Poststructuralist Critique Research Articles

Recording and researching doctoral supervision meetings: reconceptualising authenticity in supervision research

Purpose This paper contends that data generated by research on supervision are often taken as authentic data. Through an examination of studies that use audio/visual recordings to investigate supervision, the paper both promotes and problematises the recording of supervision meetings as a useful technique for doctoral supervision research. This paper aims to encourage a critical evaluation of methodological choices in research on supervision, and both promotes and problematises the practice of recording supervision meetings to enhance nuance in research on supervision practices. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews how prior studies have adopted different research methods to construct the space of supervision, and how the chosen methods have been justified. The paper draws on data from an empirical study which included interviews with supervisors in China, based on recordings of their supervision meetings. Findings Presenting a single case with one participant to explore the recording and interview process in detail, this study demonstrates how hearing the supervision meeting can present a multi-faceted picture of supervision practice. This multi-faceted picture underpins the alternative understanding of authentic data that this study unpacks. Originality/value Drawing on the tradition of poststructuralist critiques of traditional research methodology, this study is presented as a methodological paper, with a core aim of interrogating and problematising methodological decisions taken in studies of doctoral supervision. This study reviews research methods that were used in prior studies on supervision, investigating how the chosen methods were justified and how these methods affect the resultant construction of supervision.

Dialogue and the “miracle of language”: the early and late Bakhtin

Abstract This essay begins with a brief account of the French linguistic structuralism and very briefly some aspects of the post-structuralist critique of it, here represented by Lacan and, Deleuze, and Guattari as a response to it. Against this backdrop, the purpose of the essay is to show a critique of structuralism that came earlier than the post-structuralist one, namely that of the Russian philosopher of the dialogic speech and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s. The concept of the dialogical word has had a major influence in cultural semiotics, literary – and film studies and existential psychotherapy. A second purpose of this essay is to briefly show in what way the ethics of the dialogical word is important in the latter, in existential psychotherapeutic work. Translations from Swedish and French are mine.

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.

Persephone at Mid-Life: Revisiting Feminist Archetypal Theory in a Personal Journey Through Menopause

This article suggests that feminist archetypal theory provides a helpful and empowering framework through which to understand embodied change as experienced in contemporary times. A mainstream approach associated with second-wave feminism, it has fallen victim to poststructuralist critiques and is rarely used, despite a renewed popularity of goddess archetypes in broader lay culture. I argue that this framework deserves revisiting as, in generating positive images and plots, it can serve as a source of empowerment and strength for women and especially so where hegemonic contemporary discourses are overwhelmingly negative and medicalised, as in the case of menopause. Using auto-ethnographic methods, I illustrate this with reference to my own lived experience of menopausal transition. Finally, and just as importantly, I show how this approach configures a different and more holistic kind of knowledge that recognises connection, relationality and communion of self, others and world, rather than separation and domination.

Language practices in multilingual writing processes – Supporting reflection in a complex modern world

This article presents and discusses a model for the reflection of language practices in (academic) writing processes: The Resources Interrelations Model (RIM) aims at a deeper understanding of the functional application of language resources in (demanding) text production. It addresses influence factors that interfere with individual language practices and locates them on four layers: First, the writing process and its situational demands, second, individual attitudes, goals, and motivation, third, individual language and writing biographies and fourth, societal background (including the ongoing technology development and AI tools). The RIM is a theoretical model; however, it is inspired by empirical research in the PROSIMS project. In my article, I present and describe the RIM and its four layers, sketch its points of departure, and locate the model in its interdisciplinary discursive context, in particular referring to process-oriented writing research and research on multilingualism (including poststructuralist criticism of language categories). Additionally, I outline the relevance of such a model as a starting point for further research and a base for the (self-) reflection of writing processes. As the model focuses on the interrelation of influence factors (instead of specific writing strategies), it is open for individual and situational variation and for the dynamic changes in a complex modern world, while at the same time providing a framework for systematic analysis.

