Normative Notions Research Articles

Investigating a Gestational Care Facility: An Ethnographic Exploration of Bio‐technological Possibilities Through a Retro‐speculative Lens

This story outlines the use of a fictional ethnography to delve into the theme of human‐technology interface, with assisted reproduction as its focus. Drawing from my ethnographic experiences around reproductive technologies and clinical spaces at large, the narrative imagines a world where technologies that assist in processes of conception and birthing have become increasingly inventive as well as readily available. The story, drawing on both existing as well as retrospeculative techniques, studies, and theoretical concepts, explores the notion of a child‐to‐be as symbolic of the idea of birthing futures. The speculative ethnography of a clinical facility centered around assisted reproduction, in an alternative present, dives into the ‘promissory’ role played by reproductive technologies and substances, while questioning normative notions of ‘desired futures'. With its focus on technological innovations and their relationship to ever‐evolving socio‐cultural norms and values, this narrative addresses the theme of anticipation through the lens of technological speculation, possible socio‐ethical dilemmas, and desirable familial futures. It also brings to the fore themes and issues evident in our reality, by presenting extreme‐case scenarios that highlight the discourses around them. The use of fiction and ethnography allows room for provocations, while providing a space to create an imagined setting, which aids in addressing multiple thematics simultaneously

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

Citizenship, Resistance and Animals: Karamoja Region Pastoralists' Resilience against State Violence in Uganda

Abstract Universal equality is achieved through citizenship. Despite this normative definition, the reality of citizenship differs across space and time. Against the backdrop of the decentring of state power in the wake of globalisation, when Western scrutiny focused on the peripheries of Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan, and when integrated disarmament and sedentarisation policies were promoted, pastoralists in the Karamoja region of Uganda, rather than appealing to normative notions of citizenship, initiated their own practice of citizenship in resistance to and articulation with the state order. Aware that direct confrontation with power immobilises a one-sided violence perpetration/victimisation relationship, pastoralists developed a repertoire of citizenship-related practices, including animals as co-citizens, to obtain recognition for continued nomadic pastoralism.

Italian trans geographies: retracing trans/cultural narratives of people and places

ABSTRACT This article maps an overlooked cultural history of Italy by exploring the literary notion of ‘trans geographies’ – a subgenre at the crossroads of autobiography, memoir, and travel narrative – through the memorialist work of sociologist and trans activist Porpora Marcasciano. Her narratives of people and place have repositioned trans identities within public spaces, while illustrating a larger phenomenon that remains underexplored within Italian Studies, namely, how places have shaped trans identities and how trans identities have, in turn, (re)shaped places. This article situates Marcasciano’s stories of gender self-determination in relation to: (1) interdisciplinary approaches to trans geographies; and (2) the writings of two very different Italian LGBT+ icons, Romina Cecconi and Mario Mieli. As a bard of the trans movement, Marcasciano has narrated concealed trans/cultural landscapes across the Italian peninsula, including Naples and the centuries-old culture of the femminielli; Rome’s dolce vita during the 1970s and 1980s; and the achievements of the trans movement in Bologna during the 1980s and the 1990s. This remapping ultimately unveils subaltern spaces that have remained at the margins of Italian collective memory as well as spaces where trans people have successfully explored new modes of inhabiting and sharing places, beyond taken-for-granted notions of normativity and transgression. The goal of this article is to outline how Marcasciano’s trans geographies have generated creative and critical sites while fostering more inclusive ways of narrating and sharing cultural history.

SAFE FROM “HARM”: THE GOVERNANCE OF VIOLENCE BY PLATFORMS

Platforms have long been under fire for how they create and enforce policies around hate speech, harmful content, and violence. In this study, we examine how three major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) conceptualize and implement policies around how they moderate “harm,” “violence,” and “danger” on their platforms. Through a feminist discourse analysis of public facing policy documents from official blogs and help pages, we found that platforms are often narrowly defining harm and violence in ways that perpetuate ideological hegemony around what violence is, how it manifests, and who it affects. Through this governance, they continue to control normative notions of harm and violence, denying their culpability, and effectively manage perceptions of their actions and directing users’ understanding of what is “harmful” versus what is not. Rather than changing the mechanisms of their design that enable harm, the platforms reconfigure intentionality and causality to try to stop users from being “harmful,” which, ironically, perpetuates harm.

