Neo-conservative Discourse Research Articles

Aligning school mathematics with a manufactured crisis: re-rendering neoliberal and neoconservative discourses as commonsensical in a rural place

Aligning school mathematics with a manufactured crisis: re-rendering neoliberal and neoconservative discourses as commonsensical in a rural place

Teaching in Diverse Lower and Upper Secondary Schools in Norway: The Missing Links in Student Teachers’ Experiences

Teacher education programs must be able to prepare student teachers to work effectively with heterogeneous groups of students in ways that support the learning of all students and affirm their identities within growing neoliberal and neoconservative discourses. In Norway, classroom composition has also become more diverse, primarily due to a higher number of students of a transnational background. This paper explores student teachers’ experiences of preparation for the changing nature of the teaching profession that is informed by increased student diversity. A case study with four student teachers from a teacher education program at a Norwegian institution of higher education is employed to gain rich insight into the students’ perceptions and experiences. The findings illustrate a need for better preparation on the part of the program in relation to teaching content and methods, the practicum experience, and intercultural training from a pedagogical perspective.

1990s and the Remaking of the Neoconservative Foreign Policy Paradigm

This essay explains how neoconservative foreign policy doctrine evolved from strenuously seeking to defeat the communist enemy during the Cold War to thoroughly seeking to preserve America’s newfound “unipolar moment” by constructing new enemies to defeat. It analyzes the generational transition within the neoconservative movement from the 1970s to the 1990s and its empire-building project in the post-Cold War era. Based on neoconservative publications and contributions to magazines such as Commentary, The National Interest, and Weekly Standard as well as the publications, reports, and statements of neoconservative think tanks (The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, The Committee on the Present Danger, American Enterprise Institute, The Project for New American Century, among others), the essay argues that the themes associated with the neoconservatives after 9/11—such as militarism, preemptive war, regime change, democratization, and unilateralism—had been rooted in the neoconservative discourse since the 1970s. It also shows that the post-9/11 neoconservative foreign policy approach was the product of neoconservative narratives during the Cold War era and after the fall of communism. (RA)

‘Another Version of the Truth’: The politics of affect and the externalization of threat in Trent Reznor’s Year Zero

This article explores Nine Inch Nails’ album Year Zero (2007) with reference to what Brian Massumi calls the ‘politics of affect’ in the post 9/11 era. The sociopolitical discourse of managed threat both contextualizes and shapes the album’s conceptual basis, but also its lyricism, live manifestation and marketing. I propose a trajectory in Trent Reznor’s lyricism from an early introspective and confessional style to defensive and anxious tropes, emotions within a structure of feeling synonymous with the post 9/11 years. I argue that the album is a document that both reflects and critiques the overlapping social, cultural and political arenas of this era, and was particularly responsive to neoconservative discourse in its delivery, accompanying media and live performance.

Where feminists dare. The challenge to the hetero-patriarchal and neo-conservative backlash in Italy and Poland

This paper focuses on the public debate in Poland and Italy concerning the right to abortion in the contemporary rise of populist neo-conservative forces in Europe and of a global feminist movement. In both countries, the historical Catholic interference into women's reproductive rights and self-determination has been enforced by the renewed alliance of right-wing governments and pro-life groups to converge into a transnational “anti-gender war”. This represents a real backlash against women’s achievements over the last decades in terms of reproductive and sexual citizenship, which appears to be the battlefield for redefinition of western citizenship in times of global crisis. Although different genealogies, we identified a common framing of neo-conservative discourse, and of feminist claims and practices, as that of feminist strikes and social mutualism. In this perspective, we consider these practices as a normativity from below, arguing that feminist movement is addressing a new paradigm of citizenship.

Submission beyond Islam: Yielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels

Submission beyond IslamYielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels Karl Ågerup introduction On 7 January 2015, the same day as the attack on the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission was published in French. This novel, depicting a future France in which a Muslim president is elected, immediately became part of the ongoing debate on Islam and French identity. In an address to the country, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed that the attack on Charlie Hebdo should inspire the French to rise up against hatred, intolerance, and Michel Houellebecq: "La France ce n'est pas la soumission, ce n'est pas Michel Houellebecq" [France is not submission, it is not Michel Houellebecq] (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated) (Tronche). Thus, the Prime Minister associated Houellebecq and Soumission with intolerance and hatred. In this he was not alone. Former editor of Le Monde and founder of Mediapart Edwy Plenel called Houellebecq Islamophobic on national TV ("Houellebecq et islamophobie" 5:00–5:15), and socialist politician Alexis Corbière stated on national radio that Soumission adhered to xenophobic discourse ("Le grand directe" 01:30–01:40). Faithful to his habits, and to the operating manual for poets he had integrated in his 1991 essay Rester vivant (26), Houellebecq had found one of society's most sensitive wounds and rubbed salt in it. Only this time the debate was more extensive than before, and the audience too: by February 2015, the novel had simultaneously topped the sales charts in France, Italy, and Germany ("Houellebecq, superstar des ventes"). The German magazine Der Spiegel ranked Submission among the fifty best books of our times (Scappaticci), and The New York Times named it one of the top hundred books of 2015 (Pagesy). There are comprehensible arguments for reading Houellebecq's picture of a submissive France as neo-conservative discourse. Whether in the form of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" theory, of Renaud Camus' vision of a coming "great replacement," or of more realistic prognostics of cultural transformations in Europe, the question of a rising Muslim community threatening French traditions was frequently raised during the decade preceding Houellebecq's novel. Professor Jérôme Meizoz solemnly declared that he felt Soumission fed on these ideas ("Lettre" 80). The fact that [End Page 196] Houellebecq had called Islam "la religion la plus con" [the stupidest religion] in the literary magazine Lire made it easy to classify Soumission as Islamophobic (Sénécal). Notably, "Islam" can be translated as "submission," but what did Houellebecq mean by giving his novel this title? The critics were intrigued. As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier has noted, the word "soumission" is highly polysemic and takes on meanings in various areas such as sex and politics (154). From the viewpoint of Soumission's narrator, Islam is not dangerous, but valuable: Houellebecq's hero benefits from the new patriarchal order and finds it ideologically reasonable. As Philippe Lançon has emphasized, the novel can be read as both Islamophobic and Islamophilic. The novel's reception has accordingly been mixed and confused (see Ågerup, "The Political Reception"). The debate is nowhere near consensus on what Houellebecq wants to say. Is he out to make the public afraid of Islam in general, or just of patriarchal politics? Or is he attracted by the conservative morals practiced by some Muslim societies? Given the novel's evident anchoring in contemporary French political debate, such questions impose themselves even on a reader who is conscious of the literary text's principal autonomy. A certain ideological tension appears during the realization of the text, and this disturbing ambiguity, as several critics have maintained, is also one of the novel's key assets (Dorais 29; Knausgaard; Novak-Lechevalier 154). In his classic work "Implied Truths in Literature," John Hospers remarked that the literary text's resistance to a single interpretation is "frustrating and at the same time fascinating" (45). It is precisely because fictional discourse lacks a stable, responsible, and identifiable speaker that it can be so intriguing. The present study is driven by the frustration-fascination that Hospers notes, and it approaches Soumission as fictional discourse with political implications. It takes into account...

Curriculum Policies of Gender and Sexuality in Brazil: Between Biomedical, Socio-Juridical and Neoconservative Discourses

This paper proposes an analysis of the curriculum policies of gender and sexuality produced in Brazil, aiming at revealing the hegemonic practices and the articulation of different logics, such as theoretical, moral and political, that made these practices possible. Curriculum policies are here conceived as dispute fields which establish and contest meanings about curricular texts, while unstable and polysemic codifications. The present work seeks to show how the emergence and dissemination of socio-juridical discursive logics in the field of sexuality, as opposed to biomedical logics, have influenced Brazilian curricular policies since the 2000s. However, it also indicates that these logics have been strongly opposed, in recent years, for the articulation and intensification of the action of neoconservative movements in the country. This article also proposes the appropriation, within the sphere of this debate, of concepts such as the discursive field, hegemony and identification – as developed by Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory – as resources to enable a more nuanced analysis of the processes of emergence, consolidation and crisis of regimes of dominant sexuality in the curricular field, as well as the permanent tensions, conflicts, negotiations and articulations between different discourses and logics in this scenario. Key-words: Gender; Sexuality; Discourse; Curriculum Policy.

