Subversive Agency Research Articles

MOTHERS AND OTHERS IN FICTION BY SHARON DODUA OTOO AND OLIVIA WENZEL

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that in recent novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel the trope of motherhood is engaged to evoke an emancipatory impulse that is paradoxically linked to acknowledging constraint or connectedness. Motherhood is an idea burdened by historical stereotypes, and I argue that Otoo and Wenzel use aesthetic means to subvert gendered and racialising mythologies and controlling assumptions about who can provide nurturing, reinscribing motherhood in ways that depart from Western expectations of an idealised one‐on‐one relation. Building on Michelle Wright's analysis of Black motherhood as a poetic trope of subversive agency, Theresa Washington's exploration of the West African concept of Ájè in African American women's writing, and Francine Wynn's conception of the chiastic mother‐infant relation, I suggest that Otoo and Wenzel show how the trope of motherhood can not only be subversive but (perhaps appropriately) epistemically generative. It can be read as a foundational image for a different epistemological discourse that does not depend on the mastery of difference.

“Out of the Mouths of Babes”: Testimonies of Black Student Experiences in a Modern-Day Segregation Academy

While many studies have examined the historic and modern impacts of school desegregation legislation on the schooling experiences of Black students in public schools, few have examined the racialized nature of private religious schools. To address this gap, this study explored the experiences of Black, middle school students attending a “modern-day segregation academy,” a contemporary private Christian school whose beginnings can be traced to the implementation of school desegregation legislation. Framed in BlackCrit theory, findings suggest the school reproduced a climate of antiblackness that permeated school culture, curriculum, peer interactions, and pedagogy. In response, Black students implemented various acts of subversive agency to maintain joy, humanity, and faith. This study reinforces the importance of racially affirming spaces, and necessitates the development of pedagogies, practices and policies that honor the spirit of Black students, in all school settings.

GENDER AND RACE IN THE MODERNIST MIDDLEBROW

This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by situating the author, and her recovery, within wider international currents of recent feminist scholarship into neglected and lost modernist “middlebrow” women writers. I then move to analyse Faure-Favier’s innovative modernist exploration of the themes of gender and race, focusing on Blanche et Noir (1928), a novel which connects feminism, race, and aviation technology in startlingly original ways; this section of the analysis also directly engages with historical and theoretical discussions of the phenomenon of the “human zoo.” The final phase of analysis considers at length how Faure-Favier’s novel anticipates Bhabha’s mimicry through its identification of the subversive potential of a generation who, in the postcolonial era, will be understood after Bhabha as mimic men. Faure-Favier’s colonial novel offers potential for a significant expansion of Bhabha’s postcolonial – and uniquely masculine – model through consideration of how gender might interact with mimicry, advancing an argument for a strategic coalition between white women and black men which simultaneously reveals the innovations and contradictions which structure her novel and wider thinking. Faure-Favier’s novel emerges as remarkable in its preoccupation with foregrounding the subversive agency of both women and colonized men. More broadly, this consideration of mimicry in the French colonial context generates new frameworks for the interpretation of complex historical figures. Through the rediscovery of Blanche et Noir, this article offers a decisive account of the previously unrecognized achievements of female modernist authors across Europe who engaged with categories of gender, race, and class in groundbreaking ways, thus leading to a significant shift in the existing understanding of gender, race, and modernism.

Anoreksi og agens

Cultural studies and gender studies hold long-standing traditions for studying people with eating disorders as either passive objects subjected to misogynist discourses or subversive agents that negotiate societal norms. In both cases, agency is primarily investigated as a phenomenon that unfolds between the anorectic individual and the surrounding society. In contrast, this article explores how the question of agency also unfolds within the anorectic her-/himself. It does so by setting up a dialogue between the anorectic testimony of Cecilie Lind’s pathography Scarykost (2016) and philosophical ideas of corporeality in feminist new materialism, affect theory, and phenomenology. Ultimately, the article argues that the anorectic subject is not a homogenous individual that can easily be classified as either passive or active, but comprises an infra-corporeal landscape of social, psychic, and biological forms of agency that struggle to determine the will of the anorectic “I.” In that way, the article pushes back on the tendency in cultural and gender studies to make generalizing claims about the anorectic’s subversive agency – or lack thereof.

Learning development through the Girl Rising Curriculum: discursive colonialism and subversive potentials

ABSTRACT Global development and governance efforts are increasingly geared toward the unique power of girls from the Global South. In the “girling of development” discourse, investing in girls is not only the right thing to do but also the smart way to eradicate poverty and stimulate economic growth. As one iteration of this broader discourse, Girl Rising (GR) is a film turned social movement organization that prizes educating girls from the Global South to unleash positive development outcomes. With the help of the Pearson Foundation, GR created the Girl Rising Curriculum (GRC) to implement in elementary, middle, and high schools across the United States and the broader “developed world.” This article uses a postcolonial feminist framework to interrogate the colonial and capitalist logics of the GRC that, when contextualized in classroom spaces, are both reinforced and contested by teachers and students. While the GRC conceals its discursive colonialism and perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism through uplifting messages of empowering young girls, I argue that teachers and students in the classroom often reinterpret its logics through moments of subversive agency, signifying the discourse’s instability and transformative potential.

