Subversive Resistance Research Articles

‘Jobless corner campus’: an institutionalised idleness in Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi

ABSTRACT The article analyses the so-called institutional idleness observed taking place in Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. The study analyses the notion of idling – a stigmatic term that is internalised by the residents and follows the inhabitants’ reaction to the stigmatisation. Among the internalisation, another form of reaction to the stigmatisation has been identified, characterised by the involvement of the idleness in organisations formed by the residents. Such behaviour has been observed as being accompanied by a certain level of playfulness and irony resulting in what I term institutionalised idleness – a form of non-violent subversive resistance to the authoritative and disciplinary narratives of official institutions of the post-colonial state in Africa. Moreover, the study presents a spatial dimension of institutionalised idleness, allowing the residents of Kibera to secure their informal leisure spaces in the public space of the city, and to therefore challenge the normative thinking about urban living and perceptions of free time. The institutionalised idleness thus represents a strategy providing the inhabitants of informal settlements with wider recognition, however, without losing their safe space within the community.

After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...

Feeling against the plot: an African diaspora feminist politics of happiness

ABSTRACT This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.

Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping

ABTRACT This paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique.

Surrealist Nuance and Postcolonial Subjectivity

In its origins, surrealism transpired as a radical subversive culture within advanced capitalist societies in Europe during the first few decades of the twentieth century. In colonial and postcolonial societies, however, surrealism variously assumed a quintessence of a protracted struggle between, on the one hand, the old and neocolonial cultural hegemony and, on the other hand, the subversive resistance by the neocolonized, with all the paradoxical elements that are part and parcel of that struggle. One of the few manifestations of a surrealism-inspired cinematic work in the Arab world during the last century is Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990). This critically acclaimed film is a rich example of Arab cinema that celebrates non-normative personal identity while simultaneously rethinking traditional notions of nation under colonial rule. This third installment of Chahine’s autobiographical film quartet, which he intermittently drew over the course of his thirty-year career, indulges a complex exposé of Chahine the man, the artist, and the political activist. It also draws on mostly imagined, and partly real, episodes in the filmmaker’s life. As such, and rather than using a typically grand anticolonial metanarrative, the film favors the depiction of multiple surrealist proliferations of difference, juxtapositions, dislocation, and distortions seen not as embodiments of a single truth but rather as energized political and aesthetic forms of a collective project for revamping Egyptian and Arab identity and reality.

Reasons for Self-Dislocating: A review of Luciana Cadahia and Ana Carrasco-Conde (editors), Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse

Reasons for Self-DislocatingA review of Luciana Cadahia and Ana Carrasco-Conde (editors), Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse Miriam Jerade (bio) Cadahia, Luciana, and Ana Carrasco-Conde, editors. Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse. Herder, 2020. This edited collection features contributions by Spanish-speaking women scholars who share the same motif—self-dislocation. The eleven authors seek to question the locus of philosophy and the discourses that frame it. The book is founded on the idea that philosophy has been historically enunciated by a male voice located in an Anglo-American geography. As the editors claim in the introduction, the self-dislocating logos is a loxos, a "taking away," being mis-placed. This is reflected in the title of the volume, Fuera de sí mismas (Out of Their Minds), a play on words that echoes the language of mania but seeks to redress it as contrary to nonsense. Editors Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde propose that this form of collaboration allows women philosophers to claim back for themselves a voice of their own. The play between title and subtitle is also worth noticing. The title phrase "fuera de sí mismas" leads the reader to think of a judgment from outside—a female "they" who is "out of their mind" or even more literally "out of themselves." The subtitle can be read as a response. There are indeed "reasons for dislocating" ("motivos para dislocarse") the self, for making themselves uncomfortable, or self-dislocating. The contributors find themselves in a place where the voices of Spanish-speaking women philosophers are not heard. In response, the authors collectively claim the need to be creative and to dislocate the discourse. As Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde state in the introduction, "Only by being out of our minds/ourselves can we dislocate imposed places of enunciation that have turned aside our way of making philosophy, so we can open up new paths for a new logic" ("Solo estando fuera de sí mismas podemos desquiciar lugares de enunciación impuestos que han relegado nuestra forma de hacer filosofía y encontrar los caminos de una nueva lógica"; 18).1 It is not enough to publish philosophical research conducted by women in Spanish; more significantly, the collection explores a new logic of philosophical discourse through their interventions. The volume was not originally conceived as a collection of chapters focusing on feminism or on Latin American philosophy. The editors asked eleven renowned Latin American women scholars to send them texts about their current work. While the volume is not organized thematically, common topics arise in the essays. Anna Maria Brigante and Emma Ingala Gómez explore the image. Laura Quintana and Amanda Núñez García examine the possibility of political thought through aesthetics. María del Rosario Acosta and Rosaura Martínez Ruiz share a concern with the performativity of listening. Rocío Zambrana, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, and Macarena Marey critique liberal and neoliberal policies. In their respective essays, Ana Carrasco-Conde and Luciana Cadahia write about evil and desire. The originality of the book lies in the way all the contributors read canonical—and mostly male—philosophers and theorists from a situated standpoint. Zambrana interprets the debt crisis and the resistance of students in Puerto Rico through the lens of Walter Benjamin's divine violence. Acosta reads political violence as an erasure of voice in Adriana Cavarero and in Ariel Dorfman's novel La muerte y la doncella, which deals with torture in the Chilean dictatorship. Quintana writes about unburied corpses in Colombia, using Rancière and Mbembe as interlocutors. The contributors do not merely apply male theorists' ideas to a particular question but take up a particular lens to read theory otherwise. Taken together, the various situations they bring into play question the locus of philosophy. For example, the subversive resistance of students in Puerto Rico allows us to better understand why divine violence is a destruction of history and how it is conceived as an expiation of debt in mythical violence. A character in the work of a Chilean author writing about the country's dictatorship who has experienced torture in relation to their voice can shed light on the...

