Constitutive Exclusion

Author(s):  
Sina Kramer

This chapter introduces “constitutive exclusion” and makes the case for it as a framework for understanding why some claims are unintelligible as political claims, and some actors unintelligible as political agents. While many theoretical frameworks—political theory, critical theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and Afro-pessimism—rely on constitutive exclusion, none take it up explicitly. I do so around three claims: First, political borders are drawn through the internal exclusion of radical political actors, whose claims are then rendered unintelligible. Second, a politics of recognition is insufficient as a response to these exclusions, as recognition is often consistent with domination and disavowal. Third, the radical potential buried within internal exclusions is accessible by means of a method attentive to the temporality and materiality of these exclusions. The critical work of the book is in service of a future in which we no longer define ourselves through such exclusions within.

Author(s):  
Clare Chambers

This chapter discusses Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (GT) and its legacy in political theory. It sets out five themes of GT: the claim that identity is always the result of power; the interplay between sex, gender, and desire; the critique of “identity politics,” including any feminism that posits a stable category of “women”; the concept of performativity; and the possibility of change via subversive performance. The chapter then goes on to discuss the major impact that GT has had on feminist theory, queer theory, trans theory, and intersectionality, along with the surprising lack of impact on theories of multiculturalism and identity theory more broadly. Finally the chapter discusses some main criticisms of the book.


Author(s):  
Sina Kramer

Why are some claims seen or heard as political claims, while others are not? Why are some people not seen or heard as political agents? And how does their political unintelligibility shape political bodies, and the terms of political agency, from which they are excluded? Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors argues that these people, and these claims, are excluded within these political bodies and terms of political agency. They remain within and continue to do the work of defining the terms of the bodies from which they are excluded. But because their remaining within these bodies is disavowed or repressed, these potentially radical actors are politically unintelligible to those bodies. This rich and methodologically creative work draws on philosophy, critical theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory to articulate who we are by virtue of who we exclude, and what claims we cannot see, hear, or understand.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not? The work proposes an original theory to answer these questions, crossing discipline boundaries to draw on the findings of social psychology, philosophy, and normative political theory, in search of explanations of why people act altruistically and what it means to others when they do so. The theory is illustrated by examples from British history, including the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage and liberation movements, labor and socialist movements, anticolonial movements, antipoverty movements, and movements for global justice. Other People’s Struggles also contributes to new debates concerning the rights and wrongs of “speaking for others.” Debates concerning the limits of solidarity—who can be an “ally” and on what terms—have become very topical in contemporary politics, especially in identity politics and in the new “populist” movements. The book provides a theoretical and empirical account of how these questions have been addressed in the past and how they might be framed today.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842110114
Author(s):  
Philipp Degens

This article explores the relation between ownership and sustainability on a conceptual level. It specifically examines different imaginaries of sustainable property by asking how private property rights and their restrictions are conceptualized as instruments for sustainability. To do so, conflicting notions of property that underlie Western jurisprudence and political theory are contrasted. This brings us to the identification of two major traditions in property thought that build on atomist or relational conceptions of society and property, respectively. Property might be conceived as an owner’s exclusive control over an object, or as a ‘bundle of rights’ that comprises entitlements, restrictions, and obligations to various actors. Largely within the paradigm of modernization as a trajectory of sustainability, these two fundamental traditions in property theory relate to different approaches to encode sustainability into property law: i) propertization, i.e. the extension of private property forms, as in the case of carbon emissions trading schemes; ii) the acknowledgment of social and environmental obligations inherent to property, illustrated by the social obligation norm in German law.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
María Isabel Peña Aguado

