Self In Relation Research Articles

Law and the Relational Self, Jonathan Herring

<i>Law and the Relational Self</i>, Jonathan Herring

Motivation for learning Chinese in a study abroad context: Vietnamese students in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article examines Vietnamese students’ motivation for learning Mandarin Chinese during their study abroad in Taiwan and their construction of self in relation to this language learning motivation. A combination of several concepts of ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, instrumental motive, integrative motive, linguistic capital, and multiple self-aspects is used as a theoretical lens to gain insights into the students’ Chinese learning motivation. The study employs a qualitative research approach in which semi-structured interviews with English-medium students from five Taiwanese universities were conducted. Findings reveal that the students’ motivation for learning Chinese contributed to portraying their ideal and ought-to Chinese selves, which subsume their different instrumental and integrative motives for language learning. The ideal Chinese self they would like to become possesses Chinese linguistic capital, which would confer on them advantages pertaining to their study, career development and social relations. The students’ ideal Chinese self also incorporates and reinforces their (desired) cultural, economic and social selves. Implications for supporting international students’ motivation for out-of-class language learning and their construction of self at the institutional level are then discussed.

Imagining the newcomer–supervisor relationship: Future relational self in the workplace

AbstractPeople develop images of themselves in the future reflecting hopes in relation to their work, namely the future work self. In this study, we introduce the concept of Future Relational Self (FRS), conceived as a relevant dimension of the future work self that illustrates the representation of the relationship that an employee aspires to build with significant stakeholders in the workplace (i.e., the supervisor). In addition, we investigate its motivational power shaping role and relational outcomes at work. Using data collected among 215 newcomers in three different waves with a one‐month time lag, we examine the indirect effect of two characteristics of the FRS––namely salience and attribution of control––on newcomers' adjustment (i.e., role clarity and social adjustment) via leader–member exchange (LMX) quality. Results reveal that only the FRS attribution of control is positively associated with LMX quality. Moreover, the results indicate that LMX quality mediates the effects of attribution of control on both newcomers' social adjustment and role clarity. Contributions for theory and implications for practice are highlighted.

Mental Time Travel in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Current Gaps and Future Directions.

Mental Time Travel in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Current Gaps and Future Directions.

"I Can't Blame Mum": A Qualitative Exploration of Relational Dynamics in Women With Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the United Kingdom.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is conceptualized as an interpersonal act, commonly initiated by mothers. This study investigates relational dynamics among adult women who experienced FGM in childhood and have since migrated to the United Kingdom. A qualitative research design was employed, using semi-structured interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) with nine women. Three superordinate themes emerged: (a) “The ‘who to blame?’ conflict: Preserving goodness in parents”; (b) “Better or worse? Positioning the self in relation to others”; and (c) “Regaining power: Righting the wrongs.” Implications for understanding the relational consequences of FGM and the discontinuation of its intergenerational transmission are considered.

Technicization of "Birth" and "Mothering": Bioethical Debates from Feminist Perspectives.

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists argue that technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman's choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem.

Bonding Together like a Family: Self‐development within an Affective Community among Elite College Students in South Korea

AbstractWith the advance of globalization and neoliberalism, the discourse of self‐development that promotes a neoliberal vision of self figures large in the lives of college students in South Korea. Based on ethnographic research in an undergraduate business club at a prestigious university in South Korea, I explore how a neoliberal ideal of self‐development is practiced and embodied by these elite students. Specifically, I examine how they develop a unique way to promote self‐development through the mobilization of family metaphors and affective bonds within club teams. Self‐development pursued in a familial team leads them not only to reconstruct meanings of autonomy and self‐management but also to learn the significance of an affective community. By illustrating an unlikely coalition between neoliberal selfhood and familial affect, my findings point to the emergence of a profoundly relational self as a result of the reconfiguration of the neoliberal ideal in specific sociocultural and relational contexts. [neoliberal self, self‐development, affective community, familism, college students, South Korea]Abstract in Korean본 논문은 한 명문 대학교의 경영 동아리에 대한 민족지적 연구를 토대로, 명문대 학생들이 신자유주의적인 자기계발을 어떻게 토착화하여 해석하고 실천하고 있는지에 주목한다. 구체적으로 학생들이 하나의 팀을 가족에 비유하여 끈끈한 유대를 형성함으로써 자기계발을 도모하는 독특한 실천 방식을 탐구한다. 가족적인 팀에서 이루어지는 자기계발의 실천을 통해 학생들은 신자유주의적인 담론에서 요구하는 자율성과 자기관리의 의미를 새롭게 구성하고, 보살핌과 유대의 중요성에 대해 배운다. 본 연구는 신자유주의적 자기계발이 가족 비유 및 가족애적 정서와 역설적으로 결합하는 모습을 보여줌으로써, 신자유주의적인 자아상에 대한 추구가 구체적인 사회문화적 맥락에서 재구성되며 오히려 지극히 관계적인 자아를 빚어내는 모습을 포착한다.