The Agency of the Jewess and Her Palestinian Counterpart: Destabilizing Gender and Vulnerability as Resistance in Paradise Now and For My Father

In this article I compare two twenty-first-century films that foreground the subversive agency of Israeli and Palestinian women within the military context of the Middle East conflict. Paradise Now (Abu-Assad, 2005) and For My Father (Zahavi, 2008) convey the subject of powerless women living on the fringes of normative society, whose agency averts the maximal effects of a Palestinian suicide bombing. Coming from seemingly opposing perspectives—Palestinian and Israeli—these films' aesthetics nonetheless converge in both a redefinition of their genre and the place of gender and resistance within it. Not only do they collapse the spectacle of terrorism and humanize their bombers, they also destabilize the masculinity of men who self-sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland. In the process, they shift the expected locus of vulnerability as resistance—from men who implode the vulnerable body to women who risk everything to preserve it. The parallel roles of the Jewess and her Palestinian counterpart in these films implies the provocative idea that feminine intervention in the Middle East is not only admirable or "natural," but necessary, if there is to be any hope of lasting resolution. Viewing the two films in tandem on the backdrop of contemporaneous literature and film, points to the potential for a shared, feminist zeitgeist in the cultural production of the two nations at this crucial juncture in history.

Sensing the next battle: An overshadowed prehistory of creative dissent in Tunisia

When analysing the Tunisian uprising through its aesthetics, the premonitory and subversive agency of the artistic sphere becomes intelligible. This contribution, therefore, engages in a reconstruction of an often overlooked local and historical sequence of aesthetic contention and asks if this sequence prefigured the Tunisian uprising. This seditious premonitory subversion grew into a generalized practice as it emerged into full daylight during the liberation phase of the uprising as an important mediator of the fundamental changes the country was taking itself through. The specific practices that structured the aesthetics of Tunisian uprising were thus already formed a decade before the self-immolation of Tarek el-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi. This insight is not only fruitful in relation to the ongoing debates reconstructing the historical dynamics that preceded the revolution, but also gives important insights into the visionary subversive dynamics the artistic sphere is still engaging in today, maybe sensing the next battle coming.

Trafficked women’s presentation of self before the German courts

The analysis in this article provides an alternative interpretation of trafficked women’s self-presentation before the courts. I use complete observations of German judges deposing women in camera who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against their traffickers. My objective is to develop and inform a different account of the women’s self-presentation by prioritising the narrative accounts of their ‘lived’ experiences of trafficking. Invoking Judith Butler’s analysis of the complex transactions between subjectification and subversive agency and emerging debates in the health arena in psychosocial theory on resilience, I ask: How is trafficked women’s self-presentation in criminal proceedings an expression of their agency and resilience?

Empowerment and Collaborative Agency in Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

This article examines the issue of child agency and empowerment in Mildred’s D. Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. This theme is addressed by some critics who come to the conclusion that Taylor’s protagonist, the young girl Cassie Logan, develops agency and subversive subjectivity in the course of the novel. This study challenges such readings to argue that the ending of Taylor’s novel does not reflect empowerment; and consequently does not support such conclusions. Through expanding self-in-relation theory to feminism as an interpretive tool, this paper suggests that Cassie Logan’s subversive agency remains partial and incomplete because she fails to engage in an inter-connected and constructive relationship with the ‘other’. Cassie’s empowerment is partial because she fails to exert it in the larger community of African Americans and whites, that otherwise could have stimulated a greater impetus for activism. This study concludes that agency and subjectivity are constructed and empowered within the community which is larger than the self and the family.

Transgression Unbound: Subjectivity and Subversion in Howard Barker’s The Castle

ABSTRACTCritics have employed a wide range of post-structuralist theories to cast light on Howard Barker’s art of theatre, but the application of Judith Butler’s theories to Barker’s dramatic works has so far been neglected. In an attempt to fill the existing gap in the scholarship and criticism on Barker’s drama, this study will employ Judith Butler’s conceptions of fluid identity and subversive performativity as a theoretical framework to examine the presentation of transgressive subjectivity and the possibility of subversive agency in The Castle, where Barker’s innovative explorations of identity, sexuality, and freedom get manifestation through the characters’ transgressive identities and their re-significations of hegemonic institutions.

