Political Metaphor Research Articles

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity

A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity Scott L. Morgensen (bio) Recalling ASA’s momentous support for the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, Lisa Duggan queerly articulates this moment with the sudden loss of our colleague José Esteban Muñoz. In so doing she centers the furious fun that Muñoz read within queer creative and utopian practices when she addresses the arrival of queer studies in American studies. Duggan argues that, like many interventions before it, queer studies has become “integral rather than marginal” to American studies because its “refusal of identitarian logics” offers a “deep critical challenge . . . [to] conventional presumptions about who needs to know what, who should read whom, and where a given critical lens is relevant.” Duggan here frames queer studies as a crucial diagnostic of power as such, as well as of the specific forms of power addressed in American studies. In other words, having disturbed identitarianism, queer studies puts in question any presumption that “queer” refers first, or only, to sexuality or gender, which then forces us to ask, what is the power that queer studies calls us to confront? Perhaps a queer way to address this question would be to leave it entirely open—a point to which I return below. But first I want to think about José Muñoz in relation to a movement of scholars, artists, and activists who exhorted queer studies to interrogate racialized sexuality and the violences of colonial modernity. In 1997 Muñoz wrote, with Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, and Trish Rosen, that “‘queer critique,’ conceived as a means of traversing and creatively transforming conceptual boundaries . . . illuminates how various dimensions of social experience—race, sexuality, ethnicity, diaspora, gender—can cut across or transect one another.”1 And in 2005 he joined David Eng and Judith Halberstam in calling for “a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor with no fixed referent.”2 Today, our thickly stacked bookshelves of queer of color, queer diaspora, and queer Indigenous critiques model the interrogation of modernity and its coloniality as conditions of queer possibility. Both the [End Page 309] power we perceive as queer and our queer interrogations of it arise not externally to racial and colonial violence but in intimate articulation with them. Cathy Cohen in 1997 explained the whiteness of queer politics by highlighting the underlying queering of blackness by white supremacy: a sexualized antiblackness through and against which black queer life and challenges to violence emanate.3 Today, emergent Indigenous feminist and queer works collected by Joanne Barker are recentering Indigenous theories of colonialism and empire to illuminate our responsibilities (to land, all beings, and one another) as well as the relationships among decolonial struggles. With such works in mind, I want to sustain Duggan’s invocation of queer studies’ arrival by asking how the meaning of “queer” in American studies might hinge on questions of coloniality and decoloniality: questions made all the more imperative by calls for solidarity with Palestine. In this moment of engaging solidarity, thinking queerly can highlight how our acts articulate many forms of coloniality—those named, and those left unnamed—even as questioning identitarianism can return our critical attention to the relationships across differences that solidarity demands. The politics of Palestine within the ASA thus compels me to seek deeply connective theories of power and methods that can ground such theories within praxes of ethical interrelationship. When I look for queer accounts of relational lives that deepen my knowledge of and commitment to struggle, I am provoked by queer ethnographers who interrogate the violences of modernity from within deeply reflexive accounts of interrelationship. In her rendering of gendered and racialized national culture in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa presents “queer diasporic ethnography” as a method that can address how “the process of modernity extinguishes humanity but creates other possibilities for existence.”4 For Ochoa, “queer diasporic ethnography is not necessarily about queer diasporic subjects” because it “questions the boundedness of the ‘native informant’ as a point of entry.”5 Writing from her own...

‘Corruption is Dirt’: Metaphors for Political Corruption in the Spanish Press

Corruption seems to have been a fact of Spanish politics in recent years, involving property deals, local government and political parties. The latest scandal, known as the ‘Barcenas affair’, involved the conservative ruling party. Set within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this paper seeks to explore the conceptualization of corruption in Spanish through the analysis of the linguistic and verbo–pictorial metaphors used in the Spanish press to tackle the issue of corruption and the Barcenas case. We will see that the view of corruption is shaped by a number of conceptual metaphors. Like all political metaphors, corruption metaphors make an abstract concept more tangible. The study also shows how metaphor works in actual discourse, thus providing an insight into the pragmatic function of metaphor (Charteris-Black 2004, 2005). In this light, it is argued that the various metaphors structuring corruption carry a strong axiological weight by providing a negative evaluation of politica...