Just fundraising? Campaigning gendered inequalities in changing CSO fundraising markets in Finland

Civil society organisations (CSOs) often communicate global gendered inequalities simplistically from a fundraising framework to Global North audiences. While the stereotypical and racialising portrayals of women and girls in the Global South have been widely criticised, the diverse perceptions and experiences of development professionals regarding contested campaigning practices have been less discussed. Furthermore, literature has focussed on the Anglo-Saxon world, while the complex relations between gendered representations and neoliberal fundraising have been less studied in the Nordic context, where the marketisation of development apparatus is a fairly recent phenomenon. Drawing on a poststructuralist critique of development apparatus and postcolonial feminist reading on representations of the Global South, this article investigates how CSOs discursively frame gendered inequalities in their fundraising campaigns. By examining three fundraising campaigns in Finland, we demonstrate how CSOs are not only turning towards the use of a technical and neoliberal gender discourse, but doing so within an unforeseen advertising framework, in times of right-wing populist politics and a collapse in development funding. Basing our findings on qualitative data, we argue that CSOs are pressured to create simplified knowledge on gendered issues, which has provoked critical views not only from activists, but also from within CSOs.

The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Jesse Rosenthal HALE, DOROTHY J. The Novel and the New Ethics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 360 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover. Novel theory is well past the point where declaring an “ethical turn” would raise many eyebrows. The last two decades or so have proven particularly accommodating to critics who wish to assert the presence of some variation of ethical thought in the formal working of the traditional novel. Part of the compromise of the turn back to ethics has lain in stressing the formal nature of it all: as if to say, we’re not just looking at old-fashioned morals or narratorial lectures. What makes Dorothy J. Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics different is that its analysis does assume design and intention from the start. Looking specifically at novelists who are directly concerned with the academic study of literature—Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, among others— Hale short-circuits the divide between literary production and analysis. In the works of her authors she locates a set of varied ethical projects that share an awareness of the poststructuralist critique of the individual subject. These critiques, and the related attack on a hoary novelistic ethics based around a stable central subject, succeed for Hale in producing a “new ethics”—one which takes the central human subject not as a given, but as a question. This new ethics moves away from one based on coherent subjectivity: the experiences of other intelligences and points of view. In place of this by-now familiar alterity, it finds instead more modern forms, which include experiences outside of the human: “the lives of animals, states of divinity, or even the nature of fiction” (6). The Novel and the New Ethics continues the project of Hale’s extraordinary 1998 Social Formalism, which charted the ethical stakes of novel form from Henry James through poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and race theory. The argument of that book— one which seems to be every bit as indisputable as it was twenty-five years ago—was that the Jamesian model of novel theory, centered around the figure of the author, cast such a large and inescapable shadow that it would be felt in criticism for a century to come. And in spite of the novelty of the ethical approaches The Novel and the New Ethics describes, it quickly becomes clear that the point of departure has not changed. As Hale puts it, “The novelist who most inspires and authorizes this tradition within the Anglo-American context is Henry James” (25). So we are still looking at the same strong influence, and, just as in Social Formalism, this influence persists whether or not we know it: [E]ven if no one thinks they give a damn about what Henry James knew, the modern novel that James helped to invent and the tradition of novel theory that he inaugurated provide a foundational aesthetics for the novel that underlies [both ethics of alterity and] the poststructuralist new ethical theory that has [End Page 450] developed in the attempt to articulate the positive social value of literature for our postmodern age. (181) In this way, Hale’s work extends her previous argument about the Jamesian tradition into a twenty-first century that might seem to have little to do with him. Where this book parts company with Social Formalism, though, is in its shift of focus from the history of academic novel theory to what Hale refers to as “novelist-critics”: modern novelists who are in explicit conversation with academic criticism (89). Foremost among these are Morrison, Smith, and Coetzee. Though Hale is interested in the intersection between theory and practice in these authors, it often seems that theory is dominant. When she discusses Morrison, she does so in the context of Morrison’s writing on James and William Faulkner; when she turns to Smith, it is in her invocation of Elaine Scarry; and in writing on Coetzee, an academic himself, she focuses on his Elizabeth Costello—a novel that draws centrally on a novelist’s relation with academia. The Novel and the New Ethics...

The Human in Feminist Theory: Or Woman Is a Social Animal, I’m Not So Sure About Man

Abstract A feminist humanism, unlike those developed by men, would recognize that the authoritative, human subject comes in two sexes. While not being essentialist, it would accept the existence of biological, sexual difference, while taking seriously historical and cultural diversity. It would find female subjects, not in their bodies, but in their contributions to intellectual history. To defend this feminist humanism, this paper counters the post-structuralist critique of humanism, criticizing the structuralist account of language on which post-structuralism built, which it retained even in going beyond it. At the same time, it repurposes the Foucauldian idea of an archeology of knowledge to propose a feminist humanism, anchored in an archeology of women’s texts. It claims that the findings of the archeological investigations so far undertaken suggest that while man characteristically deems himself an isolated individual, made social by culture and artifice, woman, in general, experiences herself as social by nature.