“We are not the people they think we are”: First-generation undocumented immigrant belonging and legal consciousness in the wake of deferred action for parents of Americans

On 20 November 2014, President Barack Obama introduced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) as a temporary relief for undocumented immigrant parents raising citizen children in the United States. DAPA’s implementation stalled indefinitely following a court-issued injunction in 2015, subsequent legal contestation, and a Supreme Court decision in 2016 upholding the original injunction. I purport that both DAPA and its failure to implement constitute sites from within which to critically examine the legal consciousness and sense of belonging of undocumented participants. By bridging scholarship on legal consciousness and belonging, this article examines how Latino first-generation undocumented immigrants from Los Angeles, who considered DAPA, understand their unlawful presence and assert belonging in the United States (US). This article draws on participant observation in Los Angeles, California, including four DAPA legal information forums and 24 in-depth interviews following DAPA’s court injunction with undocumented parents who intended to apply to DAPA. Data reveal a legal consciousness imbued with normative and value-based notions of substantive citizenship including parenthood, law-abidingness, and contribution. In light of DAPA’s failure, participants draw on these narratives to counter-assert their belonging and deservingness of DAPA. Ultimately, this case draws attention to how undocumented, first-generation immigrant legal consciousness is more complex than previously ascertained, and how DAPA shapes immigrants’ claims to a lawful presence.

Readings in race, space and poverty in Urban Planning and Analysis of Racial poverty in American City Chicago

Abstract: In recent years long disinvested cities became the situating of revived investment magnification and economic development in an exceedingly development typically delineated as gentrification. Even so socio economic distinctions between races,ethnicities, Gender and places inside the more sizably voluminous Metropolitan space still persist suggesting that a tide doesn't raise all boats. planners should grapple with these quandaries with inequality and inequity significantly the implementation of plans and policies which will in theory give edges to any or all however in optically canvass perpetuate to accumulate benefits for a few. This analysis examines the development of race, the engendering of a place and sedulousness of penuriousness within the racialized places in the City. This analysis can have interaction in an exceedingly essential discussion of the same themes designated the normative notions of phrase, capitalism, urbanism, gender, power and house are perpendicular to privilege adscititious marginalised views of those processes.

What Makes Something Surprising?

AbstractSurprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive‐neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains when and why an unexpected fact is surprising. We distinguish between descriptive and normative notions of what is surprising; clarify the sense in which surprising facts are unexpected; and, finally, develop and defend the significance account of surprise, according to which a fact is surprising to an agent if and to the extent that it is both unexpected and significant to the agent. Since a surprising fact can be significant to an agent in various ways—personal, moral, epistemic, and aesthetic—surprise is not merely or primarily epistemic. Fitting surprise reflects more than a person’s view of what is; it reflects a person’s view of what is significant.

Structures of the Public Sphere: Contested Spaces as Assembled Interfaces

This article updates certain aspects of the normative notions of the public sphere. The complex ecosystem of social communications enhanced by mobile media platform activity has changed our perception of space. If the public sphere has to normatively assess the expected conditions for public debate and for democracy, the assemblage of devices, discourses, infrastructures, locations, and regulations must be considered together. The literature reviewed about the public sphere, spaces, and geographically-enabled mobile media leads this article to the formulation of a concept of the public sphere that considers such assemblage as an interface. As an empirically applicable update to the definition of the public sphere the text offers a model that helps analyze those factors considering how they shape the communicative space in four modes: representations, structures, textures, and connections. These modes consider the roles played by assemblages of devices, infrastructures, and content in delimiting the circulation of information. The second part of the article illustrates the model with examples from previous research, paying particular attention to the structures’ mode. The dissection of qualitative, quantitative, and geodata generated by digital and (visual) (n)ethnographic tools reveals three subcategories for the analysis of structures of space: barriers, shifts, and flows. The structures effectively enable/disable communication and define centers and peripheries in the activity flows. The contribution of this article is, thus, conceptual—it challenges and updates the notion of the public sphere; and methodological—it offers tools and outputs that align with the previously developed theoretical framework.