Increased mathematical relational understanding ability and self regulated learning of high school students through Edmodo online learning

This study aims to analyze and improve the relational mathematical learning abilities and independent learning of students who obtain Edmodo and Google Classroom learning which is reviewed with mathematical initial ability. This type of research is a quasi-experimental design. The research sample is students of class X MIPA 1 and 2. Data collection techniques with purposive sampling technique. The instrument used consisted of tests and questionnaires. The results showed that 1) Overall, the achievement and improvement of the mathematical relational understanding ability (KPRM) of students who obtained the Edmodo learning were no higher than students who received Google Classroom learning, 2) a. Viewed from the high KAM category, accepted and improved, the KPRM of students who received the Edmodo learning was no higher than students who obtained Google Classroom learning, b. Judging from the moderate KAM category, the achievement and improvement of the KPRM of the students who received the Edmodo learning were not significantly higher than students who obtained Google Classroom learning, 3) Overall, independent learning achievement arranged by students who learned Edmodo learning was not significantly higher for students who received Google Classroom learning, and 4) A significant relationship is obtained between KPRM and students’ SRL in Edmodo learning.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble

Faith styles and perceptions of other faiths among Muslims

The positive role of religion in reducing prejudice has remained a neglected theme in Psychology of religion, concerning itself mostly with prejudice and fundamentalism. Recently, noting the absence of a positive antithesis to prejudice and fundamentalism, faith development theory presents xenosophia as going beyond mere tolerance to a creative engagement with other religious faiths to develop new insights and broaden one’s own worldview. The current research undertakes a study of Muslim faith contents to get insights into how these beliefs shape construction of self in relation to other faith communities. Conducting inductive thematic analysis of faith development interviews from 12 Muslim participants from three major religious affiliations in Pakistan (equally divided for gender and ages ranging from 31 to 76 years) in an earlier research, the research analyzes a range of xenological patterns from xenophobia to xenosophia with associated potentials for inter-faith dialogue. Focusing on residents of a country with a dense Muslim population, the study carries implications for religious socialization and religious education in a globalized world.

Growing to be Independent in an Interdependent Culture: A Reflection on the Cultural Adaptation of Creative and Expressive Arts Therapy in an Asian Global City

Creative Arts Educ Ther (2020) 6(2):171–178 DOI: 10.15212/CAET/2020/6/1 Growing to be Independent in an Interdependent Culture: A Reflection on the Cultural Adaptation of Creative and Expressive Arts Therapy in an Asian Global City 在相互依存的文化中成长为独立的人： 对创造性和表达性艺术治疗于亚洲国际都会中的文化适应之反思 Abstract Hong Kong is culturally unique. Although its Chinese culture is ingrained, it is also deeply saturated by Western culture due to its long history of Western governance. When considering this in relation to personal and cultural self-construal, the question arises of whether people in Hong Kong tend to view themselves as more independent or interdependent. This question is important for creative and expressive arts therapists because self-construal affects an individual’s motivations for emotional expression and self-development in relation to others, which then affects how arts therapists can encourage individuals to express emotions and grow towards independence and self-actualization. Various clashes may arise between independent and interdependent cultures due to their different life emphases. Therefore, when adapting the skills and knowledge of creative and expressive arts therapy to an interdependent culture, full attention must be paid to supporting individuals in such a culture to discover the optimal balance of the self in relation to others and the community at large, while also considering the dynamic changes in the culture itself over time. Keywords: Independent self, Interdependent self, Chinese, Creative and expressive arts therapy, Hong Kong 摘要 香港具有独特的文化。尽管中国文化根深蒂固，由于长时间受到西方的统治，香港文化亦受到西方文化的深度熏陶和浸润。基于这点，当我们探讨个体和文化自我观念的建构时，我们会遇到「香港人到底是倾向于将自己视为较独立的，还是较相互依存」的命题。这个命题对创造性和表达性艺术治疗很重要，原因是自我观念会影响个人尤其是与人相处时的情感表达和自我发展的动机和取向，对艺术治疗师能够如何鼓励个人表达情感以让个体朝着独立和实现自我的方向成长有着重要影响。还有，生活重点在人生的不同阶段会有所不同，独立和相互依存文化之间的角力或会造成各种冲突。因此，于相互依存的文化下应用创造性和表达性艺术治疗的技巧和知识时，我们必须加倍注意如何让个人在发展个体自我的同时能够与他人和整个社会状况取得平衡，以符合相互依存的文化环境; 并同时须考虑到文化本身亦会随着时间不断变化而出现各种改变。 关键词：独立的自我， 相互依存的自我，中国，创造性和表达性艺术治疗， 香港

Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

How intoxicated are you? Investigating self and observer intoxication ratings in relation to blood alcohol concentration.

The ability to accurately detect alcohol intoxication is an important skill for people who use these substances and for a variety of professions (e.g. policing, responsible service of alcohol). Previous studies have found that intoxicated people are generally poor at estimating their own intoxication (particularly at high blood alcohol concentration; BAC) and the relationship between perceived intoxication and BAC appears to flatten at higher BAC levels. Studies of observer ratings of other's intoxication have yielded mixed results. The aim of this study was to investigate both self- and observer-ratings of intoxication against BAC levels to determine whether we observe a similar flattening in intoxication for both self- and observer-rated intoxication. Participants were 388 students interviewed outside three university events. Participants provided demographics, a rating of how intoxicated they felt (0=not at all, 10=very) and provided an alcohol breath test. Interviewers recorded a rating of how intoxicated the participant appeared to be. A significant correlation was observed between self- and observer-ratings of intoxication (r=0.802). We fitted our data with both linear and polynomial regressions. Polynomial regression accounted for more variance when predicting both self-rated intoxication (R2 =0.50 vs. R2 =0.40) and observer-rated intoxication from BAC (R2 =0.58 vs. R2 =0.52), suggesting a flattening for both intoxication ratings. Both self-rated and observer-rated intoxication appeared to flatten at higher levels of BAC. This may be due to either tolerance or a 'ceiling effect' for observable signs of intoxication.

“We need a new story to guide us”: Towards a curriculum of Rahma

Beginning with a storied moment of encounter at an academic conference in which several scholars confidently asserted the need to “humanize those who have been dehumanized”, I engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry into my tensions with this seemingly “common sense” pedagogical belief and curricular approach. I do so by interweaving my stories of experiences as a teacher educator, intergenerational survivor of Palestinian displacement, mother to a dis/abled child, and Canadian Muslim woman in hijab who is all too familiar with a condescending pity of those who project their stories of me—of who they believe me to be and what they believe my experiences to be—upon me. I also draw upon the work and ideas of curriculum, feminist, and cultural scholars and theorists to illuminate how teaching for the humanization of Others can impose borders within and between relational selves in the making. I invite other teacher educators and teachers—including those from within familial curriculum-making worlds—to imagine how we might co-compose what I have come to understand as a curriculum of Rahma alongside children, youth, families, caregivers, colleagues, and others within and across the many places we co-compose curriculum.

Self-construals as the locus of paradoxical consumer empowerment in self-service retail technology environments

While its use has expanded considerably, self-service retail technology (SSRT) continues to face mixed customer evaluations. This paper introduces an SSRT paradoxes approach, drawing on the theory of psychological empowerment that incorporates self-construals to address the various entities that SSRT users enlist to gain control over their environment. Based on consumer narratives, this study provides an extensive description of the positive and negative manifestations of SSRT-based customer empowerment, and gives credence to customer relational and collective selves as major loci of enabling or disenabling agency. Additionally, a similarity analysis of 200 data points identifies SSRT users across four communities sharing similar cognitive schemas, while revealing a paradoxical nexus between political forms of disempowerment, including dehumanization and inequitable exchange, and a sense of ubiquitous autonomy. The implications of these findings are significant for research on consumer empowerment and SSRT acceptance, as well as for retailers.

