Normative Hierarchies Research Articles

(European) Multilevel Constitutionalism to Govern Transnational Public Goods? A Reply to Petersmann

In the Article hereby commented, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann further elaborates on his will-known thesis on the constitutionalisation of UN law and WTO law. Petersmann argues, first, that the EU provides a successful example in the governance of transnational public goods; secondly, that such success story is essentially due to the EU’s basic institutional arrangements, characterised as ‘mulitilevel constitutionalism’. Petersmann thus submits that die EU’s multilevel constitutionalism provides a viable template for the international community at large, and that the UN and die WTO should further proceed down the path of ‘hard’ constitutionalisation following the EU’s example. This Reply takes issue with the second of the Article’s assumptions. It thus argues that the notion of multilevel constitutionalism does not provide a descriptively accurate account of the structure of the European legal space. Rather, it is submitted, the literature on constitutional pluralism captures more adequately the reality of competing claims to final authority in structuring the relationship between national and supranational legal system in the context of the EU. Against this background, Petersmann’s claim the the ‘European model’ ought to be transposed to the globel stage can be nuanced. Rather than aiming at enforcing normative hierarchies through effective dispute resolution mechanisms, the ‘constitional’ value of (quasi-)universal fora such as the UN and the WTO can thus lie in the potential to provide a common ‘grammar’ to discursively structure the dialogue between competing normative views on globel affairs along lines of mutual intelligibility.

(European) Multilevel Constitutionalism to Govern Transnational Public Goods? A Reply to Petersmann

In the Article hereby commented, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann further elaborates on his will-known thesis on the constitutionalisation of UN law and WTO law. Petersmann argues, first, that the EU provides a successful example in the governance of transnational public goods; secondly, that such success story is essentially due to the EU’s basic institutional arrangements, characterised as ‘mulitilevel constitutionalism’. Petersmann thus submits that die EU’s multilevel constitutionalism provides a viable template for the international community at large, and that the UN and die WTO should further proceed down the path of ‘hard’ constitutionalisation following the EU’s example. This Reply takes issue with the second of the Article’s assumptions. It thus argues that the notion of multilevel constitutionalism does not provide a descriptively accurate account of the structure of the European legal space. Rather, it is submitted, the literature on constitutional pluralism captures more adequately the reality of competing claims to final authority in structuring the relationship between national and supranational legal system in the context of the EU. Against this background, Petersmann’s claim the the ‘European model’ ought to be transposed to the globel stage can be nuanced. Rather than aiming at enforcing normative hierarchies through effective dispute resolution mechanisms, the ‘constitional’ value of (quasi-)universal fora such as the UN and the WTO can thus lie in the potential to provide a common ‘grammar’ to discursively structure the dialogue between competing normative views on globel affairs along lines of mutual intelligibility.

When Stigmatization Fails: Russia and Aggression in Ukraine

Abstract Why does stigmatization sometimes fail? The literature on stigma in international relations has done an excellent job of pointing to the role successful stigmatization processes play in the construction and maintenance of normative hierarchies, but there has been far less exploration of the conditions under which they may fail in this purpose and the potential consequences for international security and society. This article contributes such an exploration by focusing on the attempted stigma imposition on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. While Russia was stigmatized as an aggressor by a significant part of international society, including through diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, this failed to deter further Russian aggression, as demonstrated by its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and thus to reinforce the norm of territorial integrity. The article investigates the reasons for this failure, locating them both in insufficient stigma imposition—the difficulty in building and maintaining a committed “audience of normals” and to impose strong enough status loss and material costs—and to some extent in Russia's counter-stigmatizing stigma management. In conclusion, it considers what could in theory be done differently for stigma imposition to “work,” and calls for further research on the connections between stigma and emotion, as a core under-researched factor in the stigma literature.

Community Interest and the International Public Legal Order

Traditional ideas about the private nature of the international legal order are increasingly being forced to contend with the development of public legal elements at the international level. The notion of the international community interest is key to understanding these developments and, as such, has transformed our understanding of international law. There are many different approaches to the public/private distinction in law, broadly categorised into relational, public authority, and interest-based approaches. These can be reduced to four key elements of publicness: the existence of a community or public; the universality of the public regime in question with its own boundaries; normative and institutional hierarchies; the objectivity of obligation and responsibility. The development of the community interest and related norms of international law can be seen to have introduced and strengthened all of these elements of publicness within the international legal system. It is thus on its way to becoming an international public legal order. This has important implications for our understanding of international law and the future development of the international legal order.

