Transgressive Act Research Articles

From active duty to activism: how moral injury and combat trauma drive political activism and societal reintegration among Israeli veterans.

This article deals with combat experiences and their consequences and could be potentially disturbing. Moral injury (MI) is a severe form of combat trauma that shatters soldiers' moral bearings as the result of killing in war. Among the myriad ways that moral injury affects veterans' reintegration into civilian life, its impact on political and societal reintegration remains largely unstudied but crucial for personal, community, and national health. 13 in-depth interviews examine combat soldiers' exposure to potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs) that include killing enemy combatants, harming civilians, and betrayal by commanders, the military system, and society. Interviewees also described their political activities (e.g., voting, fundraising, advocacy, protest) and social activism (e.g., volunteering, teaching, charitable work). Interviewees also completed the Moral Injury Symptom Scale. Two distinct narratives process PMIEs. In a humanitarian narrative, soldiers hold themselves or their in-group morally responsible for perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent a morally transgressive act such as killing or injuring civilians or placing others at unnecessary risk. In contrast, a national security perspective blames an out-group for leaving soldiers with no choice but to act in ways that trigger moral distress. Associated with shame and guilt, the humanitarian perspective triggered amends-making and social activism after discharge. In contrast, a national security perspective associated with anger and frustration fostered protest and intense political activism. Despite its harmful health effects, moral trauma and injury can drive intense political and social activism, depending upon the narrative veterans adopt to interpret PMIEs. Aside from moral injury's personal, familial, and social effects, moral injury drives veterans' return to the political arena of civil society. As such, veterans play a central role in politics and dramatically affect post-war policy in democratic nations following conflict.

“Say, are you a little ashamed?” – Shame allocation and accountability in Israeli news interviews

In light of the growing emotionalization of public discourse, this article deals with the action of shame allocation in Israeli accountability interviews. A qualitative analysis of tokens of the Hebrew verb lehitbayesh ‘to be ashamed’ in political interviews was conducted using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis methods. The findings show that in this public context the verb lehitbayesh is mostly not used to convey an emotional state, nor can its meaning be explained by the classic theoretical conceptualization of shame. Instead, lehitbayesh is mobilized to allocate shame to another actor, and portrays the allocator as morally superior and as someone who sacrifices for what is right. Lehitbayesh is part of the negotiations between journalists and politicians over the question of who is accountable for a transgressive act, what the desired response is, and who the relevant audience for the moral lesson is.

Heidegger, Death and 'Originary-Ethics'

Outside the claim that Antigone’s blood relationship is a primal incentive towards her transgressive act, Heidegger’s readings of Antigone couch an overarching insight, which dovetails with the terrible (deinon) in Introduction to Metaphysics. For Heidegger, the deinon as the ‘terrible’ reconciles the historical role of Antigone with the utmost of risk of death. Antigone is able to preserve the essence of dik? through death’s radical negativity. In a remarkable passage, Heidegger says that the deinon is ‘the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway’. Instead of claiming that the deinon is transgression or kinship, and thereby reduce the terrible to an objective experience. I argue that the deinon resides precisely in the relationship between death and dik?. Death’s insurmountable risk is what preserves the deinon between fittingness and unfittingness; between homeliness and unhomeliness. I concur that this confrontation can only occur if Antigone’s impulse is neither her brother nor the gods. Both of these affirmations attenuate the risk of dik? since their essence reifies the inarticulate character of Antigone’s impulse. Antigone’s impulse carries that which cannot be named, or more acutely, that which elopes articulation. Antigone’s act is a consequence of a ‘risk’ that keeps itself more risky, more transgressive, and more terrible. As we ponder Heidegger’s understanding of death, it becomes clear that the ‘more terrible and distant’ is the limit beyond all limits. Death fulfills Antigone’s heroic venture in that her act is a concretion of the inarticulate nature of the deinon. The aim of this essay is to ascertain that neither familiar kinship nor transgression cohere with Heidegger’s claim on Antigone’s individual act. It suggests that dik? is the non-metaphysical risk that allows Antigone to envisage death’s radical negativity as the utmost limit that cannot be extinguished. The conclusion of this study ascertains that death’s radical negativity allows Antigone to perceive the finitude of her historical role as a citizen without naming her individual impulse, chiefly because she realizes that transgression is not a final resolve.

