Transgressive Potential Research Articles

Abortion, criminal law, and transgression

This article challenges the boundaries and binaries that legal frameworks, which attempt to exceptionalise abortion, create for the spectrum of reproductive experience. Specifically, this paper articulates the extent to which the meaning of abortion is contested in a number of ways, to the extent to which it could be argued that it does not hold a fixed understanding, and the ramifications this has for the operation of law in this area. Any legal framework which attempts to exceptionalise abortion is bound to transgress a range of experiences and impact the provision and accessibility of care in a range of ways. Building on the theme of this Special Issue, ‘transgression’, the article shows the instability and transgressive potential of law in the regulation of miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth. Miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth exist on a spectrum of experience and may engage a range of clinical encounters that are not straightforwardly distinguished from each other. The paper contributes to the scholarship calling for the decriminalization of abortion and does so by highlighting often overlooked aspects of the impacts and unworkability of criminal exceptionalisation. The claim being made in this paper is twofold: first, abortion involves a number of features which are problematic within an exceptionalist framework. This leads to the second claim which is that any exceptionalist abortion frameworks will by definition encroach on and negatively impact experiences of reproductive loss in myriad ways.

‘Dancing the fine line’: developing critical agency with transgressive social pedagogy?

We explore bell hooks’s perspectives on transgressive learning and discuss the potential for a social pedagogical practice by changing its scope and material context through the concept of the common third. We apply hooks’s points on student–educator mutuality and the necessity of dynamically repositioning educator–student relationships. We explore how research findings from different educational contexts can relate to the tension between an individual qualification on society’s terms and the development of critical agency. We begin with recent research on youth experiences of transitioning through the Danish lower to upper secondary school system, and unfold analytical findings from the research on pedagogical practices in a youth empowerment programme situated within the American food justice movement. Similarities and differences between the radically different contexts are put into perspective by applying hooks’s understanding of transgressive learning, as well as scholarly discussions of pitfalls in the performance of emancipatory education as dialogic and classroom-based. Transgressive potentials depend on the dynamic organisation of a pedagogical framework around a common third with material, embodied and social dimensions. We suggest a conceptualisation of a transgressive social pedagogy that gradually develops critical agency. The common-third activity enables a kind of mutuality that transforms educators’ power positions and opens new ways for youths to develop their agency. We wish to contribute to a rethinking of the common third as a social pedagogical core concept of relevance for Denmark’s education system.

Uwolnić „soul”, wracając do Memphis

The transgressive potential of Elvis Presley’s music and stage persona remains an inadequately explored topic. He was an affective medium which catalysed a moral, racial and social revolution. He was the first beneficiary of emancipatory transformations of sexuality. The narrations and mythologies of rock culture did not problematise Elvis’s art and image transitions – the reasons for his escapes from media stereotypes. The most salient of the medially disjointed images is Elvis’s tenuous identification with the gender role of a male role model imposed upon him. Indeed, rock heroes are to embody the “macho” role. Meanwhile, the most interesting part of Elvis’s musical identity is precisely the ambiguous status of his masculinity in the 1950s and the “non-normativity” of his persona and music in 1960s–70s.

A (Post)philosophical Argument on Anti-Art and Digital Transgressions of self-Fashioning. From Dada to Data, or How to Curate Selves on Instagram?

This article tackles the possibility to understand the process of curating the digital self by treating virtual identities as a form of anti-art. The museification of the world engaged by social networks such as Instagram, a platform canonically devoted to visual content, seems to restore the Dada tradition of the photomontage, as well as the turn to the routine of our quotidian existence, aestheticized through live transmissions and daily vlogs. Insta-gramming became a digital practice that progressively installed what Richter used to call “the alienation of photography”, as there is no aesthetic claim for the visual content, but neither a profound ignorance of artistic criteria. Therefore, anonymous masses homogenized as co-performers of life-casting online consume results of a digital curating based on the Dada photomontage, the Futurist appetite for technology and the Surrealist automatic creation or psychic automatism. My argument is that as digital curation progressively shared with vanguards such principles, virtual identities became anti-art objects. Moreover, curating the self is no longer an artistic performance, but rather a social skill. In the last part of my study, I will bring to the spotlight two competitive narrations on digital curation, productive, respectively consumptive curation. In my opinion, these two paradigms raised by Davis are relevant for developing the commodification of the self, as well as new literary practices based on Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Consequently, I argue in favour of assuming the curation of the self by digital means as a daily practice entangling creativity and leisure, understood as creleisure, a concept coined by the artist Hélio Oiticica back in 1969. As aesthetics tends to track down such behaviours for their transgressive potential, measuring the historical shift of autocreation from Dada to Data perspectives, philosophy still has to work on the consequences of such phenomena on self-care, self-knowledge, and authenticity.

“Just like everyone else:” queer representation in postmillennial Bollywood

ABSTRACT On 6 September 2018, after decades of queer activism, the Supreme Court of India declared unconstitutional the centuries-old law against sodomy, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I felt when I saw that Girl, 2019) and Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage, 2020) were the first two popular Hindi-language films, on same-sex love and desire, to be released after the scrapping of 377. We note the significance of Ek Ladki and Shubh Mangal to destigmatizing non-normative sexualities as well as the identitarian impulse of these films to name, illuminate, and mainstream queer love. We examine these films as they intervene in the broader field of representation and make complex maneuvers to normalize same-sex love and coax the consent of mainstream audiences. They do so by incorporating queer identity and same-sex love in ways that render it non-threatening to the heteronormative status quo. The intertextual allusions to popular Hindi cinema, however, carry queer transgressive potential as they allow for a claiming of a genealogy of queer desire in Hindi cinema.

Beyond the Binary

Abstract After his appointment in 2015 as creative director at Gucci, Alessandro Michele broke with the brand's look of sleek sophistication and introduced an eccentric, maximalist, and ultimately queer approach to fashion. Taking the campaign as a case study, the article aims to investigate the shifting norms of masculinities in Michele's designs. Following a visual cultural analysis as proposed by Martin Lister and Liz Wells, this article aims to consider Gucci's Spring/Summer 2016 campaign in a cultural and societal context. Focusing on the transgressive potential of gender-fluid fashion, the article draws on a theoretical framework deriving from queer theory and gender studies. The article interrogates how masculinities are constituted and renegotiated in contemporary Western culture and highlights the relevance of fashion in constituting and tackling issues of masculinity in contemporary times of change.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

“I wish people knew that there are other flavors” Reflections on the representation of poly-kink in mainstream media by polyamorous kinksters in the Netherlands

Although studies have remarked upon the increase in representation of kinksters and BDSM practices in mainstream media narratives, community voices indicate that these narratives do not provide an authentic portrayal of their community. This misrepresentation of kinksters results in stigmatization and forces the community to manage its minority stress. This article reflects upon the results from a series of interviews with Dutch poly-kink-identified participants about mainstream representations of their community. The participants agree on several main objections to this representation: mainstream media narratives ignore community norms, while they actively sensationalize and pathologize kink, and insist on stereotypical gender relations. Together, this representation undermines the transgressive potential of poly-kink relations and increases the stigmatization of this community.

Aesthetic distance as deus ex machina when the performer’s trauma is (not quite/quiet)

This article employs Practice as Research (PaR) as a paradigm to explicate the specialised research insights produced during the theatre-making process of devising and performing ReTAGS’ Antigone (not quite/quiet). I revisit Sophocles’ original Antigone, reading the circumstances of the titular character alongside the contemporary reality of postapartheid South Africa. I further employ the register of tragedy to develop my earlier conception of mbokodofication and interrogate the transgressive potential of aesthetic distance to mitigate retraumatization in performance and maintain the emotional hygiene of the performer.