Jennifer Cooke, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a plethora of writers, who have challenged and expanded previous notions of feminist life writing. In Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Jennifer Cooke identifies works by thirteen contemporary writers as examples of what she refers to as a new audacity in life writing. Several of these writers are young, early in their careers, and already connected with each other through reviewers or publishers. Defining audacity as a ‘public challenge to conventions, characterized by a disregard for decorum, protocol, or moral restraints,’ Cooke refers to the thirteen writers as feminists, even when they do not directly engage with politics. Unlike their predecessors, she clarifies further, these writers are writing in the wake of queer, gender and trauma theory, and post-structural critiques of binary thinking. They view identity as social constructions manifested both materially and bodily. Through the perspectives that these writers offer on their lives and the experimental form their writing takes, Cooke argues, they are reshaping feminism and its concerns.

Towards a relational and comparative rather than a contrastive global housing studies

Poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques have led to a necessary corrective in the social sciences, but arguments about difference and incommensurability are also mobilised to put the idea of internationally comparative housing studies into question. This paper argues for a relational and comparative global housing studies that goes beyond global north/south and east/west binaries and dichotomies. I mobilise the concept of ‘common trajectories’ (as opposed to both convergence and divergence) to illustrate how difference is constructed at multiple dimensions rather than primarily along a north/south or east/west axis. The aim is not to argue against postcolonial theory but rather to show how the misuse of these ideas has stifled theoretically-embedded empirical research in general and internationally comparative research more specifically. Finally, I explore the idea of a relational global housing studies that would focus on transnational actors, regulation and markets, as one route out of the dead-end of contrastive housing studies.

Translation as “Transcreation” and Other Productive “Betrayals”

Reconceptualization of the subordinate status of the translated text dates to the Baroque period and, more recently, to the crisis of the concept of authorship in post-structuralist criticism. This has given rise to a notion of translation as manipulation or appropriation that challenges traditional criteria of fidelity to the original text. In a similar vein, the Brazilian school, led by Oswald de Andrade in the first half of the 20th century and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in the second, stands out over the past century for its more elaborate and appealing view of translation as manipulation, which is clearly linked, in this case, to the creative process. The Brazilian school is interesting for its resolute commitment to the complete visibility of the translator, arguing for a notion of translation as transcreation and presenting the translator as transfingidor [transpretender]. It is thought-provoking because it reformulates the old debate between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the Latin American context in terms of transculturation and advocates for decentralizing and destabilizing the universal literary tradition from the periphery. This article provides a brief overview of this fascinating though controversial school, focusing on its theoretical basis as well as on the largely neglected figure of the transfingidor.

La risa de Eva: mito, historia y la subjetividad femenina en la novela El libro de Eva de Carmen Boullosa

This article offers a myth-critical analysis of the novel El libro de Eva (2020) by the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa. Subversive reading of mythical narratives is one of the most interesting proposals of the post-structuralist criticism, centered on questioning the arbitrary determination of meanings. The analysed novel exemplifies the resistance to the hierarchical codification of symbols typical of the patriarchal ideology. At discourse level, the continuity between mythical and historical times underlines the importance of foundational narratives as part of collective memory and conceptual frameworks determining the course of history. The vindication of the figure of biblical Eve restores the right of the first woman to construct and articulate her own subjectivity.

Nature of the State: Marxist Critique and its Divergences in Contemporary World

This paper seeks to synthesize the scientific issues of the Marxist critique of the State. Taking insights from secondary literature, it discusses the concept and characteristics of the State in general and then specifies the contestations of the Marxist perspective on the nature of the State. The paper illustrates how classical Marxism perceives State as a unilinear product of class struggle and serves the welfare of the dominant class. However, the recent developments in Marxism have raised questions to the realist and structural perspective of the State. The Neo-Marxist and post-Marxist scholars contributed along with the concepts of ideology, changing relations of base-structure, hegemony, State apparatus, and crisis in the purist form of class. This paper concludes that these developments are unavoidable in the present-day Marxist discourse which can be theoretically levelled as multi-realist and post-structural critiques of the State. It is expected that the implication of the paper lies to foster the Marxist critique of the state, primarily in different social science disciplines including political science, international relations, economics, and development studies.