‘Boys don’t rule us’: exploring Rwandan girls with disabilities’ resistance to masculine dominance in school

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how economically disadvantaged girls with disabilities resist masculine domination at Rwanda’s largest inclusive school, Busengare Secondary. Based on 16 in-depth interviews and 3 focus group interviews with Rwandan girls with disabilities, this study draws on critical feminist perspectives to examine the subjectivities of girls with disabilities marginalised by virtue of their gender, class and disability. The findings reveal that girls with disabilities challenge the enduring power of masculine domination that seeks to limit their leadership and learning in classrooms through two distinct strategies: assertive resistance and subversive resistance. At its core, this paper exposes gendered structures of dominance among young people with disabilities not yet addressed in gender studies and disability studies scholarship in Rwanda.

Against Power? Distinguishing Between Acquisitive Resistance and Subversion

Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. This article argues for an analytical distinction between such strategies of capturing power on behalf of those without it, and strategies for reducing power differentials directly or annihilating the capacity to accumulate power. We adopt the analytical term subversion to describe these latter efforts to reduce the intensity of, and undermine the capacity to reproduce or deepen, power relationships. Rather than focusing on redistribution or inversion of asymmetrical power relations to benefit the disempowered, subversive strategies work toward decreasing the possibility of accumulating power or, in the extreme case, completely evacuating existing unequal power relations. Thinking about political engagement in terms of limiting the possibility of asymmetrical power relationships (regardless of who holds that power) helps to illuminate a distinction between reactive politics against injustice and proactive politics that pursue alternative, increasingly just conceptual norms. We draw on threads in critical, political, and urban geographies to articulate a particularly geographic concept of “fleeing‐in‐place” as subversive resistance to hegemony, the undermining of the possibility of asymmetrical socio‐spatial power relations within existing contemporary political economies. We propose strategies for research that better highlight the differences between resistance and subversion.

Splat!: Death, mess, failure and ‘blue-balling’

This article analyzes particular strategies in my recent performance Splat! (2013) that work towards redeploying (pop)feminist structures of trauma and survival. Pop-feminist affirmation-based affects that claim to produce or activate agency, or ‘empowerment’, in the female subject are aggressively sold to women via mainstream media. This model of the empowered woman is predicated on her previous experience of trauma and the subsequent activation of ‘survival’ affects enabling the subject's ‘overcoming’ of trauma. This model of empowered or ‘coherent’ subjectivity, I argue, is one that rejects the possibility of mess, failure, humiliation, or other ‘disintegrative’ affects. Within this ‘successful’ model of subjectivity, these messy possibilities would return the subject to (her previous) victimhood. This article, however, asks whether the enactment of ‘disintegrative’ affects in contemporary women's performance, particularly in Splat!, might not only act as a subversive resistance to the strip mall of female affirmation, but also provide an alternative method of agency production that is not dependent upon the possibly impossible paradigm of the integrated subject.