Regeneration Through Violence? The American Family in Ray Donovan and Big Little Lies

<p>Celem pracy jest zbadanie, jak mitologiczny motyw odrodzenia przez przemoc, który Richard Slotkin opisał jako „metaforę nadająca strukturę amerykańskiemu doświadczeniu”, jest wykorzystywany we współczesnej amerykańskiej kulturze popularnej. Artykuł przedstawia obrazy rodziny w dwóch amerykańskich serialach telewizyjnych: serialu kryminalnym Ray Donovan (2013–2018, Showtime) i miniserialu Wielkie kłamstewka (Big Little Lies, HBO, 2017). Analiza narracji w omawianych tekstach filmowych pokazuje, że oba twórczo wykorzystują motyw odrodzenia przez przemoc. Chociaż narracje te osadzone są w różnych założeniach ideologicznych i reprezentują inne gatunki telewizyjne, w obydwu najważniejszy temat to przemoc jako główna przyczyna kryzysów w rodzinie. Przedstawienie rodziny w serialu Ray Donovan zbudowane jest w obrębie paternalistycznego, neokonserwatywnego dyskursu. Obraz ten opowiada o losach bohatera, który skutecznie zajmuje się wybawianiem z kłopotów przedstawicieli bogatej i niemoralnej elity Los Angeles, ale który nie radzi sobie z rozwiązywaniem problemów swojej dysfunkcjonalnej rodziny. Wielkie kłamstewka to historia pięciu kobiet z północnej Kalifornii należących do ostentacyjnie liberalnej i postępowej elity społecznej. Każda z nich musi się jednak zmierzyć z poważnymi problemami rodzinnymi. Niniejsze badanie dowodzi, że choć narracje w obydwu serialach podporządkowane zostały tematowi odrodzenia przez przemoc, to ich wymowa znacznie się różni. Ray Donovan konsekwentnie pokazuje, jak bezowocne i nieskuteczne jest uciekanie się do przemocy w próbach uratowania rodziny. Narracja w Wielkich kłamstewkach, chociaż osadzona w progresywnym i liberalnym dyskursie, zdaje się wskazywać, że przemoc, jako kara za zło, może prowadzić do katharsis i odrodzenia.</p>

‘Productive’ and ‘disciplined’ students for the ‘common good’: Globalised discourses of neoliberal and neoconservative responsibility in Australian education policy

The notion of responsibility makes a significant appearance in a range of Westernised education policy documents concerned with student conduct, welfare and values. While policies may differ in the extent to which responsibility is explicitly defined or generally assumed, most seem to emphasise an ideal social subject who is accountable, self-regulating and actively contributing to civic life. Drawing on insights from Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, I argue that the emphasis on neoliberal and neoconservative discourses in Australian educational policy can work to undermine more unconditional forms of responsibility grounded in notions of ethics, care and recognition of the other.

Beyond Liminality? The Kulturkampf of the Early 2000s in East Central Europe

The essay gives an overview of the rise of radical neoconservative discourses in East Central Europe in the wake of the seemingly successful completion of the transition agenda, culminating in NATO and EU accession. It describes the main directions of criticism aiming at the “liberal consensus,” held to be dominating the ideological frameworks of these countries in the 1990s. Offering the metaphor of Kulturkampf as a heuristic model to interpret the interplay between political claims and the battle for hegemony in the public sphere, it revisits some of the central battlegrounds of contention: that of memory politics, the critique of political correctness, and the debate around the reception of Western institutions and intellectual paradigms. Taking a closer look especially at the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian discussions, the essay also identifies some of the most important ideological references of the “neoconservative revolution” envisioned by these ideologues, such as decisionism, the radicalization of the majoritarian principle toward a plebiscitary understanding of democracy, the reliance on the voluntary activism of an uncivil society, and, finally, a paradoxical antielitist sort of authoritarianism. All in all, while the most spectacular manifestation of this phenomenon is no doubt in Hungary after 2010, the essay argues that it should not be considered a local anomaly but rather a more general and, to a large extent, systemic problem of the postcommunist “transition societies,” which had a very clear image of the short-term trajectory to follow in order to reach the European framework but had far fewer ideas, let alone social consensus, of the type of democratic culture they wanted to create as a result of the transition.

Closing Doors: Hollywood, Affirmative Action, and the Revitalization of Conservative Racial Politics

While the racial themes of Hollywood films have been well-documented by scholars, struggles to break down racial barriers in the film labor market are underdocumented. Although self-identifying as liberal, Hollywood of the late 1960s was in fact very resistant to employing and promoting minorities, leading the Justice Department to take the extraordinary step of preparing lawsuits under Title VII against practically the entire industry. Eithne Quinn examines Hollywoodâ�€�™s racial politics during these pivotal early years of affirmative action, looking at black and federal activism as well as the responses of studio management and craft unions. She uncovers Hollywoodâ�€�™s role in anti-affirmative action lobbying and in the formulation and propagation of emergent â�€�œcolor blindâ�€� neoconservative discourses which forwarded laissez-faire approaches to achieving racial equality.