From Decadence to Dust: A Review Essay

In 1983 Carter declared in “Notes from the Front Line” that she was in the “demythologising business” and that she feels “free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past,” in order to “check out what lies used to be a la mode and find the old lies on which new lies have been based” (74). Her interviews and nonfictional writings are littered with political declarations and intertextual metaphors to describe her fictional practices: “I’m all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (“Notes” 69).1 Such declarations, together with terms such as demythologizing, have come to haunt the landscape of Angela Carter criticism, as many critics have attempted to address the complex, often feminist, politics of Carter’s rewriting practices. An earlier 2006 volume of critical essays edited by Rebecca Munford, Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, is an example of how scholars attempt to tease out the many strands of Carter’s intertextuality. [...]

The political use of the cancer metaphor: negative consequences for the public and the cancer community.

There has been an increase in the use of cancer as a political metaphor, most recently to describe the threat of international terrorism. The powerful cancer metaphor implies a particular political problem is serious, progressive and deadly. As such to use a cancer metaphor prepares the public for a set of serious, intense and prolonged actions. While politically useful for a governmental to communicate policy, there are negative consequences to the use of the cancer metaphor. It perpetuates among the public and patients old stereotypes of cancer prognosis and therapies that oncologists have tried to combat through education. These education efforts are designed to help patients avoid overly aggressive treatments, surveillance, monitoring and surgeries. It is hard to successfully educate the general public and patients when they continuously receive alternative messages from political leaders who use the cancer metaphor for a different purpose. Professional cancer educators and clinicians should be aware of this trend and redouble efforts to educate that the political metaphor is for politics only and misleading in the public health and clinical arenas.

Protest in the time of cholera: disease and the metaphors of health and politics

In the wake of the January 2010 earthquake, UN troops leaking fecal waste into the Artibonite River introduced cholera to Haiti. Soon after, Haitians began demonstrating against the UN presence in the nation, using cholera and its implications as the crux of their accusations. The UN responded by painting protesters as a disruptive minority interfering with the political health of the nation, also using metaphors of disease to justify their actions. This article channels social movement theories to complicate media discourses surrounding protests. I argue that the cholera outbreak provided symbols and a discourse for engaging in a larger political struggle between the Haitian public and UN troops. While interrogating the use of disease metaphors by protesters and the media, this article reveals underlying assumptions about the geographies of health, simultaneously offering a more insightful reading into cultural and political reactions to the outbreak in Haiti.

The Market Metaphor As an Issue of Political Language and Practice

This paper focuses on the problem of analogies and metaphors in politics, concretely the metaphor of the market and the various analogies it encompasses applied to the political sphere, as a phenomenon of political language and practice. The inspiration behind this article is a sociological critique of the economic theory of politics by Lars Udehn. After forming a basic theoretical framework for the terms analogy and metaphor, the author discusses the problem of methodological inconsistency in the social sciences. The discussion of metaphor is presented in three parts: the inherence of homo economicus in politics, politics as exchange and politics as competition. The crucial thesis of this paper is that there are limitations on the extent to which political processes and phenomena may be understood in market terms, and individual analogies that have emerged from this metaphor are by definition only partially applicable. The conclusion is that the market metaphor presents specific difficulties and is an oversimplification which will lead sooner or later to significant misunderstandings and misinterpretations of politics.

POLITINĖ VAIZDUOTĖS REIKŠMĖ

Galima skirti du požiūrius į vaizduotės ir politikos santykį. Pirmas remiasi prielaida, jog vaizduotė politiką pakeičia fantazijomis, iliuzijomis, todėl siekia atskirti politinę tikrovę nuo vaizduotės. Antras požiūris apskritai neigia tikrovės ir įsivaizdavimo skirtį. Šį požiūrį galima paaiškinti tuo, kad kinta pats tikrovės statusas, o riba tarp to, kas realu, ir to, kas įsivaizduota, nyksta. Abu požiūriai turi rimtų trūkumų. Pirmasis nemato daugelio politiką veikiančių dalykų, kaip antai tikėjimas, prietarai, mitologija, pagaliau nepakankamai atsižvelgia į tai, kad politika sudaryta iš daugelio objektyviai neapčiuopiamų, ne empirinių dalykų. Antrasis, palenkdamas politinę tikrovę įsivaizdavimo veiksmui, neleidžia skirti fantazijų nuo realias politines pasekmes turinčių vaizduotės esinių ir galiausiai politiką paverčia spektakliu ar žaidimu. Straipsnio tikslas – konceptualizuoti politikos ir vaizduotės santykį. Skiriamos trys vaizduotės savybės, kurios taikomos politiniam pasauliui siekiant atskleisti vaizduotės prasmę politikos supratimui.