Zanele Muholi's Elements of Survival

South African Zanele Muholi’s photographs directly address resistance and tension between individual and community. Specifically, Muholi refers to the lives and loves of people who are black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI), aiming her project toward establishing and preserving “black queer visibility.” In the process, Muholi produces photographic images that refer to—and critically reconsider— longstanding visual traditions, while at the same time responding to acts of violence and dehumanization. The result is an expanding archive that visualizes various complexities of community and nation. One precedent for Muholi’s use of photography in relation to black community appeared over a century ago. Deborah Willis (2003) notes that W.E.B. DuBois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, had a fascination with photography. For DuBois, photography played a critical role in reconstructing and shaping American visual culture at the turn of the 20th century. When assembling materials for the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, DuBois turned to black photographers to mount challenges to blatantly racist and stereotypical images that pictured people of color as inferior, unattractive, and unintelligent. Collected several years prior to DuBois’s famous postulation of black racial identity as “double consciousness,” the photographs displayed in Paris were meant to serve as an archive of visual evidence that would prove black people were as multifaceted as everyone else. Unlike other exoticized collections and displays of the time, DuBois’s archive of images expresses possibility through visual self-presentation. Black photographers and their black subjects defined themselves and their beauty through photography, believing it was a significant step in the fight against violently negative imagery (Harris 2003). In a time when the deliberate distortion of black images in popular culture was common, DuBois’s archive offered a different view of the global black subject against a sociopolitical backdrop that made violent efforts to classify and control. Dubois’s exhibit ran counter to popular de-humanizing displays by visualizing black folk as an inextricable part of the fabric of society; it was a successful effort to overturn many common ideas about black life (Willis 2003:52). These photographs of a diverse range of black people played a role in shaping ideas about identity and a sense of self. Dubois’s collection of images motivated black folks, but they also informed the broader American social consciousness. Beyond racial concerns, black photographers were interested in locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of people close to them, the humor of everyday life, and the dreams of a people (Enwezor 2006, Firstenberg 2001). The visualization of educated, working, and dreaming black people formed a visual archive that documented a diverse nation of dignified, proud, successful, and beautiful humans. The pictures were radical because, through them, the African American community was presented as a group of spiritually, socially, and economically diverse individuals. The insistence on defining one’s own identity and beauty is what Willis has termed “subversive resistance.” Subversive resistance is a metaphor for strategies that produce visual images to counter dominant meanings or stereotypes (Willis 2003). It operates by offering alternative views, and its force often comes through nuanced presentation of one’s self and community. Contemporary photographs may also enable the viewer to imagine how people connect with, and belong to, their communities and nations. I use DuBois’s show as a point of departure for this essay on South African artist Zanele Muholi because in the course of my research I happened upon a reproduction of a striking archiGender and South African Art

"Girl with a pen": Girls' Studies and Third-Wave Feminism in A Room of One's Own and "Professions for Women"

Although Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own ([1929]1989) is a foundational feminist tract for theorizing women's social and artistic roles, it relies on stories, metaphors, and rhetorics of girlhood. I am the first to recognize Woolf's stylistic pattern of using the term "women" when theorizing the state of female authorship, but "girls" when fictionalizing scenes of this authorship. Using this rhetorical slippage to query aged identity in the text, the article shows how representations of girls in Woolf enact contemporary debates within third-wave feminism regarding the inclusion or exclusion of girls' studies in women's studies. Specifically, it aligns girls' studies social-science phenomenological research on real girls' articulations of their sexual bodies and sexual self-consciousness with Woolf's representations of girls' artistic/ erotic expressions. Second, the article applies a range of girls' studies research from neurology, psychology, biology, sociology, and critical theory to reveal girl characters within identities that are critically treated as adult women in Room . It recuperates the allegorical "Judith Shakespeare" as a girl figure, and links moments in her representation to research on real adolescent girls' neurological myelination, psychological crises, loss of voice, eating disorders, hormonal fluctuations, subversive resistance, teen pregnancy, and global disenfranchisement and disappearance. Through a third-wave girls' studies perspective, the article argues that Woolf imbricates girlhood in her artistic imaginary, revealing her unconscious engagement with female adolescence against her more totalizing impulse to argue for a definitive "woman genius."

Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires

Reviewed by: Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires Elizabeth Rhodes (bio) Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, EDS. Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. viii + 478 pp. index. illus. bibl. $25. As the subtitle of this handsome volume indicates, its objective is to illuminate the darker spaces in Western European historiography occupied by players on the world stage during the time when the Black Legend was created and began to engender an even darker mythology about Spain. The fine introduction (also called chapter 1) provides an overview of the legend's origins in Bartolomé de Las Casas's account of Spanish brutality in the New World colonies, the Brevisima relación of 1552. Intended for a Spanish public, the treatise was picked up by the English and then by others, who found in it ample justification for believing what they wanted about Spain, for economic and political reasons: the worst. The introduction traces the influence of Las Casas's text on the evolution of racial discourse, race being the real subject of most of the essays. Thus the book has particular value for those interested in how and why the notion of race passed from its Renaissance definition based on breeding (as in the race of a horse), to distinctions based on such things as skin color, religious beliefs, and types of writing or lack thereof. The book is divided into four parts, about (I) eastern empires, (II) Spain, (III) Holland (IV) England. The two essays in the first part address the importance of Christian converts in the Ottoman empire (Leslie Peirce) and the hidden mixing of cultures inside the harem in the Muhgal one (Ruby Lal). The editors qualify these chapters, not apparently related to the issue at hand, as an estranging frame, implicitly to destabilize more traditional points of reference. Chapters 1 through 3 of part 2 are devoted to Spain: the first interrogates racism in the medieval period that "blackened" the country by associations with Africa and Islam (David Nirenberg); the second asserts that the Spaniards' assimilation of Moorish culture was at odds with the country's political, religious, and demographic rejection of them (Barbara Fuchs); and the third presents the Spanish Inquisition's powerful bureaucracy as a symptom of Spanish modernity (Irene Silverblatt). Gonzalo Lamana offers [End Page 169] a most informative study of the ways in which different representations of a single event across time and place manipulate and embellish those events to serve particular agendas, drawing a parallel between various accounts of a 1532 violent encounter between Spaniards and Incas in Peru and the Bush administration's justifications for the war in Iraq. SilverMoon and Michael Ennis provide a revisionist interpretation of the conquest of the Nahua. Their essay problematizes the notion of conquest and erasure by highlighting enduring records of Nahua cosmology and cellular social structure (altepetl) as well as by calling attention to evidence of native subversive resistance to colonization. Yolanda Fabiola Orquera's contribution presents a broad-stroke overview of the colonial period, divided into conquest and consolidation, attempts at accommodation, and the eruption of violence. Part 2 concludes with Kathryn Burns's essay entitled "Unfixing Race." Burns's excellent contribution points to the problems inherent in the Spaniards' need to coexist with multiple races in the colonies, having ethnically cleansed their own country of Jews and Moors from 1492 to 1609. The contributions on Holland in part 3 are especially fine, beginning with Carmen Nocentelli's rereading of Dutchman Jan Huygen van Linschoten's extremely influential Itinerario, a critical account of Portuguese colonial practices in Asia. Linschoten relates the seduction of the Portuguese by things Indian, which compromised Portuguese notions of superiority, and documents the persistence of Asian erotic customs that the conquerors were more than willing to assimilate rather than vanquish. It was not all seduction, however. As Nocentelli indicates, Linschoten and other European males endorse the Chinese practice of binding women's feet to keep them (women and feet) nicely in place, and they write approvingly of sati, Brahman widows' self...

Narratives of Survival

Discussions of closure, which played an important role in the analysis of novels in the heyday of narratology, associated the open text with a subversive resistance to containment and the failure or inability to fix meaning. Such a description fails to account for narratives in which “process” or movement in time is not goal oriented, where the goal is immanent to the process and where the notion of closure is irrelevant rather than subverted or unattainable. I propose to call such plots “narratives of survival” because they tend to foreground the continuous, in principle endless, process of creation anew (production and reproduction) necessary for the maintenance of life, self, social group, family bonds, affect. In doing so they diverge from the norms that characterize the English novel in its hegemonic form, where survival is merely the taken-for-granted precondition for “higher” pursuits—a transparent means to other ends. But the sway the concept of “progress” exerts over images of forward movement, specifically the movement of stories that shape cultural notions of what makes a life worthwhile, is such that these narratives are seldom read on their own terms. Conversely, as I show through an analysis of Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, and Charles Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop, reading them on their own terms allows us to perceive an alternative view of family and home to that produced by the novel in its hegemonic form.

Negotiating Anal Intercourse in Inter-Racial Gay Relationships in Hong Kong

This article is about the experience of Chinese gay men in colonial Hong Kong, their relationship with Western partners and their sexual practices. The body of the colonized is a critical space where resistance against the subjection by the colonial intrusion is put up. As their agency and instruments of desire are actively claiming personal and interpersonal space, the forces of colonial domination are met with subversive resistance. It is in the paradoxical site of inter-racial gay anal intercourse that the equation between the colonizer and the powerful is simultaneously realized and questioned, both the enemy and the lover present themselves to a desire that is always characterized by ambivalence.