Tell and Self-Define in an Interstice

How is one to think an art practice within a double space-time which is neither in Beirut nor in Montréal, but partially in both? On one side, a time ‘at a distance’, diegetic, reiterating the occurrences of a war embanked by sectarian discourses and, on the other, a multicultural time made of girded cultural differences managed by the neo-liberal discourse in Québec and dominated by the neo-conservative discourse in Canada. These parameters characterise a new space-time which the author qualifies as interstitial.

American neoconservatism: the politics and culture of a reactionary idealism

In this book, Jean-Francois Drolet contributes to a critical engagement with American neoconservatism at the level of its intellectual foundations. Situated at the interface of the disciplines of International Relations, political theory and the history of ideas, the book moves beyond recent debates over the intricacies of the Bush administration's foreign policy to offer a deeper look at the philosophical premises of this 'new' conservatism in light of the historical events and changing social compacts that have created a demand for it over the past decades. It surveys neoconservative discourses on a wide range of issue areas such as democracy, the liberal state, capitalism, national security, international law and global liberal governance, and draws attention to the systematic links between the domestic and international dimensions of neoconservative political sociology. Taking issue with its self-image, Drolet argues and demonstrates that American neoconservatism is not the centrist 'liberal' conservatism that it pretends to be - and that many analysts have diagnosed in recent years. To the extent neoconservatism is committed to the Enlightenment discourse of liberalism, these commitments are firmly subordinated to an authoritarian form of cultural and philosophical conservatism, which is in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values and practices. Neoconservatism is not a conservative variant of liberalism but a deeply atavistic reaction to liberal modernity. It owes a lot more to the authoritarian intellectual milieu of interwar Europe than to the liberal tradition that its protagonists allegedly want to reform and protect against its enemies.

Standards-Based Curricula in a Denationalised Conception of Education: The Case of Sweden

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary school education, but in terms of governing principles for schools, these curriculum reforms can be regarded as a continuation of the 1991 reform. The authors argue that this latest reform, as part of an international policy discourse, can be said to represent a denationalised and instrumental conception of education, and that the implications for the formation of knowledge within this conception can be understood as a standards-based curriculum shaped by two powerful international influences: a technical-instrumental discourse of curriculum, emphasising the form, structure and function of the curriculum; and a neo-conservative discourse of curriculum, with an emphasis on curriculum content as a given and uncontested body of knowledge.

Exporting virtue: neoconservatism, democracy promotion and the end of history

Changes in neoconservative foreign policy thought in the post-Cold War period have often been downplayed. Interested observers seem content to emphasise continuities or merely changes in personnel with a second generation of neoconservatives replacing an earlier cadre, rather than shifts in the ideology itself. By interrogating the early post-Cold War years, this article argues that neoconservatism as an ideology underwent significant changes, with a cautious form of realism, even isolationism, replaced by a much more expansive and ambitious worldview. Humanitarian interests and the promotion of democracy abroad assumed more central roles in neoconservative discourse in a way they had not hitherto achieved. These concerns when combined with the frequent advocacy of American hegemony shifted neoconservatism in a direction which was not anticipated in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The structural decline of bipolarity in the international system; the impact of democracy promotion discourses including Francis Fukuyama's ‘End of History’ thesis; and a religious ‘turn’ in neoconservative thought all contributed to this new direction, laying the ideological groundwork for many of the ideas which underpinned the 2003 Iraq War.

The West, the rest, and the ‘war on terror’: representation of Muslims in neoconservative media discourse

This paper uses Sayyid's concept of Eurocentrism to analyse neoconservative media discourse following the September 11 attacks. Using predicate analysis on articles from The Weekly Standard magazine, this study aims to determine how neoconservative writers created a Muslim subjectivity following the attacks in order to make certain courses of action appear necessary and inevitable. Four subject positions emerged from the analysis: passive Muslims, active Muslims, the passive West, and the active West. By containing and controlling the representation of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ through these binaries, neoconservatives endeavoured to stabilise the identities of the players in the ‘war on terrorism’, and in doing so, advanced a Eurocentric discourse that attempted to re-centre the West as the vehicle of human progress, with America as its natural leader. This paper concludes that basing the ‘war on terror’ entirely around identities effectively made Eurocentrism (and Islamism) self-reinforcing, as the successful restriction of identities precluded challenges to the neoconservative discourse from any position other than a ‘Muslim’ subjectivity.

