Political Self Research Articles

Soviet Active Measures and the Second Cold War: Security, Truth, and the Politics of Self

Soviet Active Measures and the Second Cold War: Security, Truth, and the Politics of Self

Grigory Zinoviev: the torments and tosses of the oppositionist (1927-1934)

The subject of the article is the political behavior of one of Stalin's greatest opponents, Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, in the period between his first expulsion from the party at the end of 1927 and his arrest on charges of Kirov's murder in December 1934. Zinoviev's letters, speeches and statements to the party leadership are analyzed, through which he tried to achieve the main goal of returning to the party and to political activity. It is established that Zinoviev has an internal struggle between public speaking and maintaining his own political attitudes. These "torments" and "tosses" caused distrust of Zinoviev from the party leaders and led the hero first to a psychological breakdown, and then to political death. The materialistic concept (in particular, historical determinism) is used as a tool. The method of psychohistory is also used to analyze the inner world of a politician and the motivation of his actions. An analysis of Zinoviev's activities as a vivid example of the political behavior of a communist oppositionist allows us to draw the following conclusions: 1) Zinoviev's behavior during the period under review was determined by his return to the party, preferably to a leadership job. The basis for achieving the goal was the recognition of the impossibility of further opposition struggle, which could lead to a split of the CPSU(b), as well as general agreement with the policy of collectivization and industrialization that had begun; 2) The content of Zinoviev's appeals to various governing bodies, including I. V. Stalin, changed according to the situation inside the party leadership. 3) The calculation was not just to return to the party and to the leadership, but to take part on Stalin's side in the fight against Bukharin. The party leadership saw this and used it for psychological breakdown. 4) It is incorrect to consider Zinoviev's political behavior as a classic "double-dealing". He did not conduct anti-party work and did not reject the foundations of the party line. But his behavior led at the end of 1932 to a psychological breakdown and a rejection of his own political self. Finally, Zinoviev's "torments" and "throwing" stopped at the end of 1934. He died as a politician. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the very formulation of the question, the introduction of unpublished Zinoviev documents into scientific circulation, consideration through one of the leaders of the party and the oppositionist of the mechanism of strengthening Stalin's personality.

Incarcerated Body and Political Self in Tek Nath Rijal’s Torture Killing Me Softly: Bhutan Through the Eyes of Mind Control Victim

Tek Nath Rijal’s prison narrative Torture Killing Me Softly: Bhutan Through the Eyes of Mind Control Victim narrates the story of a Bhutanese captive in one’s own state. The prison narrative describes the holocaust-type imprisoned life and state tortured politically willed refugee. The captive accuses the state for secretly monitoring, and manipulating his state of mind through some highly sophisticated, lethal and anti-human ultra-modern “Mind Control Machine” (specific title is unavailable in the narratives). Adds on, the captive is seen to be fighting with his state-owned body’s involuntary actions through his own body’s voluntary conscience. The fight between voluntarily and involuntarily controlled self becomes so confusing that it brings readers doubt his objective narration. As the sociologist Anthony Giddens concerns that in the time of high modernity individuals reflect on their self-body to define the reliable sense of identity and sane-self, the captive’s narration attempts to justify the his sanity and ‘politically correct self’. The captive’s allegation on the machine-technology for reconstructing his body restrains him into a controlled and split subject.

The CPTPP, cross-strait tensions, and Taiwan’s recognition for survival strategy under the democratic progressive party

Abstract Since coming to power in 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has pledged to safeguard Taiwan’s sovereignty amidst Beijing’s aggressive imposition of the one-China principle. This article assesses the impact of the DPP’s recognition for survival strategy which involves using free trade agreements (FTAs) to boost Taiwan’s legal standing and recognition in the international community. The strategy entails a two-pronged plan: retaining Taiwan’s status as a vital regional economic player to ultimately advance its de jure sovereignty via regional FTAs. Drawing on Taiwan’s past FTA experiences, we analyze the possible outcomes of the government’s application to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the likely consequences of these outcomes on the country’s sovereign claims and status. We argue that while the DPP’s strategy plays a crucial role in renegotiating Taiwan’s political self as an unrecognized state, failure to mitigate the negative externalities of the one-China principle while negotiating and implementing the CPTPP will further undermine the country’s facto sovereignty.