'Why doesn't anyone ask me'? Patients' experiences of receiving, performing and practices of oral care in an acute Orthopaedic Department.

Oral care is an integrated part of everyday life. Within nursing, barriers related to providing oral care often lead to unmet caring needs. Poor oral care is associated with a risk of respiratory and cardiovascular complications during hospitalisation. Knowledge on patients' perspectives of maintaining or receiving oral care during admissions are limited. Following the Fundamentals of Care (FOC) framework, this study uses a person-centred approach to explore patients' perceptions and experiences of receiving or performing oral care, including the nursing staff's clinical practices. A focussed ethnographic approach was used to explore patients' perspectives and clinical practices during acute admissions in an Orthopaedic Department. The local Data Protection Agency and the Ethics Committee approved the study. Data were collected in an Orthopaedic ward at a Copenhagen University hospital, Hvidovre, and consisted of 14 days of field observations of clinical practices and 15 patient interviews. Data were analysed inductively using qualitative content analysis. Two themes were identified. The first, 'The purpose of oral care is defined by the eye of the beholder', describes the social implications for the patients and how patients reject the assumption of oral care being a transgressive act. The second, 'The unspoken need', focus on the lack of dialogue, including the limited provision of oral care and how the nursing staff assesses patients' ability to perform oral care (in)dependently without including the patients. Oral care is related to the patient's psychological and physical well-being and affects social appearance. When oral care is provided respectfully, patients do not experience oral care as a transgressive act. Nursing staff's self-assessments of the patients' (in)dependency to perform oral care risk leading to incorrect care. Developing and implementing interventions applicable to the clinical practice is needed.

The Primal Archetypal and Mythical Crone in Toni Morrison’s Portrayals of the Elder Woman

Morrison’s portrayals of the elderly woman resonate with images of the wise mythical Crone, a universal image embedded in our consciousness. In pre-patriarchal societies, elder women, Crones, were associated with both life and death. The advent of patriarchy changed how aging females were perceived and their societal roles. They were diabolized, disempowered, and regarded as useless and invisible. However, Morrison’s Crones are strong life forces, and an active valuable part of their communities. Morrison revalues their traditional maternal domestic roles, and motherhood and household become, respectively, a transgressive act and a site of resistance and power. With their ancestral spiritual/supernatural/healing properties, her Crones are ancestor figures and moral beacons for their communities. In her oeuvre, Morrison reassesses and reclaims the primordial pre-patriarchal crone archetype to empower and honor old black women and their contributions to the black community.

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement

Déambulation et quête de soi dans Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi de Fouad Laroui

This study aims to highlight the tribulations of the walker in the philosophical novel The Tribulations of the Last Sijilmassi by Fouad Laaroui. We explain how Adam experiences a metamorphosis by emptying his mind of all the texts and poetic fragments of French literature that he had previously memorized. When walking, the body and mind are in full dynamism. The metamorphosis is not without unease and identity vertigo, because the “flow of words” is accompanied by headache. Our walker gets lost in his thoughts once he is on a walk. In walking, there is a loss of landmarks and of self-seeking. In addition, a feeling of duplication and discomfort is evident in the walker. The practice of walking also appears as a revolt against and resistance to the speed of modern life. The decision to walk appears to be a folly because it is shocking and perceived as a transgressive act. For Adam, to walk is to exist and resist. The protagonist intends to “hold himself out” of the speed of modern life, in that he feels a desire to move from a profane place (the city) to a sacred place.

