Liberal Position Research Articles

The Return of Marxist Discourse to Russian-American Fiction: Keith Gessen’s Novel A Terrible Country

ABSTRACT While most of the immigrants who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union have become conservative Republicans, the generation of so-called Russian-American writers has rejected the right-wing politics of their parents in favor of a more liberal position. However, few of these authors go as far as embracing “communism” or Soviet-style state socialism. An interesting exception to this rule is the writer and journalist Keith Gessen. Unlike the Russian liberals, who criticize the Putin regime as a relapse into Soviet-style totalitarianism, Gessen interprets Putinism as a symptomatic manifestation of global neoliberalism. Gessen’s 2018 novel A Terrible Country traces the protagonist’s (and Gessen’s own) political evolution from liberalism to neo-Marxism. The book also contains a fictional portrait of the prominent Russian poet and Marxist activist Kirill Medvedev. This article discusses Gessen’s portrayal of contemporary Russian society in the context of neo-Marxist theory. As it argues, even though the plot of the novel is situated in 2008, Gessen presents an indictment of the regimes of Putin and Trump by using his own bicultural Russian-American identity as a springboard for politically engaged fiction.

Mapping affective circuits of a Twitter trolling attack against feminist arts-based pedagogy during the COVID-19 global pandemic

We examine a Twitter attack against our phEmaterialist pedagogy during a UK-wide COVID-19 lockdown. We explore how trolls swarmed together in a collective mocking and ridiculing of images of colorful Play-doh genital models posted as part of a Master’s module we teach. The session explored “clitoral validity” as a feminist pedagogical concept to disrupt phallocentric sexuality education through the modeling of the vulva and clitoris. We focus on a sub-sample of the attack, tweets that explicitly refer to clitoral validity, vulvas, and penises. We develop an analytical frame of networked affect and affective homophily in combination with psychoanalytical concepts to map affective circuits of misogyny and hate. To conclude, we use this episode to shed light on what is at stake for scholars working in feminism and/or gender and sexuality studies using creative, participatory, and arts-based methods and we both trouble and reclaim a position of bad feminist researchers/pedagogues.

Dimensions of women empowerment: A structural equation modelling approach

Study seeks to investigate the overall status of women at household level by measuring their empowerment level. The sample comprises of 250 married women from the households that were selected purposively for the study. Different dimensions of empowerment and the effect of these dimensions on the level of women empowerment is measured in the study. The study also investigates the effect of several personal characteristics on women empowerment. Using a structural equation modeling framework, women empowerment is measured along five dimensions. Study finds that among the several dimensions of empowerment Freedom of mobility and Household decision-making are the most important factors that affect women empowerment. Progressive attitude and Autonomy at parental house are the next two most important determinants of women empowerment while political participation has the lowest effect on the level of women empowerment. The study also shows that education has the highest positive influence and husband wife age difference has a negative influence on women empowerment.

INTERFAITH OUTREACH OF THE MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE: TRENDS, CAUSES, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The Muslim World League is a nominally non-governmental Islamic organisation based in Saudi Arabia. From its founding in 1962 until relatively recently, it mainly focused on promulgating the archetypal Islamic fundamentals and practices across the Muslim world in line with the vision of the Saudi state. An early indicator that this mission was giving way to a more dynamic and, relatively, liberal position was an interfaith initiative by the league in 2008 that resulted in the Makkah Appeal; a landmark document that advocated, and set appropriate terms for, Islamic initiatives in interfaith dialogue. The league’s new interfaith programme was then introduced to the world ten days later when it convened the Madrid Conference, bringing together prominent figures from all major faith traditions. But it was not until 2016 / 2017 with the coming to office of its present secretary-general, Dr. Al-Issa, and the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, that the league radically expanded and diversified its interfaith dialogue initiatives. This article examines a mixed sample of these initiatives to give a sense of how the league’s interfaith programme has evolved in recent years. It then gives an analysis of the factors likely to be driving these changes, the aims they seem oriented to achieve, and what directions they might take in future. Special attention is paid to the league’s function and significance within the larger discourse of Saudi international relations and diplomatic interests on the world stage.

Regulating abortion after ectogestation

A few decades from now, it might become possible to gestate fetuses in artificial wombs. Ectogestation as this is called, raises major legal and ethical issues, especially for abortion rights....