A liberalism betrayed? American neoconservatism and the theory of international relations

This article analyses the ideological and theoretical underpinnings of neoconservative discourses on international relations. It moves beyond recent polemics and debates over the Bush administration's foreign policy to offer a deeper look at the intellectual premises of the peculiar synthesis of realism and idealism which characterizes the neoconservative mode of political engagement with the world. Looking at the domestic and foreign policy dimensions of neoconservative political sociology, the article argues that neoconservatism is not the centrist ‘liberal’ conservatism that it pretends to be (and that many foreign policy analysts have diagnosed in recent years). It argues that to the extent that neoconservatism is committed to the Enlightenment narrative of human rights and liberal democracy, these commitments are predicated on an atavistic conservative philosophy that is in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values and liberal mechanisms of governance. The aim here is not to provide a normative defence of liberalism as such. Yet, situating neoconservatism within the broad church of liberal political theory tends to eclipse all that is specific to neoconservatism as an ideology. It endows this militaristic approach to social order with a progressive ethical gloss that it does not deserve, and it consequently muddles debates over the limits and desirability of liberal values and practices in world politics.

Reading Katrina: Race, Space and an Unnatural Disaster1

Beneath the fleeting commotion of natural disaster, the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 revealed deep-rooted dynamics of racial and class inequalities. National media frenzy in the wake of the storm on the Gulf Coast reported on the plight of black poor populations, especially in New Orleans, as those worst impacted and also most neglected. The first part of this article elaborates on the contested concepts of “race” and “racism” in a contemporary context, in which popular visual and narrative representations inform contemporary racial discourses and the perpetuation, in turn, of a dominant neoconservative hegemony. A discursive reading, in part two, of emergent political and media narratives around Katrina reveals the processes and tropes operating to (re)construct “race” in dominant American culture. In this deconstructive analysis, the devastated urban space of New Orleans emerges as a physical as well as highly symbolic regime of knowledge in relation to which dehistoricized racial constructions are propagated and naturalized. Finally, hegemony is reconceptualized as an inherently contingent contemporary power. Discursive processes of racial domination reinforced by popular representations of Hurricane Katrina have been effectively subverted by activist movements in New Orleans which mobilize alternative, experiential and spatial narratives; signifying a grassroots politicization to counter the naturalized racial tropes of neoconservative discourse and intervene with more democratic processes in the ongoing reconstruction of the devastated city.

Gestus, affect and the Post-Semiotic in Contemporary Theatre

With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the movement of its former member states towards democratic elections and capitalist economies, the Cold War was hastily and abruptly over. Triumphalist liberal and neo-conservative discourses proclaimed the end of communism and exhausted socialist populations welcomed the end of real existing socialism. Both politically and philosophically, the great modernist dualisms of communism and capitalism, East and West, Left and Right, had come to an end. This final act of deconstruction not only had profound effects on politics, culture and the everyday, but it also changed the terms and reference points for the processes of meaning-making, representation, interpretation and reception in the arts. Is there still a place for the arts of engagement in contemporary Europe? This paper proposes that these historic shifts in politics and the everyday find their artistic outlet in the shift from a gestic to an affective model of meaning and representation, or, from the semiotic to the post-semiotic. Whereas the Brechtian gestic model of social signification is based in the class war and the correlation of sign and referent, the affective domain, as theorised by Massumi drawing on Deleuze, is adaptable to a more fluid global realm. There is an associated movement from an emphasis on gesture to image. Gesture is indexic, it points to a relatively fixed social realm, whereas the image is everywhere in ‘the image- and information- based economies of late capitalism.’ Drawing on theatrical examples from Germany, the paper teases out the strengths and weaknesses of affect as a critical framework for new understandings of the arts of engagement.

What is Education for? Situating History, Cultural Understandings and Studies of Society and Environment against Neo-Conservative Critiques of Curriculum Reform

This article explores some of the debates about the nature and purpose of education in the social sciences in the Australian curricula. It examines recent attempts in studies of society and environment and history curricula to prepare students for global citizenship and responds to neo-conservative critiques that our ‘politically correct’ curricula does not impart the ‘truth’ about our ‘European’ heritage. This article argues that while the neo-conservative discourse makes claim to traditional views of knowledge and rationality, its discursive field does not address the broader questions of what sort of education our students require for the twenty-first century.