Natural Order Of Things Research Articles

The Natural Order of Things

Research Article| August 01 2017 The Natural Order of Things S. Isabel Choi S. Isabel Choi S. Isabel Choi is a lawyer-turned-writer in the Bay Area. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has attended Bread Loaf and Lit Camp. Her work has been featured in VELA and has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Slice, and the Washington Post. She is completing a family memoir based on the suicide of her grandfather, a former chief justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2017) 19 (2): 57–68. https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.19.2.0057 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation S. Isabel Choi; The Natural Order of Things. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 August 2017; 19 (2): 57–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.19.2.0057 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Discreet and Hegemonic Borderscapes of Galilee: Lebanese Residents of Israel and the Israel–Lebanon Border

ABSTRACTFollowing the processual shift in border studies, recent concepts such as “borderities” and “borderscapes” allow for original analyses that give voice to multiple agents alongside that of the nation-state in bordering processes, elucidate the links between border representation and border experience, and establish borders as both “markers of belonging and places of becoming”. This article will explore the potentials of these concepts when applied, not to the highly mediatised Separation Fence in the West Bank, but to a less studied border that reveals parallel evolutions in Israeli borderities and contemporary Middle Eastern borderscapes: the Israel-Lebanon border. It will focus on a marginal and little known phenomenon, that of the migration of Southern Lebanese to Israel. The creation of the State of Israel at the expense of Pan-Arab and Palestinian national aspirations has laid the foundations for a diversified relation to this border amongst inhabitants of the Galilee today depending notably on their belonging to the indigenous Arab population, or the more recently settled Jewish population. Through an analysis of two groups of Lebanese migrants, who, although originating from the same villages in Lebanon, settled respectively on opposite sides of the Arab/Jewish divide in Galilee, we will see how different patterns of border crossings produce different levels of interiorisation of the Israel-Lebanon border and different uses of categories of identity and meaning defined by it. Reterritorialised in either of Galilee’s superimposed geographies, Southern Lebanese migrants reveal two alternative Galilean borderscapes, one normative and hegemonic, partaking in the “national order of things”, the other discreet and alternative.

The Geographers' Manual: The Place of "Place" in António Lobo Antunes

Abstract: The abundance of place names in the novels of Lobo Antunes is not, as in some authors, a device used to “ground” their fictions, to make them more real, more down-to-earth. Place is largely what his novels are all about. The author has an especial love for his hometown, Lisbon, whose neighborhoods are often treated as major characters, with the people who inhabit them being occasionally reduced to caricatures, props, scenery. The prominence given to place makes these novels valuable sociological documents and challenges us, à la Copernicus, to realign our thinking. The Natural Order of Things and The Inquisitors’ Manual serve as sample texts for my inquiry.

The classroom moral compass – participation, engagement and transgression in classroom interaction

This article explores the moral accountability of second language classroom participation, evidenced in sequential environments where participants display an orientation to some or other transgression in the engagement framework. Classroom participation is a sensitive issue which touches on what Garfinkel (1964, 225) has referred to as the moral order, constituted through the seen-but-unnoticed practices that pass as the natural order of things. A transgression of the particular way an engagement framework is organised is accountable, and although usually non-critical, it often results in the onward flow of the classroom activity to be momentarily suspended in order to address the transgression. When a classroom participant violates this ‘normality’, it not only attracts attention but can even invite moral and psychological evaluations, and may threaten the social status of the member responsible. Participants manage the tension for adhering to certain (negative) social categories by adopting mitigating strategies, for example by occasioning a jocular frame when attending to the transgression. Drawing attention to potentially sensitive issues points at the underlying moral order and at what is handled as normal, which in turn provides the analyst with a window on the practices into which participants have been socialised.

