Lily (731), and Maureen Howard describes her as “just unconventional enough” (139). Lily as a conformist is an obvious picture to paint, which is why exploring her non-conformism in criticism has been so stimulating and fruitful. However, even with so much focus on her unconventionality, few critics have questioned the one aspect that keeps criticism of The House of Mirth from becoming even more comprehensive: Lily’s sexuality. In her 2000 PMLA article, Jennie A. Kassanoff argues that the idea of “race” is the “missing but historically crucial component complicating progressive interpretations of Wharton’s project” (61). In truth, I agree that “race” must be addressed in connection to Wharton studies and the novel itself, but I do not believe it is the only “missing […] component.” In all of The House of Mirth criticism, perhaps three articles give substantial weight to the subject of sexuality in The House of Mirth.1 Lily’s sexuality is assumed from the start because she is a woman and desired. In order to open wide the novel’s critical realm, this paper argues, sexuality must be one of the factors that is explored more thoroughly. Therefore, this study will actively read against past heteronormative impulses by investigating the convergence of conventionality and queerness in Lily Bart, and how, paradoxically, the one sustains the other. In the spirit of Dimock’s argument in which Lily’s “deviance” (787)2 is explored via exchange, this paper will expand Lily’s queerness through her idealized status, but will focus on gender and sexuality rather than the marketplace. To Let Live Livability, by the end of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905), is finally all that matters. As readers, we watch with increasing dismay as the narrow sphere of Lily Bart’s existence slowly and surely shrinks to the slightest of spaces. Lily’s lifelong work – honing her womanly [End Page 116] graces – extends her visibility as an ideal image,3 but also insures her ruin. This visibility, in tandem with conventional heteronormative assumptions prohibiting queerness, are two factors that fundamentally – and paradoxically – allow Lily’s survival, but in the end are also her undoing. Employing Judith Butler’s ideas of cultural “intelligibility” (visibility) and “unintelligibility” (invisibility) on the one hand, and queering Lily Bart by challenging the heteronormative assumptions inherent in her place as an ideal of her ‘sex,’ I will follow the story of Lily Bart in her quest for a livable life. The American theorist Judith Butler is primarily known for her theory of performativity,4 but a theme not discussed nearly enough when analyzing or applying her theory is that which underlies its theorization in the first place: Butler’s concern with what makes life worth living and who has a right to that life. In a number of her books, Butler explores the idea of livable and unlivable lives. She discusses bodies that, in fact, do matter, and those that do not: a poignant exploration of how cultures value and devalue bodies, and ascribe, or deny, humanity to such bodies. She suggests that lives are livable when those lives’ bodies are culturally intelligible. As noted by Moya Lloyd in her book Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Butler’s idea of livability is the result of a “relation between normative violence and cultural intelligibility: how, that is, culturally particular norms define who is recognizable as a subject capable of living a life that counts […] in terms of human survival” (134). Livable lives, then, are those lives whose bodies move relatively freely without undue injury from societal norms. Conversely, unlivable lives are those in which bodies are unrecognizable or culturally unintelligible. For them, specific opportunities are foreclosed, and...

Why Everyday Life Matters: Class, Community and Making Life Livable

This article argues that studying everyday life is valuable because it makes sociologists attend to the routine and temporal aspects of social life. The ‘everyday’ brings the seasons of society into view. It also brings to the fore how liveable lives are made in the midst of the social damage produced by widening class divisions. Drawing lessons from Erving Goffman’s sociology, the article argues that attending to everyday life necessitates developing an eye for detail and attentiveness to the seemingly unimportant. It is also argued that central to the study of everyday life is the relationship between history, culture, class and biography. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of a working-class estate in Croydon, south London where residents light up their home at Christmas in ‘chromatic surplus’.

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

The Erotics of a Livable Life: Colonial Power and the Affective Work of Queer Desire in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt

This essay is about the life-making place of desire in queer life. It asks what kinds of lives are made livable through the articulation of desire, and how the structures of feeling that we recognize as queer desire can be written or erased across the historical record.

Skam, stolthet och respekt. Nyanser, känslor och queer potential i berättelser om att ha hiv

This article explores the phenomenon HIV through queer readings. It explores the making of meaning, the nuances, dimensions and experiences in narratives on having HIV in contemporary Sweden. It centres around questions about the distinctiveness of HIV narratives and asks which narratives that are (made) possible, and which ones are (made) impossible? What types of relations are there between narratives and norms? What narratives of resistance are made visible? The found meaning making exposes a queer potential beyond health- and heteronormatives. Based on two different types of materials, 1) interviews of people with HIV and 2) autobiographies on living with HIV, the article traces negated experiences of living with HIV and finds both positive and negative ones. This is made visible by utilizing two types of queer methodologies and close readings of the texts: one phenomenological and one intersectional. Using a queer-phenomenological close reading of the material, the article traces negated experiences and disorientation through emotions of shame and melancholia. Using a queer-intersectional close reading of the material reveals experiences and emotions with more positive connotations, such as pride. The article finds queer potential in the gaps between the negative and positive emotions. In these gaps, and by using the concepts of queer time, heteronormativity and healthnormativity, the article traces and finds queer potential, expressed as a critique of the nuclear family. The queer potential of the narratives points to the ways companionships and intimacies other than the heteronormative can be built. The article concludes that living with HIV in Sweden today is a complex position consisting of negotiations with negative imaginaries on HIV, heteronormative and healthnormative ways of viewing a “liveable life”, and being an acceptable person.