Virginia Woolf, Immanence and Ontological Pacifism

In these times of pandemics, increasing social inequalities, civic unrest and the rise of illiberalism, populism, anti-European Union politics and the ‘fake news’ ideology, it is important to revisit Woolf’s pacifism and anti-war and anti-fascist activism. Woolf’s writing offers a mode of understanding emotional economies of despair at this moment of the posthuman convergence and reworking these negative passions into the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative future. Approaching Woolf from a feminist neo-vitalist position as a thinker of immanence, sexed matter, and affirmative ethics, she shows us how to embody the cracks or wounds of existence in ways accountable to our times.

Fashioning feminism: how Leandra Medine and other Man Repeller authors blog about choice and the gaze

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change.

19세기 영국 사회 속에서의 지능 기계와 계산 기계의 의미: 19세기 영국 신문 자료와 풍자 잡지 『펀치』를 중심으로

In the 19^th century, the England society developed negative perception of machines that could replace human physical labor whereas it did not have a similar attitude towards machines that could replace mental labor such as ‘calculating machines.’ The word ‘intelligent machine’ began to appear in the England society after the advent of Charles Babbage’s calculating machine embodying some of human mental activities. However, the term initially meant greedy aristocrats or working-class people without progressive attitude and willpower. And the meaning was gradually expanded to include passive and uncritical human beings in England. In this situation, Babbage wanted to position his calculating machine as an ‘engine’ rather than a ‘machine’ and the England society accepted Babbage’s machine as an ‘intelligent automaton’ rather than as an ‘intelligent machine.’ Technophilic imagination continued about intelligent automatons during this period, but technophobic concerns did not appear. This study examines the meaning of intelligent machines in Victorian culture by analyzing England newspaper materials and satirical magazine Punch published in the early 19th century to the early 20th century. Technical terms can be used as a metaphor to refer to various elements and phenomena in society. When we pay attention to the meaning of science and technology terms, we will be able to understand our society''s perception and attitude toward science and technology anew.

Ethnography of the kitchen: The Women’s House, a space for feminist alliance and intercultural encounter

In this article, we delve into a debate about whether a kitchen was to be installed in a new Women’s House in a city in the Basque Country (Hernani, Gipuzkoa). The ethnography presented here was conducted by observing the process around the creation of the House. Articulating the debate’s main points led us to examine the dominant cultural assumptions about cooking in Basque society, especially in view of the opposing feminist positions on the kitchen and the domestic sphere. To understand the changes that took place, it is essential to consider the participants’ previous experience, the shape the discussion took and the diffractions and interferences that occurred during the process, as well as the priority placed on ‘being and doing together’ and being aware of the (self-)imposed limits while also allowing, even for a short period of time, the dichotomies that characterize and delimit this intercultural encounter to be questioned.

Personality and the Policy Positions of Politicians

Politicians’ support of or opposition to concrete policies is uniquely consequential for policymaking, public opinion, and a host of other societal outcomes. Explaining their policy positions is therefore a major research agenda in political science. Here, we evaluate the role of politicians’ personality traits, measured with the Big Five typology, in shaping how liberal or conservative their economic and social policy positions are. While existing research establishes this link among nonelites, it is far from obvious that the same holds for politicians, who have systematically different personality profiles, and whose positions are constrained by party lines. Using an in‐person study of 893 legislators in five countries who completed personality questionnaires and provided detailed issue positions, we find that Openness to Experience is strongly and positively predictive of politicians’ liberal positions on both economic and social policies, but a null relationship for Conscientiousness. We also find that Extraversion predicts more conservative economic (but not social) policy positions. We discuss implications for the role of elites’ individual characteristics in policymaking.

‘A long meandering slide’: Feminist critique, genderqueerness, sexual agency and Crip subjectivity in Stephen Dwoskin’s late works

Stephen Dwoskin was a prolific experimental filmmaker from the mid-1960s until his death in 2012. Commonly associated with the New York underground film scene and the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op, which he co-founded in 1966, Jewish-American Dwoskin was also a childhood survivor of polio and a disability rights activist. Though an enduring oral legacy of feminist criticism of Dwoskin’s work remains since the 1980s, Dwoskin’s later work from the 1990s and 2000s is acutely understudied. In this article, I recontextualize earlier feminist positions in light of the ‘cripping’ of sexuality and gender proposed by recent critical disability studies, applied to two of Dwoskin’s later works. Adopting archival evidence of feminist critique, feminist art histories and Crip approaches to sexuality, I examine androgyny and genderqueerness in Dwoskin’s photomontages from Ha, Ha! La Solution Imaginaire (1993) and conflations of critical medical and BDSM-structured care in the film Intoxicated by My Illness (2001). I conclude that Dwoskin’s work invites rich epistemological re-evaluation of both feminist critique and entrenched sociocultural conceptions of gendered subjectivity, intimacy and sexual agency.