The political economy of industrial pollution control: environmental regulation in Swedish industry for five decades

The paper analyzes the prerequisites for a regulatory-driven transition toward radically lower air and water pollution in industry. This is achieved in the empirical context of the Swedish mining and metals industry, and by investigating the environmental licensing processes during two regulatory systems. The paper derives an analytical framework that explores under what circumstances such licensing processes can result in radical emissions reductions without seriously jeopardizing the competitiveness of the industry. Archived material covering six environmental licensing processes, three during each system, is used to illustrate the various design and implementation issues. The results suggest that regulatory-driven green transitions benefit from trust-based bargaining procedures in which companies are involved in repeated interactions with regulatory authorities, and which extended probation periods permit tests of novel abatement technologies (including innovation). The findings also illustrate the importance of abstaining from simplified normative notions about policy instrument choice (e.g. taxes versus standards).

The internet’s “transnational” boyfriend: digital (re)presentations of celebrity men

ABSTRACT This article explores online (re)presentations of famous men and masculinities, and the surrounding concept of “the internet’s boyfriend”. The work examines how such discourse is shaped by global dynamics, structural racism, an “economy of visibility”, and demand for depictions of “difference.” Drawing on studies of celebrity, masculinities, marketing, and digital culture, I analyse how three famous men who are publicly desired and/or admired are (re)presented in digital spheres—memes, videos, articles, and accumulative discourse. Focusing on (re)presentations of Timothée Chalamet, Idris Elba, and Bong Joon-ho, I scrutinise how famous men are transnationally remediated in ways that can reinforce, resist, and rupture Anglo-Western normative notions of desirable masculinity. Culturally specific and hybridised ideas, identities, and ideologies that are projected onto such men online reveal the entanglements of issues concerning sexuality, (non)whiteness, exoticisation, nationality, masculinity, celebrity, and global media. Although “the internet’s boyfriend” is not always white, he is often someone who grew up in, identifies with, and is praised within, Western cultures. This article explicates how and why online (re)presentations of famous men in a transnational media landscape are couched in common narratives which include them being claimed as an (inter)national treasure, attractive to Anglophiles, and (re)presented as eccentric and exoticised Others.

Marcello the Dog and More-Than-Human Family in Elina Brotherus's Self-Portraits from the Series Carpe Fucking Diem

This article examines the possibilities of visual culture to open new perspectives on interspecies relations by analyzing self-portraits from visual artist Elina Brotherus’s photography series Carpe Fucking Diem (2011–2015). Brotherus has suggested that this series talks “about a failure to have a family with kids and give normality the finger”. The self-portraits can be seen to address this “failure” to have a normative nuclear family, while simultaneously questioning the desirability of the norm itself through Brotherus’s relationship with her pet dog, dachshund Marcello. The article explores the more-than-human notions of kinship and family in Carpe Fucking Diem, drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, as well as discussions on new materialism and posthumanism. The concept of companion species deconstructs human exceptionalism and the boundaries between human and animal, and indicates that the physical and affective co-becomings between humans and the non-human significant others co-evolve with each other in complex and asymmetrical ways. In affective and embodied readings of three self-portraits and one video work from the Carpe Fucking Diem series, I examine how Elina Brotherus’s self-portraits call into question the normative notions of family as human-centered and heteronormative.

Negative Affect, Queer Aesthetics, and the Illuminations of Cleanness

ABSTRACT In 1924, W. W. Greg referred to the twelve illuminations of London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. as “queer pictures.” Greg’s provocative description of these images serves as the foundation for a reconsideration of the manuscript’s much maligned visual program. By first attending to the affectively negative and highly aestheticized terms which have come to be associated with the images, such as “crude” and “amateur,” this article argues for the reconsideration of the implications of such language. In doing so, it provides a means of understanding how such language reinforces notions of aesthetic and sexual normativity. It likewise explores the role of Cleanness — one of the four poems copied into MS Cotton Nero A.x. — in establishing an aesthetic dialectic which pervades the manuscript object itself. In juxtaposing the “fayre formez” of God’s court and the “dedez vnfayre” ascribed to sexual deviancy, the poet of Cleanness fashions a dialectic which highlights the co-constitutive interplay of cleanness and filth in the medieval religious imagination. This article ultimately contends that the “crudity” of the illuminations represents a complex understanding and deliberate extension of the poet’s textual dialectic which is predicated on the careful suggestion of sin and explicit depiction of God’s judgment.