Beyond Binarism? Intersex as an Epistemological and Political Challenge*

Sexual difference combines various aspects, ranging from the biological to the social, which, once delimited, reduce people to two political categories: woman and man. Although these categories are not naturally watertight, most societies reject diversity (understood as deformity) in favour of a binary sexual system. This article aims to deconstruct this binarism, suggesting that it is not coherent to speak of two sexes, but rather of a multiplicity. Based on feminist theory, queer theory and philosophy, the text develops a reflection on intersex, showing how it has been considered at different times. It also addresses the history of sexual regulation and discusses its causes and effects. Reflection on the concept of human being, which till now excluded intersex – by and large placed beyond the limits of the possible – leads to the interconnection of Butler’s definition of the livable life with Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality, which may be the key to the recognition of intersex as a human category.

Queerness and Children’s Literature: Embracing the Negative

Queerness and Children’s Literature: Embracing the Negative Laura Robinson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution As I sit down to write this introduction in late summer of 2013, three unrelated media stories keep tugging my attention away from queerness and children’s literature, the special topic for this issue of Bookbird. First, in July 2013, the group Geeks Out called for a boycott of the soon-to-be released film version of Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game. Geeks Out is protesting Card’s anti-gay stance, which he articulated in a 1990 interview for the magazine Sunstone. Lest you think this was a while back, the New York Times also points out that Card was on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, until very recently. Second, the Russian government’s new law against gay propagandizing is rousing the ire of many people internationally and mobilizing a movement to boycott the winter Olympics in Sochi. Third, on 22 July, Dwayne Jones, a [End Page v] transgender sixteen year old, was beaten to death by a mob in Jamaica supposedly because he went to a party dressed as a female.1 While at first glance these stories seem unrelated, each is strangely connected to queerness and children’s literature. First, Geeks Out might do well to consider how the young adult novel Ender’s Game can be read, despite Card’s beliefs spoken elsewhere. As Jennifer Mitchell argues in this issue, this novel, the first of Card’s trilogy, if not the others, “is full of queer potential.” Indeed, the queerness of a novel that has spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list (paperback mass market fiction) might have more ideological impact than an organization that attempts to regulate the meaning of marriage. Reading texts queerly can change the world. Second, the BBC News Europe’s coverage of the concern over how Russia’s repressive laws will affect athletes at the Sochi Olympics quotes the interior ministry as saying “that officials would act during the games—as at any other time—to protect children ‘from the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’” (BBC News, my emphasis). Many critics have discussed the use of children as a trope to police adult sexuality (see Undoing Gender, Butler and Kincaid). Given the arguments in his book Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature, Tison Pugh might take this further and suggest to the Russian state that the very laws that enforce or fetishize childhood innocence work to produce queerness and, moreover, create such an ignorance “that normative heterosexuality itself becomes corruptive” (166). The marriage of queer theory with children’s literature studies enables us to unpack the devastating irony of Russia’s attempt to police not only sexuality but its representation in so-called propaganda. Third, according to the Ottawa Citizen, Dwayne Jones was kicked out of his home and shamed at age fourteen and then murdered at age sixteen, all because he did not, and perhaps simply could not, abide by the standards of his society. I include Dwayne’s story because he is a child who did not end up having what Judith Butler calls a “livable life.” She discusses the violence that homosexual and trans people experience all over the world: “The negation, through violence, of that body is a vain and violent effort to restore order, to renew the social world on the basis of intelligible gender, and to refuse the challenge to rethink that world as something other than natural or necessary” (Undoing Gender 34). The work we do as literary scholars may sometimes seem far removed from the so-called real world; however, many academics’ insistence on unveiling the constructedness of the social order, on denaturalizing power relations, on challenging the world as it is, whether through history, anthropology, psychology, or children’s literature, can indeed have an impact on real children’s lives, can “open the possibility of both identifying and articulating queer child life” (xxxiii, emphasis in original), to borrow words from Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. This issue on queerness and children’s literature yokes together the political...