FIGURAS DE LO MISMO Y DE LO OTRO: ENTRE LO SEMIÓTICO Y LO POLÍTICO

Resumen: En esta presentación, pretendemos exponer las aporías que nos permiten definir el Mismo en relación con el Otro. El Otro es un término que ya incluye una oposición a Mismo. El Otro es relacional. Se trata de analizar, en las diversas posiciones lógicas que los términos Otro e Mismo pueden tomar en el cuadrado semiótico, las figuras correspondientes al Mismo y al Otro y concebir que hay un ajedrez político que se dibuja en estas confrontaciones que establece el cuadrado semiótico. Establecer el límite o los límites entre el Mismo y el Otro nos permite pensar sobre el marco geopolítico actual.Abstract: In this presentation, we intend to expose the insoluble contradiction that allow us to define the Self in relation to the Other. The Other is a term that already includes an opposition to the Self. The Other is relational. We intend to analyze, in the various logical positions that the terms Other and Self can take in the semiotic square, the figures corresponding to the Same and the Other and to conceive that there is a political chess that is drawn in these confrontations that the semiotic square establishes. Establishing the border or the boundaries between the Self and the Other this allows us to think about the current geopolitical framework.

The Emerging Paradigm of Relational Self Psychology: An Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT This article describes the evolution of a critical dimension of self psychology that has evolved since Heinz Kohut’s death, one characterized by the transition from a one-person to a two-person psychology. This transition involved, initially, the change in the analyst’s role as limited to interpreting the patient’s intrapsychically generated selfobject experiences of development, rupture, and repair, to an emergence into full personhood; second, a new emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity participating in a bi-directional relationship of mutuality rather than a unidirectional provision of needed functions; and finally, an overall approach to the therapeutic process as a complex, dynamic system. This emergent paradigm within self psychology we term relational self psychology. We illustrate its evolution through a historical review of critical papers that extended and transformed Kohut’s original vision, which already contained the seeds of a genuinely intersubjective and relational model. We outline these changes in four sections: (I) “Empathy and Beyond,” detailing the concept’s evolution within Kohut’s writing and its subsequent elaboration; (II) “From Provision to Mutuality,” describing the movement beyond Kohut’s focus on understanding and explaining and the mutative force of optimal frustration; (III) “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” discussing infant research emphasizing face-to-face interaction and mutual regulation moving into the development of a truly bi-directional model of therapeutic action; and finally, (IV) “From Dyads to Systems,” integrating self psychology into a broader intersubjective, relational, dynamic system and theoretical context. Each section concludes with a bibliography of seminal-related articles that may offer a syllabus for further study.

The “Scene of Discourse”: Foucault and the Theater of Truth (on &lt;em&gt;Parrhēsía)&lt;/em&gt;

The "Scene of Discourse"Foucault and the Theater of Truth (On Parrhēsía) Kélina Gotman (bio) Foucault's views on theater shifted radically in the decade between 1975 and his death in 1984. Often noted in theater and performance studies, Foucault's concept of the spectacularity of discipline and punishment—the spectacle of the scaffold—most vividly articulated in Surveiller et Punir (1975, Discipline and Punish [1977]), suggests that for centuries, power played out theatrically, through a show of public humiliation.1 But visuality remained important even when punishment went behind the scenes. He wrote, "We are [today] much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine" (Foucault 1977, 217). In this view, power in the postindustrial West was characterized by mechanisms of observation and calculation designed to keep subjects in states of perpetual abeyance. Yet within the next decade, Foucault would come back to thinking about theatricality of another sort, seeing in discursive figures and practices of theater another beacon for politics. This time, he would return more closely to the Greeks, articulating a practice of observation and self-observation reaching in particular to Stoic and Cynic writings. In this later, less well-known work, Foucault attended carefully to the dramaturgical ways mutual relations of friendship, pedagogy, dramatic performance, and care enacted frank or fearless speech (parrhēsía). From this perspective, "care of self" (epimeleia heautou) and "knowledge of self" (gnōthi seauton) supported care of the other in a cultivable relationship requiring of all parties involved the courage to see and hear as well as to seek out truth.2 This article takes up the task of thinking Foucault's relationship to this other politics—to a practice of truth-speaking. I argue that this is a dramaturgical practice, grounded in theater as an engine of truth. [End Page 28] Significantly for Foucault, particularly between 1979 and 1984, when he was working through concepts of critique and governmentality, theater and performance became figures for thinking how to engage with relationships of self to self and self to other. This is not "theater" primarily in the sense of public spectacle—lies behind which "truth" might hover like an actor behind a mask—but attention to scenes of knowing, to the exercise of the gaze, and to the movements of thought. The philósophos—a physician of the soul—calls herself to herself, enabling and supporting thereby the possibility that others will be transformed through careful attention to truth as to an everyday practice in the "arts of life." DISCIPLINE AND ASKĒSIS Theory in this sense is a practice of care, and philosophy is everyday training in the practice of cutting and caring, truthful life. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France, the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth, and elsewhere, Foucault engages candidly in meditating on his own excurses and stray thoughts, extended digressions and returns. What I call his discursive theatricalism, his heightened presence to the present moment, constitutes a method grounded in the tripartite work of parrhēsía (truthful, fearless speech), askēsis (everyday training in philosophical life), and alēthourgia (the progressive unfolding of truth discourse) to shape the work of "critique." For Foucault, philosophy returns to Greco-Roman practices of self, anchored in radical self-searching; he does not merely discuss this but performs it obliquely for his audiences and himself.3 This joins what his interlocutor classicist Pierre Hadot (2002 [1993]) called "spiritual exercises" and what Foucault saw as "diagnosing the present" and one's role in it, speaking carefully what it may hurt to hear.4 Critique thus brings into focus a way of knowing exercised as tekhnai peri bion—arts of living, or everyday training in truthful life (Foucault 2014b, 31–44; 2001e, 248; 2017, 93). Understood first of all as a biotechnology or technology or technique of the self, these arts simultaneously enact a theater of self-discovery and self-disclosure (2014b, 37). Importantly, this "self" is not narcissistic: the arts of living unravel concepts of "self" bound up in particular modes of subjectivation or [End Page 29] subjective scenographies, arguably...