Transgressive Potential Prediction and Optimal Cross Design of Seed Protein Content in the Northeast China Soybean Population Based on Full Exploration of the QTL-Allele System.

Northeast China is a major soybean production region in China. A representative sample of the Northeast China soybean germplasm population (NECSGP) composed of 361 accessions was evaluated for their seed protein content (SPC) in Tieling, Northeast China. This SPC varied greatly, with a mean SPC of 40.77%, ranging from 36.60 to 46.07%, but it was lower than that of the Chinese soybean landrace population (43.10%, ranging from 37.51 to 50.46%). The SPC increased slightly from 40.32–40.97% in the old maturity groups (MG, MGIII + II + I) to 40.93–41.58% in the new MGs (MG0 + 00 + 000). The restricted two-stage multi-locus genome-wide association study (RTM-GWAS) with 15,501 SNP linkage-disequilibrium block (SNPLDB) markers identified 73 SPC quantitative trait loci (QTLs) with 273 alleles, explaining 71.70% of the phenotypic variation, wherein 28 QTLs were new ones. The evolutionary changes of QTL-allele structures from old MGs to new MGs were analyzed, and 97.79% of the alleles in new MGs were inherited from the old MGs and 2.21% were new. The small amount of new positive allele emergence and possible recombination between alleles might explain the slight SPC increase in the new MGs. The prediction of recombination potentials in the SPC of all the possible crosses indicated that the mean of SPC overall crosses was 43.29% (+2.52%) and the maximum was 50.00% (+9.23%) in the SPC, and the maximum transgressive potential was 3.93%, suggesting that SPC breeding potentials do exist in the NECSGP. A total of 120 candidate genes were annotated and functionally classified into 13 categories, indicating that SPC is a complex trait conferred by a gene network.

Review: Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, by Rosalind Galt

Review: <i>Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization</i>, by Rosalind Galt

The ‘good’ of extending fertility: ontology and moral reasoning in a biotemporal regime of reproduction

Since the emergence of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a specific set of technologies has been developed to address the problem of the ‘biological clock’. The medical extension of fertility time is accompanied by promissory narratives to help women synchronize conflicting biological and social temporalities. This possibility also has a transgressive potential by blurring one of the biological landmarks – the menopause – by which reproductive lives are organized and governed. These new ways of managing, measuring and controlling reproductive time have renewed debates on the age limits of motherhood and the moral legitimacy of medical intervention into age-related fertility decline. Building on Amir’s feminist concept of biotemporality, this paper questions what happens when the ontological foundations of age-limited motherhood are disrupted by technologies which allow fertility to be extended. It discusses the reconfigurations of the ontological boundaries of the facts of life in the light of literature on reproductive technologies and temporality. Through the Swiss experience, the paper shows how medical experts are drawn into negotiating the ontological boundaries of age-limited motherhood along the binaries of the normal/pathological and the biological/social. Questioning the purpose of medical interventions in what are seen as facts of life, they produce different configurations of moral reasoning where what is natural undergoes shifts which both reinforce the normative order and subvert it.

Closer. Fatness, desire, and seeing as touching

ABSTRACT Thinking through the concept of “seeing as touching” as articulated in the work of Laura Marks, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer, this article uses a research-creation approach involving somatic and visual prompts to explore questions around intimacy, visuality, touch, and distance. Building on the concepts of desirability hierarchies and economies of care, it investigates connections between fatphobia and feelings of desire and disgust, highlighting the complex role that sensations can play in reproducing and reinforcing normative body standards and white supremacist power structures. The article includes still photographs from a video-based exploration of a fat “haptic visuality” and suggests a connection between the generative ambiguity such an approach to making images can allow for and the inherent transgressive potential of fat embodiment.