Women as Subject of Defiance and Everyday Politics of Hijab as Dress Code in Modern Iran

In this article I delve into the cultural meanings of the hijab in urban Iranian society by examining the ways in which Iranian Muslim women use it. I discuss the hijab as symbol of social conflict rather than repression. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in Teheran, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, I examine the Iranian women’s subjective choices and narratives regarding the hijab. My data show that the hijab has become controversial as the government uses it as a tool to control and restrict the Muslim younger generations. The political significance of social identity is manifest in an oppressive dress code and state mandated use of the hijab intended to mask Iranian women in their social surroundings. My research has two goals: (1) to examine the subjective act of wearing certain kinds of hijabas symbolic performances and (2) to grasp the political meaning of the ‘green hijab’ as a symbol of resistance during the Green Movement in 2009. I argue that the issues surrounding the hijab in Iranian society are no longer exclusively concerned with gender oppression, but reflect a more complex cultural and political edifice in modern Iran. By analyzing women’s narratives, I suggest that the Islamic government uses women’s hijab to control the individual, while at the same time, Iranian women use the hijab as a political metaphor of resistance against the ruling government.

A Diachronic Study of Political Metaphors and Their Social Implications in Government Work Reports (1983-2013) in China

Conceptual metaphors since the reform and opening up in China in political discourses in Zhejiang provincial government work reports are taken as the research corpus for studying their usages diachronically in order to find out the development trends of various kinds of political metaphors in different historical periods and to explore the way of the local government changing the constructions and forms of the conceptual metaphors according to the social development in Zhejiang. Based on these analyses, the governance strategies and the social implications conceived in the metaphor phenomenon including social psychologies, values, morals, laws, economies, beliefs and citizens’ living styles are discussed.

Embodied cognition, abstract concepts, and the benefits of new technology for implicit body manipulation.

Current approaches on cognition hold that concrete concepts are grounded in concrete experiences. There is no consensus, however, as to whether this is equally true for abstract concepts. In this review we discuss how the body might be involved in understanding abstract concepts through metaphor activation. Substantial research has been conducted on the activation of common orientational metaphors with bodily manipulations, such as “power is up” and “more is up” representations. We will focus on the political metaphor that has a more complex association between the concept and the concrete domain. However, the outcomes of studies on this political metaphor have not always been consistent, possibly because the experimental manipulation was not implicit enough. The inclusion of new technological devices in this area of research, such as the Wii Balance Board, seems promising in order to assess the groundedness of abstract conceptual spatial metaphors in an implicit manner. This may aid further research to effectively demonstrate the interrelatedness between the body and more abstract representations.

FRI-09 “MEDICINE IS A SOCIAL SCIENCE” – LIFE AND WORK OF RUDOLF VIRCHOW (1821-1902)

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory of Urology I (Podium)1 Apr 2014FRI-09 “MEDICINE IS A SOCIAL SCIENCE” – LIFE AND WORK OF RUDOLF VIRCHOW (1821-1902) Matthis Krischel Matthis KrischelMatthis Krischel More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2014.02.1727AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Introduction and Objectives Rudolf Virchow is widely known as one of the founding fathers of modern pathology. In addition to that, he was politically active throughout his life, participating in the failed German republican revolution of 1848 and being elected to the municipal parliament of Berlin and the German national parliament. Virchow extensively studied the relationships between social structure, hunger and disease and combined his work on pathology and his politics into social medicine. Methods Biographies of and letters and publications by Rudolf Virchow are surveyed and analyzed. In addition to his work as a pathologist, his contributions to social medicine and politics are considered. Results Virchow’s epidemiological studies in Silesia in the spring of 1848 can be understood as a critical experience that led him to proclaim: “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale.” From that point on, he not only worked in his pathology laboratory, but also championed public health measures, such as food safety and the foundation of municipal hospitals. Social aspects also became part of his medical writings on cellular pathology, but Virchow avoided overstretching political metaphors. Conclusions Equally important as a pathologist and a practitioner of social medicine, Virchow should be remembered for both today. © 2014FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 191Issue 4SApril 2014Page: e623-e624 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2014MetricsAuthor Information Matthis Krischel More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Metaphors we (De)Legitimize by: Patterns of Metaphor Use in The Economist