Blood, Bile, and Blessings: Normative Hierarchies in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Women's Writing

Blood, Bile, and Blessings: Normative Hierarchies in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Women's Writing

Diffusionism and Beyond in IR Norm Research

ABSTRACT This article suggests the relevance of diffusionism in discussing the past, the present, and the future of the International Relations (IR) norm diffusion literature. The paper argues, thus, that IR norm research has reproduced the diffusionist and beyond-diffusionist mechanisms and epistemologies that the anthropological research on culture diffusion has developed, and this has been consequential for the discipline. Accordingly, the diffusionism dominant in the mainstream IR norm research has led to the normalisation of normative hierarchies and power asymmetries between geographies in the diffusion context. The critical norm research, complementarily, while extensively criticising such biased scholarly practices, failed to diagnose the problem as diffusionism and thus failed to benefit from the informed conclusions the anthropological schools offered regarding beyond-diffusionism in diffusion research. The paper takes this as a basis for highlighting the necessity to further extend the dialogue between IR and social sciences and humanities on issues including diffusion.

Translocal Householding

Abstract The urban experience remains inextricably entangled with the rural for millions of poor migrants to cities in the global South who labor in informal economies. Translocal households, households that share the labor and costs of social reproduction spatially across the city and the country, are an important site of entanglement, empirically and imaginatively. The dynamics of translocal householding in the oral histories of two migrants to Delhi reveal intermittent pathways of escape from and recuperation of normative hierarchies of social difference—especially of gender and caste—over life times and spaces. The need for care and rejuvenation lead to creating new forms of community and unexpected friendships in cities, with village households a fallback. In the process of seeking aspirations, refuge, belonging, and a final resting place, it is likely that hierarchies based on social difference shift but are recuperated in translocal households.

Toward a Reasons-First View of Normative Background Conditions

Background conditions are thought to explain how objects can have value in virtue of certain features and how reasons can consist in certain facts. The following paper provides an account of what background conditions are and what effect they have on normative features. It defends the idea that if values depend on reasons, then there is nothing really surprising or mysterious about the presence of background conditions in normative explanations. Background conditions turn out to be a natural and predictable result of normative hierarchies that treat reasons as metaphysically fundamental relative to other normative features. The account is also shown to have advantages over competing accounts in that it is able to capture the functional criteria that characterize background conditions while remaining theoretically parsimonious.

Decolonizing the Curriculum

Global German Studies require a reassessment of the global histories, narratives, and injustices that continue to be underrepresented in the classroom as well as a critical reflection of how we define “German.” This article investigates the crucial role of decolonization in the reenvisioning of the discipline. Decolonization is understood as an intentional decentering of dominant voices, an interrogation of whiteness, and a move toward pedagogies incorporating Indigenous epistemologies and social justice practices. The article highlights opportunities for creating a global and decolonized curriculum, which can be implemented across all levels in German language classes, including German Studies courses taught in English. Examples demonstrate how such an approach decenters normative hierarchies that privilege whiteness, the cisgendered, hetero, abled, etc. and simultaneously reframe particular local histories while interrogating global colonizing processes and oppression.

Tracing minor gesture in Maya Krishna Rao’s kathakali-influenced performance

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip E. Muehlenbeck

Reviewed by: Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip E. Muehlenbeck Hannah Fereshtehkhou (bio) Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Vanderbilt University Press, Philip E. Muehlenbeck ed., 2017), ISBN 978–0–2143–9, 306 pages. In order to make the most of our understanding of the past, we must take steps to fully comprehend the challenges and nuances of history. Philip Muehlenbeck’s edited collection Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War,1 recognizes the importance of this and makes the effort to analyze the Cold War era from a gender and sexuality perspective. The Cold War was an event and time period that shaped cultures, and decisions made during that era were also influenced by and in reaction to, culture at that time. To this point, Meuhlenbeck and the authors understand that “we cannot effectively analyze decision making at the very top without taking into account the cultural assumptions of the decision makers.”2 Additionally, it is [End Page 252] imperative to delve into specific cultural values and systems such as gender and sexuality, because “feminist scholarship has observed that wars occur because power hierarchies grounded in constructions of gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity require them. Warring parties deploy difference to justify domination and, in the process, seek to sustain the hierarchies that imbue the system with meaning.”3 The assertion being made is that the Cold War was more than just a military standoff between nuclear powers; it was a battle between warring cultures and ideologies rooted, in part, in gender and sexuality hierarchies. While not arguing that the Cold War was necessarily caused by power hierarchies, Meuhlenbeck asserts that “[t]he Cold War fits well into this paradigm, since the maintenance of differences of all kinds remained fundamental to both the superpowers and their allies.”4 The following chapters reveal and explain how existing hierarchies influenced policy, were reinforced by the politics of the Cold War, and were used to “justify domination.” Such a discussion enables readers to better understand the context and motivations of the actions that were taken and the decisions that were made during the Cold War. The book consists of three thematic sections: sexuality, femininities, and masculinities. With these foci, the chapters demonstrate that the Cold War was truly a global event, and they highlight how, while the hegemonic powers of the East and West were building up both borders and competing ideologies, the “politics of gender and sexuality”5 around the world was being shaped and manifesting in similar ways to reinforce patriarchal and normative hierarchies. The commonalities of these discourses and policies speak to the ways gender and sexuality are universally expressed, understood, and controlled. The three thematic foci specifically show how sexuality is often policed, women are controlled, and gender roles are defined by and conflated with citizenship. The first section of the book focuses on how culture and policy during the Cold War were related to sexuality. This period of time saw an emphasis on natalism policies intended to encourage population growth and address depopulation concerns. Katherine Rossy and Kathleen Tobin write separately about the policies and concerns of France and the US during this era. France’s natalism policies resulted in the “repatriation” of numerous stateless children whose national origins were unknown in post-war France-occupied Germany, as well as in the perpetuation of patriarchal gender roles for French women. The US was meanwhile preoccupied with population levels around the world. Population was a specific concern in relation to “economic capacity”6 because “ideological battles centered on the sanctity of the free market.”7 In other words, the US was concerned about its population in terms of the sustainability and success of its free market economy. At the same time, Tobin explains that the quickly increasing population rates in Third World countries were seen as destabilizing, putting US trade interests at risk, as well as making Third World countries susceptible [End Page 253] to the spread of Communism. All of these national concerns resulted in the implementation of natalism policies that inherently fell onto women, burdening them with the pressure to increase birth rates while simultaneously attempting to police their...