Phraseologism’ transgressive potential

There is a number of researches and scientific articles dedicated to phraseology, general theoretical questions still remain uncovered. Actually, phraseology is frequently presented as an applied science rather than a field of basic research. The question of phraseological units from the perspective of multilingualism and interlanguage translation is arguable. Meanwhile phraseological units carry evaluative information content, they are prone to variability, and this is where the problem of translating such an expression arises. The novelty of this research lies in the consideration of the problem of translation of phraseological units from the point of view of the «freezing» strategy. The purpose of this work is to analyze the potential for «freezing» as well as the equivalence in translating French phraseological units into Ukrainian. The tasks are to carry out a comparative analysis of phraseological units with a similar semantic load and to determine the degree of their direct translatability. It is shown by examples, at the level of interlanguage translation, that the freezing strategy when translating phraseological units can correspond to two models of constructing different meanings, creating linguistic and extralinguistic problems for translation. The correspondence and dimensions of «freezing» in translation stimulated the interest of linguists relatively recently. It was found that the interlingual translation of phraseological units generates linguistic and extralinguistic difficulties. Throughout the translation of the particular phraseological units, first of all, the semantic aspect was taken into account, and then the building was measured in close connection with the connotation. The results of the analysis of phraseological units of the described languages showed that the translation from Ukrainian far exceeds the potential for «freezing» into French language due to its peculiarities and complexity of the linguistic structure. Opportunities for practical application - the study is aimed at the prospect of new positions for comparative research on interlanguage translation.

Carmen Miranda: an Embodied Marketplace Icon

Abstract Building upon the CCT framework of incorporation of ideologies, taste regimes, and national and regional interests by consumer cultures, this paper proposes that social and political ideologies are also embodied in marketplace icons. This paper aims, then, to bring together the concepts of iconicity and liminality to provide an account of Carmen Miranda as a marketplace icon who not only embodied the national myths of her time but also continues to be employed in the current marketplace for a variety of purposes. As such, icons like Carmen contribute to the production of marketplaces in which historical, political, and ideological issues are naturalized. Carmen’s collaboration via cultural industries such as radio and cinema, her omnipresence in advertising campaigns and in the printed media, and her influence on female fashion contributed to the consumer culture of her time. Moreover, the mythical character of her persona and her cultural legacy hold an expressive symbolic power, making her a remarkable contemporary marketplace icon. The key to her iconicity is her liminality; unsettling hierarchies, traversing social planes, and questioning identity. As a marketplace icon, Carmen’s legacy is thus constantly reissued, founded upon the ambivalence of her persona and signaling her transgressive potential.

Carmen Miranda: an Embodied Marketplace Icon

Abstract Building upon the CCT framework of incorporation of ideologies, taste regimes, and national and regional interests by consumer cultures, this paper proposes that social and political ideologies are also embodied in marketplace icons. This paper aims, then, to bring together the concepts of iconicity and liminality to provide an account of Carmen Miranda as a marketplace icon who not only embodied the national myths of her time but also continues to be employed in the current marketplace for a variety of purposes. As such, icons like Carmen contribute to the production of marketplaces in which historical, political, and ideological issues are naturalized. Carmen’s collaboration via cultural industries such as radio and cinema, her omnipresence in advertising campaigns and in the printed media, and her influence on female fashion contributed to the consumer culture of her time. Moreover, the mythical character of her persona and her cultural legacy hold an expressive symbolic power, making her a remarkable contemporary marketplace icon. The key to her iconicity is her liminality; unsettling hierarchies, traversing social planes, and questioning identity. As a marketplace icon, Carmen’s legacy is thus constantly reissued, founded upon the ambivalence of her persona and signaling her transgressive potential.