The Celebrity of Exilic Romance: Francisco de Miranda and Lord Byron

ABSTRACTThis comparative analysis argues that Lord Byron's celebrity, and the ways in which he sought to deploy it, was anticipated by Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), the Venezuelan exile, adventurer, and revolutionary. Miranda inspired a type of transnational celebrity classified here as “exilic romance.” Defined by the appropriation and performance of several often contradictory identities, exilic romance operated as a living text, one that was being constantly edited, revised, and reinterpreted. Its many poses, which included the reinterpretation of courtly love, episodic adventure, and erotic symbolism, drew on literary genres (romance, picaresque, epic, and drama) and on classic Hispanic cultural symbols (such as El Cid, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and el pícaro). These literary “reenactments” were shaped in numerous ways by exile: the exotic distance of physical, cultural, and anachronistic separation that existed between the celebrity object and his public reception. This exilic distance enabled a fluid celebrity form of myriad personae that became the foundation for the subversive agency that critics have commonly associated with Byron's elusive classification. In proposing that Miranda's celebrity prefigured Byron's, this argument shows how exilic romance captured the political and cultural imagination on both sides of the Atlantic for four decades through the public fascination with Miranda's and Byron's lives and how Byron made the fascination and elusiveness of exilic romance one of the subjects of Don Juan.

Carnivalising Postcolonial Zimbabwe: The Vulgar and Grotesque Logic of Postcolonial Protest in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013)

SummaryThis article set out to explore NoViolet Bulawayo's We need new names from the perspective of carnivalised writing. The objectives of the article were to unpack how the vulgar and the grotesque were used to create carnival moments in the narrative and to examine how marginal subjects gain voice and some degree of power to live an alternative life, even if this is momentary. It sought to examine how Bulawayo derives her aesthetics from the vulgar and the grotesque to create a carnivalesque logic that informs postcolonial protest in the novel. The analysis made use of the theoretical concepts of carnival propounded by Mikhail Bakhtin. This article argues that the text is constituted by a regime of the vulgar, which the child characters deploy for transgressing hegemonic practices and authoritative discourses. Social norms are suspended and the children have a subversive agency, courtesy of parody and satire. The article reveals that apart from speaking back to power, the children harness the image of kaka (human excrement) as a discursive resource to satirise the failures of the Zimbabwean postcolony and to degrade all forms of authority. It is concluded that while the scatological in the novel suggests social indictment, the images of kaka and dirt fail to transcend protest to see the realisation of a desired postcolonial condition.

International Women’s Day in the Brazilian Countryside: New Forms of Political Protest and Resistance

This paper examines new forms of political protest and resistance carried out by Brazilian peasant women during the celebration of International Women’s Day. Since 2006, the Brazilian women of La Via Campesina (International Peasant Movement) have taken radical action in order to reclaim 8 March as an international day of struggle by women workers and to question the political, cultural and economic model of development. Their efforts to break the silence about the social and environmental impact of the expanding ‘green desert’ created by the eucalyptus monoculture of the big paper companies in Brazil provides a remarkable case of women’s subversive agency. Based on the documentary Rompendo o Silencio ( Breaking the Silence ), produced by La Via Campesina to record the action taken by 2,000 women on International Women’s Day in 2006, as well as interviews with women from the organisation who took part in that event, this study argues that peasant women’s radical action provides new insights for the analysis of feminism in Latin America and worldwide. It also demonstrates that through their radical and collective actions, which challenge traditional forms of participation and gender roles, peasant women have become one of the major forces within the current movement campaigning for the development of an agro-ecological and sustainable agriculture in Brazil. Keywords : women, feminism, La Via Campesina, social movements, green desert, Brazil.

The pedagogical role of multicultural leadership in post-apartheid South Africa

Practical theology in the 21st century is faced with increasing diversity that requires a new pedagogy to address multicultural challenges. Multiculturalism serves as a subversive agency for monocultural and ‘silent minority’ landscapes. It might also contribute to the development of an identity pedagogue for the three public spaces of theology, specifically in South Africa, where this new democracy seeks a new culture of humanity and has to deal with the dichotomy of a multicultural society and a resistant monocultural ‘laager’ mentality of minority races. Despite the promising start to its democracy, South Africa has many social challenges and practical theology has a role to play by reflecting on how we understand and embody the relationship between faith, culture and public life. To this end, this article seeks to reflect critically on spirituality, leadership and social transformation praxis in search of meaning-forming multicultural praxes.