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal IslamLGBTI Rights in Turkey: Sexuality and the State in the Middle East

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal IslamLGBTI Rights in Turkey: Sexuality and the State in the Middle East

The Challenge of Cultivating National and Cosmopolitan Identities Through Literature: Insights From Singapore Schools

AbstractSince the late 20th century, scholars have called for a need to broaden the aims of teaching English Literature away from its Eurocentric focus. Much effort has also been invested in making the subject more relevant through diversifying the texts studied and connecting texts to current social and global issues. It is pertinent now to ask what the significant role of Literature is in a globally interconnected age. In particular, what do teachers believe are key philosophical objectives of teaching literature, and how does this influence the texts they select, the instructional strategies they employ, and the values they seek to cultivate in the classroom? In this article, we report on the first National Survey of Literature Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices in Singapore schools. First, we review four key pedagogical movements that have underpinned the teaching of literature in schools around the world: New Criticism, Reader‐Response Criticism, Poststructuralist Criticism, and Ethical Criticism. These respectively represent four key constructs (text, reader, culture, and other) used in the design and analysis of our survey instrument. Next, we report on the survey findings, focusing on Singapore as a barometer of current trends given its identity as an Anglophone country negotiating conflicting global and postcolonial identities with an education system that inhabits colonial traditions. We highlight key tensions arising from the impetus to develop national and cosmopolitan identities through Literature, and reflect on the implications for future directions in teaching.

Antik Kastabala Kenti Kuzey Kilise Üzerine Gözlemler: Uzam, Mekan ve Anlamsal Üretim Döngüsü

Castabala in Ancient Cilicia is a city became prominent during Late Hellenstic period during the reign of Tarkondimotos, vassal king of Rome. The golden age of the city was its time under the Roman Imperial Period. During this period, in 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, a colonnaded street and other monumental buildings were built. In Late Antiquity, idiosyncratic sacred structures/buildings of the singularity of worship were also built in the city. In this context, the buildings named “North Church” and “South Church” were built by re-using of the architectural elements of the monumental buildings of Roman Empire period of the city. North Church is the main subject to be focused in this paper. In the context of Kuzey Kilise, the construction in question takes on a paradoxical meaning. The main reason of it is that the blocks and architectural elements not to be situated in the places which normally they had to be. The monumental mass as called North Church within the scope of the article is analyzed within the frame of the spolia, deconstruction, Genius Loci concept and Artemis Perasia cult, the God-Emperors of Rome, the construction of Christianity via Paul and the interpretation of this construction in the context of poststructuralist critique. Besides, North Church edifice is commentated within the frame of certain contexts and clusteral relationships in terms of church architecture and typology in the context of Cilicia and Anatolia.

English

This paper is an ethnographic examination and exploration of the power politics of the Ar Rinci Foirne and the subsequent changes in perceived nationalism, stylizations, and memory of Irish dance as it refers to both the practiced repertoire and textual archive of ceili dancing within Ireland and the Diaspora. The researcher examined each iteration of the Ar Rinci Fiorne antecedent and relevant texts the socio-political climate following the Irish Civil War, and the aims of the Gaelic League to determine how the textual archiving through the 2014 edition of “Ar Rinci Foirne'' affected embodied memory of Irish Ceili dancing. Theories of transculturation, ethnography, post-structuralist criticism, archiving with thematic and chronological examination of texts were utilized with a qualitative methodology. Through the intentional inclusion and exclusion of dances, the Ar Rinci Foirne functions as codification and propaganda of Irishness through dance, while systematically altering and erasing embodied memory of ceili dances within Ireland and the Diaspora.   Key words: Irish dance, ceili, ethnography, embodied memory, folk dance.

Butler and Postanalytic Philosophy

AbstractThis article has two aims: (i) to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and (ii) to argue that Butler's poststructuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given herpragmaticparallel with Sellars's critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to (i), I argue that Butler's objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from a definition ofwomanto what one may call poststructuralistsites of womanparallels moving away from adefinition of knowledgeto a pragmatic account ofknowledgeas arecognizable standing in the normative space of reasons. With regard to (ii), I argue that the important parallels between Butler's poststructuralist feminism and Sellars's antirepresentationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her poststructuralist feminism as mapping outpragmaticcognitive strategies and visions fordoing philosophy. This article starts a conversation between two philosophers whom the literature has yet to fully introduce to each other.

