Cultural Hegemony

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Jones

This chapter explores the collapse of national front politics and the violent cultural conflict that followed the revolution of July 14, 1958. It shows how relatively minor ideological disputes over the meaning of “Arab unity” evolved into a vicious cultural confrontation between communists and nationalists. The chapter documents the role of nationalist poets in constructing an anticommunist cultural discourse that emphasized the sexual immorality of their rivals. Their own vision of “muscular nationalism” portrayed the nationalist Baʿth Party as custodians of national honor and progressive advocates of women’s liberation. Communist poets struggled to combat these allegations by defending the progressive aspects of their agenda, but they remained hesitant to address questions of gender and sexuality directly. The poetry wars of this period critically shaped the cultural politics of national liberation and presaged the sectarian violence of the coming decades.

Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B Camminga

In 2011, Miss Sahhara, a transgender woman from Nigeria with UK refugee status, was crowned First Princess at the world’s largest and most prestigious beauty pageant for transgender women—Miss International Queen. The then Cultural Minister of Nigeria when contacted for comment responded that if she was transgender, she could not be Nigerian, and if she was Nigerian, she could not be transgender—a tacit denial of her very existence. In recent years, LGBT people “fleeing Africa” to the “Global North” has become a common media trope. Responses to this, emanating from a variety of African voices, have provided a more nuanced reading of sexuality. What has been absent from these readings has been the role of gender expression, particularly a consideration of transgender experiences. I understand transgender refugees to have taken up “lines of flight” such that, in a Deleuzian sense, they do not only flee persecution in countries of origin but also recreate or speak back to systems of control and oppressive social conditions. Some transgender people who have left, like Miss Sahhara, have not gone silently, using digital means to project a new political visibility of individuals, those who are both transgender and African, back at the African continent. In Miss Sahhara’s case, this political visibility has not gone unnoticed in the Nigerian tabloid press. Drawing on the story of Miss Sahhara, this paper maps these flows and contraflows, asking what they might reveal about configurations of nationhood, gender and sexuality as they are formed at both the digital and physical interstices between Africa and the Global North.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esethu Monakali

This article offers an analysis of the identity work of a black transgender woman through life history research. Identity work pertains to the ongoing effort of authoring oneself and positions the individual as the agent; not a passive recipient of identity scripts. The findings draw from three life history interviews. Using thematic analysis, the following themes emerge: institutionalisation of gender norms; gender and sexuality unintelligibility; transitioning and passing; and lastly, gender expression and public spaces. The discussion follows from a poststructuralist conception of identity, which frames identity as fluid and as being continually established. The study contends that identity work is a complex and fragmented process, which is shaped by other social identities. To that end, the study also acknowledges the role of collective agency in shaping gender identity.


Cultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-163
Author(s):  
Soochul KIM ◽  
Kyung Han YOU

This study examines the dynamics of cultural politics in reality television shows featuring North Korean resettlers (NKR2) in South Korea. As existing studies focus on the role of media representation reproducing a dominant ideology for the resettlers, this paper focuses on the specific media rituals of NKR2 programs, which can be seen as a product of the neoliberalist localization process of the global media industry. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how NKR2 programs interrupt the current dynamics of emotions in regard to North Korean resettlers in South Korea. We argue that in shaping civic identity as an effect of the NKR2 show, cultural politics of citizenship in South Korea on North Korean resettlers serve the formation of relatively conservative and sexist civic identity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wade

<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Resumen </strong></span>| En este trabajo quiero presentar una cronología convencional del concepto raza que marca un movimiento en el cual raza cambia de ser una idea basada en la cultura y el medio ambiente, a ser algo biológico, inflexible y determinante, para luego volver a ser una noción que habla de la cultura<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>Resumo cómo la idea de raza ha cambiado a través del tiempo, mirando necesariamente el rol que ha desempeñado la ciencia, y enfocando los diferentes discursos de índole <em>natural-cultural </em>sobre los cuerpos, el medio ambiente y el comportamiento, en los cuales las dimensiones culturales y naturales siempre coexisten<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>“La naturaleza” no puede ser entendida solamente como “la biología” y ni la naturaleza ni la biología necesariamente implican sólo el determinismo, la fijeza y la inmutabilidad Estar abiertos a la coexistencia de la cultura y la naturaleza y a la mutabilidad de la naturaleza nos permite ver mejor el ámbito de acción del pensamiento racial.</p><p class="p1"><strong><em>Race, Science and Society</em></strong></p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p2"><span class="s1"><strong>Abstract </strong></span>| In this article I present and critique a standard chronology of race as, first, a concept rooted in culture and environment, and later in human biology and determinism, and finally back to culture alone<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>I will outline changing understandings of race over time, with some attention to the role of science, broadly understood, and on the continuing but changing character of race as a natural-cultural discourse about organic bodies, environments and behavior, in which both cultural and natural dimensions always co-exist<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>“Nature” is not to be understood simply as “biology,” and neither nature nor biology necessarily imply the fixity and determination that they are often assumed nowadays to involve<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>Being open to the co-existence of culture and nature and the mutability of the latter allows us to better comprehend the whole range of action of racial thinking.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


Author(s):  
Hannah Dyer

Discussions surrounding the rights, desires, and subjectivities of queer youth in education have a history marked by both controversy and optimism. Many researchers, practitioners, and teachers who critically examine the role of education in the lives of queer youth insist that the youth themselves should be involved in setting the terms of debate surrounding if and how they should be included in sites of education. This is important because the ways in which their needs and subjectivities are conceptualized have a direct impact on the futures that queer youth imagine for themselves and for others. For example, the furious and impassioned debates about sex education in schooling are also to do with the amount of empathy we have for queer youth. Thus, sex education is a frequent point of analysis in literature on queer youth in education. Literature on queer youth and education also helpfully demonstrates how racialization, gender, neoliberalism, and settler-colonialism permeate discourses of queer inclusion and constitute the conditions of both acceptance and oppression for queer youth. While queer studies has at times sharpened perceptions of queer youth’s subjective and systemic experiences in education, it cannot be collapsed into a unified theory of sexuality because it too is ripe with debate, variation, and contradiction. As many scholars and intellectual traditions make clear, the global and transnational dimensions of gender and sexuality cannot be subsumed into a unified taxonomy of desire or subject formation. More ethical interactions between teachers, peers, and queer youth are needed because our theories of queer desire and the discourses we attach to them evince material realities for queer youth. Despite the often prevailing insistence that queer youth belong in educational institutions, homophobia and heteronormativity continue to make inclusion a complicated landscape. In recognition of these dynamics, literature in the field of educational studies also insists that some queer youth find hope in education. Withdrawing advocacy and representation for queer, trans, and nonbinary youth in educational settings becomes dangerous when it creates a terrain for isolation and shame. Importantly, queer theory and LGBTQ studies have conceptualized the needs of queer youth in ways that emphasize education as a space wrought with emotion, power, and desire. Early theorizing of non-normative sexual desire continues to set the stage for contemporary discussions of schools as spaces of power and repression. That is, histories of activism, knowledge, and policy construction have made the present conditions of both inclusion and exclusion for queer youth. Contemporary debates about belonging and marginalization in schools are made from the residues and endurance of earlier formations of gender and race.


It was our plan that this meeting should consider some aspects of the changes in material civilization and intellectual life in Britain and the United Provinces resulting from the union of the two Crowns in 1688. A parallel meeting in Amsterdam will devote more attention to politics and the fine arts. In a short time it is impossible to cover many topics and we thought it right to pay some attention to the role of the Stadtholder while not omitting the two great scientific figures of this age, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton. It is tempting to suppose that the replacement of James II on the throne of England by William and Mary, as it ensured the ascendancy of Protestantism, so also it introduced a strong Dutch influence to replace the Frenchification characteristic of the reigns of Charles and James. Did not William, in stemming the territorial expansion of France, also check its cultural hegemony? So far as Britain is concerned the proposition is dubious, for our cultural links with The Netherlands were already strong before 1688, not least because of earlier migrations and the relationships formed during the Civil Wars and their aftermath. In the scientific realm one thinks especially of van Schooten and the Dutch mathematical school, of De Graaf, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek and especially Christiaan Huygens.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-101
Author(s):  
Daniel Jones ◽  
Lucía Ariza ◽  
Mario Pecheny

This paper examines the relation between sexual politics and post-neoliberalism/populism in Kirchners’ Argentina between 2003 and 2015, focusing on the role of religious actors. Despite the opposition of religious leaders, including that of Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis), Argentina advanced in the recognition of gender and sexual rights during the Kirchners’ administrations. Conflicts around gender and sexuality, particularly around same-sex marriage, explain some of the tensions between political and religious actors in the period. The focus of this paper on sexual politics shows that the Kirchners’ administrations, unlike other traditional populist or post-neoliberal administrations, had a strong liberal component, which explains the tensions between that populist government and conservative religious actors.


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