The Eloquent Blood

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manon Hedenborg White
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Sexual Freedom ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Positive Reinterpretation ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
Written Sources

The study analyzes constructions of femininity and feminine sexuality in interpretations of the goddess Babalon, a central deity in the British occultist Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) religion Thelema. Babalon is based on Crowley’s positive reinterpretation of the biblical Whore of Babylon and symbolizes liberated female sexuality and the spiritual modality of passionate union with existence. Analyzing historical and contemporary written sources, qualitative interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in the Anglo-American esoteric milieu, the study traces interpretations of Babalon from the works of Crowley and some of his key disciples—including the rocket scientist John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons and the enigmatic British occultist Kenneth Grant—from the fin-de-siècle to the present. From the 1990s onward, female and LGBTQ esotericists have challenged historical interpretations of Babalon, drawing on feminist and queer thought and conceptualizing femininity in new ways. Femininity has held a problematic position in feminist theory, often being associated with lack, artifice, and restriction. However, the present study—which assumes that femininities are neither exclusively heterosexual nor limited to women—indicates how interpretations of Babalon have both built on and challenged dominant gender logics. As the first academic monograph to analyze Crowley’s and his followers’ ideas from the perspective of gender, this book contributes to the underexplored study of gender in Western esotericism. By analyzing the development of a misogynistic biblical symbol into an image of feminine sexual freedom, the study also sheds light on interactions between Western esotericism and broader cultural and sociopolitical trends.

scholarly journals ‘Do We Look like Boy Racers?’ The Role of the Folk Devil in Contemporary Moral Panics

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Lumsden
Keyword(s):  
Moral Panic ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Young Drivers ◽  
The Media ◽  
Collective Process ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Societal Reaction

This article addresses the failure of studies concerning moral panics to take into account the reaction of those individuals who are the subject of social anxiety. It responds to the suggestion by McRobbie and Thornton (1995) that studies of moral panic need to account for the role played by the ‘folk devils’ themselves, for a moral panic is a collective process (Young, 2007). The paper presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork with the ‘boy racer’ culture in Aberdeen, qualitative interviews with members of outside groups, and content analysis of media articles. The societal reaction to the ‘boy racer’ subculture in Aberdeen is evidence of a contemporary moral panic. The media's representation of the subculture contributed to the stigmatization of young drivers and the labelling of the subculture's activities as deviant and antisocial. The drivers were aware of their negative portrayal in the media; however their attempts to change the myth of the ‘boy racer’ were unsuccessful. Although subcultural media can provide an outlet of self-expression for youths, these forms of media can also become caught-up in the moral panic. Ironically the youths’ own niche and micro media reified the (ir)rationality for the moral panic.

scholarly journals Answering for Islam: Journalistic and Islamic Conceptions of Authority

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Munnik
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Professional Experience ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Real People ◽  
Official Sources

Media representations of Muslims in Britain have often disappointed both faith practitioners and scholars. Imputed failings include distorting beliefs or practices, essentialising the faith, and amplifying voices that are not representative of Islam. This last factor hinges on questions of authority: what journalists and Muslims recognise as authority can differ in important ways. Drawing on studies of journalism practice, prior professional experience, and ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews in Scotland, I discuss the conventional preference among journalists for “official sources” and the problems this can present in terms of hierarchy in Islam. I contrast this with a less-studied imperative, also present in newsrooms, for “real people”. This category matches well with Islam’s decentralised tradition and presents an opportunity to understand how different kinds of sources are presented in media coverage. It is possible for journalists to ensure that these differing claims to authority are represented properly, though this requires knowledge and responsibility.

Beyond ‘Token’ Firefighters: Exploring Women's Experiences of Gender and Identity at Work

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamika Perrott
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Emergency Services ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Fire Service ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Gendered Organizations ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
Token Status

