Poststructuralist Thinking Research Articles

White-Collar Masochism: Grove Press and the Death of the Managerial Subject

This essay examines the US literary publisher Grove Press from 1951 to 1970. During this period, Grove promoted an aesthetic that Susan Sontag termed the “new sensibility,” one that valued impersonal sensations over personal expression. Grove thus became a key mediator between humanism and antihumanism, publishing many of the major literary works cited by poststructuralist thinkers. This editorial sensibility found its roots in the class character of the press, which was headed by affluent radical Barney Rosset. Drawing on close readings of key publications, as well as of editorial discourse such as advertising and marketing surveys, this essay argues that the masochistic fantasies of self-shattering featured in Grove’s publications allowed its imagined audience of professional-managerial class radicals to appear to transcend their economic positions. In the pages of Grove publications, white-collar masochists styled themselves as revolutionary suicides or self-destructive saboteurs squandering the human capital of the organizations in which they worked. Nevertheless, this imaginative solution failed to overcome the press’s own class contradictions, which came to a head during the unionization drive and feminist protest occupation of Grove in 1970.

Power theories in political ecology

Power plays a key role in definitions of political ecology. Likewise, empirical studies within this field tend to provide detailed presentations of various uses of power, involving corporate and conservation interventions influencing access to land and natural resources. The results include struggle and conflict. Yet, there is a lack of theoretical elaboration showing how power may be understood in political ecology. In this article, we start to fill this gap by reviewing the different theoretical perspectives on power that have dominated this field. There are combinations of influences, two of them being actor-oriented and neo-Marxist approaches used from the 1980s. Typically, case studies are presented of environmental interventions by a broad range of actors at various scales from the local to the global. The focus has been on processes involving actors behind these interventions, as well as the outcomes for different social groups. Over the last two decades, in political ecology we have increasingly seen a move in power perspectives towards poststructuralist thinking about "discursive power", inspired by Foucault. Today, the three approaches (actor-oriented, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian) and their combinations form a synergy of power perspectives that provide a set of rich and nuanced insights into how power is manifested in environmental conflicts and governance. We argue that combining power perspectives is one of political ecology's strengths, which should be nurtured through a continuous examination of a broad spectrum of social science theories on power.

Between North-South Civil War and East-West Manifest Destiny: Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” as Geo-Historical Allegory

Between North-South Civil War and East-West Manifest Destiny: Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” as Geo-Historical Allegory

Unravelling the Workings of Difference in Collaborative Inquiry

This article explores the collaboration among five Czech and Danish researchers across nations, languages, ages, and institutions. The ambition is to unravel and destabilize views on collaboration that tend to idealize collaborative processes and methodologies. We suggest difference as a principal generator of complexity and tension. Through an analysis of two memory-work stories, we show how dynamic forces of difference disturb ideals of collaboration and dialogue. In terms of theory, we draw on Bakhtinian dialogical conceptions of difference and on poststructuralist thinkers, including Bronwyn Davies, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. We conclude with reflections on difference and power in collaborative processes.

The ‘strong’ state and the ‘soft’ market in educational reform processes: Management philosophies and their consequences

In contemporary western society, welfare work in general, particularly in education, has been struck by an endless series of policy reforms, discourses and technologies. These have consequences not only for the production of professional identity, but also for the way educational tasks are understood and handled. Inspired by the work of post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Rose, Ball, Alvesson and Willmott, and the psychoanalytical thinker Žižek, the authors describe some of these consequences by analysing two examples which stem from the Danish educational context: upper secondary schools and vocational educational training. The first example shows how a ‘strong’ state logic results in a focus on numbers, which leads to a form of cynical leadership and an undermining of teachers’ professional judgment. The second example shows how leaders and teachers in a vocational training school, with help from critical utopian action researchers, seek to innovate their practices in accordance with ‘soft’ market logic. As a consequence, teachers’ professionalism is ‘hijacked’ by a new form of organizational professionalism.

