Paradox Of Recognition Research Articles

Artists in Isolation: The Paradox of Recognition in Paul Auster’s the Book of Illusions

ABSTRACT Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions presents a series of isolated, decentered artists whose identities, not merely their stories, are nested inside one another. Through a handful of textual clues, the narrator Zimmer assembles, within himself, the identity of the silent movie actor Hector Mann, and that construction, in turn, reflects back on Zimmer and secures his identity. The creative act can become a debilitating retreat or a productive form of intersubjectivity. In his quest for a stable identity, Zimmer explores what it means to be either an artist like Mann who shuts out the audience, depriving himself of the other’s gaze, or one who narrates himself into existence through a communion with absent and imaginary people. Auster complicates a simple notion of recognition and the possibility of intersubjectivity, by rejecting humanist presuppositions about the subject and by qualifying – through his depiction of desire and the quest narrative – a postmodern view of the decentered, intertextual subject. A postmodern dialectics of recognition appear not only in Zimmer’s textual relation to Mann and his flesh-and-blood relation to Alma, but also in Mann’s secret film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

Law, gender identity, and the uses of human rights: The paradox of recognition in South Asia

South Asia abounds with diverse gender identities that vary regionally based on religion, language, and cultural practices. Transgender rights activists have successfully deployed human rights rhetoric in order to obtain legal recognition of diverse gender identities from courts. However, the collapsing of these diverse identities and practices into a single category, under the transgender umbrella, by governments and judiciaries has created complex mechanisms for legal recognition of transgender persons. Simultaneously, international human rights principles are being invoked to win victories at the national level, which in turn offers insights into the dynamic interplay between law, activism, and human rights. In this article, we outline the constraints and opportunities presented by the changes in legal recognition of diverse gender identities across South Asia. We argue that the uses of international human rights statutes in national-level legal and judicial deliberations about recognizing transgender persons across South Asia offer limited opportunities, and mostly delimit access to formal citizenship, the very objective these laws seek to achieve. Simultaneously, this moment of wrestling with the limits of law, while continuing to demand full recognition from individual states, has given rise to cross-border mobilizations of a vibrant transgender rights movement. Such mobilizations reveal how diverse transgender activists are reinterpreting human rights principles in order to create coalitional multi-issue trans/justice movements throughout South Asia.

Gender in a Box? The Paradoxes of Recognition beyond the Gender Binary

The growing visibility of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals paved the way for a novel politics of transgender recognition in the legal sphere and state-governed public policies. Considering that the possibilities for registering multiple genders beyond male or female are taking effect in several countries, this article examines recent developments and claims that recognition is complicit with misrecognition for two main reasons. Firstly, because models of recognition tend to equalize all the interactions and all the fields of social life. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s notion of spheres of recognition, I argue that inasmuch as different forms of recognition (legal, moral, affective) are governed by different norms and gender regimes, the dynamics of recognition produce misrecognition. Secondly, because legal and institutional recognition tends to reify individual identity. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s critique of the identity model of recognition, I contend that the identity recognition model tends to impose a norm rather than recognizing diversity. Therefore, gender identity categories can—through a process of reification—block the entitlement to affirm one’s self-determined gender identity. The paradoxical dynamics of recognition are empirically illustrated through an analysis of third-gender markers and their effects upon the lives and narratives of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. By examining the case of Nepal in comparative perspective with other developments in Asia and South America, it is demonstrated that the identity model of recognition is complicit with feelings and practices of misrecognition.

Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism

Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism

The paradox of recognition: hijra, third gender and sexual rights in Bangladesh

Hijra, the iconic figure of South Asian gender and sexual difference, comprise a publicly institutionalised subculture of male-bodied feminine-identified people. Although they have existed as a culturally recognised third gender for a very long time, it is only recently that hijra have been legally recognised as a third gender in several South Asian countries. This paper focuses on the transformation of this long-running cultural category of third gender into a legal category of third gender in Bangladesh, showing that the process of legal recognition has necessitated a simultaneous mobilisation of a discourse of disability in the constitution of hijra as citizens worthy of rights. While the international community views the recognition of a third gender as a progressive socio-legal advance in the obtaining of sexual rights in a Muslim majority Bangladesh, locally, hijra are understood as a special group of people born with ‘missing’ or ambiguous genitals delinked from desire. Furthermore, what was previously a trope of disfigurement based on putative genital status has now been transformed into a discourse of disability, a corollary to which several interest groups, namely the civil society, the state, international community and hijra themselves, have all been party.

Meaningfulness and Paradoxes of Recognition in Dirty Work

Drawing on 37 interviews conducted with refuse collectors, street cleaners and graffiti removers in three London-based organisations, the paper demonstrates how recognition can potentially work in a paradoxical way. Although participants' logic of actions and meanings that they attach to their work and life experiences were shaped by their aspirations for life improvement and were arguably compatible with changing economic conditions and normative expectations, it wasn't one of either pure determinacy or indeterminacy (McNay, 2006). Their determination to advance was mixed with life uncertainties - the material conditions of their existence - and was censored by social relations that were expressed in the engrained dispositions and tendencies of embodied subjects (Bourdieu, 1990). Their actions and the production of meaningfulness were driven by dimensions that might not be easily integrated within the positive notion of recognition-impulse, necessity, uncertainty and doubt. Workers demonstrated both the ...

The Two Sides of Recognition: Gender Justice and the Pluralization of Social Esteem

This article seeks to sketch the contours of a good society, distinguished by its gender justice and the plural recognition of egalitarian difference. I begin by reconstructing Nancy Fraser's arguments highlighting the link between distributive justice and relations of recognition, in particular as it applies to gender justice. In a second step, I show that the debate on the politics of recognition has confirmed what empirical analyses already indicated, namely that Fraser's status model takes too reductive a stance towards the identity-constituting effects of relations of recognition. The simple demand that identities be recognized, however, glosses over the paradox of recognition, which arises out of the ambiguity between the demand for equal respect and the demand for the recognition of difference. This paradox cannot be resolved unless one takes into consideration the compensatory effect of value pluralism, that is, the inherent pluralism of recognition, well captured in the notion of "egalitarian difference".

Recognition, Cooperation and the Moral Presuppositions of Capitalist Organization of Work

Abstract Starting from the current debate on work and recognition, the article describes how shifts within the cultural frames of work, the transformation of hierarchies into internal markets and the development of a service economy lead to problems which can take the form of a 'paradox of recognition'. This paradox cannot be dissolved simply by a conceptual distinction between equal respect for persons and qualifying esteem of performance and efficiency, at least as long as we are interested in a matching of empirical analysis and normative critique. The normative claims for visibility and transparency of work are described as a paradigmatic case for the entanglement of questions of respect and esteem. With respect to recent developments within critical theory, the article argues that the idea of immanent critique needs further elaboration in order to accentuate the relation between normative critique and functional analysis.