QUALITY MANAGEMENT, AN ISSUE VITAL FOR EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT

Quality management is the management philosophy that emphasizes the need to improve the products and service in order to better exploit the resources of the organization, which requires continuous improvement in the quality of performance of all processes, products and services of an organization. The main bastion of quality-management is focusing on customers and is recognized as a fundamental component of development strategies for market competition. However, quality management in organizations is facing with dilemmas where managers prefer to organize day-to-day activities in a predictable and routine manner in which the change of stability is the natural order of things in the global living space of current operations. The organizations hardly open space for installation change by reducing their ability to change and innovation to increase efficiency in its operations. The authors of this study emphasize the question of why most of the changes in quality management are slow and simultaneously performed gradually while the organizations in the global economy require rapid and radical changes in the direction of using new techniques and technologies, introducing new products and services, making applicable strategy and structure, its own identity and culture. This is how these four types of changes basically realize competitive advantage where managers can ensure that each of the necessary ingredients for change in quality management is affordable and effective.Using technical innovation, as a tissue of the organizational structure that encourages autonomy of employees in the flow of ideas from the bottom upwards is of most interest to organizations. The change in strategy and structure in quality management and top-down approach, which is particularly applicable, are the scope of the administration that takes responsibility for the restructuring changes in the directions of operations, objectives and control systems. Culture, cultural identity and changes basically belong generally to the top managers in reengineering, change of horizontal forms of organization and organizational diversity and organization that teaches and guides the development of human and social aspects and use knowledge from behavioral science to bring real changes in attitudes and communications with consumers. Implementation of systems, methodology and metrology systems as quality builds confidentiality to anything that can be measured, because new technologies have made quality of the products and services are measured to the lowest values, therefore, today’s organizations require strong leadership to guide these processes.

The Epistemology of Writing Childhood: Hans-Ulrich Treichel'sDer Verlorene

The voice of a suffering child has a unique ability to elicit empathy, and to diffuse the historical specificity of whatever cruelty may have been enacted against it. As retrospectively conceived innocent subjects in literature and film, are generally depicted having a limited range of understanding, a quality that makes them appear strange, even foreign, but one that also allows for profound insight, serving to offset the more hardened minds of adults. In his introduction to The Children's Culture Reader, Henry Jenkins points out that adult projections, fantasies, and desires continue to frame the child in dominant myths about childhood innocence. Referring to James Kincaid, he writes, [t]he innocent child wants nothing, desires nothing, and demands nothing-except, perhaps its own innocence. [...] Childhood is a cultural that must be inculcated and enforced upon children (1-2). The child conveniently exists in a space that is both apolitical and asocial, and, such, is conceived in close proximity to the and primitive world beyond historical specificity. The child's exceptional status, its perceived innocence,is the effect of a persistent ideology that posits a particular perception of Romantic childhood the only conceivable way of understanding (see Higonnet). As Jenkins has pointed out, we locate the child outside the culture, precisely so that we can use it to regulate cultural hierarchies. [...] the innocent child is a myth, in Roland Barthes's of the word, a figure that transforms culture into nature (15). Referring to childhood a in Barthes's of the term makes clear that perceptions of the child are caught in a dominant belief system that hides its manipulative and socially vested interests behind the appearance and appeal of common sense and the natural order of things. In Mythologies Barthes maintains that the power of resides in the very fact that myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection (240) that manages to establish its convincing authority by naturalizing the concepts it presents.In representations of violent chapters of history centered on child witnesses these powerful naturalizing tendencies are seductive and problematic in equal measure. On the one hand, faces and voices of return us to history with great force and immediacy, eliciting affect and visceral identification (see Lury and Higonnet). But on the other hand, the aesthetically reconfigured child is charged with articulating the gravitas of historical events without possessing the maturity to understand and navigate historical facts and contexts. When used this way, as an unexamined emblem of vulnerability and innocence (Hirsch, Generation 16667), and aligned with the victim position, representations of run the risk of framing the violence of history in uncritical and apologetic ways. In the following reading of Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene (1998) I will show how the ubiquitous but problematic perspective of a child can be mobilized in productive ways. I argue that by relying on a child narrator the embodiment of a retrospectively reconfigured literary perspective, Treichel's text simultaneously accentuates and contests the ability of an innocent and naive figure to perceive the complexity of a past that resides in the present. This voice is, in effect, the poignant voice of postmemory, a voice fraught with pain and confusion about past experiences that are not one's own. It is a narrative choreography that carefully overwrites a child's tendencies toward immediate experience and emotional vulnerability with an adult's inclination toward critical distance and belated processing. My reading will consider Treichel's text in relation to Marianne Hirsch's conception of postmemory, well Max Silverman's conception of palimpsestic memory. Both of these notions have recently energized critical memory studies and opened new ways of understanding transgenerational transpositions of trauma by probing how the present is always already overwritten by the past. …

Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)

Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)

The engineer in field biologist’s clothing: Whitlow Au’s academic years

In 1993, the same year that The Sonar of Dolphins was published, Whitlow Au transitioned from the U.S. Navy’s Naval Ocean Systems Center to the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Thus began a second professional act, so to speak, of field-based research and mentoring the next generation of marine bioacousticians. An electrical engineer doing field biology may not seem like the natural order of things at first, but the combination of Whitlow’s engineering and acoustic prowess coupled with the enthusiasm and energy of bright young biologists resulted in a powerful research team. Thanks to Whitlow’s ingenuity and commitment to advancing the state of the art, Hawaii’s coastlines and marine habitats around the world were explored like never before. A lack of funding or the availability of appropriate instrumentation were never an obstacle, but rather became opportunities for creativity and invention. Whitlow and his students’ research on dolphins, their prey, snapping shrimp, humpback whales, and other taxa l...

The edges of the nation: a research agenda for uncovering the taken‐for‐granted foundations of everyday nationhood

AbstractIn many parts of the world, nationalism has gone underground. It's there, just beneath the surface, underpinning the social order without requiring, or even permitting, much tinkering. This is the realm of the unselfconscious: nationhood not as an object of purposeful manipulation, but as an unspoken set of assumptions about the national order of things. But if the nation is unseen, unheard, unnoticed, how do we know this? Indeed, how can we know this? In this paper, I elaborate a breaching approach for uncovering the ways the nation is taken for granted. I look to the edges of the nation: the places, times and situations where the nation is on the periphery – the edges – of consciousness, lurking just beneath the surface where it might be teased out with a carefully concocted breach. My aim is to explore and exploit these edges to turn unselfconscious suppositions about the nation into explicit articulations of the nation.

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity by Simone C. Drake

Reviewed by: Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity by Simone C. Drake Shalini Nadaswaran CRITICAL APPROPRIATIONS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY, by Simone C. Drake. Southern Literary Studies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 186 pp. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook. Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity makes an indelible mark in moving representations of African American women from the periphery to the center, offering fascinating and thorough discussions that conceptualize their transnational identities through transformation and reconstruction. Mapping new directions in black women’s studies through a variety of literary and cultural productions, Simone C. Drake argues for a syncretic blending that shifts away from homogeneity and essentialism. This suggested state of transformation permeates the work, which goes beyond common explorations of motherhood and community. Drake complicates notions of sameness, considering how the social and political positions African American women occupy are shaped while simultaneously examining categories of gender and identity. Drake’s work addresses a pressing need for more imaginative approaches to identity, suggesting that acts of appropriation require a creative openness towards new structures of knowledge, allowing for possibilities of redefinition, of interrogation of values, and of agency. Appropriation here is a powerful idea that contributes to constructing as well as re-imagining formations of subjectivities. This book is broadly framed in accordance with the pluralities of forms and opinions it addresses. Drake’s analysis erodes confining definitions and [End Page 294] boundaries, primarily in the geographical notions of movement, positing that African American women can develop transnational identities without necessarily leaving the United States, an argument that acknowledges the influx and influence of popular culture on these identities. A prime focus of the book is the manner in which advances in modernity and technology influence culture. Drake explores each work of art as constructing varied epistemologies that help to better appreciate complex, transnational blackness. To do this, Critical Appropriations is divided into three parts. Drake begins with gender consciousness among black women in part one, explored through Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994). In part two, Drake addresses the transnational feminism and sisterhood found in Beyoncé and Shakira’s “Beautiful Liar” (2007) music video collaboration. Finally, part three considers third-wave feminism and black masculinity in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1994). Collectively, these parts clearly and cogently demonstrate the ways in which black women critically engage with transnationalism while mediating the anxieties and ambivalences produced by these explorations. Drake’s discussion of Beyoncé and Shakira’s collaborative implications offers, in my opinion, the book’s distinctive quality, drawing critical attention to the construction and contestation of transnational identities. Reading Beyoncé’s position as a celebrated music icon, Drake presents a riveting argument on the equivocal space Beyoncé inhabits. On one hand, she has been identified as transnational in transcending different barriers, yet on the other, she has been progressively identified less as a black woman as she has become thinner, lighter, blonder, and her hair straighter. This ambiguity is complex, yet in the “Beautiful Liar” video with Shakira, the appropriation of transnational sisterhood is evoked, not only creating a new identification of female solidarity but also suggesting a shift in understanding black female identities. The two women in the video, after discovering that they are dating the same man, do not fight over him but instead move towards a sisterhood or transnational feminism, restoring “a natural order of things that patriarchy stole from women” and proposing that the intersection of gender and transnational consciousness offers new platforms of identification and empowerment (p. 98). Hence, situating Beyoncé and Shakira’s collaboration in a transnational framework imagines a new way of engagement different from generic race-based reflections. This book is significant in bridging the gaps between African American women’s stories and transnational discourse. A valuable and useful publication, which offers a multiplicity in conceptualizing black women’s identities, Critical Appropriations unarguably adds a rich contribution to scholarly works in this field. To quote from Drake’s conclusion, “there are [End Page 295...