Jana Sverdljuk, Terje Mikael, Hasle Joranger, Erika K. Jackson, Peter Kivisto, Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA: A Historical Exploration of Identity (review)

111 R E V I E W S Jana Sverdljuk, Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger, Erika K. Jackson, and Peter Kivisto, eds., Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA: A Historical Exploration of Identity London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Pages vii–­ xv + 192. Mike Hill Nordic Whiteness, the first “systemic study of whiteness . . . from the historical perspective of Nordic immigration to the USA” (2), adds new complexity to scholarly consensus on the temporal, geographical, and categorical specificity of a once presumedly ubiquitous racial default setting. In particular the book focuses on the hundred-­ year period between the agricultural era of the late eighteenth century and the industrialization of the United States by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following recent developments within American migration history, and what is recognized, controversially, as the ethnographic subfield of “whiteness studies,” its authors “proceed from the poststructuralist view of identity as a ‘creative and chaotic space of existence’” (5). The book’s introduction and several of its chapters give due recognition to David Roediger’s influential Marxist critique of whiteness as a “symbolic wage” (4). According to this thesis, whiteness has historically prevented European migrants from achieving “strong [class-­ based] alliances with African-­ American workers” (7). But there is no sign of class-­ reductionism in Nordic Whiteness, nor are its references to non-­ whiteness confounded by a simple white-­ black binary, as the prefix non-­might imply (182). “Whiteness was not a monolithic notion and could be challenged and/or nuanced by other forms of identity” (1). Sometimes 112 reviews in their encounters with whiteness Nordic peoples (Danes, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians , and Sámi) were made into “marginalized figures” (1); other times Nordics were opposed against African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese, so as to make their affiliation with white identity “as advantageous as possible” (182). The overall emphasis on “fluidity,” and such similar terms as “complexity ” (xiii; 1; 9; 146), “fluctuation” (xiii; 38), “contradiction” (1), “division” (1; 146), “destabilization” (1), “ambivalence” (10, 38), and so on, should not be taken as too strongly “poststructuralist.” The Nordic pluralization of whiteness does not bespeak some vaguely identifiable “chaos” beyond human ken. Rather, one of the great strengths of Nordic Whiteness is not just to redivide whiteness once again, but also to add it up in a newly complete way: the divisions its authors identify within the supposed uniformity of the dominant American race (see here the legal equation in 1790 between U.S. “citizenship” and “free white persons” [5]) lead to a more expansive understanding of humanity on the move than either the terms “America” or “race” have allowed. The volume is carefully organized to debunk six discretely named “color-­ blind myths about Nordic immigration” (2): myths of “empty lands”; “ethnic homogeneity”; “attachment to egalitarian values”; “harmony with other ethnic groups”; “easy assimilation”; and “political and ideological consensus between Nordics and the white Anglo-­ Saxon elite.” Six corresponding sections comprised one or more chapters uniquely aimed to “expose each previously mentioned myth” (6). In the first section, “Whiteness as Epistemological Ignorance,” Bergland examines “land policy in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the Dakota war in 1863, and Norwegian centennial celebrations of 1914 and 1925” (6). In section two, “Not Quite White,” Jensen examines “the racialization of Norway’s indigenous people” (38), the Sámi population. In section three, “White Immigrants and the Failure of Class Solidarity,” Rasmussen tests Roediger’s theory of whiteness as the obstruction of multiracial class solidarity, showing how antislavery endorsements could devolve into “Old World racial ideology” by adhering to “American ideals of land ownership” (56). A fourth section is called “Nordic Superiority and 113 reviews the Derogatory Representation of Others.” Two chapters, one by Brøndal on the “construction of the Nordic self in relation to Southern and Eastern Europeans, Chinese immigrants,” and others (8), and one by Grav on Norwegian resistance to “becoming white” (99), serve as counterpoints to the way whiteness was variously affirmed or rejected by different kinds of Nordic identities at their more granu­ lar levels. Section five, “Challenging Intersections of Whiteness and Ethnicity,” contains chapters by Joranger and Lovoll challenging the centrality of “economic inclusion” to the pressures of white assimilation (10...