Towards an Integrated View of Disability: Bridging Theory and Praxis

For a long time, disability was perceived through a medical lens as a purely individual, physical manifestation. This view has changed through the works of various social model theorists who presented disability as a socially imposed experience, as opposed to the experiences of individual impairments. Nevertheless, each of these perspectives present an aspect of what seems to be a complex reality. The aim of this paper is to pursue an understanding of the disabled identity that is holistic and takes into account the built environment, and the historical aspects of the disabled identity. Another problem that we must confront ourselves with is how such a complex understanding of the disabled identity which draws from the post-structural critique of the same could be meaningfully used to inform policy. This paper tries to integrate John-Sebastien Beaudry’s method of liminal reasoning and Mari J. Matsuda’s method of multiple consciousness in order to conceive a method that may help to employ critical perspectives that inform theory into practice in policy and legality, bridging the gap between theory and practice.

Nate MarshallFinna

lost his soul and, while he’s been unaware of the missing soul for quite some time, it is out there looking for him, desperately trying to catch up. Souls live slow, gentle, and unhurried lives, so John is given a prescription to rest and to wait. He finds a cottage on the outskirts of the unnamed city and does precisely as prescribed; “He didn’t do anything else,” Tokarczuk writes. What follows are pages of Concejo’s timid, delicate pencil drawings: postcards of indistinguishable places, a public park in winter, silhouettes of people walking their dogs or playing ice hockey, a lone figure’s footsteps in the snow, and a child, no more than seven or eight years old. While John waits and the plants in the cottage grow tall and wild, the child wanders on, observing a village dance, playing at the seaside, and gazing at a sunset through a train window . These scenes feel far from the frantic existence John left behind. Is the child unable or just unwilling to witness those moments—dull commutes, board meetings , tennis sessions, late nights working? Or is it John himself, sitting in the cottage, revisiting only the slowest and most serene memories to invite his soul back in? As the child closes in on the present day, Concejo’s grayscale illustrations give way to a burst of color, as a bearded, aged John and his soul meet face to face on opposing pages in a sincerely moving tableau. Of course, there has never been a stranger time to review a book about slowing down, a year into a pandemic and in the dead of a dark winter lockdown. We don’t really know what John has left behind, only that he lives “happily ever after” through “all the peaceful winters that followed.” Reading, I felt a sad pang of envy for John’s hurried modern life—an ache to see a city through a hotel window, or to look through any window that isn’t mine. Our response to enforced inertia has been an insatiable craving for more: more excitement, more feeling, more lockdown hobbies—anything to keep us from sitting, “day after day, waiting .” But in waiting for his soul, John came to recognize what is “enough” or, as many other fairy tales imply, “just right.” In a time of uncertainty, stagnation, and grief, Tokarczuk and Concejo offer consolation—that we too might stop and recognize what is enough, endure our own “peaceful winters,” and possibly let go of the craving for more than that. Hannah Weber Brighton, United Kingdom Nate Marshall Finna New York. Penguin Random House. 2020. 112 pages. SLIPPERINESS IN LANGUAGE, often invoked as a postmodern outcome of oppositional poetry, could mean, in some parts of the world, slipperiness in life, literally social or physical death. Words carry consequences. No one understands this more than Nate Marshall, whose eponymous poem Finna catalogs near misses and narrow escapes that underscore a journey of linguistic and emotional survival. Such a journey is arguably emblematic and a necessary precursor for living fully as a human being and flourishing inside an art that, as this book testifies, is more than imaginative fodder: i remember a million finnas i avoided to get here. like the day them dudes jumped me off the bus & i was finna get stomped out like a loose square. or the day they got to shooting at the park & i was finna catch one like an alley-oop. or the day my grandma died & my grades dropped & i was finna not finish high school except i had a praying mama & good teachers & poems to write. If, as poststructuralist critics remind us, language is destiny, Marshall also knows that language is likewise geography and the people “who you [matter] to.” Alerting his reader to its origins, a speaker announces, “finna comes from the southern phrase fixing to,” but one of the nobler aims of the book is to pay homage to his genesis, the city of Chicago where, yes, “bustdowns bloom in our mouths” but also where gangs give “the strong dap & safe haven / to go on being bookish / & breathing & walking in the hood,” and where the young poet’s tongue is shaped by a grandmother who “kept...