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body): Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature”

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body):Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature” Tae Yun Lim (bio) introduction Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong has a unique relationship with the Korean language and culture through her innovative and stylish English verses in Translating Mo'um (2002; hereinafter TM) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007; hereinafter DDR). These books elaborate Hong's “cultural zigzagging,” the re-importation of the English language back to Western culture, and “misplaced cultural bartering” in the imagined city called “the Desert” (Kryah, “Interview”).1 Reading Hong's work in relation to a matrix of French post-structuralist thinkers and phenomenologists reveals that her language can be interpreted as a “minor literature” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and that her work enacts new forms of culturally or ethnically “in-between” or “becoming” ethnic subjectivity. Hong's “minoritized” ways of using language no longer denote the Korean or Asian American subject as a racially and culturally homogeneous subject. Her “minor” language functions as a new cultural lens through which these “in-between” subjects, if only temporarily, reinterpret themselves and the world around them; therefore, Hong's experimental language is an important political tool for these culturally in-between figures. Like many other contemporary Asian American writers, Hong's attitude towards the term “Asian American” is ambivalent. As Song Min Hyoung has noted, Asian American writers and poets in the last three decades, including Hong, are “engaged in actively redefining what it means to be an Asian American … [and] work within a space of tense creativity that reflects a national unease [End Page 83] about the question of race” (14). Eunsong Kim and Don Mee Choi also state that in the contemporary era, Asian Americanness is no longer a manageable or controllable category, as it is comprised of rich and complex genealogies of diverse cultural and racial groups in their manifesto “Refusal=Intervention.” In this regard, the importance of reading contemporary Korean American women poets no longer lies in “their exploration of the complexities of 'Korean' or 'Korean-American' or 'Korean-American woman' as subject positions or as opportunities for constructing even minority/oppositional voices …, [but in] their poem's hostility to these questions” (McNeill 2). Hong's art aesthetic revolving around the pure language—that does not have any fixed semantic referent—and new “becoming” subject is evident in Dance Dance Revolution. The title is derived from the name of a series of music video games produced by a Japanese company. To play this game, the players first choose a pop song and stand on a platform to hit the colored arrows on the screen with their feet to musical cues. Hong titles her work DDR because this process of cultural zigzagging—in which Western pop music and dance moves are imported, made into game formats in Asian countries, gain popularity and are reimported into Western countries, losing their cultural originality—is similar to the ways in which the English language in the contemporary era is losing its original meaning and becoming distorted or transformed under the influence of globalization. The contemporary world is one in which different cultures daily flow across their borders, and so cultural/ethnic identities are continually being disconnected and dislocated by elements from other cultures and languages. No one culture or language now can be truly insulated from another. “The Desert” in Hong's DDR is a microcosm showing how our fast-changing multicultural and multilingual society creates a culturally and racially different (Asian American) subject that has lost its cultural or national originality. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. In DDR, she incorporates elements of the Korean language and culture into her English verses, attempting to construct her “becoming” or “in-between” writing subject. Hong's hybridized language has the creative and transformative force to construct identities beyond conventional notions of nation and culture. Hong uses a hybrid of English and foreign elements, particularly from Korean language and culture, to differentiate her subject from a homogeneous national/cultural identity—but not [End Page 84] entirely. Under the conditions of this transnational or cultural mobility the main character, the Guide, and her use...

On thinking about the nexus between art and everyday aesthetics

Because certain aestheticians attempt to keep art and everyday aesthetics apart, the aim of this article is to question whether it is tenable and beneficial to do so. To this end, poststructural thinking is employed to argue that essentialist aesthetics does not hold water and that the deconstruction of such opens the door for thinking art and quotidian aesthetics together. This is not a trivial matter, because by resisting reciprocity between art and everyday aesthetic life, one stands to impoverish both.

Vygotsky, Neoliberalism and Post-structuralism: A Response to Jacob Klitmøller and Two Further Reviews of my Book “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development” (Routledge, hardcover 2012, paperback 2014)

The paperback edition of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development”, which was published in 2014, almost coincided with the publication of two book reviews; one kindly written by Fabienne Gfeller (2014, in French for Cahiers de psychologie et éducation) and one by Jacob Klitmøller (2014, in Outlines: Critical Practice Studies). A third review of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development” has recently been published with Power and Education (by Matthew Connolly, 2015). As a first response to the discussion, which the book provoked, I try to briefly explore below a central question: Is linking post-structuralist thinking and Vygotskian scholarship meaningful?