“Still Raped Over Here”: Gay Male Femininity and the Rewards of Camp Ambivalence in Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls

ABSTRACTGirls Will Be Girls (GWBG) delivers a substantive queer-feminist critique of heteronormative animus toward women and gay men through jokes that weaponize that animus for insurgent purposes. The film’s rape and abortion jokes showcase the provocative notion that negative representations of femininity might be wielded strategically and, in fact, more resonantly because they resist recuperation by marginalizing normative hierarchies. GBWG’s enactment of gay male femininity deploys queer dissidence by ameliorating pain through mockery while emphasizing the costs of heteronormative and patriarchal inflictions. This essay offers a test case for a queer feminist politics—one that, without discarding the imperatives for and rewards of more materially grounded political work, mines the critical as well as affective affordances of rage, mockery, and indignity against heteronormativity’s arbitrary but still formidable injunctions. A queer feminist reading of camp denaturalizes heteronormativity with a potency that queer theory and feminist theory might harness yet more effectually in less divided collaboration.

Agrarian questions of labor in urban India: middle migrants, translocal householding and the intersectional politics of social reproduction

ABSTRACTOur paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of ‘cultural production’. Our term ‘middle migrants’ characterizes households that have managed to establish a foothold in cities, even as they remain enmeshed in their rural lives through translocal householding and cultural dispositions to difference.

On the Role of Normative Hierarchies in Constitutional Reasoning: A Survey of Some Paradigmatic Cases

AbstractThis article examines the role of normative hierarchies in constitutional argumentation. A threefold distinction between formal, material, and axiological hierarchy is employed. The correlative concepts of formal validity, material validity, and applicability are also briefly described. Within this framework, four cases are analysed: Decisions 1146/1988 and 10/2010 of the Italian Constitutional Court, and Kadi I and Opinion 2/2013 of the Court of Justice of the European Union. As a result, it is argued that axiological hierarchies are frequently used to reshape certain fundamental legal arrangements, namely, the hierarchy of sources (Decision 1146/1988 and Kadi), competence clauses (Decision 10/2010), and interpretive methodologies (Opinion 2/13).

(Not) getting the credit: women, liminal subjectivity and resisting neoliberalism in documentary production

Women experience positive engagements with documentary as an enclave that values their gendered contribution, but also suffer negative encounters with it as a genre that restricts their full involvement, by promoting masculinist practices as normative. This gendered dynamic means that women occupy a liminal space with regard to documentary. Women’s liminal status is experienced negatively in a number of ways: first, during commissioning, where their approach to narrative, budgets and directing are questioned; second, in terms of work relationships where they are required to be relentlessly ‘likeable’; and third, when credits for work performed are withheld. Women’s subjective identities are constructed around this negative liminal positioning but it can become a position or form of positive adaptation to gendered and neoliberal subjectivity in their working lives. Resistance occurs when women conduct practices such as, first, enhancing the status of affective labour; second, when they undo or reject working through normative hierarchies; and third, when they collaborate in documentary production to negate neoliberal logics of individualization. Liminality, thus, constitutes both a way of understanding women’s negative experiences of gender inequality in documentary production but also a potentially positive form of resistance to the gendered precarity that characterizes creative labour.