The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude

I. A completely or an originally irreligious civilization has in all likelihood never existed, but it is not, in itself, unimaginable; what is more important, the modern civilization of Western mankind, originally (and still, in part, actually) Christian, has revealed a trend of evolution towards a society in which, practically speaking, religion as a determining factor of private and public life is to yield its place to a nonreligious, immanentistic, secular moral orientation which may best be described succinctly as humanitarian. While such a prospect cannot but appall the believer, it has also evoked misgivings and apprehension in a good many nonreligious or not emphatically students of human civilization; nay, terrified some of them, perhaps, to an extent to which it could never terrify the believer himself. For it is precisely the nobler and more perspicacious kind of mundane thinker who is apt to be worried primarily about the fate of human civilization as such, than which he knows no thing. Yet it is a grave problem, and one that poses itself on a purely worldly level of thinking, how far an irreligious civilization can subsist at all, or how soon it is bound to degenerate into a state of barbarism: in other words, whether humanitarianism is essentially capable of maintaining itself in actual reality or is fated to defeat its own ends, thus marking but a brief transition towards disintegration and anarchy--coupled, of necessity, with new phenomena of tyranny and new forms of gross and superstitious creeds widely dissimilar to its own mental world. It goes without saying that the rise of Communism and of Fascism--most characteristically, however, of Nazism-- is entirely calculated to impress the observer as premonitory signs (if not more) of just such a turn of evolution. The problem I have indicated concerns the Catholic less directly and from a somewhat different angle, but concern him it certainly does. It is not only that we are interested in civilization as against barbarity; nor, merely, the greater freedom the Church may hope to enjoy under a tolerant system as compared with fresh brands of virulent paganism and a totalitarian idolatry of secular power; it is also well for us to understand wholly and in all its implications the intrinsic inadequacy of humanitarianism, so as to be able to help our non-Catholic and non-Christian fellows towards a fuller understanding thereof. For secular preoccupations of a legitimate and dignified kind have often in history supplied valuable and important elements of society with the initial motives for their conversions to the Faith. The sketchy remarks which follow, destined to throw some light on a very few aspects of the vast problem, are purely analytic in character, and in no way supposed to contribute directly to a historic prognosis or a cultural program. I may also observe that I intend to examine, here, the humanitarian as contrasted to the in general, rather than to the specifically Catholic one. By no means does this imply, however, any leaning towards the shallow and absurd view that all religions teach essentially the same thing; nor indeed the view that any kind of religiousness is necessarily better, or more consonant with the basic values of Civilization, than the irreligious in its form. II. A few clarifications regarding nomenclature may seem advisable. 1. By a religious attitude we mean a corporate--or at least, a socially relevant--outlook on human affairs which contains a reference to a higher Power (or a system of such powers) underlying cosmic reality, and invested with a claim to determine, direct, or guide human thought and behavior. The term higher is meant to indicate an order of Reality qualitatively distinct from the natural order of things and events as experienced in the everyday existence of a given society, including even such unknown objects and forces as can at any rate be imagined as mere additional elements essentially fitting into the texture of natural reality. …