The Politics of Anonymity: Foucault, Feminism, and Gender Non-conforming Prisoners

The Politics of Anonymity: Foucault, Feminism, and Gender Non-conforming Prisoners Perry Zurn Throughout the late twentieth century, a number of post-structuralist thinkers put out a relatively sustained call for the practice of anonymity. The idea here was to escape the confines of identity, resist the restraints of administrative bureaucracy, and to become someone new or think something else entirely. Over the years, this call has been thoroughly critiqued by feminists, critical race theorists, and others committed to a politics of difference.1 From their perspective, the call to anonymity belies the intense privilege of those unfamiliar with the inescapable visibility, coupled with deep ignorance, so well known to marginalized people. Michel Foucault is one of these espousers of anonymity. It is my aim in this essay, however, to complicate his account, showing lines of connection or sympathy with a politics of difference. I do so by analyzing his involvement in a 1970s activist cell called the Prisons Information Group. The Prisons Information Group (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, the GIP) aimed to “give [prisoners] the floor,” thereby publicizing information about the prison from within it. The GIP utilized anonymity as a tactic of resistance against institutionalized forms of naming. But they equally used naming as a tactical resistance against institutionalized forms of anonymity. By analyzing this group’s use of anonymity, I develop a critical account of anonymity—one sensitive to the differential politics involved in the chosen or forced renunciation of a name. I then use my analysis of the [End Page 27] GIP’s call to tactical specificity to investigate issues of anonymity peculiar to LGBT prisoners. In this way, I aim not only to reinterpret Foucault’s seemingly blanket literary call to anonymity as a tactical resistance to the authorial name, but to contribute to the critical evaluation of anonymity and naming as practices of resistance within and beyond the prison. The Call to Anonymity The post-structural critique of names and its correlate call to anonymity stem from a fundamental destabilization of the subject, authorship, and therefore language. Paradigms here include Derrida’s description of the “endless desertification of language” (1995, 56), Deleuze’s summons to “depersonalization” (1983, 7) or “becoming imperceptible” (2005, 279–83), and Rancière’s endorsement of “becoming-anonymous” (2005, 81–88). Foucault is also a champion of anonymity. Although traceable across his career, it is perhaps best expressed in his 1980 interview for Le Monde, “The Masked Philosopher.” Here, Foucault diagnoses French philosophy as “failing,” because it occurs exclusively under the auspices of “intellectuals,” who tout their individual theories more than they engage critically and creatively with the world. In an attempt to perform this diagnosis, Foucault insists that his name not be appended to Le Monde’s piece. Foucault explains his choice as follows: “Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (1997a, 321). Foucault had some faith that, without his then notorious name overshadowing, clarifying, or even explaining away his words, those words might inspire his readers to think differently, and in that sense the activity might rise to the title of “philosophy.” Anonymity, for Foucault then, is a precondition of philosophy. It facilitates the sort of systematic agitation necessary to think differently so as to act diagonally across the social fabric (1997b, 138). Overwhelmingly, Foucault’s references to anonymity are literary in nature. In every period of his work, he proposes to write anonymously. Nevertheless, Foucault’s penchant for anonymity is perhaps memorialized in the popular imagination not by his authorial desires but by his bodily practices of sex, drugs, and the baths. Citing his 1978 interview “The Gay Science” (2011), biographer David Macey notes, “[Foucault] relished the anonymity afforded by saunas and bath-houses where ‘you stop being imprisoned inside your own face, your own past, your own identity,’ where ‘it’s not the assertion of identity that’s important’” (1993, xv). Certainly, Foucault’s literary and physical experiments with anonymity must be placed within the larger context of practices of the self. In his development of these practices, Foucault...

Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press by Marianne Van Remoortel (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press by Marianne Van Remoortel Solveig C. Robinson (bio) Marianne Van Remoortel, Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. x + 189. $90/£55 (cloth). In the introduction to her compelling new work on women’s contributions to the Victorian periodical industry, Marianne Van Remoortel observes that while “post-structuralist thinking has encouraged us to view periodical texts as performative of gender and class, it has often done so at the expense of the individuals staging the performance” (4). To correct this oversight, Van Remoortel offers a number of what she refers to as “qualitative case studies” of individual women whose work in the industry included editing, illustration, compositing, and needlework instruction. Together, these studies illuminate the “multiplicity of lives and careers that underpinned the development of the Victorian periodical press” (135). Although the case studies are denoted “qualitative,” their subjects—and significance—are brought to life through an impressive amount of quantitative detail, detail gleaned not just from the pages of periodicals and publishers’ archives in Britain, North America, and beyond but also from painstaking searches through less conventionally “scholarly” resources, such as a large number of genealogical databases. The result is an engagingly fresh and eminently readable account of how a number of Victorian women launched themselves into the world of letters and tried (sometimes desperately) to stay afloat. Early versions of some chapters have appeared in VPR, and readers will be glad to see these ideas pulled together and fleshed out further. Van Remoortel’s choice of subjects constitutes one of the many strengths of this study. The women’s professional lives not only represent a very interesting [End Page 625] cross-section of the kinds of work and opportunities that existed in the Victorian publishing world, but their personal details also reflect quite diverse backgrounds and outcomes. There are some familiar names here—notably Christina Rossetti and Emily Faithfull—but it is largely the unfamiliar names, and the processes by which Van Remoortel went about tracing their details, that make this book such an interesting read. She writes, “Finding the female contributors is one thing, but getting to know more about them is quite another” (10). Barbara Onslow’s Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2000) was one source of inspiration. In a characteristic passage, Onslow mused about the near-anonymity of some nineteenth-century magazine contributors: “Scanning runs of journals, one’s eye is caught by once popular, almost forgotten names like Mrs. T. K. Hervy and Miss Pardoe, and others less familiar and less frequent. Who was Maria Norris . . . or Mrs White who surfaced in ladies’ papers about the same time?” (qtd., 10). One of the pleasures of Van Remoortel’s new work is that we learn the answers to some of these questions of identity. For example, it turns out that Maria Norris not only contributed to the Ladies’ Cabinet (where Onslow spotted her) but also to Household Words (where she was partially identified in Anne Lohrli’s index to the magazine) and to the New Monthly Belle Assemblée. Norris also published biographies and at least one novel before turning from literature to millinery and then to running a school (22–23). But Norris’s story is really only a sidebar that demonstrates how newly available electronic resources can be usefully mined to resolve some abiding scholarly questions. The main subjects of Van Remoortel’s study, each of whom commands a chapter, are Eliza Warren Francis, editor of the long-running domestic magazine the Ladies’ Treasury (1857–95) and author of a number of popular books on household management; Matilda Marian Pullan, a prolific contributor of needlework patterns, editor of the handwork columns in a variety of periodicals, and eventually editor of the American Gazette of Fashion, which later became Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine (1854–82); Christina Rossetti, poet; Florence and Adelaide Claxton, artists who became “two of the most popular and most prolific British female magazine illustrators of the 1860s” (92); and women’s rights activist Emily Faithfull, founder of the Victoria Press. The chapter on Eliza Warren Francis...

Performing a Choice-Narrative: A qualitative study of the patterns in STEM students’ higher education choices

Students’ science choices have long attracted attention in both public and research. Recently there has been a call for qualitative studies to explore how choices create a sense of fit for individual students. Therefore, this paper aims to study how science students’ choices of higher education are performed and to uncover the patterns of students’ construction of their choice-narratives. The paper is based on a qualitative study among 38 Danish upper secondary school students. The theoretical framework is narrative psychology combined with post-structural thinking. The study shows that constructing a choice-narrative is complicated identity-work. First, the students felt encouraged to identify their interests, not only the ones related to the subject matter, but also various interests that were equally negotiated in relation to each other. Second, the choice-narratives were personalised; on the one side articulated as not too predictable, and on the other side appearing realistic and adjusted to the students’ sense of self. Third, the choice-narratives were informed, validated and adjusted in the students’ social network providing the students with a repertoire of viable pathways. The study demonstrates how cultural discourses about how a proper choice is made set the scene for the students’ choices. The study raises some concerns for science education. Improving students’ interests in science alone might not lead to increased admission as several interests equally intervene. To attract more students to science, we must consider how to actively engage them in crafting their own education, as a way to support them in making personal sense.

Power and practices: questions concerning the legislation of health professions in Brazil.