Rossana CampoNever Felt So Good by Adria Frizzi

companies, journalists, craft skills versus desk jobs, internet impact, mother/daughter relationships, recurring generational trauma, ancient warfare techniques, birthrights —and forgiveness. Descriptions of olive-picking traditions are lyrical. The novel’s title stems from James Baldwin ’s 1962 Progressive essay, “A Letter to My Nephew.” Discussing it with Nahr, a character says: “Reading Baldwin ought to be slow. Every sentence beckons not only the mind, but also one’s heart, history, and future.” They talk about surviving colonialism , loving ancestors, and relating to Israelis. Abulhawa sums it up: “This is what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere .” Against the Loveless World is a compelling novel by an author who’s lived Middle East headlines. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Rossana Campo Never Felt So Good Trans. Adria Frizzi. McLean, Illinois. Dalkey Archive Press. 2020. ROSSANA CAMPO (b. 1963) burst on the Italian literary scene in 1992 with a picaresque novel about underwear: her own. A movie version followed the success of In principio erano le mutande (In the beginning was underwear), and Campo, the daughter of Neapolitan parents who resettled in Genoa, was off and running. Like many Italian writers of her generation, especially those associated with the socalled Giovani cannibali (Young cannibals), her prose was a slangy, provocative narrative that explored female sexuality. Both Campo’s themes and stylistic choices may explain why it’s taken twentyeight years for English-language readers to get a taste of “what women talk about when men aren’t around.” In an essay that accompanies her translation of Campo’s third novel, Mai sentita così bene (Never felt so good), Adria Frizzi suggests some reasons for the neglect: “the American literary establishment’s (publishers and literary agents alike) perceptions of Campo’s writing appear to be largely based on the fact that it doesn’t fit familiar but rigid and often obsolete categories and expectations (literary vs. commercial; canonical vs. experimental; highbrow vs. lowbrow) or even established genres and subgenres (fiction vs. theatre or film script; romance, confessional, chick lit, etc.).” Frizzi quotes the novelist: “What I’m trying to do with my writing is to deliver maximum force and energy. In order to do this I’ve always tried to eliminate everything that sounds fake, cloying, sappy, literary and stuffy to me.” Campo’s project—and the source of her unique voice—is to transfer the immediacy of speech onto the page. I first met Campo’s hilarious, spot-on satire in her second novel, Il pieno di super (Full tank), in which adolescent girls facing discrimination as meridionali (southerners ) use humor as their protective shield. Few are spared in this send-up of racist teachers and dysfunctional families. (The title comes from a father’s sex boast to his wife—“Come here, let me fill you up”—as reported by their spying daughter.) Specifically, Campo’s teenagers are trying to free themselves of the tentacles of an entrenched patriarchy. Their girl gossip is itself a transgressive act, and Campo renders their dialogue without censorship or punctuation. The same boisterous idiom and obsessive intimacy characterize the female protagonists of Never Felt So Good, who might be the same girls ten years later and living in Paris. Their lives unfold in all their messiness during an endless dinner party, arranged to welcome back Lucia, who has fled her “veeerry square” life to run off with a German biker. “Anyway, we’ve been making fun of her forever,” the narrator explains. “Because she’s really ridiculous, the type who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, suffers from gastritis, is afraid of flying and getting locked in the bathroom at a bar, can you imagine?” What defines the “crazy girlfriends” as much as their bad-ass jargon is their commitment to sexual freedom. Lucia is the butt of their jokes because she was married for five years without cheating on her husband. And cheating, as it turns out, provides the climactic bombshell that Betty is pregnant by Gianni, who is Beate’s husband and Ale’s lover. Confused? The evening is full of unusual twists, such as when the vengeful Beate, hell-bent to murder her rival Ale...

Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus by Rebecca Gould

Reviewed by: Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus by Rebecca Gould Ian Lanzillotti (bio) Rebecca Gould, Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 352 pp., ill. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-300-20064-5. The works of indigenous writers of the Caucasus have been neglected in studies of literary representations of the region. Rather, scholars have focused on the works of Russian writers and the place of the Caucasus in the Russian literary imagination.1 Rebecca Gould's Writers and Rebels explores the aestheticization of violence across multiple Caucasus literatures of insurgency, and places these literatures in conversation with each other. Drawing on fluency in Arabic, Chechen, Georgian, and Russian, Gould has written the first major comparative study of the literatures of the Caucasus. Similarly impressive, and rare for a Western scholar, Gould draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the North Caucasus. Gould's work also impresses in its ability to breakdown the disciplinary and geographic barriers that have constrained Caucasus studies. While an emphasis on anti-colonial resistance has dominated Caucasus studies, the ways in which literature and its aesthetics of violence shaped the interpretive frameworks of people in the region have largely been ignored (and this applies to Eurasian studies more broadly). To the extent that scholarship on the Caucasus engages with literature, it is usually viewed as a reflection of politics. Gould's interdisciplinary approach to the region, which draws on insights from subaltern studies, aesthetic theory, literary theory, post-structuralism, and Western Marxism, reveals the ways in which texts "giv[e] birth to new ways of conceiving political life" (P. 23). Caucasus studies has also been characterized by a tendency to see the North and South Caucasus in isolation from each other. In focusing on works of Georgian literature that have taken anti-colonial resistance in North Caucasus as their subject and highlighting how Georgian writers contributed to the aestheticization of violence in their writings in ways that parallel the work of [End Page 327] Chechen writers, Gould helps break down this artificial scholarly divide. More than covering an understudied literary history, Gould contributes to the study of anti-colonial violence by adopting the methods of literary anthropology, which uses literature to understand culture and social life. While most studies of anti-colonial violence have asked why anti-state actors turn to violence, Gould explores "the literary and aesthetic question of why and how anticolonial violence mesmerizes and mobilizes religious sensibilities" (P. 7). Gould argues that it is through these questions that we can better understand "how violence can become a viable – and often the only – modality of social existence, and of resistance, in societies ravaged by colonial and neocolonial rule" (P. 7). For Gould, it is through "the repetition and performance of [anti-colonial] violence in cultural production" that violence becomes aestheticized and, ultimately, attractive (P. 6). This understanding of how literary representations of violence become part of cultural memory offers a new way of answering the question so often asked by political scientists of the Caucasus and Eastern Europe: Why do some conflicts persist while others dissipate? Transgressive sanctity is the conceptual framework that undergirds Gould's examination of the aestheticization of violence in Caucasus literatures of insurgency. Transgressive sanctity is the sacralization of rebellion through "transgression against an externally imposed legal order" that has not yet become hegemonic and is seen as illegitimately imposed. According to Gould, "the transgressive act [results] in the altering of local legal, aesthetic, and ethical norms" (P. 3). Transgressive sanctity emerged as a means of challenging colonial governmentality in the wake of the defeat of Imam Shamil and his theocratic anti-colonial state after more than twenty-five years of resistance to Russian rule. At this point, hope was lost for successful anti-colonial resistance and there was a vacuum of authority caused by the destruction of the indigenous legal system and the rejection of the externally imposed colonial order. In this context, the abrek – the precolonial socialbandit-turned-sacred-warrior – defended indigenous communal values from colonialism by "craft[ing] an alternative ethical system" (P. 7). The abrek did this "by violating an external...

All that glitters is not gold: Counter penetrating in the name of Blackness and queerness, or, Athi-Patra Ruga's camp act in the dirt

In this article I engage South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga's artistic practice to flesh out the complexities that arise from the intersection of the terms Black and queer. Drawing on diverse historical, social and textual resources, I interpret Ruga's dismantling of dominant post-apartheid and postcolonial narratives vis-a-vis a close reading of some of his provocative avatars. Ruga's practices of staining, tainting and contaminating serve to expose the borders that produce conventional notions of race and gender. The article employs camp discourse in its allusion to performativity, displacement and artifice in order to 1) lay bare prevailing normative structures; and 2) dismantle conventional views of identity. To avoid being blindsided by camp's flamboyance and ostentation, I propose a view that favours an intimate embroilment with dirt - a stance I argue may furnish camp acts with political intent and so help create a more sophisticated and comprehensive view on the juncture of Blackness and queerness. Relying on Ruga's method of counter penetration as a way of fleshing out a hermeneutic view of Black queer subjectivity, I show how counter penetration in Ruga's estimation is a subversive and transgressive act intent on contaminating and infecting conventional narratives of history, identity and politics. Keywords: Black queer identity, camp, Athi-Patra Ruga, performance.

