Forms Of Subversion Research Articles

THE REPRESENTATION OF THE FEMALE PROTAGONIST IN JOANNE HARRIS’S NOVEL “GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS”

The paper zeroes in on the peculiarities of representing the main female character in a British novel “Gentlemen and Players” published in 2005. The crucial point that the research encompasses is a challenge to the status quo of gender imbalance which is portrayed, inter alia, through showing a certain playfulness of the main character. Notably, playfulness must be read here as a form of (social/cultural/political) subversion, which enables one to look beyond and deconstruct “arbitrary ranks/truths”. The carnivalesque nature of the female protagonist is manifested in connection with the changing status of women in contemporary societies. The image of a submissive woman fabricated by men still lingers in many cultures. This gives rise to a mutant woman, mirrored with the help of a subversive fictional female character who is a trickster. It is evinced that the fossilized patterns of perceiving a woman, and attitudes towards her in the male-dominated environment are likely to pose an impending threat, not only to men’s lives but also to the lives of children and other women. Affected by a number of factors, the female protagonist reveals her eclectic identity and we witness how she turns into a monstrous creature with overwhelming destructive power inside. Consequently, the authenticity of the woman suffers and we may talk about her symbolic death.

Research contributions: The role of the iconoclast

Research contributions: The role of the iconoclast

On Not Getting What You Want: Elvio Fachinelli's Anti-Authoritarianism

Many social theorists have drawn on Freud to analyse authoritarian minds. The literature on deconditioning, on the deliverance from slavish desires, is considerably less robust. This essay brings to the fore the fundamental problems facing psychiatric professionals who hope to contribute to the deconditioning process, by contextualizing the work of the Italian psychoanalyst, Elvio Fachinelli. It shows that, making creative use of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Monika Seifert and others, Fachinelli not only developed original analyses of anti-authoritarian social movements but also advanced concrete suggestions for how psychoanalysts might strike at the roots of mass conformism by facilitating revolutionary forms of repetition.

Step, step, rest, step: challenging age-related norms and biometric bodies through self-tracking data-rematerialization

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a research-creation project that aimed to explore how the experience of self-tracking and the data retrieved from self-tracking activities could be used to creatively critique the norms and regulatory mechanisms embedded within self-tracking devices and practices as they come to intersect with pressures and injunctions lying on seniors’ bodies. More specifically, we discuss the processes of research and creation involved in the ‘Dancing with Fitbit’ project (http://labs.fluxo.art.br/dancing-with-fitbit/), oriented by the key question: How can we use data and the lived self-tracking experience to disrupt the biometric bodies produced by self-tracking technologies, as they intersect with ideals of ‘successful aging’? The article presents the processes at stake in the development of the project, so as to highlight how creation and research co-informed each other and to render explicit the tacit knowledge produced and embedded in the interrelated creative processes (Paquin, L.-C. 2018. Faire le récit de sa pratique de recherche-création. https://www.academia.edu/38426295/Faire_le_r%C3%A9cit_de_sa_pratique_de_recherche-cr%C3%A9ation). We first present the ‘creation-as-research’ (Chapman, O., and K. Sawchuk. 2012. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances’.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (1): 5–26. doi:10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2489) approach mobilized. We then present the subversive forms of data materialization (through choreography, sounds, visuals) we carried out and how they relate to the initial creative and critical intents formulated by the project. We conclude by highlighting the importance of the collaborative and processual character of the project.

Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value

Abstract W. E. B. Du Bois wrote extensively about African-American cotton growers and the Southern Black Belt, beginning with the sociological studies he conducted while at Atlanta University. Over time, his approach to these subjects became increasingly literary and experimental. He made the region—and specifically its dirt—a medium for analyzing the history and dynamics of racial capitalism, and for imagining forms of value not grounded in the violent extraction and mystification of black labor power. In doing so Du Bois countered the blame narrative developed by white southerners like Alfred Holt Stone, who attributed soil exhaustion and economic stagnation to the “monstrocity” of self-possessed black labor. He dismantles racist figures of black encumbrance, nomadism, and decay in which antebellum theories of climate determinism were retooled to promote new forms of racial exploitation. This essay analyzes Du Bois’s dirt poetics in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s work on the rhetoricity of Marxist social movements, it examines the revolutionary forms of radical contingency that Du Bois discovers at the intersection of linguistic and economic value.

Rays of hope

The arrival of revolutionary new forms of solar power will be a major factor in the fight against climate change, says Tom Chivers

Prayer spaces in schools: a subversion of policy implementation?