Developments in professional practice can be related to ongoing changes in relations of power among professionals, which often lead to changes in the boundaries of practices. The differing contexts of practices also influence these changing relations among health professionals. Legislation governing professional practice also differs from country to country. In Brazil, over the past 12 years, in a climate of deep disagreement, a new law to regulate medical practice has been discussed. It was sanctioned, or made into law, but with some notable changes, in July 2013. Of interest to us in this paper are the ways the proposed legislation, by setting out the boundaries and scope of medical practice, 'interfered' in the practices of other health professions, undermining many 'independent' practices that have developed over time. However, even taking into account the multiple routes through which practices are established and developed, the role of legislation that seems able to contradict and deny the historical realities of multiple, intersecting practices should be critically interrogated. In this paper, we use the theoretical resources of poststructuralist thinking to explore gaps, ambiguities, and power relations implicit in the discourses that constituted this law. We argue that although the new law can be understood as a social and political device that will interfere in the organization of other health professions' practices, such legislation is only part of what constitutes change in a consolidated professional practice. And while it is important to understand the effects of such legislation, healthcare practices are also realized or 'made real' through ongoing relations of knowledge and power, including, as we will see in this case, activities of resistance. The problem, then, is to understand the practical arrangements, including legislation, traditions and routines, values and knowledge that come to shape the practices of nursing in a particular context.

Cuerpo, historia y textualidad en Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso y Gabriel García Márquez by Olivia Vásquez-Medina (review)

Reviewed by: Cuerpo, historia y textualidad en Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso y Gabriel García Márquez by Olivia Vásquez-Medina Brian L. Price Vásquez-Medina, Olivia. Cuerpo, historia y textualidad en Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso y Gabriel García Márquez. Madrid & Frankfurt: Iberoamericana & Vervuert, 2013. 235pp. Over the last thirty years, major commemorative events like the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and, more recently, the bicentennial celebration of independence from colonial rule have sparked increased public interest in Spanish America’s past. Amid the proliferation of websites, public spectacles, television shows, motion pictures, and even patriotic songs, historical fiction stands out as a popular and productive medium for thinking about how history is constructed, deployed, and consumed. Critics like Seymour Menton (1993), María Cristina Pons (1996), Santiago Juan Navarro (1999), Magdalena Perkowska (2008), Elisabeth Guerrero (2008), and Kristine Ibsen (2010), among others, have each in turn interrogated the relationships between fiction and history, and the past and the present. Olivia Vázquez-Medina’s book, Cuerpo, historia y textualidad, presents the most recent critical engagement with the genre. Building upon the poststructuralist thinking of Hayden White, the postmodern metafictional theories of Linda [End Page 410] Hutcheon, and the Bakhtinian narratological strategies described by Menton—arguably the cardinal points of theoretical orientation for many studies on historical fiction over the last thirty years—Vázquez-Medina proposes reading the body in three touchstone novels as an allegorical representation of both the nation and the historiographic process. The book contains a brief introduction, three chapters that discuss one novel each, and a conclusion that neatly ties together the preceding analyses. It is thoroughly researched, well structured, and clearly written. In the introductory chapter, Vázquez-Medina lays out the historical, theoretical, and literary framework for the analyses that follow. Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo, Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El general en su laberinto, she explains, belong to the “new historical novel,” a term coined by Fernando Aínsa and popularized by Menton to describe the experimental and irreverent style of rewriting the national past that emerged in the late fifties and continues through the present. Furthermore, each of the three novels under consideration focuses on important protagonists of the nineteenth-century nation-building period: Roa Bastos considers the megalomania of Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, del Paso tackles the ephemeral experiment with conservative monarchy under Maximilian and Carlota, and García Márquez reimagines the last months of a dying Simón Bolívar. Vásquez-Medina argues that in each, the body of these historical figures “es el punto de partida para meditar sobre el estado de la nación en un momento histórico percibido como problemático” and that this use of the body offers a double critique: one of the fictionalized past, and another of the present moment from which the novel is written (17). Because these moments tend be problematic, she continues, “el énfasis en el cuerpo no está del lado del gozo, de la afirmación vital y lúdica, de la abundancia . . . sino en la decadencia, la desintegración, la enfermedad, los aspectos más sombríos del imaginario corporal” (31). The first of these decomposing national bodies appears in the chapter that Vásquez-Medina dedicates to Roa Bastos. Here she explores the relationship between the dictatorial body and the use of power by the state in Yo el Supremo, and suggests that the novel “recurre a la imaginería corporal tradicionalmente relacionada con la representación del Estado despótico, pero también la reinventa y la distorsiona para poner en escena la aniquilación del poder absoluto” (43). Following a summary of Dr. Francia’s life, including a balanced appreciation of his government’s strengths (fiscal stability, infrastructure development, and agrarian reform) against his personal shortcomings (megalomania), Vázquez-Medina identifies textual passages where Roa Bastos clearly links the dictator’s physical body with the nation. However, whereas Dr. Francia would like to imagine a complete identification between his own body and that of the...

The appraisal of difference: Critical gerontology and the active-ageing-paradigm

The article deals with the re-negotiation of old age in current times of flexible capitalism and its analysis by Critical Gerontologists who criticize this process as age denial and midlife-imperialism. Starting out from the instructive critique of active ageing and consumer-based anti-ageing strategies, rooted in the heterogeneous field of Critical Gerontology, the here presented contribution aims at critically reviewing and discussing this critique. The article exposes theoretical pitfalls that make this critique run into a dead-end, since old age tends to be homogenized and sometimes even naturalized within Critical Gerontology: Though certainly often unintended, the appreciation of old age as being positively different from midlife ends up with sheltering “old people” as “the others” from the impositions of active society. After elaborating on this difference perspective and discussing its problems, I will finally sketch some conceptual ideas, inspired by poststructuralist thinking, on how to overcome the fruitless dichotomy of imperialism/sameness (“they have to be like us”) and difference (“they are the others”).

Deviance as Pedagogy: From Nondominant Cultural Capital to Deviantly Marked Cultural Repertoires

Background/ContextPierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital has been employed extensively in sociological, educational, and anthropological research. However, Bourdieu's conceptualization of cultural capital has often been misread to refer only to “high status” or dominant cultural norms and resources at the cost of overlooking the meaningful and productive practices of nondominant and marginalized cultural communities.Focus of StudyBy reconceptualizing Cohen's politics of deviance, this paper leans on post-structuralist thinkers to develop a conceptualization of the cultural repertoires of marginalized communities, hereafter referred to as deviantly marked cultural repertoires, that places at the center labeled practices of deviance. It is posited that in these labeled deviant cultural practices—which are often overlooked, shunned, and ignored—are valuable and meaningful experiences of learning and development.Research DesignUsing scenes from the HBO series The Wire as a cultural text, a materialist analysis is conducted to demonstrate empirically the pedagogically rich processes of deviantly marked cultural repertoires.ConclusionsThis paper argues for a research agenda on the learning and development present in the often overlooked, shunned, ignored, and marked/labeled practices of deviance as a way to explore the transformative pedagogical possibilities in marginalized youth cultures.

The advance of poststructuralism and its influence on family therapy.

Postmodernism began to influence family therapy very early in the 1980s with articles referencing postmodern ideas, focusing on meaning and multiplicity. With the appearance of narrative therapy on the scene in the 1990s there was a shift toward poststructural thinking, which refined the movement and politicized the clinical work. Even with a bit of a backlash, whether because this was a new idea or it somehow threatened a positivistic culture, a poststructural view has continued to have effects on family therapy. This article explores the variety of influences: the expansion of narrative ideas, the innovation of Madsen's collaborative helping, and also more nuanced effects. I argue that a poststructural view has effectively changed how many family therapists think and may also be subtly influencing how they might work.

Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

Is Law Opposed to Politics for Feminists?: The Case of the Lusty Lady

Although feminists have historically engaged the law for political purposes, this article traces critiques of such engagements from early feminist legal theory to poststructuralist feminist thought. While early feminist legal theorists understood the law as patriarchal and oppressive, poststructuralists suggest that the law is productive. This theory of law would seem to necessitate reimagining how feminists might engage law. However, poststructuralist feminist thinkers argue that activists should eschew legal tactics in favor of political practices of resignification, collectivity, and agonistic democracy. Thus, these thinkers construct an opposition between law and politics that fundamentally contradicts their understanding of law as productive. Through an examination of this contradiction, the article shows that these thinkers implicitly share a conception of law as oppressive with early feminist legal theorists. Therefore, the poststructuralists fail to fully develop the insights of their own theory. Through a case study of the unionization of San Francisco’s Lusty Lady strip club in 1996, the article demonstrates how law is both productive and not inherently opposed to politics; it not only shows how law and politics are dynamically connected, but also how law can, at times, bolster politics. Thus, the article rethinks the place of law in feminist politics.