The present research is a follow-up to another study (Rasti & Sahragard, 2012) with an exclusive focus on political metaphor in general and specifically its (de)legitimatory role in the British paper The Economist . The Western paper takes an explicit sanctions-supportive stance on Iran’s nuclear issue. With an eye to spotting instances of political metaphor in the said paper, the researchers, in the process of analyzing the data, which included 30 argumentative and expository articles taken from the British paper within two time frames – the first spanning 2005-2006 and the second encompassing data from 2012 and the beginning of 2013, came up with a superordinate metaphorical pattern i.e., IRAN AS A HUMAN and its concomitant submetaphors i.e., IRAN AS A RACER/PLAYER, IRAN AS A BUSINESSMAN, IRAN AS A SUFFERER, and IRAN AS A SUSPECT/CULPRIT (for the first phase) and IRAN AS A WRONGDOER , IRAN AS A PATIENT and IRAN AS AN UNWANTED GUEST / A TRESPASSOR (as far as the second phase was concerned). The study concludes with the insight that the Western newspaper, among other things, stylistically and rhetorically employs and manipulates the metaphorical scenarios to justify and highlight the force and effectiveness of the West-backed sanctions against Iran and to render the country’s nuclear plans as illicit and unwarranted.

Allegorical Consent: The Faerie Queene and the Politics of Erotic Subjection

This essay examines The Faerie Queene’s use of erotic subjection as a political metaphor for theorizing the relation between conquest and consent. In the Radigund episode of Book V, Spenser explores the gender dynamics of this trope, as the subjected body is male and the monarch, female. These scenes act as a powerful counter-narrative to the poem’s earlier representations of erotic subjection by showing that external obedience cannot be equated with consent. Radigund forces Artegall to wear women’s clothing and to do women’s work, but this submission constitutes nothing more than slavery. The narrative blends political domination with sexual conquest to demonstrate that compliance is not loyalty and violence cannot elicit love.

Plutarco, Sólon e a metáfora política da superfície calma do mar

Plutarco, Sólon e a metáfora política da superfície calma do mar

Reflections on the Body in Clive Barker’s “The Body Politic”

The article aims at deciphering Clive Barker’s multilayered short story “The Body Politic” inserted in the 4th book of Books of Blood (1984-1985). In this work, the British author presents the human body as literally a book which has to be opened, rediscovered; it is a terra incognita marked by the resurgence of repressed elements or by the sense of urgency of applying a new significance to this locus. The notion of rewriting is a leitmotiv in “The Body Politic” as Barker seems to redefine not merely the organic political metaphor but drapes this imagery with Gothic, biblical or psychoanalytic veils. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) is a cornerstone to apprehend the depiction of the body as the ultimate unknown. The narrative traps the reader into the paradoxical hypnotic delights of the Otherized, abjectified body.

Translating Political Metaphors: Conflict Potential of zenci [negro] in Turkish-English

Political metaphors are expressed by lexical items with political content. Their transfer into other languages as part of political texts involves a potential of conflict due to their political and ideological load. Political interviews that are published through interpretation may be used to exemplify how transfer of source metaphors involve conflict depending on the translational decisions. This article focuses on the transfer of a political metaphor in an interpreter-mediated political interview as a source of potential conflict. The article first presents the concept of ideology in translation and markers of ideology in relation to political correctness and conflict as ideological aspects of political translation. It then focuses on zenci [negro/nigger] in Turkish as a political metaphor in transfer into English. The background for and the analysis of the sample metaphor in source and target languages, as well as the conclusions driven out of this case, aim to set the grounds for future discussions of similar cases in Turkish-English political translation.

El buen pastor en Carlos II: equidad y crítica política

One of the most prominent political metaphors in the Spanish baroque political thought is related with the biblical image of the good shepherd. In the second half of the sixteenth century, it helped to develop images of political homogeneity from the king. It was also used as a way to negotiate and define the political role of the Spanish monarchy in this conflictive and critical period. Finally, a certain degree of evolution can be detected in this political concept, motivated by the concerning for the conservation of the Spanish monarchy and the Succession War.