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

The Labyrinth of Multitask Teachers in Learning and Working Environment in Times of Pandemic

The study highlights the journey of multitasking teachers in learning and working environments. Specifically, it unveils the professional experience of teachers who are studying in a Graduate school while working and managing effectively delivering instruction during pandemic. The study used descriptivecorrelation design through survey technique with researcher-made questionnaire which was participated by secondary public-school teachers in Candelaria East District. Findings revealed that the majority of the respondents are female 31- 35 years old, with master units and have 1-5 years of teaching experience. Teachers are very resilient and enthusiastic in accepting and adjusting to the new normal in their teaching and learning experience. Clearly, they are confident in their abilities to overcome such difficulties and they are able to improve digital literacy in the context of 21st-century learning design. More, study revealed that there is no significant association between a teacher's length of service and their teaching performance. It is recommended to teachers to display empathy, establish trust, and a desire for togetherness to lead the way in achieving the addressed goals. Significantly, teachers' responsibilities are growing at such a rapid pace that they will become stagnant if they refuse to pursue self-development and must have a progressive attitude on their roles as change agents.

Empowered but abused? A moderated mediation analysis to explore the relationship between wife's relative resources, relational empowerment and physical abuse

There is a growing body of literature focusing on the direct relationship between women's relative resources (WRR) and intimate partner violence (IPV). However, the underlying mechanism remains largely unexplored. Grounded in the popular sociological theories, Relative Resource Theory (RRT) and Gendered Resource Theory (GRT), this study addresses the research gap by proposing a moderated-mediation model to i) understand the process through which WRR influences the relational empowerment and violence victimization, and, ii) explain the role of husband's patriarchal attitude in the proposed linkages. We posit that the relationship between WRR and IPV is mediated by relational empowerment, and husband's patriarchal attitude moderates the relationship between relational empowerment and physical abuse. The proposed model is tested in the Indian context using secondary data collected from 47,514 married couples. As our variables of interest were latent constructs, we first used factor analysis in AMOS v.22. Then, using the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique, the proposed model is tested in SPSS v.22 using the bootstrap Confidence Interval (C.I.) method. In our study sample, about 28% of ever-married women reported experiencing spousal violence in the last 12 months. The study finds that WRR is a significant predictor of relational empowerment (β = 0.21, p < 0.01), and relational empowerment is negatively associated (β = −0.06; p < 0.01) with violence victimization, thus supporting mediating role of relational empowerment in WRR-Abuse linkage. The interaction of the husband's patriarchal attitude with relational empowerment significantly predicts violence victimization. Our study results indicate the critical role of socio-cultural norms, rooted in patriarchy, in understanding IPV. The study findings suggest that the potential of women empowerment initiatives against IPV is conditional on men's progressive attitude. The study findings call for acknowledging the complexity of the interaction between patriarchal attitude and IPV on the one hand, and women's position in society, in any attempt at empowerment.

More than Eve: Women and Superior Secondariness in English Poetry, 1751–1810

Mary Leapor, Mary Scott, Joanna Southcott, Lucy Aikin, and their peers collectively articulate what I call women's “superior secondariness.” To counter an eighteenth-century culture that represented man as “primary” (universal and originary) and woman as “secondary” (derivative and dependent), these poets posited the secondary not as inferior or less, but as a necessary, often highly desirable, condition of women's belatedness. Advocating revision and renaming, these writers developed a distinctive feminist poetics of improvement in order to express women's ascendency as the sex that comes second in time, whether as a refined Eve in relation to a rudimentary Adam, or as the revisionary woman poet in relation to the originary masculine classic author. Taken together, their rewritings of Original Sin, human origins, English poetry, and Britain's progress transformed the discourse of secondariness, often used to deride women's verse as inferior in the period, into a feminist position of power. In tracing the ordering function of superior secondariness from 1751 to 1810, the present essay returns to Enlightenment literary form to understand poetry's vital role in inaugurating the feminist projects of historicizing the associations between women writers and theorizing the gender of aesthetic production.