The Good, the Bad and the Right: Formal Reductions among Deontic Concepts

The present article provides a taxonomic analysis of bimodal logics of normative ideality and normative awfulness, two notions whose meaning is here explained in terms of the moral values pursued by a given community. Furthermore, the article addresses the traditional problem of a reduction among deontic concepts: we explore the possibility of defining other relevant normative notions, such as obligation, explicit permission and Hohfeldian relations, in terms of ideality and awfulness. Some proposals in this respect, which have been formulated in the literature over the years, are here improved and discussed with reference to the various logics that we will introduce.

Aging biomarkers and the measurement of health and risk.

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to develop a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship.

Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

Reviewed by: Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera Angel Daniel Matos (bio) Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera. UP of Mississippi, 2020. In the forum on Latinx Young Adult Literature published in volume 47 of Children's Literature, Marilisa Jiménez García introduces the compilation of essays by highlighting how Latinx literature pushes scholars to question what people and experiences are often excluded from academic discourse. In particular, Jiménez García highlights the potential that Latinx literature possesses to reframe and recontextualize our critical and pedagogical relationship with youth literatures and cultures: "Latinx literature is a liminal space daring us to transcend disciplines and borders, asking us to go beyond our neat definitions" (7). In addition to underscoring the critical potentialities of Latinx youth literatures, Jiménez García urges scholars to resist the homogenizing pressures of perpetuating a single story through our research and to move beyond mainstream narratives that frame Latinxs as "light-skinned [End Page 277] Spanish speakers" (6). In more ways than one, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera's Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (henceforth Nerds) not only celebrates people, experiences, and texts that push us to rethink normative understandings of young Latinx life, but further complies with Jiménez García's call for critical interventions that push us to acknowledge the complexity, richness, and paradoxes present in multiple representations of Latinx experience. This exemplifies a crucial intervention within the field of young adult literature, especially within the intersection of Latinx literature, youth cultures, and existing conversations on marginalization and liminality in teen cultural productions. The essays in Nerds scrutinize representations of teen Latinx life that contest or pressure mainstream narratives that associate these teens with "cool" and "hip" practices and beliefs. Most of the essays focus on teens who would commonly be described as "uncool," or that challenge the stereotypical representation of Latinx adolescents in literature and media. Additionally, the essays push readers to interrogate the ways in which "uncool" and ostracized teens must negotiate their outsider status given their positionality as members of marginalized Latinx communities. Although Nerds could have implemented a more robust introductory framework that would assist readers in further understanding the tensions that exist between Latinx contexts and "uncool" experiences and identities—which are often aligned with frameworks pertaining to ideological whiteness—this collection excels at highlighting new, unprecedented, and academically rigorous ways of thinking about Chicanx and Latinx young adult literature. The volume succeeds in its mission to challenge normative and monolithic notions of what teen Latinx life looks and feels like—and in the process, it pushes readers to engage in necessary, albeit difficult conversations on topics such as cultural authenticity and the limits of mainstream representations. Nerds is organized into four overarching sections, and each of these is focused on Latinx teen characters who embody different types of marginalized or "outsider" identities: artists and creators, superheroes and nonhuman beings, nerds and academically driven teens, and "non-cholo" characters who contest norms of gender and sexuality. The first section, "Artists and Punks," more specifically focuses on characters who are outsiders given their creative interests—with a particular attention in young Latinx women who engage with writing and zine crafting as a way of negotiating their liminal positionalities. The section opens with Amanda Ellis's "Chicana Teens, Zines, and Poetry [End Page 278] Scenes: Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero," which traces how Quintero's book offers a gripping representation of a geeky Chicana feminist by highlighting the transformative and political potential of creative writing and journaling. Lettycia Terrones's standout essay, "Praxis of Refusal: Self-Fashioning Identity and Throwing Attitude in Pérez's The First Rule of Punk," examines the social challenges that bicultural and mix-raced girls often experience, focusing particularly on how the protagonist of Celia C. Pérez's middle-grade novel invokes a punk-rock sensibility in order to develop an activist-oriented identity that resists assimilative pressures. Terrones's essay rigorously grapples...