Despite the increasing percentage of women entering masculinized workplaces, certain organizations consistently see little change in the gender makeup of their staff. Contemporary scholarship suggests that women in rigidly gendered organizations are often assigned a token status and are victimized due to their gender. This study relocates the conversations of women as tokens towards a fresh conversation of women's agency in masculinized workplaces. This paper uses ten qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to discuss how female firefighters navigate their gender at work. This article draws on reflexive accounts of everyday gendered negotiations to look at how the female firefighters ‘do gender’ within a specific fire service in Australia. I argue that emergency services, such as firefighting, create a contradictory field where women are located in (1) a paradoxical environment where the ‘female body’ is problematized (2) a work environment where they have to repeatedly prove their cultural competence in order to confirm their professional identity. The findings suggest that while female firefighters do have agency, tokenism locates many of them in a ‘never quite there’ bind that challenges their ability to progress into leadership roles within the service. This article concludes that the nuanced difference between, and at times, within the women's narratives problematizes the bounds of personal agency and cultural change. This consequently results in resistance to policies by some women that may benefit like-situated women, such as affirmative action.

scholarly journals The anticipatory politics of dispossession in a Senegalese mining negotiation

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Fent
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Land Expropriation ◽  
Multiple Timescales ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Environmental Impact Assessments ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
To Come

The concept of accumulation by dispossession is often mobilized in political ecological and geographical literature, to explain the ways that capitalist accumulation depends on the violent and extra-economic seizure of land and resources. Yet dispossession is also mobilized as a fear about the future, as a way of articulating historical and non-capitalist motivations for land expropriation, and as an avenue for political action. Amid negotiations for a heavy mineral sands mine in the Casamance region of Senegal, narratives of dispossession circulated frequently, even though no mining had yet taken place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this article examines the contentious politics around the proposed mine, which mobilize multiple timescales. In this context, activists and village residents have engaged in an anticipatory politics that is influenced by past and present processes of land occupancy, environmental change, and state disinvestment, and is aimed at contesting potential dispossessions to come, making claims to resources, and securing a place in the imagined future. At the same time, state and corporate actors have engaged in their own anticipatory actions, through environmental impact assessments and other technologies of prediction that minimize, invalidate, or circumvent anti-dispossession movements. This article argues that experiences of and resistances to dispossession are mediated by the folding together of temporal frames and diverse displacements. In particular, it attends to anticipation as a key temporal mechanism through which dispossession is both enacted and contested. As such, it contributes to political ecology by combining materialist conceptions of dispossession and displacement with theorizations of anticipation and the future.Keywords: accumulation by dispossession, anticipatory politics, mining, Senegal

scholarly journals Feminist Responses to Freud Through the “Equality vs. Difference” Debate

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Feyda Sayan Cengiz
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Difference

Freudian psychoanalysis has long been a matter of debate among feminists, and usually criticized for biological determinism. While discussing the Freudian framework, feminists have also been discussing how to define a female subject and the age old “equality vs. difference” discussion. This study discusses critical feminist responses to Freud which demonstrate the intricacies of the “equality vs. difference” debate amongst different strands of feminist theory. This article analyses three diverse lines of argumentation regarding psychoanalysis and the equality vs. difference debate by focusing on the works of Luce Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir and Juliet Mitchell. Beauvoir and Irigaray both criticize the Freudian approach for taking “the male” as the real, essential subject. However, whereas Beauvoir sides with an egalitarian feminism, Irigaray defends underlining the difference of female sexuality. Juliet Mitchell, on the other hand, defends Freudian psychoanalysis through the argument that psychoanalysis actually offers a way to understand how the unconscious carries the heritage of historical and social reality. Accordingly, what Freudian psychoanalysis does is to analyze, rather than to legitimize, the basis of the patriarchal order in the unconscious.

Experience

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Grant
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Personal Politics ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter analyzes multiple conceptualizations of experience developed within Anglo-American and French feminist theory, and traces their relation to the concepts “woman,” “patriarchy,” and “personal politics.” It explores experience as epistemological ground, as a mechanism of subject formation, as a technique in consciousness raising, and as a methodology. Taking the feminist sexuality debates as a point of departure, the chapter also situates the limitations of feminist notions of experience in relation to queer theory, critical theory, poststructuralism, and the problematics of humanism. Finally, the chapter shows how feminist theoretical uses of the idea of experience parallel explorations and developments of the concept in other non-feminist critical theories. Though it has very often been ignored or considered as something of an anomaly by other critical theorists, the chapter demonstrates that feminist theory is a kind of critical theory and situates it in that broader context.

scholarly journals From Whore to Heroine: Deconstructing the Myth of the Fallen Woman and Redefining Female Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fiction

MANUSYA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Surapeepan Chatraporn
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Sexual Freedom ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Sexually Aggressive ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood ◽  
Female Bodies