Survival Migrancy and the Political Self: A Nascent Construct from Pastoral Care With Venezuelan Men in Ecuador

Survival Migrancy and the Political Self: A Nascent Construct from Pastoral Care With Venezuelan Men in Ecuador

TikTok and Civic Activity Among Young Adults

TikTok is known for its lighthearted dance and lip-synch videos, yet videos with the hashtag #politics have garnered nearly 14 billion views. Does young adults’ politically oriented expression on TikTok lead to increased civic engagement offline? TikTok helps incorporate young adults into political social networks that may encourage additional civic activity. In addition, the playful, humorous nature of TikTok-based political expression encourages young adults to develop participatory, political selves. Using data from a 2020 survey of Americans between 18 and 25 years old, we find that posting political videos on TikTok connects with higher offline civic engagement. The results suggest that playful political expression is an important feature for promoting young adult civic engagement.

Book Review: The discursive construction of the modern political self: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the age of social media

Book Review: The discursive construction of the modern political self: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the age of social media

Black Skin, Red Masques: Reading Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde in Tension with Edgar Allan Poe

If we read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” as an allegory of the coronavirus crisis, how can we account for the resurgence of Black Lives Matter during this time? Scholars now agree that Poe held deeply racist beliefs about Black people: his Philadelphia was both a hub for scientific innovation and scientific racism coeval with being a site for a vibrant free Black community. I pair Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde to juxtapose with Poe in order to read the tensions between Poe’s racism versus Fanon’s anticolonial critique and Lorde’s Black feminism. Poe’s story offers us a tale of privileged indulgence as a selfish refuge during broader social crisis, which can be troubled by Fanon’s discussion of Black ontology and the “Prospero complex”. In contrast, Lorde’s Burst of Light presents an analysis for how self-care can be “an act of political warfare”, with her battles against cancer amidst her global activism for social justice focused on Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour. In my essay I use the dynamic anachronistic convergence of their writings as an occasion to consider questions of the racial politics of self and collective care in the face of crises of pandemic and police brutality that disproportionately impact Black people.

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song ed. by Rachel May Golden and Katerine Kong

Reviewed by: Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song ed. by Rachel May Golden and Katerine Kong Juliana Starr Golden, Rachel May, and Katerine Kong, eds. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song. UP of Florida, 2021. ISBN 978-0-8130-6903-6. Pp. 310. This collection, comprised of an introduction by the editors and ten essays, traces the gendered manifestations and meanings of voice in France and Occitania, from the twelfth century until the early sixteenth century. The volume views medieval France as a locus of new trends in travel, trade, and cross-cultural encounters and as a hotspot of artistic ingenuity, including experimentation with French and Occitan (newly valued vernaculars), the productions of learned, Latinate scholars and scribes, the blossoming of troubadour and trouvère lyric, liturgical innovations that responded to changing needs, and the formation of the polyphonic song. Through such utterances—in song, liturgy, romances, letters, treatises, and sermons—medieval people cultivated their performative and political selves, shaping contemporaneous belief systems about gender. Most chapters engage in the important work of recuperating female-voiced genres, restoring female voice and subjectivity to their rightful place in medieval French literature and lyric. In chapter 1, however, Katherine Kong examines the exercise of Lancelot’s masculine voice in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier de la charrette, not as constitutive of a universal gendered subjectivity but rather to consider how its privileged status overrides abject, liminal, and subjugated performances of voice. In chapter 2, Tamara Bentley Caudill examines how gendered voices operate within conventions of particular troubadour lyric genres like the tenso and canso, while reinforcing and challenging gendered expectations. In chapter 3, Anne Adele Levitsky explores how the troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan challenges gender binaries in his classification of song genres, by distinguishing grammatical gender from socially constructed notions of song types. In chapter 4, Meghan Quinlan examines two linked trouvère songs and traces their poetic-musical interrelationships. Chapter 5, by Rachel May Golden, focuses on two anonymous trouvère lament songs that develop the voice’s capacity to engage with and reinterpret losses stemming from crusading contexts. In chapter 6, Lydia M. Walker examines how bishop Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) strategically constructs a preaching voice, developing vivid imagery and vocabulary to persuasively perform sermons in support of the Fifth Crusade. In chapter 7, Lisa Colton demonstrates the distinctive polyphonic construction of the motet as a community of voices in dialogue, one that allowed composers to interact with and comment upon past conventions, create multiple registers of gendered expressivity, and newly negotiate the vocalization of striking and highly personal emotions against ecclesiastic regulations for controlling such utterances. Anna Kathryn Grau, in chapter 8, employs close musico-poetic readings of female voices within motets to uncover nuanced gendered readings. Emily J. Hutchinson, in chapter 9, locates in the textual voice [End Page 195] of Christine de Pizan acts of gendered and political resistance. Finally, chapter 10, by Daisy Delogu, examines the early sixteenth-century court of Queen Claude of France where Anne de Graville, in an act of “voiceover,” boldly adapts the work of Boccaccio, appropriating a male-authored Italian text into her own romance intended for a female patron and public. This expertly researched and crafted collection is highly recommended to all interested in the complex relationships between gender and voice in medieval French culture. [End Page 196] Juliana Starr University of New Orleans (LA) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Framing Selves: Home, Gender, and Politics in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is an important voice in South Asian diasporic poetry. Her work enunciates the challenges that various marginalized communities face in their quotidian dealings with society and the state. This article reads her poems and drawings from I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at My Table (2006) to highlight the internal and external conflictual negotiations involved for women in the formation of resistant selves that aim to critique gendered, societal, and political norms harshly imposed on women. Her poetry consciously reframes selves and expresses the questions and possibilities that inhere in this process. The emergence of a productive instability of poetic form and meaning in her work charts avenues and modes for her poetic subjects to rediscover agency in their private and public lives. The article shows how Dharker's poetry invests the future with potential for the emergence of consciously political selves.

Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars 1985–2000

This essay examines two recently published collections of seminars, Madness and the Social Link, and The Birth of a Political Self. The seminars were run by Jean-Max Gaudillière at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in France, and transcribed by his wife, psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine. The two collections elucidate their pioneering approach to psychoanalysis of psychoses and trauma. They firmly place madness within the social and political circumstances of historical events traced through generations, and argue for the role of psychoanalysis in uncovering the “counter-history” of the official social narratives.

Moving toward Radical Love in Organizing Spaces

Moving toward Radical Love in Organizing Spaces

New Women and the Politics of Self: An Insight into Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”

This article is entitled "New Women and the Politics of Self: An Insight into Henrik Ibsen's “A Doll's House” and George Bernard Shaw's “Saint Joan”." The article investigates how the heroines in the plays of both authors break away from the mores of the Victorian and Norwegian societies in a bid to find their true selves. The article attempts a comparative analysis of the revolutionary attitudes of Ibsen's and Shaw's women. It illustrates the claim that the heroines of both authors are precursors of change and instruments of meaningful alteration. Based on the assumption that the women of Ibsen and Shaw are revolutionists and agents of socio-political, cultural, and economic transformation, the article posits that the unconventional mindsets of the heroines represent a threat to 19th-century society in general and the sacrosanctity of Victorian mores in particular. Seen from the feminist and Marxist perspectives, this article focuses on how Ibsen and Shaw used the stage in the 19th century to create stereotypical new women to achieve a gradual and sometimes cataclysmic transformation of their societies. According to the article, to discover their true selves, the heroines of the playwrights must challenge the inanities of conformist degeneracy in society and break the confining chain that limits women's freedom.

Contemporary Confessional Forms and Confessional Art

Within our twenty-first century confessional landscape, a new set of possibilities for confession has been realised which, in relation to the chronology of confessional art, expands on the political and social conditions visible in pre-millennial cultural politics. The confessional turn in postmodernity requires less of an emphasis on pre-modern frameworks of ritualised Christian confessional discourses. Taking into account the ubiquity of contemporary confessional forms (eg Facebook, Instagram, and the vlog/blogosphere), such historical terms of ritualised confession and its association to power appear almost archaic today. This article focuses on a framework of confessional art that explores a more direct mode of self-disclosure in order to examine self-representation and its relationship to subjectivity. As the boundaries between private and public space become increasingly problematised within this confessional landscape, this article posits that contemporary confessional art gives voice to displaced subjectivities to present a more complex politics of self.

The historical transformation of the Iranian parliamentary complex

ABSTRACT This article aims to provide a better understanding of how the Iranian parliament building, as an assemblage of buildings, urban spaces, narratives and similar symbols, shapes, reshapes and negotiates the Iranian concept of its political self since the establishment of the parliamentary structure in 1906. It examines the political practices, ideologies and consciousness of people affected by different political concepts embedded in each regime. This article discusses the involvement of spaces in creating historical events. Despite similar historical studies, it focuses on where the history of constituting the Iranian Parliament happened. It does so by reviewing and analysing the archives, documents and new urban plans for the Iranian Parliament.