Reconceptualising world order: Chinese political thought and its challenge to International Relations theory

AbstractAt the outset of the twenty-first century, the world is facing a range of problems, including environmental, economic, and security risks, that increasingly challenge the logic of nation-state governance. While American and European models of International Relations and global governance, such as the Westphalian system of states and the Washington Consensus, have come under attack from poststructuralist thinkers, political philosophers from China and Taiwan have tried to reconceptualise the world of the twenty-first century from their own perspectives. This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and confronts them with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea. The article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, ‘worldists’, and procedural constructivists, showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: ‘all-under-heaven’. I argue that these contributions will progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations, while at the same time contending that so-called non-Western theorising, if it is to contribute to IRT, will require additional rigorous empirical grounding, a critical perspective on its entanglement with nationalist political discourses in East Asian societies, and the willingness to incorporate existing theories.

The Island and the Madhouse: Rethinking the Subject and the Archipelago in Recent Cuban Literature

Aunque estoy a punto de renacer,no lo proclamare a los cuatro vientosni me sentire un elegido:solo me toco en suerte,y lo acepto porque no esta en mi manonegarme, y seria por otra parte unadescortesiaque un hombre distinguido jamas haria.Se me ha anunciado que manana,a las siete y seis minutos de la tarde,me convertire en una isla,isla como suelen ser las islas.Mis piernas se iran haciendo tierra y mar,y poco a poco, igual que un andantechopiniano,empezaran a salirme arboles en losbrazos,rosas en los ojos y arena en el pecho.En la boca las palabras moriranpara que el viento a su deseo puedaulular.Despues, tendido como suelen hacer lasislas,mirare fijamente al horizonte,vere salir el sol. la luna,y lejos ya de la inquietud,dire muy bajito:?asi que era verdad?-Virgilio Pinera, Isla, 1979Although I am about to be reborn,I will not proclaim it to the four windsnor feel myself a chosen one:it was just my luck,and I accept it because it is not in myhandsto refuse, and it would, moreover, be adiscourtesywhich a distinguished man should nevercommit.It's been announced to me thattomorrow,at six past seven in the evening,I will become an island,an island as islands usually are.My legs will make land and sea,and slowly, like a Chopin andante,trees will begin to come from my arms,roses from my eyes and sand from mychest.In my mouth the words will dieso that the wind can howl at its pleasure.After, lying as islands usually do,I will look fixedly at the horizon,I will see the sun rise, the moon,and far now from any anxiety,I will say very sofdy:so it was true?Contemporary Cuban literature has mostly been read in relation to the political and socioeconomic context of the Cuban Revolution's post-Soviet period, which obviously is a singular condition of the writing of the island. In this essay, however, I would like to adopt a different scope and explore this literature's Caribbean connection through Edouard Glissant's concepts of relation, archipelago, and diversion. Cuba's connection with Caribbean canonical writing has nevertheless quite often been problematic. On the one hand, Cuba has a very strong notion of nation and national literary canon, in which the gaze of the metropolis and of Latin American avant-gardes is rather more present than is the case for its Caribbean neighbors and in which the insular condition returns once and again as a motif. On the other hand, some Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Antonio Benitez Rojo, could even be considered as foundational within a Caribbean context of repeating islands. I will take a point of departure from Glissant's notion of archipelago in relation to one novel in particular, Desde Los Blancos Manicomios (2010), by Margarita Mateo. In this discussion, I will show the ambivalence and the limits of these concepts by Glissant, which deal simultaneously with the limits of belonging and detachment of a community or imaginary identity. I will discuss whether the use of archipelago stands for a deterritorialization and fragmentation in Mateo's novel and whether it produces agency for the subject. This contemporary novel seems to deal above all with the self as such, within an archipelagic constellation of cultural identity in which foundational fictions of belonging are also quite present. This constellation serves as a commentary on those foundational texts, as an interwoven texture of poststructuralist thinking and intertextual voyage.Not only as a scholar but also as a fictional writer, Mateo, who was born in Havana in 1950, offers a refreshing voice in Cuba's contemporary cultural field. …