Ralph Kerwineo's Queer Body: Narrating the Scales of Social Membership in the Early Twentieth Century

To understand the role that scale and region have played in queer history, this essay tracks the narratives produced about the life of Ralph Kerwineo — a biologically female, mixed-race Milwaukee resident who was arrested in 1914 after living as a male for over eight years. This essay explores Kerwineo's narrative production across numerous scales (looking at local and national newspapers, as well as sexological literature), calling attention to how the narratives converge and diverge as they enflesh Kerwineo as social deviant, innocent victim, or idle curiosity. Grappling with the ways that Kerwineo's story was and was not haunted by the debates over eugenics, border security, and homosexuality on both the national and local scales provides new insight into how local communities negotiated the boundaries of social membership in ways that occasionally defied nationalizing narratives of proper citizenship. Indeed, while newspapers elsewhere produced pathologized accounts of Kerwineo's life, Milwaukee seemingly provided a supportive space for Kerwineo and his wives. In exploring how Kerwineo and his wives were able to carve out livable lives for themselves in early twentieth-century Milwaukee, this essay adds to the emergent scholarship within queer studies that has challenged the previously dominant notion of what Judith Halberstam has termed metronormativity, wherein large metropolitan areas are assumed to provide queer subjects with opportunities that rural spaces and smaller cities cannot.

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation

Racial affective economies, disalienation and ‘race made ordinary’

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disalienation-estrangement from the ‘raced’ subject positionings of the racial contract.

Unmanageable Work, (Un)liveable Lives

This article draws from interview material with sex worker rights activists in London, and sex work scholarship, to explore the demand for labour rights for sex workers and erotic dancers. I argue that there are two positions visible in activism and scholarship, which I term ‘liberal’ and ‘materialist’. Whilst the former posits that the problem with sex work is insufficient mainstreaming of commercial sex within the labour market, the latter stresses the need for protections and freedoms from the labour market and repressive criminal and immigration laws. I suggest that these two perspectives need to be thought together. To this end, for the first time in the UK context I ask what labour rights can do for erotic dancers and indoor-based sex workers. I argue that, whilst labour law may offer some level of protection, both forms of commercial sexual service are ultimately unmanageable and that the strategy of securing individual labour rights suffers from several limitations. In the final part, I map the materialist frames onto broader feminist citizenship debates. I ask whether these models can deliver the protections sought and tentatively propose that a feminist-oriented demand for a basic income may be of use to the sex worker rights movement today.

Soweto nights: making black queer space in post-apartheid South Africa

In this article, I examine black queer nightlife in Soweto and its relationship with the making of black queer space in South Africa. Through an in-depth examination of the microgeographies of a Soweto stokvel party, I reveal the complexities of post-apartheid formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Employing the idea of usable space, I highlight quotidian practices of leisure as an important site for understanding cultural creativity within the marginalized spaces occupied by black South African queers. Performance and performativity are central to organizing nightlife spaces and reveal both the possibilities and limits encountered by black queers as they try to construct livable lives.

Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Contents: Preface Introduction: queer youth suicide, vulnerability and unliveable lives Queer suicide representations in popular media Histories and genealogies of suicide research and sexuality It gets better? Online representations of hope, vulnerability and resilience Reconstitutions: identity, subjectivity and the dominant discourses of sexuality Tensions: suicide, sexual identity and shame Community: homonormativity, exclusion and relative misery Conclusion: towards liveable lives Bibliography Filmography Index.

Some Gays and the Queers

Some Gays and the Queers

Towards a more liveable life for close relatives of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder

The life of close relatives of persons with bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with emotional distress, depression, and a high level of use of mental health care. Illness-related changes of their life situation endanger relationships, social life, finances, and occupational functioning. Understanding of facilitating conditions for close relatives is still a neglected research area. The aim of the present study thus was to explore what makes the life of close relatives of persons with BD more liveable. A lifeworld phenomenological approach was used. The findings reveal that keeping distance, having stability in everyday life, and strengthening equality through transparent communication are conditions that enable close relatives to influence the unpredictable and its consequences and thus make life more liveable. This implies contributions from close relatives, the person with BD, and the caring services. We propose that health-care support should not be divided in support for the patient and/or the close relatives but instead be designed as support for the 'patient and close relatives' as a unit. Professional caregivers need to take responsibility for creating intersubjective settings for the person with BD and their close relatives to share their needs and make joint plans for how to influence the illness-related life issues.

Bodies, identities and performances: reconfiguring the language of gender and schooling

In this paper I seek to address a series of tensions in the ways we think, write and speak about gender in classrooms and playgrounds, and in the language we use to describe children and their behaviour. I shall examine some of the concepts we use for describing gender relations among children and consider the extent to which they are still useful. My main focus is on hegemonic masculinity; the female as Other; and ‘doing’ boy or girl, masculinity or femininity. I conclude that we need to take the language we use extremely seriously, and that in our work we need to primarily be focused on ensuring that all children are able to have ‘livable lives’ in school and elsewhere.