ABSTRACTBased on a major evaluation project, this article presents an emerging theme from research on the activities supported by Prayer Spaces in Schools, an organisation supporting ‘pop-up’ prayer spaces in schools across the UK and internationally. Evaluating the activities primarily in terms of their possible contribution to spiritual development, a number of important issues arose relating to policy on education and religion. This article focuses on how some engage with these prayer spaces as a way of reimagining and renegotiating educational policy. Based on data gathered from interviews with staff and students (aged 7–16) across seven schools in England, questionnaire responses from 555 students across 15 schools and feedback from two prayer spaces conferences, a hermeneutic approach is used to compare the interpretations of staff with those of students and the implicit positions of policy documents. This article explores various forms of policy implementation and how staff engagement with prayer spaces can be seen as a form of subversion, with staff tactically subverting policy implementation sometimes in order to promote the very intention of those policies – a form of what we refer to as subversive obedience.

Superando abordagens colaborativa e agonística do planejamento: caminhos para sua radicalização por meio de ações subversivas

Resumo A intenção deste artigo é identificar condições sob as quais um planejamento “emancipador” poderia ser possível como propuseram abordagens colaborativa e agnóstica. Numa breve apresentação das duas formas se conclui que elas não cumprem essa promessa, na medida em que não são capazes de enfrentar neoliberalização e globalização como duas características preeminentes da atual ordem social. Argumenta-se que apenas formas mais radicais de ações de planejamento poderiam ter esse potencial uma vez que conseguem articular “forças subversivas” sempre presentes no cotidiano das pessoas. Assim, a última parte do trabalho é dedicada à indicação de uma perspectiva mais radical de ações sociais e, especialmente, de suas formas subversivas (de antivalor no sentido marxiano de “Gegenwert”).

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

How many social workers does it take to change a light bulb? One to hold the bulb in place and the rest to incite revolution: subversion, social work and humour

With its challenges to government austerity, social work could be characterised as a subversive activity as the profession finds itself increasingly alienated from government policies, which have negatively impacted on both the profession and service users. In this context, humour can be a mechanism for social workers to survive under increasingly challenging conditions. Some social workers use subversive forms of humour to survive as they find themselves subject to closer regulation and micromanagement. This article is based on original research into the relationship between humour and social work. Subversive humour, with its challenges to authority, is common in jokes made by service users, who use it to challenge social work authority, and social workers, who employ subversive humour to challenge stereotypes and survive under oppressive management practices. Both these aspects of humour are examined in relation to the contemporary context of social work in the UK.

Los límites de la forma en la poesía de Joserramón Melendes

La poética literaria del puertorriqueño Joserramón Melendes (1952) propone una ortografíaalternativa llamada a reproducir la lengua hablada. Esta práctica de escritura fonética simplificadoradel español se justifica como una dicción que se acerca más al habla popular, argumento que instalael proyecto estético de Melendes en un terreno político. Este artículo propone una lectura de La casade la forma (1986) centrada en el lenguaje como aparato de subversión. Como se verá, en La casa dela forma la escritura fonética de Melendes termina atrapada en los límites de su propio andamiaje.

Memorial Arts by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz: Negative Spaces and Memorial Spielerei

Memorial Arts by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas KnitzNegative Spaces and Memorial Spielerei James E. Young Among the hundreds of submissions in the 1995 competition for a German national "memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe," one seemed an especially uncanny embodiment of the impossible questions at the heart of Germany's memorial process. Artist Horst Hoheisel, already well-known for his negative-form monument in Kassel, proposed a simple, if provocative anti-solution to the memorial competition: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, and then cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument? Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construction of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another destruction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people. Rather than concretizing and thereby displacing the memory of Europe's murdered Jews, the artist would open a place in the landscape to be filled with the memory of those who come to remember Europe's murdered Jews. A landmark celebrating Prussian might and crowned by a chariot-borne Quadriga, the Roman goddess of peace, would be demolished to make room for the memory of Jewish victims of German might and peacelessness. In fact, perhaps no single emblem better represents the conflicted, self-abnegating motives for memory in Germany today than the vanishing monument.1 Of course, such a memorial undoing would never be sanctioned by the German government, and this, too, was part of the artist's point. Hoheisel's proposed destruction of the Brandenburger Tor participated [End Page 619] Click for larger view View full resolution in the competition for a national Holocaust memorial, even as its radicalism precluded the possibility of its execution. At least part of its polemic, therefore, was directed against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seemed to suggest that the surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory. For it may be the finished monument that completes memory itself, puts a cap on memory work, and draws a bottom line underneath an era that will forever haunt Germany. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than any single "final solution" to Germany's memorial problem.2 Like other cultural and aesthetic forms in Europe and America, the monument—in both idea and practice—has undergone a radical transformation over the course of the twentieth century. As intersection between public art and political memory, the monument has necessarily reflected the aesthetic and political revolutions, as well as the wider crises of representation, following all of this century's major upheavals—including both First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, the rise and fall of communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites. In every case, the monument [End Page 620] reflects both its socio-historical and aesthetic contexts: artists working in eras of cubism, expressionism, socialist realism, earthworks, minimalism, or conceptual art remain answerable to the needs of both art and official history. The result has been a metamorphosis of the monument from the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons of the late nineteenth century celebrating national ideals and triumphs to the anti-heroic, often ironic and self-effacing conceptual installations marking the national ambivalence and uncertainty of late-twentieth-century postmodernism. Unlike the utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped to redeem art and literature after World War I, much post-Holocaust literature and art is pointedly anti-redemptory. The post-Holocaust memory artist, in particular, would say, "Not only is art not the answer, but that after the Holocaust, there can be no more Final Solutions." Some of this skepticism has been a direct response to the enormity of the Holocaust—which seemed to exhaust not only the forms of modernist experimentation and innovation, but...