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The articles in this issue provide a glimpse of the difficult questions and expansive, insightful possibilities that drive the discipline of Asian American studies. While each paper identifies a distinct research agenda and methodological approach, they all make clear the urgency of their fundamental contributions. The unsaid and unspeakable are exposed in careful and meticulous ways, with the understanding that such acts of engagement are crucial steps toward justice. The first three papers begin in Korea—a tiny peninsula, forever entangled with one empire after another, and the far too common horrors of sexual violence as an instrument of colonization. Yuri Doolan's piece begins by uncovering the origins of a "vexed intrapersonal relation" associated with adopted children from Korea. Doolan begins by noting that studies of Korean adoption often reference camptowns—neighborhoods near US military bases where off-duty troops find recreational activities, including sexual services, provided by local residents—in passing, as mere background context to a larger point. Doolan convincingly argues that this is a crucial, missed opportunity in understanding not only international adoption but also the sexual and racial formation of Korean and Korean American women in the United States. The author traces the discursive and ideological framing of adopted girls from Korea as rescued and rehabilitated prostitutes, as needing to be saved from "a perverse heredity and carnal savagery." The presumed origins of adopted children as sons or daughters of prostitutes became central to the maintenance of international adoptions from South Korea. Doolan illustrates how this [End Page v] persistent hypersexualization of Korean orphans and Korean American women functions to promote US exceptionalism as a humanitarian nation. Then, Laura Barberán Reinares shifts our approach to issues of sexual violence, empire, and Korea through the literary works of three Korean American authors: Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee. Reinares focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language by analyzing the narration of systematic rapes endured by "comfort women" in World War II. In this article, Barberán Reinares outlines the complex task of writers in depicting sexual violence, or verbally representing the "unrepresentable." Barberán Reinares highlights the conundrum for these writers as they grapple with the discursive limits of a human rights approach to faithfully relay stories of violence as evidence for justice, knowing that the narration (fictional or otherwise) of detailed accounts may in fact reobjectify victims by merely serving others' voyeuristic curiosity. In her careful analysis, Barberán Reinares shows how these three authors avoid potentially exploitative imagery without necessarily sacrificing the political for the aesthetic. In their fictionalized representations, each author, in their own manner, creatively focuses on the inner, abject aspect of violence through a variety of narrative tools. In this way, fictional representations can convey the gravity of the violence while also developing characters not solely defined by their abuse. In Na-Young Lee's paper, we see that human rights discourse comes with further complications. The struggle to bring accountability for the violence inflicted by the Japanese military sexual slavery system illustrates how even the most egregious acts of state violence do not necessarily warrant collective repudiation or international action. Justice does not just happen. In the case of "comfort women," a coordinated effort by many individuals was required. These activists had to not only shift our understanding of human rights beyond issues that center men and thereby obscure sexual or intimate violence as worthy of global attention, but also question normative Western notions of "universal" human rights, which diminish issues raised by global south nations as "local" concerns. Lee provides a detailed "backstage" account of how "comfort women" activism by Korean women was central in making this shift. Lee argues that an international movement in solidarity with "comfort women" rewrote the norms of global women's rights in the 1990s. Incorporating methods of oral history interviews, participant observations, and textual analysis of activist archives, Lee carefully maps how this international effort transcended the boundaries of nation, race, and gender. The next article, by Lei Zhang, details a human rights activism of a different sort. Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown of...