Africa in New Orleans: Creole Complexities in Racist America

Africa in New Orleans: Creole Complexities in Racist America

Roundtable Discussion: Must i be Womanist?: Response

Response Debra Mubashshir Majeed (bio) Some might argue that Monica Coleman's "Must I be womanist?" represents the ideological concerns of a young, thoughtful scholar who expected the shoulders of her mentors to be strong and broad enough to both carry her to her destiny and shield her destiny for her until she met it. In other words, Coleman appears to cast herself—and other "third-wave" womanists, like me—as both benefactor and victim, both a daughter and a granddaughter of a movement whose subversive agency has been both inspired and handcuffed by trailblazers who spoke the truth, but not audibly enough, not persuasively enough, not often enough, and not completely enough to clarify the meaning of "womanism" for succeeding generations. Speaking of the work of those "passionate people of faith" who encouragingly "mentored and "mothered" her, Coleman declares, "I've been dissatisfied by the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship." From the outset, she acknowledges the intellectual minefi eld she has entered as well as the utmost respect with which her questioning begins. Still, she chastises her mentors for not removing the guesswork, for leaving her with questions about her intellectual and activist identity that she does not want. For me, the question isn't whether her theorizing is accurate. Instead I [End Page 113] wonder, does she alone harbor perceptions about the utility of the womanist legacy for non-Christian women attempting to name themselves from within the boundaries of womanist thought, or has the Christology of the Western womanist agenda rendered other religious traditions so invisible that non-Christian women may live more authentically outside of—and perhaps far away from—the womanist camp? In 1994, I faced a similar intellectual dilemma; I wanted someone else to reduce my options for me, too. Thankfully, Jacquelyn Grant refused to do so. In that year, she traveled to Pasadena, California, from Atlanta, Georgia, to present a public lecture on her groundbreaking work White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus.1 I was a second-career master of divinity student at Fuller-Evangelical Theological Seminary, contemplating my field of study for a doctoral degree. With the aid of event coordinator and good friend Aleese Moore, I was able to spend a few private moments with Grant prior to her departure. She agreed to meet me in a nearby hotel lobby. I was intimidated by Grant (and, for that matter, by Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and Renita Weems too). So I arrived early—or so I had intended. However, I found that Grant was already seated, in a rich, oversized bamboo chair that resembled more a throne than seating for the dispensation of career advice. I knew our time was short, so I was direct. I shared the short version of my life's journey and interests and then asked, "So what can I study?" Without a blink, and in her usual authoritative voice, Grant replied, "What do you want to study?" After losing a couple of rounds of this form of conversational volleying, I declared, "You mean there's no list from which I am to pick?" I walked away feeling naive, dejected, and enormously wasteful of Grant's time. The idea that one could (or should at least attempt to) connect her seminary training to her passion had never occurred to me. I expected Grant to help me choose the shape of my doctoral work, based upon her wisdom concerning the academy and her knowledge of what was acceptable for an African American clergywoman to study. Instead, she refused to overlook my intellectual interests or to support any attempt of mine to remain within the ideological boundaries others tried to draw around African American female scholars. On that wonderfully sunny California afternoon, Grant challenged me to recognize that I had options even she could not circumscribe. She knew full well that I might endure nights of intellectual and spiritual jihad on the path to realizing that I should craft a dissertation project bearing some resemblance to my personal aspirations rather than limit my advanced studies solely to someone else's predetermined categories. (In this context I use the Arabic term jihad to connote internal struggle for personal...

Self-Reflective Helping

ABSTRACT Empirical evidence suggests that postsecondary education for offenders within the Texas prison population is an effective means of reducing recidivism. This article is an interpretative essay attempting to understand these beneficial effects. It contrasts the naïve interpretation of enhanced offender agency with Foucault's powers of normalization as the foreground for a larger discussion of what it means to help. It suggests a theoretical framework for client empowerment that embraces the ideal of parity of control between the extremes of subversive agency and the social power of normalization.

Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political Thought

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces.

Montage, cinematic subjectivity and feminism in Ozaki Midori's Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense

Ozaki Midori (1896–1971) is an important modernist author whose work has only recently begun to be reassessed. This essay analyzes Ozaki's best‐known text, Dainana kankai hokō (Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense, 1933). I argue that Dainana kankai hokō should be read in conjunction with Ozaki's film criticism as well as in the context of the theory and practice of montage and of avant‐garde film and photography in the 1920s and 1930s. This perspective in its turn should be linked to modernist mass culture, especially to the so‐called trends of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) in this period. Structured to a great extent by montage, Dainana kankai hokō stages an elaborate mimicry and/or anticipation of the speculations of critics and theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein and Kitagawa Fuyuhiko which not only reveals itself as a parody and deconstruction of these discourses but at the same time suggests exuberant feminist fantasies of empowerment. The World of the Seventh Sense also articulates a feminist cinematic schizoanalysis representing both a remarkable anticipation, and a critique and transformation of the postmodern schizoanalytic project in Deleuze and Guattari. Ozaki's feminist schizo‐politics calls attention especially to the tendency to de‐corporealize, dehistoricize and atomize/render diffuse the subversive agency of gender, sexuality and the body in the writings of the two French philosophers.