Negotiating control

Excluded from ‘the national order of things' refugees live under specific forms of control. Similarly, those citizens that the state considers as potential or real ‘enemies of the nation' live under forms of control that do not apply to other citizens. Using the paired comparison of a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank and the Palestinian districts of an Israeli city, this paper argues that a focus on control can help break the strict analytical dichotomy between cities and camps and between citizens and refugees. It draws attention to the role of agencies of control ranging from humanitarian organizations to policing agencies in shaping how marginalized refugees and citizens negotiate access to scarce material and symbolic resources. In the process, it shows how the forms that political engagement takes in the city and the camp challenge fixed notions of citizenship, cities and camps—for example, the notion that citizenship status and cities are inherently politically empowering while refugee status and camps are inherently depoliticizing.

Struggles for the Folk. Politics of Culture in Czechoslovak Ethnography, 1940s–1950s

Focusing on politics of culture in early socialist era, this article explores struggles for imposing particular visions of “folk” during the revolutionary zeal characterizing the post-1948 period's development in the discipline of Czechoslovak ethnography. It examines the self-proclaimed turn from previous ethnographic traditions, accused of bourgeois nationalism, to socialist orientation towards studying “true folk”. By tracing struggles around the re-conceptualization of constitutive criteria and boundaries defining the essential object of ethnographic inquiry, the socialist ethnographers readjusted to the changes by focusing on more “progressive” traditions and shifted towards the “working-class” seen as possessing revolutionary spirit and the true authentic essence of the nation. The article argues that the new ethnographic wave ultimately re-inscribed the essentialist categories they virtually combatted by embedding them within the same structural framework rooted in the national order of things.

Миф как категория символической политики: анализ теоретических развилок

The article describes theoretical junctions revealed by different definitions and usages of the concept “political myth”. It argues that the main difficulty results from the fact that “myth” is a “universal” social phenomenon that is rather “particular” in its manifestation: it is fundamental for any society, but its “work” depends on perception of specific groups in concrete contexts. The article considers theoretical discussions about a narrative nature of contemporary myths, their exclusively verbal or non-verbal form, about arrangement of mythical comprehension of reality and mechanisms of mythologization, about connections between myths and ideologies. However most scholars agree that about capability to be shared and perceived as “a natural order of things” should be considered a key characteristic of any myth. This category is fundamental for analysis of symbolic politics. However its heuristic potential depends on a particular research focus. In the frame of narrower approach that considers symbolic politics as a “constructivist” activity of political elites aimed at manipulation of mass consciousness “the myth” comes as a category of political practice; it points to “artificial”, simulating character of the constructed signs. While a wider approach viewing symbolic politics as a social production of competing ways of interpretation of reality and struggle for their domination opens a perspective for considering myth as communicative process that involves both mythmakers and their auditory. It makes focus on a study of both political and semantic conditions that make particular myth a “lens” that determines perception of reality. So, myth turns to be both category of practice in symbolic politics and instrument of its analysis which makes the work with this term rather complicated.

Archaeology, aviation, and the topographical projection of ‘Paradoxical Modernism’ in 1940s South Africa

