Shaping Of Self Research Articles

Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture

This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these ‘orders of worth’ interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly – and morality – evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong – have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss ‘good’ food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for ‘good’ jobs, want to work in ‘good’ work spaces and aim to be a ‘good’ worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life – from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation.

Landscaping Selves Through Parkour: Reinterpreting the Urban Environment of Singapore

Drawing on cultural geographical work on mobilities and landscape, this article examines parkour in Singapore, a context in which everyday mobile practices are conventionally understood to be heavily constrained and disciplined. As an urban mobile practice that involves bodily adaptation to and dynamic interaction with the prevailing built environment, parkour reveals complex relationships between the self and the landscape. For its practitioners, the doing of parkour holds potential not only for reimagining what Singapore’s urban landscape is or can be but also for reconfiguring understandings of themselves. The term landscaping captures the continuous and concurrent shaping of self and landscape through parkour; landscapes affect individual bodies and are actively (re)constituted through embodied movement. The article engages parkour in more-than-representational terms. By segueing between discursive and phenomenological approaches to mobilities and landscape, a dual emphasis on corporeal experience and representational frameworks highlights how both create and/or regulate such mobile bodies and practices within the landscape.

Queer post-gender ethics: The shape of selves to come, Lucy Nicholas

<i>Queer post-gender ethics: The shape of selves to come</i>, Lucy Nicholas

Book review: Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come

Book review: Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come

Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come

Introduction 1. The Resilience of Bigenderism 2. Diagnosing and Transcending Sexual Difference 3. Gender Justice 4. Philosophical Arguments for Post-Gender Ontological Ethics 5. Queer Futures and Queer Ethics: Sketching Inexhaustibly Reciprocal Androgyny 6. The Politics of Implementing Post-Gender Ethics: Beyond Idealism / Realism 7. The Fully Armed Self: Cultivating Post-Gender Subjects 8. Ethical Post-Gender Sexual Relationships and Communities Conclusion: Utopian Realism

Book Review: Queer post-gender ethics: The shape of selves to come authored by Lucy Nicholas

The following is a book review of the recently published book by Lucy Nicholas. The reviewer was sourced by the editors of the special edition, and is not known by the author of the book.

The Statistical Aesthetics of Henry James, or Jamesian Naturalism

This essay contends that James's late fiction subscribed to notions of form and taste best described as statistical, and that statistics was in the first place modeled on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century aesthetics. James's "statistical aesthetics" refers to a form of premodernist impersonality, whereby the suppression of individuality is accomplished through the shaping of selves according to social ideals. Statisticians dubbed such a statistical character " l'homme moyen " ("average man"), indicating not mediocrity but exemplary sociability. James's interest in statistics suggests that we can understand him as a naturalist writer, but in doing so we must reevaluate the commonplace understanding of naturalism as the discourse of social determinism.

Cultural Shaping of Self, Emotion, and Well‐Being: How Does It Work?

AbstractIn this paper, we review the existent literature to propose that (i) different cultures have distinct views of self, which are instrumental in organizing daily routines, practices, and public meanings, (ii) the resulting behavioral environment shapes personal motivational propensities, (iii) the behavioral environment also carries information about normative expectations about what it is to be a ‘good’ person, and, as a consequence, (iv) culture has substantive influences on emotion, well‐being, and health. In making this proposal, we highlight the distinction between personal motivational propensities and the society's normative expectations. The consequences of the cultural views of self on personal motivational propensities and those on the society's normative expectations may typically be concordant and, yet, the concordance can be disrupted especially at times of rapid social change. Directions for future research on culture, emotion, and well‐being are discussed.

The shape of selves to come

Through a critique of Richard Rorty, I develop a program of self-creation. While Rorty rightly encourages ironic and poetic redescriptions, his feel for this work is disembodied and context-blind. In contrast, I propose an institutionally situated and full-bodied creative exercise which contextually reworks central tropes. Rorty's position is also overly privatized. This hinders 'public' discourse and imprisons marginalized persons within institutionalized identities. Self-creation should not be a solely 'private' affair. Rorty's public/ private distinction has some merit, however. We should, on the whole, primarily treat self-creation as a 'private' endeavor. The end of self-creation should not be legislation. Instead, we should dethrone disempowering identities and reconstruct new ones beyond the reach of policy debates. If we do so, we will proceed with greater sophistication, stability and radicality than would otherwise be the case. This in turn will produce richer selves and offer novel resources to works of 'public' reconstruction.

Lyric Memory, Oral History, and the Shaping of Self in Spanish Narrative

Journal Article LYRIC MEMORY, ORAL HISTORY, AND THE SHAPING OF SELF IN SPANISH NARRATIVE Get access BIRUTÉ CIPLIJAUSKAITÉ BIRUTÉ CIPLIJAUSKAITÉ University of Wisconsin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4, October 1992, Pages 390–400, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/XXVIII.4.390 Published: 01 October 1992

Godwin's "Memoirs" of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject

Godwin's "Memoirs" of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject