The Pop-Feminist Subject

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Social Determinism ◽  
Counter Model ◽  
Shifting Identities ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 explores how pop-feminist accounts of subjectivity draw heavily upon poststructuralist understandings of identity as pluralistic and unstable. Many pop-feminists, however, retain the assumption that, underlying the playful performance of shifting identities, there remains a sovereign subject capable of mediating reflexively and autonomously over such performances. Spiers shows how this ‘sovereign’, yet ‘performative’ pop-feminist subject is profoundly linked to the ideal flexible, entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism. She then develops a counter model of subjectivity and agency based on an ethics of intersubjective relationality, reflecting on the role narrative plays within the theories of subjectification that seek to carve out a space for agency away from the binary of social determinism and prediscursive subjective sovereignty, a binary much pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative ultimately reverts to. This underpins Spiers’s claim that the literary fiction discussed generates a more probing exploration of selfhood and agency than the pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative.

British Pop-Feminism on the Literary Marketplace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Chick Lit

This chapter investigates post-chick-lit debates concerning the ‘democratization’ of fiction which collide with claims that the UK’s publishing industry inclines increasingly towards simplifying and sexualizing literary fiction written by women. Long-standing debates within feminist scholarship concerning the practices of reading first-person narratives written by women become compounded by the contemporary frameworks of market and genre within which those narratives are situated. Spiers examines three examples of pop-literary fiction by British writers Scarlett Thomas, Helen Walsh, and Gwendoline Riley, reading these against the corpus of British pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative written by journalists Polly Vernon, Caitlin Moran, Ellie Levenson, and Hadley Freeman, and academics Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis L. F Lee ◽  
Joseph M Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Media System ◽  
System P ◽  
Connective Action ◽  
Integrated Media ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 introduces the background of the Umbrella Movement, a protest movement that took hold in Hong Kong in 2014, and outlines the theoretical principles underlying the analysis of the role of media and communication in the occupation campaign. It explicates how the Umbrella Movement is similar to but also different from the ideal-typical networked social movement and crowd-enabled connective action. It explains why the Umbrella Movement should be seen as a case in which the logic of connective action intervenes into a planned collective action. It also introduces the notion of conditioned contingencies and the conceptualization of an integrated media system.

Unexpected Consequences

Toxic Shock ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-47
Author(s):  
Sharra L. Vostral
Keyword(s):  
Staphylococcus Aureus ◽  
Harmful Consequence ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Unexpected Consequences

The grounding assumptions and conceptualizations of bacteria and gendered technology are the focus of chapter 1. The term “biocatalytic technology” provides a way to think through this relationship between bacterium and technology as active co-agents. The tampon, conceptualized as an inert plug to stop up the fluids of a mechanical body, instead served as a catalyst, prompting bacterium that were at best in stasis to begin producing toxins. Individually both the tampon and bacterium were neutral, but due to ecological circumstances they triggered a harmful consequence. Constituent bacteria, menstruating bodies, and a reactive rather than inert technology converged to create the ideal environment for the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium to live and flourish in some women. Opportunistic, the bacterium became the unintended user of the tampon technology.

Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Professional Group ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The World ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Ideal

This book analyzes the early stages of the interior design profession as articulated within the circles involved in the decoration of the private home in the second half of nineteenth-century France. It argues that the increased presence of the modern, domestic interior in the visual culture of the nineteenth century enabled the profession to take shape. Upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, department stores, taste advisors, collectors, and illustrators, came together to “sell” the idea of the unified interior as an image and a total work of art. The ideal domestic interior took several media as its outlet, including taste manuals, pattern books, illustrated magazines, art and architectural exhibitions, and department store catalogs. The chapters outline the terms of reception within which the work of each professional group involved in the appearance and design of the nineteenth-century French domestic interior emerged and focus on specific works by members of each group. If Chapter 1 concentrates on collectors and taste advisors, outlining the new definitions of the modern interior they developed, Chapter 2 focuses on the response of upholsterers, architects, and cabinet-makers to the same new conceptions of the ideal private interior. Chapter 3 considers the contribution of the world of entertainment to the field of interior design while Chapter 4 moves into the world of commerce to study how department stores popularized the modern interior with the middle classes. Chapter 5 returns to architects to understand how their engagement with popular journals shaped new interior decorating styles.

Conclusion Pop-Feminism and the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sense Of Identity

The volume’s primary question is whether the notions of subjectivity and agency proposed by the fiction, non-fiction, and life narratives differ, and how those differences impact upon the degree of political critique. Spiers concludes that multiple pop-feminist forms fixate on the private and the corporeal, endlessly emphasizing individual choice; both everything and nothing can be understood as feminist. Such texts also showcase the sanitized transgressive gesture as an intrinsic element of neoliberal rhetoric, even post-financial crisis. The author demonstrates how examples of literary pop writing by women explore a possible coherent sense of identity beyond the surfaces of the pop-cultural archive. She concludes that subjective incoherence in the novels co-exists in productive tension with a desire for coherence and unity that in no way resembles the model of pre-discursive sovereign subjectivity uncovered in the pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative, as it fundamentally relates to an ethics of intersubjective relations.

Nutrition

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philip A. Mackowiak
Keyword(s):  
Morbid Obesity ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Suicide Victim ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Bronze Statue ◽  
The Village ◽  
Final Work ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 (“Nutrition”) features works of art depicting patients with nutritional disorders. Examples of both overnutrition and undernutrition are included. The final work considered is one by Johann J. Hasselhorst, titled Dissection of a Young Woman, in which an 18-year-old suicide victim is being dissected by a male surgeon to determine the ideal measurements of the female form. Her ideal from is contrasted earlier in the chapter with that of subjects, such as the Venus of Willendorf (a Paleolithic statuette discovered in the village of Willendorf, Austria in 1908 C.E.), with various forms of morbid obesity, and others, such as the Starving Buddha (a 2nd century B.C.E. bronze statue located in the Lahore Museum), that depict Kwashiorkor, cretinism, scurvy, pellagra, and other ravages of undernutrition.

The One and the Many

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Dmitri Nikulin
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 examines the relation of the one to the many in Plotinus, which is fundamental for his thought. It establishes a system of axiomatic claims about the one, such as that there is a principle of the whole, which is also the principle of being that transcends being; that the act of producing is ontologically prior to and more perfect than what is produced; and that everything perfect produces of necessity. It further argues that both the one and otherness transpire in the constitution of three different representations of the many, which are the ideal numbers, the intellect that thinks the plurality of the noetic objects, and matter. Otherness, then, inevitably appears as dual and ambiguous, as both the rationally conceivable principle of negativity and also as pure indefiniteness, in which respect it is similar to matter.

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