Taking the pressure: Unpacking the relation between norms, social hierarchies, and social pressures on states

This article advances a hierarchy-centered approach to the study of international social pressure on states. Prior scholarship has centered on the exposure of a gap between word and deed as key for social pressure. We argue that the scholarship on social pressure would benefit from paying more attention to the centrality of social hierarchies in the dynamics and effects of social pressure on states. It is through comparative assessments — the normative ordering of states as superior and inferior and placement in a social hierarchy — that social pressure is exerted and states are prodded into action. States positioned at the top or in the middle of normative hierarchies may be subjected to different social pressure than states positioned at the bottom. Developing this claim, we contend that normative hierarchies come in several forms. Reflecting on the dynamics of these normative hierarchies is important in and of itself, in our view, as it provides a deeper understanding of how norms generate shame, embarrassment, or status anxiety. That said, understanding normative hierarchies also gives us added purchase on explaining how states manage the social pressure of being ranked.

Race-ing Queerness

We argue that the representations of sex, love, and relationships in the television series Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) mirrors existing racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed hierarchies of masculinities among queer men. DTLA attempts to project a more inclusive ideology through its focus on typically marginalized groups but fails to offer a space for resisting or subverting those hierarchies. For that reason, we complicate DTLA’s representations as reproducing normative hierarchies. By doing so, we reimagine the potentiality of mediated spaces where the intersections and complexities of differences are embraced.

Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business

This short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher–practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls ‘hard knowledge’ above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of research methods inherently bound up with the researcher as an individual and the materiality of lived experience within research. Yet, in our experience, although each PaR project is individual, PaR projects follow certain shared modes evolving largely from embodied and heuristic research methods adapted from social sciences, such as (auto)ethnography, participant observation, phenomenology and action research. PaR methodology in theatre and performance is composed of a bricolage of these openly embodied methods, which makes PaR, as an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries, somewhat queer in academic terms already. It is unsurprising, then, that PaR is so attractive to queer practitioner–researchers bent on queering normative hierarchies of knowledge.

Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld: A “Modern Woman” of Sport and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Canada

Jewish-Canadian athlete Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld has been remembered as an exceptional all-around athlete, whose career triumph occurred at the 1928 Olympics where she won a gold medal as the lead-off member of the 4 × 100-meter relay team, a silver medal in the disputed 100-meter race, and placed fifth in the 800-meter race. She was also a hard-hitting sports journalist, in an occupation dominated by men, who championed women’s issues at all levels—local, national, and international—through her daily column for the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1937 to 1958; a coach for the women’s track and field team at the 1934 British Empire Games; and a critic of sport policy, particularly amateur athletics. In 1950 she was named Canada’s woman athlete of the half-century, narrowly edging out figure skater Barbara Ann Scott. The only Jewish athlete ever to win a gold medal in track and field, she was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel in 1981. The accolades for Rosenfeld continued to mount. In 1991 the city of Toronto established the Bobbie Rosenfeld Park situated between the Sky Dome and the CN Tower. On 9 June 1996, the Canada Post Corporation paid tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Modern Olympic Games by issuing five stamps honoring Canadian Olympians who distinguished themselves at previous Olympics, and included Bobbie Rosenfeld among those recognized.1 Rosenfeld’s athletic career spanned that crucial period in women’s sport history between the two world wars, long recognized by sports historians as “the golden age of women’s sport in Canada.”2 Rosenfeld, with her bobbed hair—the derivation of her nickname “Bobbie”—her lean athletic body, independent career girl persona, and immigrant working-class background, was the embodiment of a new type of femininity that emerged in the interwar years known variously as the Modern Girl and the Modern Woman. As a collective of women’s historians demonstrated recently, the Modern Girl emerged quite literally around the world in the first half of the twentieth century.3 Historian Kathy Peiss writes, “The Modern Girl was variously a symbol of female social freedom, normative Western racial hierarchies, the universality of beauty, standards of hygiene and fashion, and a modernizing economy.”4 Whereas the Modern Girl is usually associated with the representation of the sexualized, commodified flapper in the scholarly literature, another version

Les projets n’engagent que ceux qui y croient ! Une étude longitudinale des projets, performances et compétences

The internal mobility project is recognized as a good practice by the HRM community. Nevertheless, we know few about the way projects develop and projects influence on effective behaviors, like competencies development. To fill this gap, we define project as the result of an interaction between performance and organizational norms. We test this model with a semi-longitudial, 83 subjects survey. The results show that individuals craft projects primarily in function of normative hierarchies. We also demonstrate that the influence of projects on competencies development is heterogeneous