Tell Me Who Your Enemies Are and I Will Tell You Who You Are’: Populism and The Creation of The Political Self

This article has been retracted due to double publication in another journal with the same article. Based on the clarification from the author. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication in this journal is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal.

Of Self and Polity: Writing Resistance in Dixit’s Madhavi

Madan Mani Dixit’s novel Madhavi (1983) subtly argues for change in the existing rigid political order of his time by projecting self larger than the polity. Borrowing a narrative from the Mahabharata, the novelist develops it into a full length novel to point out the cracks in the political system of his time: as a political order, the Panchayat had lost the sense of justice within the first two decades after its promulgation in 1962. Dixit employs Galav and Madhavi as dissenting voice of the age, upholding the spirit of resistance and seeking for transformation in consciousness. The tale from the post-Vedic society serves as an instance to imply the parallel situation of the country that attempts to transcend beyond the contemporary context. In this study, I have approached the novel from the new historicist vantage point to dissect the text in the changing political context of its writing. The paper claims that as a Nepali novel, Dixit’s Madhavi rewrites the episode of political struggle between the person and polity in an oppressive political order in the 1970s in Nepal when the political self and polity were in tension as the outcome of their struggle for a new order in society. Moving beyond the existing situation, the maestro novelist picks the narrative of Madhavi and Galav from the Mahabharata and sets them in quest of new order in the form of agrarian society from the crumbling order of slavery. Dixit’s work critiques the limitations of both self and polity in leaving the impact of one on the other, thereby exposing the brutal treatment and fall of an oppressive political order. This paper reads historical reality of the 1970s in Dixit’s Madhavi in which the author writes the political history of Nepal.

Social Media Expression, Political Extremity, and Reduced Network Interaction: An Imagined Audience Approach

The recent rise of political extremity and radicalization has presented unique challenges to contemporary politics, governance, and social cohesion in many societies in the world. In this study, we propose an imagined audience approach to understand how social media’s expanded expression capabilities are related to users’ political extremity and reduced network interaction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our imagined audience framework using a multi-country survey data set. Results from the United States, South Korea, and Japan reveal that expressive use of social media is associated with more extreme political attitudes and heightened intolerance, but the effect is contingent on whom the expresser has in mind as their audience. In particular, expressing one’s political self has a depolarizing effect for those expecting low audience reinforcement. We test the boundary conditions of our model in a more restricted information environment with a Chinese sample. We conclude by discussing the significance of our imagined audience approach and its relevance to today’s technology-mediated self-presentation.

Skid Row Indians and the Politics of Self

At the same time as native Indians have been increasing their political lobbying and organizational activity in Canada, the slum neighbourhoods of the inner cities have been witnessing a steady growth in Indian residents. Based on a study of the “Skid Row” Indian community in Vancouver, this paper seeks to link these two apparently disparate phenomena. It is argued that the underlying theme of Indian life on Skid Row is also political. The self-neglect, violence and other disvalued behaviours of Skid Row are seen as the political statements of a group who sees itself as powerless. Acting out the political process of the rejection of society on the stages of their own personal minds and bodies, Indians engage in “the politics of self”.

Queer expectations: An empirical critique of rural LGBT+ narratives

Much of the body of literature on LGBT+ populations within the United States place urban areas and so-called gayborhoods as goals and eventualities, paralleling early US studies on immigration. Using a multistage, mixed-methods approach, consisting of secondary analysis of the Pew 2013 Study of LGBT Persons ( N = 1197) and in-depth interviews (35 gay men, 2 trans-identifying individuals, 1 heterosexual woman, and 2 lesbians), we found that rural LGBT+ residents engaged in both short-term and long-term travel to mitigate feelings of being spatially segregated from the loci of gay social life—what Ghaziani (2019a) refers to as cultural archipelagos. However, rural residents also used their geographical location to resist dominant narratives about LGBT+ life. Some of our respondents felt that living in rural areas better situated them to be activists and advocates for LGBT+ rights, while others simply did not feel they could be comfortable within more urban contexts. These findings suggest that rural LGBT+ residents may have delinked their sexual selves with their cultural and political selves, thus illustrating the plurality of rural queer voices that exists. As we also argue, while residence category should be considered as influencing one’s experience, care must be used to avoid overly deterministic accounts. Finally, this article extends earlier work by Brekhus (2003), Mattson (2015), and Ghaziani (2019a) by presenting the meaningfulness of travel to and from queer cultural strongholds.