Political Subjects Research Articles

Euphemisms and Dysphemisms in Netizens' Comments on Instagram Accounts @Sherlyannavita

This study aims to (1) find out the meaning of euphemisms and dysphemisms, (2) find out the function of euphemisms and dysphemisms in the Instagram comment column @sherlyannavita. This study uses sociolinguistic studies to examine various sources of meaning and function. This research is qualitative research. The method used in this study is descriptive analysis. The source of data in this study is comments on @sherlyannavita Instagram accounts with political themes in posts in September and October 2023. This research data is in the form of expressions or expressions classified as euphemisms and dysphemisms. Data collection techniques in the form of listen and record techniques. The analysis method used is in the form of referential padan techniques. Presentation of research results using informal methods. The results of this study were in the form of 25 euphemism expression data with associative meanings and functions to smooth speech. While the expression of dysphemism there are 28 data on the expression of dysphemism with associative and conceptual meanings, while its functions are in the form of ridicule, expressions of irritation, and expressions of disapproval.

The Imider protest camp: resistance by repossession and lived citizenship at the global margins of Moroccan society

ABSTRACT This article delves into the eight-year protest camp of Imider (2011–2019), analyzing important shifts both in forms of resistance as well as in political subjectivity within Morocco’s protest landscape. The camp was the place/space where a historical struggle against one of the largest silver mines in Africa converged and new lived practices, relationships and subjectivities materialized. We explore the intricate connections between lived citizenship and what we term ‘resistance by repossession’. We aim to understand how meanings of citizenship are (re)made from below as a response to accumulation by dispossession and driven by the intimate ties between marginalized communities and land. In this process, activists deliberately crossed the boundaries and affinities of the nation-state in search of meanings and alliances elsewhere, highlighting the more complex spatialities of lived citizenship and resistance from the margins.

APPLICATION OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN POLITICAL PROCESSES IN THE USA, EU, CHINA AND RUSSIA. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The article reveals the peculiarities of application of digital technologies and AI in political processes in the USA, EU, China and Russia on the basis of comparative analysis. The conclusion is made about the competitive advantage of the USA in this area and the growing competition between Washington and Beijing in the digital field. In addition to positive factors of participation of digital technologies and AI in public administration and in the organization and conduct of elections, serious risks have been identified, such as possible leaks of large amounts of personal data as a result of cyberattacks, generation of fake news by neural networks, and malicious activity of chatbots with the aim of forming the public opinion on a political subject desired by the government or a particular state. The place of Russia in the list of main contenders for superiority in the digital sphere is determined.

Censoring Kuli Pratha in British India

In 1917, the United Provinces government in British India proscribed Lakshman Singh’s play titled Kuli Pratha arthat Biswin Shatbdi ki Gulami (The System of Recruiting Coolies, in other words, Slavery in the Twentieth Century), under the Indian Press Act of 1910. This essay analyzes Kuli Pratha’s proscription when indenture was an important issue on the nationalist agenda and shows that legal control of literature was shaped not only by issues within the subcontinent but also by British imperial policies and practices in the Empire’s colonial outposts beyond India. Analyzing the play in tandem with its proscription, its extra-legal contexts, and its official English translation that served to direct authorities about its political subject matter, thus, provides a layered understanding of the complicated entanglements of colonialism, nationalism, and literature.

Towards Transversal Housing Solidarities Across Space, Time and Subjects

ABSTRACT The paper documents the emergence of precarious local and migrant tenants as political subjects that build transversal housing solidarities in Greek cities amidst multiple intersecting crises. In doing so, I introduce the feminist concept of transversal solidarities to housing studies and expand it by bringing it in dialogue with debates on housing precarity. Understanding transversal solidarity as an integral part of housing struggles and as an important theoretical concept in debates on housing precarity, I argue, is a crucial step forward to housing theory as it foregrounds transversal housing solidarities as translocal and intersectional processes through which collective political subjects emerge. Drawing from rent struggles in Greece, I demonstrate that transversal housing solidarities are being built across space, time and subjects: they are local and place-based initiatives, embedded in broader networks of trans-local solidarities that are generative of concrete social and political alternatives to the neoliberal housing model.