Menna Gallie’s Strike for a Kingdom (1959) Redefining Genre and Gender

Posing as no more than a whodunnit, Menna Gallie’s first novel introduced a new and distinctive voice into post-war anglophone Welsh writing. It was witty, comic, affectionate, often irreverent and distinctively Welsh – she claimed that she wrote with a Welsh accent. But a lightness of touch mediated through a traditionally unchallenging genre can conceal a deadly seriousness of purpose. This essay suggests that <i>Strike for a Kingdom </i>is a remarkable text inviting just such a bi-focal reading. As a seemingly artless whodunnit it provides the required transgressive act leading to a return to the established order expected by a predominantly bourgeois readership. As a politically charged narrative the novel’s value lies not in its generic formulations but in its coded representation of how colonising Anglocentric power systems, especially structural patriarchy, class hierarchy and accompanying gender differentiation, represented principally through a police inspector, run counter to indigenous forms of passive, collective masculinity in the western mining valleys.

Visual seduction: Eroticism in surrealistic art photography and postmodern fashion photography

Surrealistic art photography reveals eroticism and nudity as something that both fascinates and agitates, compelling the audience to pay attention, willingly or reluctantly. Undoubtedly, for surrealistic artists the sphere of fantasy and sexual sensation emerge as a source of pleasure and aesthetic sensation. Surrealistic fantasies, dreams and human sexuality have merged with elements of art and porn culture to create hybrid visual forms and postmodern fashion photography is certainly among them. Unlike surrealistic art photography that serves as an emancipatory tactic or as a transgressive act of provoking the public, postmodern fashion photography utilizes eroticism as an expression or vestige of perverse enjoyment. Perversion in the eroticized postmodern context holds somewhat particular meaning. Desire is operationalized without restrictions, appears everywhere while losing its imaginary. Hence, visual seduction is a never-ending game between seducers and the seduced. In light of a growing interest in understanding photography, and visual culture, this article examines how eroticism is constructed through surrealistic photographed content, and it explores the implication of this for further study of postmodern fashion photography. Conceptually, and methodologically, this article draws on semiotics (Roland Barthes), and discursive analysis, including psychoanalytic (Sigmund Freud), and representational theory and practice (Laura Mulvey, Stuart Hall and Jean Baudrillard).

Toothless Pedagogy? Problematizing Paternalism in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies

Toothless Pedagogy?Problematizing Paternalism in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies Marah Gubar (bio) About a decade ago, Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter's 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007) caused a ruckus in my college-level children's literature course. I can describe the ruckus. It was prompted by this picture book's final page, which departs from the crime-and-punishment pattern that governs the rest of Offill and Carpenter's narrative about a puckish little girl who gets into trouble for performing one spectacular piece of mischief after another. Before the story draws to its close, we repeatedly see our cheeky narrator engaging in a transgressive act, always introduced by the phrase "I had an idea to. …" Immediately thereafter, she announces that her freedom to execute that misdeed has been curtailed: either lower down on the same page or on the facing one, she repeats the description of the misbehavior that she just gave, inserted in the midst of the phrase "I am not allowed to … anymore." At first glance, the final page of the story seems like it will follow this pattern, too. The line "I had an idea to say the opposite of what I mean to trick everyone" floats above an image of the little girl hugging her mother while the words "I'm sorry" emanate from her mouth in a speech bubble. But instead of going on to characterize lying as verboten, the narrator unexpectedly concludes, "I am allowed to say the opposite of what I mean forevermore." Clutched behind her back as she smiles at us from over her deluded mother's shoulder is the big black stapler that she used to perform her first transgression, which was to affix her little brother's hair to his pillow while he was sleeping. What upset my students about this final tableau was not only that it presents lying as a viable option but also that it destabilizes the didactic agenda that structures the rest of the story. Our narrator, this ending hints, hasn't really learned her lesson about any of the seventeen things that adults have forbidden her to do, many of which are quite aggressive. (Besides picking on her little brother in a variety of ways, she also purposely sets a classmate's shoe on fire with a magnifying glass.) Student after student began objecting to the various ways that Offill and Carpenter's protagonist violates the rules of good conduct, [End Page 153] as well as expressing concern that the story's conclusion encourages child readers to regard lying and bullying as acceptable behaviors. Surprised by the force of this negative response, I wondered aloud whether we might be more tolerant of such misbehavior if the main character were male. Was it possible that Offill and Carpenter were trying to resist the "sugar and spice/and everything nice" view of girlhood, I asked, by confronting us with such a creatively disruptive heroine? Some of my students gamely got on board with this idea, pointing out that the "I had an idea to…" construction aligns mischief with intellectual inventiveness, and that the all-female creative team dress their girl protagonist and her brother in contrasting pink and blue clothing, thus signaling from the start that gender roles are salient to their story. Since they simultaneously subvert the norms of little girl prettiness by giving their white heroine big black boots and hair as messy as a bird's nest, it seems plausible to assume that they are interested in revising our conventional picture of what little girls are like. Working together, these students and I formulated an alternative interpretation of the story's ending. Rather than assuming that it condones dishonesty and aggression, we suggested, perhaps it aims to open up space for child readers to exercise their own judgment with regard to the question of how problematic the girl's behavior is. Looking for textual evidence to support this idea, one especially ingenious closereader noticed that the illustration on the cover of 17 Things is drawn from the perspective of the mother looking down on her daughter as she misbehaves. By putting readers into the mother...

‘What’s Disability Got To Do With It?’: Crippin’ Educational Studies at the Intersections

This is the introductory article to a special issue that foregrounds the centrality of an intersectional and enmeshed disability studies as an analytical framework in educational studies. The guest coeditors note that there has been a paucity of articles published in this journal that engage critical disability studies. This has occurred despite the fact that disability, as a pivotal analytic, is deployed in educational contacts to often simultaneously disrupt and reproduce the everyday workings of the settler colonial state that are simultaneously anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant, antitransgender, antiqueer, antipoor, and also antidisability. And yet, notwithstanding its pivotal location, educational studies scholarship continues to enable the erasure and invisibility of disability in discussions of transformative educational praxis. The authors of the articles in this special issue break with this tradition and, instead, offer diverse and compelling analyses that critically engage disability at the intersections of race, sexuality, immigration/refugee, gender, class, and gender identity. The guest editors discuss the critiques and possibilities that enable/disenable critical disabilities studies at the intersections and enmeshments of social difference. The introduction describes how the articles included in this special issue explicate the problematic: What’s disability got to do with educational studies? Drawing on Robert McRuer’s (2006) conceptualization of “cripping as a paradoxical and transgressive act of talking back to discourses of compulsory normativity, the guest editors hope this special issue encourages readers to continue the critical work of crippin’ educational studies.

The Problem of Female Subjectivity in the Novel “The Handwriting of Leonardo” by Dina Rubina