Notes on Autotheory, Art Writing, and The Encounter with Carla Lonzi

Notes on Autotheory, Art Writing, and The Encounter with Carla Lonzi Nicole Trigg (bio) I wanted to make a book that rambled a little, you know? It's what really bothers me about critics, where you won't find it, this sense of rhythm, this passing from one topic to the next. The critic is always so dogged instead. To me … I can't tolerate that sense of the mind hounding after one thing. —Carla Lonzi, Self-Portrait1 Self is in the middle, and it wants to slide away. I experience myself as alternately restrictive and expansive: restrictive when held to the expectation to reproduce myself as [End Page 534] more-of-the-same, and expansive when I can stray, and make more of myself in excess of identity. Autotheory sublimates this tension. A hybrid, creative-critical genre, autotheory is writing and thinking the self in relation to the world by way of close encounters with others—people and things. It thrives on the encounter and thus entails departing from self-certainty; in this sense, it is an absent center or placeholder for what we are not, or not yet. Autotheory reflects becoming. We cannot anticipate the formal or aesthetic qualities of autotheory because we cannot predict the encounters that generate it; we lean into unknowing as an outlet from the melancholy of identity. Whereas autotheory has been censured as narcissistic life-writing that shores up and consolidates a self, it actually documents the self's dispersal, collaboration, and mutation in complex relation to the world. If narcissism "arises when libidinal cathexes are called in away from external objects," the I of autotheory is subject to the opposite pull, moving excentrically, unfailingly interested in others.2 Autotheory views the ban on personal pronouns from critical discourse—which autotheory's own shaming as narcissistic life-writing demonstrates—as a twisted extension of the dubious claim to self-mastery at the heart of patriarchal logic. Like the autotheoretical, art writing is another compound idea with space between its parts that I prefer to hold open. The influences of poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, critical race studies, posthumanism, the philosophy of science, and other deviant, interdisciplinary impetuses have de-formed a genre that was once all about securing the myth of the 'great man': the solely viable, entirely unoriginal ego-ideal under patriarchy. What if today's art writing isn't (only) writing about art so much as writing as art? To say so is to willfully obfuscate the category. Art writing-as-art shares key features with autotheory: its fuel is the encounter, and its trajectory is outward from identity. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is said to have inseminated the Western art historical tradition. By staging the writing of art as a series of encounters with the "lives of the artists," he helped boost the artist's status during the Renaissance: from mere worker to singular genius. By pointing to the continuity between artwork and artist biography, Vasari rarefied both, inflating the value of the package. What's more, he secured his own status and remunerable occupation as the artists' savvy proxy if not intimate acquaintance.3 Griselda Pollock offers a salient reading of the classical artist biographer à la Vasari as masculine narcissist, trapped in a never-ending Oedipal loop, where idolatry of the artist-genius, the longed-for father figure, flows over into rivalry. In this conception, the proto-art writer identifies so strongly with the artist he admires that the boundaries between them interpenetrate, and the writing moves back and forth between distant adulation of the artist's works, and details from his life—yielding a hybrid text that evinces the writer's narcissistic fusion with his externalized ideal.4 What is lost—besides the contributions of all "others" [End Page 535] who misfit the "great (White, property-owning) man" prototype, master of intellectual and cultural production—is the kernel of art writing's potential: namely, the movement away from sameness and recursion, from recognizable forms, into unauthorized contact zones. Rather than mediating art and artists, thus preserving hierarchies, roles, and statuses, the art writer-autotheorist, whom I fantasize, encounters them. In the space of exchange, a dynamic, collective "self...