Learning to Become Smart Radicals: A Regenerative Lens on the Potential for Peace and Reconciliation through Youth and Education Systems

Media coverage and foreign policy around the globe often spread messages of fear about the possible radicalization of the world's growing youth population. More nuance was brought into these debates in 2015 by UN Security Council Resolution 2250 and the subsequent Global Study on Youth, Peace, and Security (Simpson 2018), while specific attention was directed at the potential of education to support young people's agency for peacebuilding. In this reflective piece, I aim to bring a fresh perspective to current education in emergencies thinking and offer insights into how a regenerative approach to education can help reshape it to prepare the younger generations to respond effectively to peacebuilding and to the related "wicked challenges." I bring together two existing conceptual frameworks—the 4Rs (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2017) and Tomaševski's 4As (2005; see also Shah and Lopes Cardozo 2019)—that are directly relevant to the education in emergencies field. Building on this conceptual work, I adopt a regenerative lens on reconciliation and engage a law of three framework to encourage a deeper understanding of education's transgressive potential to inspire alternative, reconciliatory paths toward peacebuilding. I will invite and encourage you, the reader, to apply these regenerative conceptual explorations to your own experience. The aim of this conceptual exploration is to inspire the development of "smartly radical" questions; to support research, policy, and practice design that is more critically informed and consciousness driven; and, finally, to support the transformative potential of education systems and stakeholders to serve younger generations more effectively and enable them to respond to "glocal" challenges in ways that are mindful, conscious, and effective.

The Post Anthropocentric Turn in Contemporary Art

The article examines the reaction of modern visual art to the paradigm shift in the socio-cultural understanding of man taking place today. Researchers define the new discursive field as posthumanistic. The ambiguity of the concept of posthumanism becomes the reason for referring to the term post-anthropocentrism, which more appropriately describes both the direction of thought of the last decades and the main vector of the development of present-day art. The author puts forward the concept of a post-anthropocentric turn realized in art. The main purpose of the article is to substantiate and describe this turn. Using concrete examples, various art contexts are considered, including: visualizations of the “world-for-us”, “world-in-itself”, “world-without-us”; an appeal to the interspecific community; a statement of the symmetry of human and non-human actors in the work. The research is based on the works of representatives of critical posthumanism and speculative realism. The author concludes that contemporary visual art, conceptualizing and radicalizing the main ideas of post-anthropocentrism, creates many alternative ideas about the situation in which a modern person finds himself. She also notes the transgressive potential of this art.

De/Stabilizing Heterosexuality in the Pardoner’s Tale

The paper sets out to argue that the Pardoner’s atypical sexuality is subversive of the medieval gender matrix and that his challenge to heteronormativity is ultimately encompassed and disarmed. Chaucer presents the Pardoner as a genderly ambiguous Other who does not fit the compulsory pattern of the two biological sexes. In its pronounced otherness and difference, his queer body disrupts the medieval normative order. Paradoxically, however, his difference re-inscribes that very order and reinforces the institutional status quo. His transgressive potential is met by containment and heterosexual hegemony is eventually re-established and re-affirmed.

Iconographies of the everyday: Mediated whiteness and food hospitality activism

The category of the ‘everyday’ has been relatively un-theorised in studies of digital food culture. Drawing on theories that the everyday is not just a backdrop but through which race, class and gender are constituted, and the cultural production of whiteness, I analyse digital photographs from the Welcome Dinner Project’s webpages and social media. The Welcome Dinner Project is an Australian food hospitality activism charity, which organises and facilitates one-off dinners to bring ‘newly arrived’ and ‘established Australians’ together over potluck hospitality to address isolation and racism. My overall argument is that Welcome Dinner Project representations and media representations of Welcome Dinner Project are underscored by conflicting representations of race, diversity and privilege. Despite the good intentions of the Welcome Dinner Project, the formal images it disseminates work to service the status quo by enacting and reinforcing dominant notions of middle-class whiteness in Australia, moderating the transgressive potential of its activism. However, these processes are subverted by less formal and unruly images depicting people outside, in mess, in non-hierarchical groups and migrant hosting. Such imagery can be understood as a form of visual activism which challenges the iconographies of whiteness in digital food culture and normative ideals of race-neutral domesticity and everydayness.