Maria W. Stewart, Ethnologist and Proto-Black Feminist

AbstractDiscussions about nineteenth-century African American ethnology tend to focus only on black male thinkers. In the nineteenth century, ethnology was the study of difference among humans and often used racist science to justify discrimination against blacks. Black woman thinker Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) made important contributions to ethnology but remains understudied. I argue that Stewart is a black feminist ethnologist because she aligns herself with her black male interlocutors on the core points of ethnology. Yet Stewart adds a distinctly black feminist position to the conversation. By focusing on Stewart's speech “An Address Delivered to the African Masonic Hall” (1833), I show that she concurs with her contemporaries that black people are inherently great because of their genealogical connection to Africa. Stewart also agrees that the inherent greatness of blacks establishes their claim to sociopolitical rights. I argue that Stewart's call for racial unity makes her a proto-black feminist and is a unique feature of her contribution to African American ethnology. Stewart's call demands that white people be held responsible for the harm that they have caused to blacks, which can be remedied by the races coming together on equal footing.

A Matter of Trust: How Political and Social Trust Relate to the Acceptance of Covid-19 Policies in Germany

ABSTRACT In Germany, the federal and Länder governments have been implementing policies in order to contain the spread of Covid-19 since March 2020. This article examines the effects of political and social trust on the acceptance of these policies. The latter is, in turn, a prerequisite for compliance with public policy. In a multi-level regression analysis based on two waves of survey data collected in May and November 2020, we find that trust relates to the acceptance of anti-pandemic measures. Political trust, i.e. trust in political actors and institutions has a positive effect on acceptance. Social trust, meaning the trust in other citizens is found to reduce acceptance of measures like contact restrictions. In addition, ideological positions influence the effects of both trust variables. The impact of political trust on acceptance increases with increasingly liberal positions in both survey waves, since individuals with these positions might generally be more wary of state interference. We also found an interaction between social trust and ideology during the second wave: the further respondents are on the political right, the more the negative effect of social trust on acceptance is enhanced, as these individuals might favour individualism and self-reliance in general.

Die Phänomenologie der Medizin und ihre feministische Kritik

AbstractThe phenomenology of medicine is that part of the research field of the philosophy of medicine that asks about the subjective experience of illness. In contrast to the philosophy of medicine, the phenomenological approaches explicitly include medical and bioethical questions as part of their research interests. The paper provides an overview of the most important questions and topics of the phenomenology of medicine. Subsequently I will refer to the fundamental critique articulated by feminist positions in the field of phenomenology of medicine. In addition to the socio-political contextualisation of the experience of illness, this also includes the necessary recourse to empirical research.

"Esa Segunda Nacíon": The Colonial Logic of Galdós's Dońa Perfecta

This article will analyze the role of colonialism in Benito Perez Galdos’ novel Dona Perfecta by putting it into dialogue with the work of Jose Rizal. By examining the two writers side by side, we will see how the logic of colonialism manifested itself in the formal aspects of their work. Galdos will show us how the internal contradictions of metropolitan Spain during the Carlist Wars obeyed the same logic as the governing of the remaining overseas empire. Meanwhile, Rizal’s first novel, Noli me tangere, reveals how those same contradictions were equally complicit in the colonial project. Colonialism, while not explicitly mentioned by Galdos, manifests itself in the formal aspects of the novel, revealing a logic shared by internal as well as colonial contradictions. Noli me tangere, while thematically similar to Dona Perfecta, goes farther than Galdos in problematizing the Spanish liberal position, especially towards colonialism. While the realist novels of Galdos are an important window into 19th century Spain, Rizal’s work pushes those contradictions, thus revealing more fully the cultural logic of late imperial Spain.

Securitizing Communication: On the Indeterminacy of Participant Roles in Online Journalism

This article takes Judith T. Irvine’s insights about the indeterminacy of participant roles and interpretive frameworks to explore how the increased use of social media in journalism leads to new quandaries for political actors. The dialogics of distributing or amalgamating participant roles provide for a particularly tricky domain of maneuver for journalists in India and Israel, where rightwing leaders seek to control news that disseminates rapidly on the currents of social media. Journalists have long sought to avoid becoming the story themselves, as part of claiming liberal positions that distinguish the reported events from their representation. It considers the current attempt to clamp‐down on social media use by journalists as a securitization of communication, where the very journalistic utterance is used by ruling politicians to make the journalist, or potentially the news media more generally, into a threat to public security. However, even such policing can be too slow. This article thus also considers how outraged publics become an important aspect of policing social media.