At the time of his premature death in 1942, Rex Martienssen, the gifted South African architect who had helped make Johannesburg an outpost of modernism, had just completed a seminal PhD thesis on Greek space, and was documenting the layout of remote African settlements in South Africa's highlands. Martienssen's writings suggest that the link between these disjunct projects was topographical thinking, a form of architectural seeing and thinking that ontologically articulates time, place and culture. His research project was informed by the white colonial national intellectual search for an alternative to the racialised imaginary geography being promoted by white nationalism in the 1930s, a paradoxical modernity that would be progressive and cosmopolitan, yet also respected a timeless order threatened by European modernity. This re-envisioning of the 'place' of Western culture in Africa was encouraged by two seemingly-unrelated engagements with the sub-continent's terrain: archaeology and commercial aviation. Both practices came into their own in Southern Africa during this period, deploying Western technique and rationality in ways that constructed a vision of the subcontinent that unsettled the territorial limits and historical narratives of the post-colony, and inaugurated perceptions of the African landscape as modern and transcultural, yet situated in the Hegelian geographical movement of history. This made it possible to imagine, for the first time, that the topographical organisation of indigenous settlements might yield a spatial logic for new urban areas. A key figure in understanding this multiscalar geo-historical subjectivity was Le Corbusier, who had close ties with Martienssen and what he called le Groupe Transvaal. Le Corbusier's global journeys during the 1930s had made him increasingly interested in the anthropo-geographic traces left by the 'natural order of things' in human environments, and the possibility of a neo-syndicalist world order based on geo-political regions that were latitudinally complementary.

The Church, Gender and AIDS: What's Wrong with Patriarchy?

Many women and children suffer in silence in cultures where patriarchy is condoned and defended as the natural order of things. The inferior status ascribed women and children where patriarchy is imbued as hypernormative, render them vulnerable to contracting the HI-virus - as the case study cited here reveals. While government and civil society, including the church, sometimes react when violence against women and/or children end in the victim of violence being killed, the argument made here is that a pro-active response may go a long way - such as addressing the patriarchy of our (Christian) faith.

Chance, Divine Action and the Natural Order of Things

Most people believe that everything happens for a reason. Whether it is “God’s will,” “karma” or “fate,” we want to believe that an overarching purpose undergirds everything, that nothing in the world--especially a disaster or tragedy--is a random, meaningless event. This dilemma presents itself provocatively in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that, in the conventional scientific understanding, is driven by random chance. Reconciling chance and divine purpose poses challenges to the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the Hebrew Scriptures, in the ancient and powerful story of Job, reveal that questions of purpose and order have long been a part of the conversation. Although the Bible generally affirms that God blesses the righteous in an orderly way, the story of Job is a powerful counterexample to this orderly scheme. The achingly beautiful but tragic story of Job, in concert with the modern quantum picture of the world, push back against the idea that “everything happens for a reason.”

Tomorrow or the natural order of things: a study for a possible gentrification of the 'villas operárias' in Lisbon

This article is an exploratory work, with the aim of introducing the research the authors have carried out on gentrification of the traditional workers’ villages in Lisbon as a way to tackle some of the major problems that the city faces at the beginning of the third millennium. First, we describe Lisbon briefly. Afterwards, we introduce the concepts of gentrification and villas operárias . The aim is to show that they have been part of the culture of the capital and pinpoint several examples in consecrated Portuguese literature and cinema since the early years of the 20th century. The design of the villas operárias strengthens the sense of community and the sense of belonging. At a time of historical rehabilitation of urban spaces, (re)creating spaces with their own identity is crucial to enhance the dynamics of the city.

Family Matters: How Queering the Intimate Queers the International

A key insight of queer analytics is that codes and practices of “normalcy” simultaneously constitute “deviancy,” exclusions, and “otherings” as sites of social violence. To reveal how power operates in normative codes and normalizing practices, queer theory aims to “make strange”—disrupt, destabilize, deconstruct, effectively to queer— what is considered normal, commonplace, taken-for-granted, or the “natural order of things.” The point is to contest normativities and orthodoxies (Browne 2006:886), in part by exposing “regimes of the normal” (Eng et al. 2005:3) as historically contingent and power-laden social constructions and by disclosing inconsistencies, instabilities, and fluidities of social meanings and boundaries . In particular, queer work contests “power-ridden normativities of sex” (Berlant and Warner 1995:345) exemplified in heteronormative sex/affective arrangements, and the “normalizing mechanisms of state power” (Eng et al. 2005:1) exemplified in heteropatriarchal marriage/kinship arrangements. Drawing on extensive cross-disciplinary research over several decades, I argue that the making of states is the making of “sex.” In contrast to decentralized networks of societal organization, successful processes of political centralization, that is, state making, are distinguished by their formal (legal) codification of marriage (entailing the heterosexual matrix and “nuclear” family/household form) and patriarchal inheritance of property and citizenship (instituting “private” property and insider–outsider status differentiation). These processes and their power relations are legible initially in early (archaic) state formation, and subsequently (amplified by Christian ideology) in modern European state-making and colonizing practices, eventuating in the now hegemonic form of “sovereign” states constituting Disciplinary IR. In short, the (contingent and contested) normalization of heteropatriarchal principles has historically been key to securing “appropriate” social reproduction and reliable transmission of property and citizenship claims enabling intergenerational continuity of state formations. I have recently summarized this genealogy of “sex,” “the family,” and state formation (Peterson 2014a) and earlier considered the intentional and unintentional queering of states/nations (Peterson …