<p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">La teoría feminista heredó de una tradición filosófica hostil la identificación de cuerpo y mujer. Partiendo de esta identificación de mujer y cuerpo es comprensible que un cuestionamiento del concepto ‘mujer’  influya asimismo en el lugar que va a encontrar el cuerpo dentro del movimiento y teoría feministas. Ese lugar será diferente dependiendo de las diversas reivindicaciones que marcan las diferencias entre los distintos feminismos y teorías </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><em>queer</em></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">. La pregunta que se plantea es hasta qué punto la precariedad del cuerpo femenino dentro de la misma teoría feminista es consecuencia del cuestionamiento del concepto de mujer o si, por el contrario, no será más bien el rechazo a una realidad corporal concreta lo que ha permitido y ayudado a desarmar los conceptos de ‘mujer’ y ‘mujeres’ hasta el punto de considerarlos como innecesario para el mismo discurso y políticas feministas contemporáneos.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Palabras claves: cuerpo, mujeres, feminismo, Teoría Queer</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /><em>Indeterminacy of the body: precariousness of body in the feminist discourse</em></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><em><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Feminist theory inherited the identification of woman and body from a hostile philosophical tradition. Given this identification, it is understandable that a questioning of the concept ‚woman‘ also influences the place that the body will find in the feminist movements and theories. The question that arises is how far the precariousness of the female body within feminist theory itself is the result of a questioning of the concept of ‘woman’ or whether, on the contrary, it is the rejection of a concrete corporal reality which has enabled and helped to disarm the concepts of ‚woman‘ and ‚women‘ to the point of considering them unnecessary for contemporary feminist discourse and politics.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></em></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><em><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Keywords: body, women, feminism, Queer Theory<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></em></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"> </p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"> </p>


Ramus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Valentina Moro

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of kinship in Sophocles’ Theban plays has raised a great deal of interest in critical interpretations in the fields of philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. From the 1970s onward, Antigone in particular has also become a staple of feminist theory, both as a philosophical and political gesture contra Hegel and Lacan, but also in connection with post-structuralism. Conversely, the topic of kinship in Athenian drama has attracted comparatively little attention from classical philologists. As a consequence, theorists have often been more inclined to discuss the theme with reference to modern conceptual frameworks, rather than to Sophocles’ language itself.


Author(s):  
Matthew John Paul Tan

This chapter will explore the varieties of political thought informed by divine revelation as understood in the Christian tradition. It will do so with reference to the metaphysical assumptions of what happens when transcendence meets history, and accordingly divide the inquiry into three archetypes. The first are the monists, for whom transcendence collapses into the temporal. The second are the dialecticians, for whom the uncrossable distinction between heaven and earth results in a struggle between the two. The third are the participationists, for whom the transcendent and the historical can harmoniously cohere through a ‘mediating third’ plane. For each mode, a brief sketch will be given of the writings of exemplary thinkers, and of the promises and pitfalls. In highlighting this variety, the aim of charting this map is to nuance the discussion currently taking place concerning the motivations and modus operandi of religiously informed political actors.


Author(s):  
Nina Kuorikoski

North American television series The L Word (USA 2004-present) tells the story of a group of lesbian and bisexual women living in Los Angeles. The current article offers a close reading of the first two seasons of the series, analysing them from the perspectives of both feminist theory and queer theory. It demonstrates that even though the series deconstructs the normative boundaries of both gender and sexuality, it can also be said to maintain the ideals of a heteronormative society. The argument is explored by paying attention to several aspects of the series. These include the series' advertising both in Finland and the United States and the normative femininity of the lesbian characters. In addition, the article aims to highlight the manner in which the series depicts certain characters which can be said to stretch the normative boundaries of gender and sexuality. Through this, the article strives to give a diverse account of the series' first two seasons and further critical discussion of The L Word and its representations.


Author(s):  
Lisa Pace Vetter

Frances Wright makes several major contributions to political theory. She served as an essential transitional figure from republicanism to early American socialism. Wright outlined a comprehensive system of reform based on an epistemological method of inquiry. Although Alexis de Tocqueville is credited with anticipating aspects of what would become critical race theory, her devastating critique of slavery in America precedes his by several years and includes elements of critical race theory as well. Unlike Tocqueville, Wright also applies those principles to the plight of American women, which prefigures aspects of critical feminist theory. Wright presents an early version of intersectionality by portraying the oppression of women, the enslavement of African Americans, and the injustice of economic inequality as intertwined through institutionalized corruption.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document