IN BATTLE FOR PEACE DURING ‘SCOUNDREL TIME’

AbstractUsing the praxis and persecution of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois as a case study, this article analyzes the ways in which anticommunism became a tool of investigating, policing, discrediting, and ultimately curtailing what I call “Radical Black Peace Activism.” During the Cold War, the U.S. state apparatus treated this form of activism as an anti-American, foreign-inspired threat to national security attributable to the Communist “peace offensive.” Radical Black Peace Activists linked the end of global conflict, disarmament, and non-proliferation with antiracism, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. They argued that progress and justice could only be realized through international cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In other words, they demanded a new world order that would displace the United States, and its relentless militarism, as the world’s police. The investigation, indictment, and defamation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which coincided with the intensification of the Korean War, is illustrative of how Radical Black Peace Activism was treated as a form of Soviet-backed subversion. Through anticommunism, the U.S. state apparatus deemed the use of anti-Black and antiradical repression imperative to its security, stability, and status as the global defender of freedom and democracy.

Foucault with Marx by Jacques Bidet

Reviewed by: Foucault with Marx by Jacques Bidet Alex Moskowitz Bidet, Jacques. Foucault with Marx. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Zed Books, 2016. 272 pp. Jacques Bidet's recent work is a significant contribution to the surge of interest in the ways in which Karl Marx's and Michel Foucault's thought overlaps. In Foucault with Marx, Bidet seeks to form a theoretical framework that contains the two eponymous figures. Bidet rightfully argues that most scholarship that strives to open a dialogue between Marx and Foucault merely results in monologues where Foucault mobilizes categories of race and gender while Marx focuses on class analysis. While any comparative study runs the risk of descending into banality, Bidet's refreshing attentiveness to both the Foucauldian and Marxist projects allows for a singular encounter that locates the two in what Bidet calls a "general theory of modern society" (4). The central concern of Bidet's book is to construct a "metastructural edifice" that is able to sustain an extended encounter between Foucault and Marx. That metastructure, Bidet writes, is the "fiction" that the notion of the "modern social 'structure'" presupposes: "that is to say, that [the structure] produces as the real condition of its existence" (6). Bidet's metastructure is not a preexisting foundation upon which modern society is built; rather, the metastructure only appears after the fact as a precondition of society. Bidet's second chapter is perhaps the most foundational section of the book. Here, Bidet begins to develop the coordinates of the metastructure he forms in opposing Marxist "property-power" to Foucauldian "knowledge-power."1 Bidet argues that property-power—the concept that power emanates from the holders of capital—provides an incomplete picture of how power functions in society. Foucault's theory of knowledge-power, "the other pole of power and domination within modern society," serves as a necessary supplement to Marxist theory (59). Whereas property-power is centered around the concentration of capital, knowledge-power is focused on individuals who possess intellectual competencies of various types, from university professors to office [End Page 119] administrators. While there are undoubtedly members of the capitalist class who find themselves leading various institutions, Bidet is interested in demonstrating how knowledge-power and its immense organizational capacities enable forms of capitalist domination in the first place. Though it seems at times that Bidet simply wants to identify aspects of the social world that Marx does not account for, the conclusion of his second chapter makes clear that Bidet aims to read Foucault and Marx against one another. Bidet uses Foucault's notion of knowledge-power to redraw the lines of class struggle. He argues, for instance, that to practice Marxism today requires a new understanding of social class, one that finds its enemy not only in the power wielded by exploitative capital, but also in modern techniques of domination that exceed capitalist relations. Very much in the lineage of post-Marxist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Étienne Balibar, Bidet recasts the concept of class struggle by loosening some of the subjectivizing mechanisms in orthodox Marxism. Bidet argues that the relations of domination to which knowledge-power gives rise only become perceptible by and through the intellectual activities of those who wield it. Foucault's notion of the "specific intellectual" thus serves as a more refined version of Antonio Gramsci's organic intellectual. For Bidet, specific intellectuals produce new kinds of subversive knowledge through their direct contact with knowledge formed in the disciplines they practice. By introducing the notion of the specific intellectual and relating it to the theory of class struggle, Bidet broadens Marxism's social and political concerns. If Chapter Two highlights a weakness in Marxism and compensates for it by adding Foucault's insights to the equation, Bidet's third chapter pinpoints where Foucault's thought is lacking and returns to Marx in search of a solution. In this chapter, Bidet's objective is to overcome the contradiction between Foucault's nominalist and Marx's structuralist systems. By placing both in a larger political theory, Bidet seeks to account for a greater "diversity of forms of social subversion" than either system could provide on its own (124). Bidet...