The article is devoted to the consideration of the problem of female subjectivity, which is directly included in the process of conceptualizing the gender picture of the world. This problem occupies a central position in the novel by Dina Rubina's "The Handwriting of Leonardo" (2008), while the main form of her artistic presentation is the heterotopy of the circus. The puzzle organization of this heterotopy allows you to focus attention on the circus culture as a way of life, as a kind of cosmos based on a transgressive act. D. Rubina, playing circus nomadism, turns the heterotopy of the circus into a space for the deployment of female subjectivity, an important role in this case is the fundamental refusal of the circus to "tell" and "reflect", its utmost demonstrativeness.Androgyny of the main heroine of the novel by Anna Nesterenko becomes an indirect evidence of the reduction of corporeality, focusing on the production of female subjectivity, the realization of which is associated with the motive of the mirror: the view "on oneself" reveals the result of looking "into oneself." One of the forms of representation of the mirror motif is the interaction of an objectified and personalized narrative, while the masculine-personalized narrative (with the epistolary of Senya and the monologized narrative of Volodya in conversation with the Interpol investigator Robert Kerler) fulfills in the novel the role of a peculiar mirror, allowing to realize the view "on oneself." The correlation of these two aspects becomes a reflection of the process of the formation of female subjectivity, the space for the unfoldment of which is the heterotopy of the circus de-centered in all its manifestations.

A Traumatic Intrusion with Transgressive Possibilities power as a relational and discursive phoneomenon

Therapy in one way or other has always been about subversion – whether it was the undermining of symptoms, the provision of a transitional space for the considering of serious changes in one’s life, a space for political conversations with social ramifications or more recently the co-creation of a space where the transformation of consciousness might take place. All of these aspects of therapy are about disrupting the habitual, the unseen and the conditioned in our personal and social lives. As such, one could posit that therapy, to be true to its spirit, is transgressive of the taken for granted – those conditioned responses which both keep us going and challenge us to transform. (1) In that way all change is in part a transgressive act. In our moves to evolve or co-evolve there needs to be a going beyond a previous positioning (Simon 2007). This special issue is a celebration of such an evolution and transgressions by many courageous beings in their own small and larger ways of living out a life of difference on the margins. Indeed this marginal siting cannot be but transgressive as they illuminate that which marginalizes in the first place. This paper also relates to a transgression of a small kind. For many years I had worked with metaphors and experiences of marginalization, power, gender inequality, abuse and victimization. These categories seemed quite clear until the intrusion that is described here entered my life and home. What follows is my attempt at deconstructing previous clarities and restorying a lived experience of ambiguities in relation to power and powerlessness. I will explore a power saturated and personally traumatic event as a relational enactment. I have chosen to explicate my own experiences this time as for most presentations and papers, I speak as a professional working with clients who have experienced trauma. However, on this occasion I thought I would take a reverse position and address my own trauma which I first wrote about (for myself) in the immediate aftermath of the event described.

The Cyborg Flâneur: Reimagining Urban Nature through the Act of Walking

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.

Indirect Relations Between Transgressive Acts and General Combat Exposure and Moral Injury.

Moral injury describes the deleterious effects of acts of commission (e.g., killing noncombatants), omission (e.g., failing to prevent a massacre), or betrayal (i.e., by a trusted authority figure) during military service that transgress accepted behavioral boundaries and norms. Transgressive acts are proposed to lead to a guilt- and shame-based syndrome consisting of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, demoralization, self-handicapping, and self-injury. In this study, we tested a frequently cited model of moral injury and assessed the associations between potentially transgressive acts, moral injury outcomes, and guilt and fear. Additionally, we sought to clarify the relative contribution of transgressive and nontransgressive/general combat exposure to moral injury. On the basis of previous research and theory, we anticipated that the transgressive acts would be related to outcomes through guilt and that nontransgressive combat exposure would be related to outcomes through fear. Secondary analysis was conducted on data from a sample of combat-exposed male veterans at a Midwestern Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center (N = 190) who participated in a larger parent study on postdeployment readjustment. Structural equation modeling was used to test the pathways from transgressive and nontransgressive combat exposure to PTSD symptoms and suicidality through combat-related guilt and combat-related fear. The institutional review boards of the Midwestern VA medical center and the university of the affiliated researchers approved the study. In total, 38% (n = 72) of the sample reported a potentially transgressive act as one of their three worst traumatic events. The most common potentially transgressive act was killing an enemy combatant (17%; n = 32). In structural equation modeling analyses. potentially transgressive acts were indirectly related to both suicidality (β = 0.09, p < 0.01) and PTSD symptoms (β = 0.06, p < 0.05) through guilt. General combat exposure was indirectly related to PTSD through fear, β = 0.19, p < 0.01. Combat exposure was not directly or indirectly related to suicidality. Overall, these findings suggest that veterans with a history of potentially transgressive acts may present to the VA with a constellation of symptoms that are associated with combat-related guilt. Transgressive acts were identified using a qualitative approach, allowing a broader sampling of this domain. Results were limited by the use of self-report data and by gathering data from participants who were Veterans seeking compensation and pension evaluations for PTSD. The clinical implications suggest that focusing on fear-related outcomes and ignoring guilt- and shame-based reactions may lead to an incomplete case conceptualization. Clinicians working with veterans with moral injury are encouraged to prepare themselves for the discomfiting therapeutic experiences of bearing witness to and empathizing with clients' memories of their actions, which may include atrocities. Effective and empathic treatments that address the guilt and shame associated with transgressive acts are needed to adequately care for returning veterans.