Laundebaazi

If there is a growing consensus on seeing the colony as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, not simply a site of exploitation, then we need to know what went into that lab experiment. In this essay I focus on the experiment around same-sex desire and on one of its major constituents – laundebaazi (habit for boys, inclination to play with them). Laundebaazi is a social register that sets same-sex desire within the idea of habit, within a language of excess, not different in kind from opposite-sex desire but in degree, and in a continuum with other kinds of excesses like music, prostitutes, cards or alcohol. The on-ground experiment between ‘homosexuality’ and laundebaazi has been a long-drawn one and has involved a measure of solubility. After establishing the general north-Indian idiom of baazi as a social frame for habit and excess, I elaborate on laundebaazi as being possible within its pool. I also work out laundebaazi as a reigning political metaphor in crisis between the ‘feudal’ and the ‘democratic’ moments in south Asia. I finish off with gaybaazi – one of the odd precipitates that result from this experiment of modernity.

Clinton and the playing-the-gender-card metaphor in campaign news

This article offers a critical discourse analysis of the use of the playing-the-gender-card metaphor in US campaign coverage, with a focus on its use in Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign for president in 2007. I argue that the media use the gender-card metaphor to stand in for a variety of complex arguments about women in politics. The essay serves as a case study to validate how political metaphors can be used to obscure socially unacceptable and empirically unsupportable arguments. It also reveals that it is taboo for women candidates to talk about sex discrimination on the campaign trail and that the culture operates to silence its legacy of proscribing women from the political field. Finally, the essay encourages future women candidates to plan rhetorical responses to the gender-card metaphor by understanding the latent arguments and connotations buried in it.

Security Bonds: On Feeling Power and the Fiction of an Animal Governmentality

FIGHTING POWER, Feeling Power In theatre of unconditional War on Terror declared by U.S. after 9/11 attacks on its homeland, few spectacles can rival raid on Osama bin Laden's living quarters in Pakistan in May of 2011. Although this paramilitary drama seemed to embroil exclusively human actors, news quickly spread through global media that one member of elite team of U.S. Navy seals that descended on bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was canine. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois whose tracking sense proved vital in deadliest manhunt of early twenty-first century, emerged from U.S. mission a national hero thanks to his zealous part in sniffing founder of al-Qaeda. Dogs have become visibly embedded in groundwork and fantasy of a state of security that, radiating out from U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is today global in its means and effects. Other Military Working Dogs (mwds) besides Cairo have figured prominently in a post-9/11 order of security. Perhaps most notorious are those German shepherds shown with their human handlers in trophy photographs taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, poised to unleash their powers of psychic and physical terror on Iraqi prisoners. MWDs and police dogs are now routinely referred to in idiom of security as K9s, an abbreviated homophone for canines that places them in technological series with other weaponry like M-16 family of combat rifles or UH-60 series of Black Hawk helicopters used in raid on bin Laden's compound. That is, security dogs are fetishized as optimally efficient fighting machines whose performance is augmented by sleek layers of combat gear supplied by military outfitters like K9 Storm, a Canadian-based company in business of cladding new dogs of war. Alongside valorization of dogs' fighting power in service of global policing and security, in what follows I begin tracing a particular genealogy of biopower in which it is not only dogs' powers of detecting and detaining but simultaneously their feeling power, and more specifically their capacity for loving attachment, that is cultivated as an instrument of unconditional security. This particular genealogy of feeling power sparks much thornier, speculative question of how we might think of other species as subjects of, and to, governmentality, a question prompted by participatory spirit that seems to animate other species' involvements in modern states of war and peace. (1) Cairo's role in bin Laden raid, for instance, appeared to be more than that of a K9 machine expertly trained to follow orders but, rather, to be that of a keen, self-motivated animal subjectively identified with spirit of mission. The genealogy of feeling power that I set out to trace through modern dog stories nests inside--even as it complicates--the remarkable history of governmentality that Foucault traces in his College de France lectures, where he distinguishes regimes of sovereign and disciplinary power from biopolitical apparatuses of security that begin to emerge in Europe in eighteenth century (Security). Foucault links rise of police and security to a form of political reason concerned with management of (human) population at level of its species existence, a biopolitical model of government whose techniques he traces back to early pastoral power of Church. In Foucault's analysis, figure of a human shepherd is metaphorical of an art of government that caringly ministers to a flock of sheep, itself metaphorical for population as a new subject of State biopower (Security 11). Yet there is no mention in his lectures of role sheepdogs literally and historically play in pastoral economies, where they function as prosthetic strong-arm of a shepherd. (2) This omission in his study of pastoral power is doubtless due, first, to fact that Foucault treats the sheep-fold (130) solely as a political metaphor and, second, to Foucault's view that pastoral power in its secular, state form does not require (law) enforcement since governmentality operates by inculcating very conduct of conduct, that is, self-conduct of subjects who govern themselves. …