“May There Always Be Sunshine!”: A Symbol of Childhood in Soviet and American Cold War Songs

Introduction. The article is the first to study the use of the symbol of childhood by the USSR and the USA songs for the representation of Cold War issues. Methods and materials. Based on the methodology of constructivism, the author analyzes the reasons for the politicization of the image of childhood and the role of popular music as an instrument of symbolic politics. Qualitative content analysis is used to examine more than 400 songs of the USSR and the USA related to Cold War issues; about 70 of them use the symbol of childhood. The symbol of childhood in the Soviet song. A study of USSR songs demonstrates that images of children were an important component of the “cultural Cold War” on the musical front. The symbol of childhood in the American song. U.S. musical pieces contributed significantly to the legitimation of the Cold War and the construction of images of “us” and “them,” including with the help of images of children. Results. The comparative analysis shows that in both the USSR and the USA, it was used to represent such issues as peace, war, security, nuclear weapons, freedom, justice, and the future of humanity. Not only did it create the image of the enemy, but it also deconstructed it by showing the similarity of the two nations in basic values, including attitudes toward children. In addition to the common features, songs in the USA and the USSR also reveal different characteristics. In the former, children are primarily the object of defense; in the latter, they are also subjects of politics and active fighters for peace. In the former, one can find negative images of childhood in the USSR; in the latter, young Americans are first and foremost children, just like everyone else. In the Soviet song, these images remain practically unchanged; in the American protest song, the symbol under study is used to delegitimize the policy of the authorities.

Ideology, Subject and Gender: Undoing Representations in the Thought of Teresa De Lauretis and Judith Butler

In Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, the subject is linked to gender rules. However, the answer to the question of why there is a collaboration between ideology, subject, and gender is not found in Althusser. Political subjectivity and political struggle therefore remain trapped in class debates for Althusser. Judith Butler and Teresa De Lauretis, similarly situated in their understanding of subject, gender, and politics, extend Althusser’s perspective on ideology and subject to the construction of gender and understand gender as a kind of ideology. By emphasising the outside of ideology, they disrupt the collaboration between ideology and subject. They extend the economic level, in which Althusser was trapped, to the whole of social life. In this way, they turn life and every encounter in life into a space of possibility for overcoming gender representations and political emancipation.

Always and forever: Materializing an environmental public in Bristol Bay, Alaska

In this article, we examine how residents of the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, an area known for its vibrant salmon fishery, have mobilized to oppose the longstanding threat of large-scale mining in the Bay's headwaters. Drawing on ethnographic research in the region, we show how organizers and activists working to defeat the proposed Pebble Mine respond to unceasing if often unpredictable pressures that arrive in a distinctively erratic, fast-yet-slow fashion. Our analysis explores the implications of this condition for everyday efforts to bring together and maintain what we conceptualize as an environmental public: a community whose composition speaks to certain spatial, temporal, and material features associated with natural resources as well as to the bureaucratic demands of the resource-regulating, extraction-oriented state. By joining scholarship on resource temporalities with that on material publics, we add to studies of action in the face of extractivism in highlighting the tremendous behind-the-scenes labor and dexterity required to sustain an environmental public through the vicissitudes of a drawn-out struggle, requirements that in this case give rise to an always-and-forever political subjectivity primed for perpetual vigilance. While we focus on the specificities of the Pebble fight, we argue that this subjectivity and its burdens are central to a growing number of environmental contests today, as conditions of vulnerability are broadened at the same time that responsibility for confronting them proves unevenly distributed.

From Teachers to Preachers: Xi Jinping and Changing Priorities in Chinese Ideo-Political Education

Ideo-political education is the CCP’s school-based system for inculcating China’s next generation with the Party-state’s official ideology. What effect if any has Xi Jinping’s leadership had on this system? This paper compares key policy documents from the Hu Jintao (2002-2012) and Xi Jinping eras, identifying their key differences. Hu’s leadership promoted improved pedagogy, professionalization and textbook reforms as solutions to ongoing problems with ideological education. Xi instead emphasizes the political loyalty and ideological discipline of political subject teachers and ensuring that his “thought” permeates their classes and textbooks. The focus on “correct” politics in hiring decisions and promotion to leadership positions within universities stems from a broader obsession with political loyalty and ideology in the Xi era, suggesting that Chinese education will continue down the road of tightening ideological control and the penetration of politics into other subjects.

Between Charity and Neoliberalism: The Campaign for Funding Women's Refuges in Australia, 1974–1985

Abstract: Australia's first women's refuge was established in 1974, marking a crucial outgrowth of women's liberation activism that placed domestic violence on the public agenda. To maintain refuges, feminists seized opportunities presented by the progressive Gough Whitlam Labor government. This convergence between a reforming government and the women's movement meant that Australian feminist refuges were among the first in the world to receive state support, in 1975. Maintaining this support required feminist activists to engage with the Australian state. They framed their claims in two ways: they foregrounded women's traumatic narratives of experiences of domestic violence, and they asserted that refuges were a distinctive feminist service. Adapting to a constantly changing political context, however, advocates found it difficult to distinguish their activities from charitable refuges. Their emphasis on women's trauma foregrounded a victimized political subject while the movement's emphasis on fostering "self-help" was co-opted by advocates of neoliberal governance.