Before Harriet Blogged: Notes on Girls with Notebooks

Before Harriet BloggedNotes on Girls with Notebooks Bonnie J. Morris (bio) She ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it . . . there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head out the pen onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself. —Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy She dug into her bag, drew out her notebook, scribbled something, and tucked the pen in her hair. . . . Was it being a girl, Suzie wondered, that made this idea so difficult? A girl was really at the mercy of other people's thoughts, wasn't she? —Hope Campbell, Why Not Join the Giraffes? For many young girls, keeping a journal or diary is an important rite of passage: a statement of private identity, a narrative of self-importance, and (often) a transgressive act of describing intimate truths shielded from parents and peers. Private writing is also a privileged activity in a world where literacy and access to free time and writing materials are unavailable to millions of girls and women. Ironically, the hours or even years invested in journal writing by girls with such opportunity may end up in ashes: the deliberate burning or shredding of adolescent pages marks a separation from the earlier, embarrassed self. Such erasure also shields, from a parent or friend's prying eyes, observations that revealed forbidden truths. While Internet blogging has exacerbated all these factors, from complications of access to technology to panic over an intimate blog "gone viral," in this essay I am primarily interested in old-fashioned writing by hand; pen on paper. I was a girl with a journal; I remain interested to this day in other girls with [End Page 47] journals and how they used self-expression in navigating the path to womanhood and a writing life. Women who like to scrawl by hand in journals are a uniquely modern clan, a tribe that would be unrecognizable to our Paleolithic stone-age ancestors. Instead of prioritizing sheer survival against the elements, we place finding time to write at the top of our agenda. We prefer gifts of pens and paper to milk and honey or the fat of the lamb. Our cave-dwelling ancestors' bodies were oriented to absolute basics: hunting, gathering, feeding, reproducing, and staying warm; yet we turn down social invitations of food, alcohol, and even sexual companionship in order to spend nights alone, in a cold apartment, narrating life into a bound volume. How does any woman dare to write her life down? How does that start? Writing is, after all, a relationship. If keeping a journal marks one as an antisocial oddity, how much more so when one is female, expected to be available to others, always sharing, other-directed, keeping nothing back. Too much thinking has always been jeered as unfeminine: witness the centuries of cruel jokes depicting brainy girls as ugly, unlikely to marry. Thinking is masculine; caring for others, feminine. Even a progressive writer like John Steinbeck used this gender binary in The Grapes of Wrath, when the earth mother Ma Joad famously intoned, "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head." History books rarely acknowledge the personal, reflective writings and diaries left by women. Instead, we usually learn about great men, and their ideas, until we think that only men made history. My job as a women's history professor is to unlock the female past; to help students believe it could be women who drew on the cave walls at Knossos. But these students arrive in my classroom only after a lifetime of learning that important men, generals and clergy and politicians, are the ones who seized leadership and who wrote in public places. The inner visions of these few men ("Man got it all in his head"), shared with the world, created the rules and revolutions for Western culture. Moses held up his chiseled Ten Commandments, and Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door. Acknowledging that...