Representation without Recognition: A Survey of Arab American Images in Egyptian Cinema

This article surveys a representational pattern in Egyptian cinema since the 1990s that both counters Hollywood's Orientalist binaries and produces alternative imaginations of Arab Americans. Egyptian filmmakers, I argue, have confined the filmic imaginations of Arab Americans within the parameters of Egyptian identity. While embedded in nationalist articulations of class, gender, and generation, and presented within multilayered critiques of materialism, power, and nostalgia, the Egyptian American characters in the surveyed films are either denigrated as American or celebrated as Egyptian. Thus, the Egyptian cinematic form of subversion, I contend, fails to navigate away from reversing Hollywood's polarizing portrayals.

Espionage: the concept and corpus delicti

The article analyzes the issues of criminal legal interpretation of espionage. It is noted that one of the main tasks assigned to the Security Service of Ukraine is to counteract espionage as one of the most dangerous forms of reconnaissance and subversion against citizens, society and the state, which may lead to the loss of territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence of Ukraine.Some ways of improving the definition of espionage in the criminal law of Ukraine, adaptation to the current conditions, unification and optimization of the process of qualification of this crime are highlighted. The emphasis is placed on the conditions that affect the qualification of the said crime, taking into account the possible damage that this offense may have on the public interest.

Digital Subversion

The aim of this article is to review and identify main attributes of a new form of subversion, so called digital subversion. Digital subversion is relatively new phenomena frequently used as vital part of nowadays resistance movement and hybrid warfare tactics. The article looks at subversion from the point of history through resistance movement and current use of hybrid warfare tactics where digital subversion can be considered as a vehicle for the deployment and achievement of other elements, tools and objectives of hybrid warfare. Within the digital subversion operating concept can be identified such elements and tools like online trolling, digital and social media, digital activism, digital media and marginally also cyber operations. Conclusion is focused on strategic and institutional perspective of how to counter digital subversion. An article expands today view on subversion as a vital element of resistance movement and hybrid warfare fused with cyberspace to a digital subversion.

Grace, Laura Jane. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. New York: Hachette, 2016. 320 pp. ISBN: 9780316387958. £13.99. Print.


 
 
 In her autobiography Tranny (2016), punk singer/songwriter Laura Jane Grace explores the excesses of two forms of subversion, against the music industry, and heteronormativity as a transgender woman. In the following review, Gina Maya analyses the implications of her experiences as a counter-cultural icon.
 
 

Corruption, organized crime and the bright side of subversion of law

We study an enforcement model in which, as soon as a Legislator grants an amnesty to low-rank criminals cooperating with the justice, top criminals react by bribing public officials in order to avoid being sanctioned. We show that, to prevent this form of subversion of law, the optimal policy must grant leniency not only to low-rank criminals but also to officials who plead guilty and report bribe-givers. By doing so, the policy increases the conviction risk not only for top criminals but also for their soldiers. This higher risk increases the reservation wage that top criminals must pay in order to recruit soldiers and therefore reduces the crime profitability (the bright side of subversion of law).

Reconfiguring the breastfeeding body in urban public spaces

The breastfeeding body is subject to overt and subversive forms of regulation and control in contemporary society, where it is sexualized and naturalized, rendered both visible and invisible, revered and found disruptive. Despite health policy espousing the benefits of breastfeeding for mother and child, duration rates in Canada remain relatively low. In this paper, I explore the spatial practices of the breastfeeding body in public, using feminist work on the body and theorizations of built form, urban space and embodied practice. Drawing on a series of feminist autoethnographic vignettes, I write my breastfeeding body into a diversity of routine urban spaces – a car, grocery store, mall, bookstore, highway, alleyway – and narrate my experiences negotiating social responses and spatial arrangements. I argue that the breastfeeding body challenges normative understandings of gender, motherhood and sexuality through its participation and presence in public space. The breastfeeding body transgresses the meaning of space and the performance of identity as it claims space for private use.