Queer –activism and intersectionality? A discourse analysis of queer –political subject formations in the problematization of ‘race’

ABSTRACT Queer and intersectional perspectives play an important role in activism and academia and are critical of a collective ‘we’ that is arranged around a (single-issue) identity. However, queer sexual politics are still a side of white theory production, especially in the German-speaking world. This study explores how the current queer political subject in the German-speaking world is constituted in the ‘problematization’ of racism based on a poststructuralist critique of the subject. Against the backdrop of the shared but slightly different critique of identity politics from queer and intersectional perspectives, it also looks at the role intersectionality plays in these queer problematizations of racism. To that end, following Foucault and Jäger, discourse analysis was conducted on materials produced by five German-speaking queer-activist organizations between 2010 and 2016. This study presents the results of the analysis of two representative discourse fragments; in both discourse fragments, a more open queer political subject is constituted in the problematization of ‘race’ by referring in slightly different ways to intersectional critiques, but also to the concept of precarity.

The after rights of the Citizen of the UK and its Colonies: who is the subject of the rights of the citizen in Britain’s hostile environment?

ABSTRACT Radical democrats highlight the emancipatory potential of citizenship rights insofar as they enable the enactment of political subjectivity by those who lay claim to them. However, the conjuncture(s) within which citizenship rights originate (and are rearticulated) matters for the kind of political subjectivity they afford. This article traces the articulation of citizenship rights in Britain in relation to three historical conjunctures: 1948 (in which the introduction of the status of Citizen of the UK and its Colonies (CUKC) coincided with imperial decline); 1981 (in which the status of CUKC was displaced by that of British Citizen as Britain reinvented itself as a nation-state) and; 2012 (in which the hostile environment for irregular migrants was instituted amidst sustained austerity for its citizens). This conjunctural analysis enables us to recognise the good character requirement (that underpins the deportation of Black Britons to former colonies) and the Right to Rent (that deputises immigration control to landlords) as after rights of the CUKC, that is, rights depleted of their political significance as belonging to a free and equal member of the polity. This, I argue, significantly limits any emancipatory potential that enacting citizenship rights in Britain might otherwise enable.

Female rage, the politics of care, and ambivalence of liberal democracy in Bratya Basu's Creusa – The Queen

Bratya Basu's play, ‘Creusa – The Queen’ is an adaptation of Euripides’ Ion that centers Creusa and her experience. Basu's adaptation critiques not only the relationship between humans and gods like in Euripides’ original, but also the entanglement of religious and secular law, and the idea of the rational individual subject. By centering Creusa and her lived experience, Basu articulates an ambivalence towards traditional liberal democracy based on its reliance on the image of a rational individual subject that serves the image of the law rather than using the law to facilitate, develop, and reflect relations, experiences, and communities of care that make up the body politic. Through its use of suspense and focus on Creusa, the play challenges binaries still found in contemporary political theory such as emotional/rational, domestic/public, care/justice, female/male. In this essay we outline the erasure of women as liberal subjects, the affective turn in politics, and the role of Creusa's experience in the play in challenging the rational traditional subject as a model for an effective political subject. Ultimately, it is Creusa's certainty about and acceptance of the divine and secular orders that allow liberal democracy to survive, thus grounding the power of the project in Creusa's affective response.

The “Funny Line Veil” and the mediated political subjectivity of Muslim women in Indonesia

ABSTRACT The growing use of the internet, especially in urban centres, has made social media the contemporary discursive battleground for Muslims to dispute their cultural and political subjectivities. Muslim womanhood, particularly, has always been a concept under constant scrutiny. Previously, narratives about the ideal Muslim women were dominated by male preachers in mosques and public seminars. Nonetheless, social media has given Muslim women a platform to express what their cultural identity entails, the problems they experience, and their aspirations. This paper analyses the cyberspace activism strategy used by so-called controversial Muslim women group to express their political subjectivity within the Muslims community. This paper focuses on the Instagram account of Cadar Garis Lucu, a self-proclaimed feminist niqabi (face-veiled) community. Content analysis of Cadar Garis Lucu’s Instagram posts and in-depth interviews with its members revealed their three discursive strategies: emphasising authenticity – that their choice of face veiling is their own choice; appealing to moderate Indonesian Muslims’ interpretations of religion as an expression of love and plurality; and utilising collaborations with other similarly moderate religious social media accounts, to further justify face-veiled as a part of moderate Islam in Indonesia.

Squatted Sacred Spaces: A Left-Radical Political Theology of Hamburg’s Rote Flora

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes Hamburg’s (in)famous squatted Rote Flora to argue that Left-radical squats can be fruitfully read as “sacred spaces.” It uses political theology vis-à-vis sacredness to understand fringe Left-radical subjects, and elucidates their purity concerns of space and political subjectivity. To this end, the paper adapts Bataille’s “left-sacred to the left-radical subject concerned with purity in the sense of being” “unassimilable” or “holy and set apart” from society. This occurs via maintaining a space that is “non-negotiable” to profane societal values, rather than in any deity-oriented or classical religious sense. Within this reading, these heterogeneous spaces must be maintained and kept “pure” of homogeneous profane (capitalist) influences. The paper analyzes these purity concerns via three manifestations: (1) the squat’s spatial purity from profane societal contamination or influence; (2) language and the fear of discursive integration through contracts; (3) the formation and reification of the pure, ascetic identity.