Editors’ Page

Editors’ Page Stephanie G’Schwind and Sasha Steensen It’s easy to get a little lazy during the summer, settling deeply into that poolside chaise longue, umbrella drink within easy reach, scent of coconut in the air. And why shouldn’t you? You’ve earned it, this “weekend” of the year: June, July, and August standing in for an extended Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But don’t get too comfortable just yet; the stories and essays in this issue promise to keep you on the edge of your beach towel. Striking the first note of disequilibrium in this issue’s fiction, Brad Felver’s “Dogs of Detroit” presents a city in which “the natural order of things has been upended”: feral dogs roam the city, buildings are abandoned and left to decay, and a boy’s mother goes missing—leaving him and his father to work out their grief through art and violence. Amid an out-of-season twister, Kate Folk’s “Tornado Season” finds a teenage girl and her single mother harboring a fugitive whose attention they both desire. Goldberry Long gives us a nun painfully out of sync with her parish, unable to reconcile her true heart with her faith, in “How Sister Concepción Burned Down Nuestra Señora de Los Luceros through No Fault of Her Own, Which Everyone Agrees.” And in Elizabeth Poliner’s “Sometime, Springtime,” a woman works to regain her balance after her lover unexpectedly dumps her, navigating a world that now seems “a kind of foreign universe … a place where she felt alien, displaced.” Carrying this discordant tune through the nonfiction, Daniel Sherrell’s “Big Pin” pulls back the curtain to reveal the culture of high school wrestling—a limbo world that is neither school nor life, but “somehow takes the place of both”—in which boys starve themselves down to unnatural weights, strive to knock one another off balance, and subject themselves to abuse and humiliaton for a dubious return on their investment. In “Tenebrae,” a meditative essay on art and religion, Jan Shoemaker reflects on the destabilizing experience of tending to her dementia-stricken mother, the roles of caregiving inverted. Liza Cochran, though, examining addiction and depression, writes about righting oneself again, finding a spiritual compass—a higher power, perhaps—amid the wilderness in her moving essay “Natural Forces.” So if your chaise has a seatbelt, you may want to fasten it: it’s going to be a bumpy read. —Stephanie G'Schwind [End Page 1] As I write this introductory statement, I am at the Denver International Airport. I have been here for several hours, and I am told I will be here for several more. This space, to borrow some words from Gertrude Stein, “is a space of time that is filled always filled with moving.” It is a space constructed by, and always aware of, passing hours. The good news: for company, I have the poetry for the summer issue of Colorado Review. These poems, oddly hourly, are full of waiting. Laura Wetherington’s Pierre Rivière “was known to sit for hours, watching birds and frogs he’d nailed to trees.” Lee Ann Brown tells us in her elegy for Amiri Baraka that, despite his being two hours late for a reading, “everybody Stayed.” Some poetry is not only worth waiting for, but it transforms the very makeup of an hour. In the presence of these poems I find that I no longer dread the hours ahead of me; I eagerly await them because “already the hour / is less than an hour” (Carolina Ebeid). I anticipate that you, too, will spend many happy hours in and among these beautiful poems. —Sasha Steensen [End Page 2] Copyright © 2014 Center for Literary Publishing