Mina Loy's Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

 Reviews possession of language. How does one represent the non-human in narrative, and what debates must ensue about the nature and limits of anthropocentrism? Jon Hegglund’s contribution makes claims for the power of narrative in highlighting non-human agency (in horror literature or sci-fi). Mention is also made in the Introduction of children’s fiction, which is so oen about animals, though children’s literature is sadly absent from the main body of essays. () Second is the issue of narrative ethics, the way narratives position or assume their agents and recipients in culturally specific ways, making narratology engage issues of cultural politics beyond the kinds of exclusively technical or formal analysis and classification with which it is still oen identified. () A third key direction for narratology engaged here is a turn towards cognitive science, as in Matthew M. Low’s exploratory paper on how its cognitive modelling through narratives can work as a resource for the actual restoration of the American prairie. e edited collection of essays is a staple form of research publication in the humanities. However, it is probably rare for someone other than a reviewer to read a collection from cover to cover. I would also wager that if a survey were done of citations from this kind of critical anthology, the introduction would oen rank among the most utilized of its essays. is will probably be the case with James and Morel’s fine ‘Introduction: Notes toward New Econarratologies’, which performs well the overall revisionist work ascribed to the whole collection. So many ecocritical essays, including several here, take the limited form of proselytizing for a contemporary text likely to be unknown to a reader. As James and Morel showcase, an introduction has the advantage of needing to be succinct and of being written last, as a summary overview, with less of the air of being a critic’s personal performance. D U T C Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. By L S. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . x+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book joins a number of recent monographs that reflect a burgeoning academic interest in the work of long-neglected but quintessential modernist Mina Loy, notably Tara Prescott’s Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ) and Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ). Laura Scuriatti makes an original contribution to the field by exploring some of the less familiar material reprinted in Mina Loy: Stories and Essays, ed. by Sara Crangle (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ): work such as the ‘Mi & Lo’ fragments, and the essays ‘History of Religion and Eros’ and ‘e Library of the Sphinx’, the latter an imagined dialogue with Havelock Ellis that contains a characteristically piquant Loy observation: ‘the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman’ (p. ). Scuriatti also delves into the archive of unpublished material held at Yale, MLR, .,   commenting, for example, on the ‘Geronimo’ fragment, a portrayal of Giovanni Papini intended for the unfinished prose work ‘Esau Penfold’, and (more extensively ) on ‘Goy Israels’, a prose account of the family dysfunctions that Loy also explored in her long poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’. Rather than being consigned to the ‘marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women) who did not fit the criteria of high modernism’, Scuriatti suggests that Loy should be seen as projecting a ‘critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon’ (p. ). She identifies Loy’s work as being informed by a tension between, on the one hand, the early modernist conception of ‘the artwork as a product of genius’ with its creator ‘endowed with a quasi-divine power of insight into reality’ and, on the other, a more ‘critical modernist conception, which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist, and art as part of a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity, and subjectivity’ (ibid.). Chapters are devoted to Loy’s interaction with radical Italian writing before the First World War, as influenced by Otto Weininger...

The Art of Writing from the Border: Narrative Decentralisation and Pluricultural Identity Construction in Tomizza’s Franziska (1996)

This article examines one of Tomizza’s unjustifiably understudied texts within two primary contexts: one formed around the historical, political and social background of early 20th-Century Trieste, the other around the author’s recurrent concern with hybrid characters and geopolitical, cultural and linguistic borderlands. At the surface, these contexts are dramatised to revisit a political and ethnic conflict from the viewpoint of one of its most invisible victims. To uncover the novel’s more deep-running operations, however, this study takes a narratological approach and applies perspectives associated with imagology and linguistic hybridity as well as theories of border writing and border-crossing. Whereas the narrative fusion of historical reconstruction, self-reflexive commentaries, epistolary testimonies and mythical fictionalisations creates a discourse of literary fragmentation and deterritorialisation, the protagonist’s biographical background and socio-culturally embedded experiences are interlaced to represent a liminal character formed by dual perspectives, plurilingual enunciations and incompatible loyalties. Franziska exists between history and myth and as she increasingly acquires different cultural codes, she also comes to linger, irreconcilably, between different and conflicting cultural civilisations. Just as the multidimensional text questions norms of literary unity, so does this fluid character expose stereotypical conceptions of ethnic identities. As an amalgamated device, the self-referential narrator and the border crosser he constructs expose not only ideals of linguistic and cultural purity but also totalitarian conceptions of geographical and cultural borders. Ultimately, this experimental literary operation implicates the reader in a democratic literacy of multiple perspectives that questions normative notions of identities, belonging, culture and nationhood.

The work lives of disabled teachers: revisiting inclusive education in English schools

Globally there is a focus on ensuring a more diverse teaching workforce ensuring representation across gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity. However, little attention is paid to ensuring the inclusion of disabled teachers. This paper examines the work lives of ten disabled teachers in schools across England. Their experiences suggest that whilst there is a strong discourse on inclusive education within English schools and policies this does not necessarily extend to disabled teachers themselves. Whilst the disabled teachers participating in this research demonstrated ways in which their presence disrupted normative notions of able-bodiedness in education and they actively created spaces for inclusive learning, the majority also reported facing significant discrimination and barriers whilst at work. Urgent change is needed to support disabled teachers to access effective training as well as the removal of barriers to enable disabled teachers to remain in the workforce and progress their careers. Points of interest Inclusive education is vital in order to ensure education for all. Efforts to include teachers with diverse characteristics into the workforce are being promoted globally, however; this rarely includes disabled teachers. If education is to be truly inclusive then we need to support and encourage not only children with disabilities, but also work to support and encourage the careers of disabled teachers. This study is comprised of in-depth interviews with 10 teachers in England who reflect on what it means to be disabled and to pursue a career in mainstream schools.