The fallen woman, long existent in patriarchal discourse and intensified by Victorian sexual ethics, succumbs to seduction or sensual desires, suffers social condemnation and ostracism, and eventually dies, either repentantly or shamelessly. The questions of female sexuality and feminine virtues are dealt with in The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and The Awakening. Daisy Buchanan, Jordan, and Myrtle, all three sexually transgressive women, are punished, with Myrtle, the most sexually aggressive, being subjected to an outrageous death penalty. Daisy Miller, upon engaging in acts of self-presentation and female appropriation of male space, undergoes social disapprobation and dies an untimely death. Edna, though boldly adopting a single sexual standard for both men and women and awakening to life’s independence and sexual freedom, eventually realizes there is no space for her and submerges herself in the ocean. In contrast, the recent contemporary narrative pattern deconstructs the myth of the fallen woman and allows the fallen woman to live and prosper. The fallen woman, traditionally a secondary character who is considered a threat to the virtuous heroine, has emerged as a major or central character with a revolutionary power that both conquers and heals. Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café acknowledge female mobility and sexual freedom and appropriate a space hitherto denied to fallen women. Eva Bates and Gertrudis, satiating female sexual desires and representing eroticized female bodies, overturn the traditional narrative of falling and dying by becoming competent and worthy members of society. Tita and Vianne are central heroines who challenge the cult of true womanhood, embody the sexualized New Woman and display strength and personal power, making them pillars of their communities.

Figures of Interest

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Elissa Marder
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In his seminar on the Death Penalty, Derrida insists upon the irreducibly theatrical and spectacular nature of any legal execution. An execution is not merely the material outcome of a legal process, but also the very representational means by which the law stages and asserts its own legitimacy. He also raises a set of questions concerning the relationship between the machines that administer the death penalty and dominant male fantasies regarding feminine sexuality, calling attention to the fact that the death machine is always a woman (virgin, mother, whore or widow) who, in carrying out the cold decree of the law, is depicted as a voracious and terrifying vampire. This chapter examines how discourses surrounding the death penalty have consistently called upon and been haunted by powerful phantasies about female sexuality and why those phantasies paradoxically belong to the very logic rational justice to which they appear to be opposed.

scholarly journals COVID-ized Ethnography: Challenges and Opportunities for Young Environmental Activists and Researchers

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Dena Arya ◽  
Matt Henn
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Iterative Process ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Online Ethnography ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Impact

This article offers a critical and reflective examination of the impact of the enforced 2020/21 COVID-19 lockdown on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with UK-based young environmental activists. A matrix of researcher and activist challenges and opportunities has been co-created with young environmental activists using an emergent research design, incorporating a phased and intensive iterative process using online ethnography and online qualitative interviews. The article focuses on reflections emerging from the process of co-designing and then use of this matrix in practice. It offers an evidence base which others researching hard-to-reach youth populations may themselves deploy when negotiating face-to-face fieldwork approval at their own academic institutions. The pandemic and its associated control regimes, such as lockdown and social distancing measures, will have lasting effects for both activism and researchers. The methodological reflections we offer in this article have the potential to contribute to the learning of social science researchers with respect to how best to respond when carrying out online fieldwork in such contexts—particularly, but not only, with young activists.

scholarly journals The temporality of humanitarianism : Provincializing everyday volunteer practices at European borders

Intersections ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-31
Author(s):  
Synnøve Bendixsen ◽  
Marie Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Mode Of Being

While recognizing that ‘volunteering for refugees’ is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, this article will discuss how we can ethnographically explore the everyday humanitarian practices of volunteers as shaped in intrinsic ways by their mode of being in the world as ethically concerned human beings. Building on recent scholarship within the anthropology of humanitarianism in which local and everyday versions of humanitarian practice are foregrounded, we wish to further the understanding of everyday volunteer practices through establishing a lens of temporality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews among small-scale volunteer networks and NGOs in Greece and in Northern Europe working in response to the refugee influx to Europe since 2015, we suggest three different modalities of volunteering among non-professionals, which we designate: temporality of crisis, which concentrates on the impulse to help as an immediate response to a critical moment in time, temporality of care expressing the asymmetrical presences in the field of volunteering and temporality of reflexivity, which highlights ambivalence and doubt as intrinsic to the volunteer practices. In this article, we aim for a provincializing of everyday humanitarian practices and explore humanitarianism ‘from the ground’ and in specific locations and times.

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