Public Health in Private

ABSTRACT Elite women seized the public health campaign during the 1900 plague outbreak to assert political influence and advocate for sanitation reform grounded in their domestic experiences. These women advocated for their inclusion in the political sphere by valuing their domestic experiences as knowledge relevant for public health initiatives. This reframing of experience positioned them as viable citizens in the imminent Federation. Applying Laura Zanotti's concept of relational ontology, this analysis frames their actions as not simply a battle against institutional authority but as careful and strategic interactions with their era's political context, exploiting aspects of it that were beneficial to them. Their ambivalent involvement in the public health campaign illustrates a complex chapter in Australian medical history. Women used the opportunity of plague to reevaluate their experience of the home as a form of knowledge relevant to public health. At the same time, they leveraged their growing status as political subjects to oppress others.

CARTOGRAPHIC WRITING: Institutional analysis in the context of a psychosocial care center (CAPS) II

This experience report is an institutional analysis based on the experiences of two interns at a Psychosocial Care Center (CAPS) II. Our intention is to raise some questions and reflections about Institutional Psychology and the institutionalities that permeate the service, the tension between the instituted and the instituting, focusing on the language that operates as an institution. The objectives are: to investigate the possible logic of subversion in such a scenario, still permeated by the asylum model; to examine how Institutional Psychology can assist in this subversion; to determine if language, as an institution, can free bodies from such a model. We used the cartography method, where the procedures involved observation, field diary recording, sharing in supervisions, and literature review. Five examples of language observed in the service are used: invalidation of suffering, infantilization, LGBTI+phobia, stereotypes against psychoactive substance users, and re-signification of the language of madness. A discussion is conducted on these five examples based on the results obtained, which point to the importance of Institutional Psychology and the need for training professionals and emancipating users as political subjects. We understand that, with the raised reflections and discussions, room can be opened for transformations. In the final considerations, it is concluded that language has the potential to contribute to reinforcing or liberating the abjection of certain bodies produced by the asylum model. This liberation occurs when there is analysis, redesign, and collaboration with CAPS users.

Frontline Citizens: Liberation Movements, Transnational Solidarity, and the Making of Anti-Imperialist Citizenship in Tanzania

AbstractThis article explores the intricate relationship between transnational solidarity and citizenship in socialist Tanzania, renowned for its extensive and enduring support of liberation movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. Termed “frontline citizenship”, this unique political subjectivity, evolving in the 1960s, was shaped not only by Tanzania's geopolitical location, nationalist struggles against colonialism, and government efforts to instil attitudes of anti-colonial solidarity in the population, but also by initiatives of hosted liberation movements, Tanzanians’ embrace of global anti-imperialist currents from Cuba to China and Vietnam, and critiques of politicians in exile. The article highlights the gendered and generational aspects of the solidarity regime, scrutinizes contested material solidarities, and discusses the partial decline of the frontline citizenship discourse. It does so by investigating the role of media, the impact of the paramilitary National Service, and the dynamics of material support practices. Drawing on multi-archival research, interviews, memoirs, and secondary literature, with a focus on South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), the analysis challenges conventional views of state-sponsored solidarity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between state initiatives and grassroots participation as well as “external” and “internal” actors. Conceiving socialist Tanzania's solidarity regime in this way contributes to a broader understanding of the intersection between anti-imperialist world-making, nationalist state-building, and everyday performances of citizenship.

Casting History in Bronze: Delving into the Political Mosaic of Maharaja Ranjit Singh Sculptures

Statues within urban landscapes serve as powerful instruments shaping the collective ethos of communities and ethnic groups, functioning as identity markers and emblematic embodiments of power and ideology. Crafted as vehicles for political messaging throughout history, statues endure as relics, actively participating in societal discourse. They represent collective imprints, embodying a community’s history and broadcasting its traditions, institutions, beliefs, and ideologies. This study explores the commemorative practices and visual rhetoric of monuments and statues, focusing on the iconic status of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Punjab. Analyzing statues in Amritsar and Ludhiana, it delves into their symbolic allure, guided by Mitchell’s Picture Theory, Roland Barthes’ conception of images as political subjects, and Stuart Hall’s “Encoding-Decoding” discourse. Unearthing the interplay of images in shaping collective memory, this research illuminates the contemporary political and cultural significance of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s statues.

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City: New Canadian Refugee Narratives and the Borders of the Socio-Political Community

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community.