scholarly journals States of Exception: Legal Governance of Trans Women in Urban Turkey

2020 ◽  
pp. 096466392092478
Author(s):  
Ezgi Taşcıoğlu

Based on life-story narratives of trans women, this article aims to shed light on the role of the law in their exclusion from public spaces in urban Turkey over the last four decades. In the light of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the sovereign exception, I argue trans women in Turkey routinely find themselves in the position of homo sacer: the bare life that has been rendered politically disqualified and consigned to death. Unlike in Agamben’s account, in which subjects are turned into homo sacers in a singular gesture of the sovereign, my analysis directs attention to the myriad ways states of exception can be created. The experiences of trans women in urban Turkey demonstrate that exceptional legal regimes can be generated by suspending – or by simply not enforcing – the law, as well as, conversely, by establishing an overwhelming presence of the law in daily life. Rather than opposing legality to sovereignty, I argue closer attention needs to be paid to the interfaces of law with negative forms of power and to increasingly sophisticated ways of articulating biopolitical concerns to legal practices revolving around sovereignty.

Author(s):  
Mikko Laitinen

AbstractThis article discusses selected observations of English usage in signage in Finland, a Nordic nation in which the significance of English has become more pronounced in recent decades. The background for this study comes from a large quantitative survey, carried out in 2007, charting the role of English in the Finnish society. One of the topic areas in this survey deals with people's encounters with English and its visibility in their daily life, and this article aims to add a qualitative angle to these results. The observations discussed here were collected in 2009 during a six-day bicycle trip from Helsinki to the regional centre of Oulu. The analysis moves from mere quantitative recording of signs to a more nuanced analysis of interpretations of their situated meanings in public spaces. These observations show that the presence of English in both urban and rural areas of the country is far from a simple phenomenon, and illustrate how charting signs in space provide valuable information on language contact situations.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Darling

This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of ‘compassionate repression’. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a ‘deliberate policy of destitution’, I argue that through such acts of sovereign abandonment asylum seekers are relegated to a position reliant solely upon the ethical sensibilities of others. I then proceed to consider ways in which such a positioning ‘outside the law’ has been employed by asylum seekers and local campaigners to make ethical claims and demands upon the relational nature of the citizen as a figure of potential bare life. I then close by arguing that such an ethical gesture alone, of ‘assuming bare life’, is not enough and that the outright rejection of logics of distinction which Agamben suggests as a future politics offers little means to politically engage bare life beyond an irreconcilable ethic of the unconditionally hospitable. Opposed to this, I suggest the need to (re)engage with political theories which draw the political as always already an ethical practice in itself. Here, I examine the UK's involvement in the UNHCR Gateway Protection Programme, as an example of a conditional, and imperfect, act of hospitality, one grounded in distinction, yet one which holds both the risks of ethical practice and the possibility of political alteration at its heart.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Aliverti

This article explores the place of law and legality in the formation of British national identity and its reproduction (and contestation) inside the courtroom. It draws on sociolegal scholarship on legal culture, legal consciousness and ‘law and colonialism’ to shed light on the cultural power of the law to forge national subjectivities. The law does more than adjudicating justice and imposing sanctions. Its symbolic power lies in its capacity to construct legal subjectivities, of both individuals and nations. Through the law and its categories, people make sense of the social world and their position in it. The law can articulate national identities by expressing who we are and who we would like to be as a nation. By exploring the place of the law in discourses of British nationhood, this article contributes to our understanding of the ideological role of the law in reifying racial and global hierarchies. It also sheds light on how the boundaries of belonging can be unsettled through law’s power.


Author(s):  
Minna Saariketo

This presentation examines how the softwarization of everyday life is experienced. The point of embarkation is the observation that despite the proliferation computation in the everyday, people pay little attention to the conditions of software and its role in shaping their mundane time-spaces. I will discuss results from a case study that used Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (1992/2004) to shed light on how the rhythms of code-based technology are experienced. The research design of the intervention was inspired by the idea of privacy mirrors (Ngueyn and Mynatt 2002). Research participants (n=13), who described their relation to their devices as intense, used tracking software (RescueTime, ManicTime, App Usage or RealizD) in their ICTs and kept media diaries. These were used as artefacts in the interviews to enable reflection on the role of ICTs in daily life. The results from the rhythmanalysis show how the complex intertwinement of digital devices and applications in the everyday evokes manifold feelings. Simultaneously, technology is perceived as an aid in organizing and managing the daily life, but it also induces feelings of losing control, chaos, and burden. The results suggest that although people might take for granted the infrastructural conditions of technology, such as data mining, they still actively negotiate their relation to devices and applications vis-à-vis temporality. Outcomes from the intervention encourage developing further research designs that use the means of softwarization itself (e.g. tracking and digital traces) to enable critical reflection.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Samanta Vitória Siqueira ◽  
Karina De Castilhos Lucena

Resumo: Este artigo apresenta a biografia e as obras da escritora, empregada doméstica e militante social martinicana Françoise Ega (1920-1976) buscando dar visibilidade para sua trajetória de vida e para suas publicações ainda pouco conhecidas nos círculos acadêmicos e literários brasileiros. Primeiramente, apresentamos a biografia da autora com foco em seus deslocamentos e atuação política. Depois, comentamos brevemente suas obras Le temps de madras (1966), Lettres à une noire (1978) e L’Alizé ne soufflait plus (2000), relacionando-as com a vida da autora e com a sociedade martinicana. Por fim, sob uma perspectiva que não dissocia literatura e sociedade e que considera a história específica de socialização de mulheres diaspóricas afrodescendentes, propõe-se uma reflexão sobre o lugar de intelectuais negras na história da literatura latino-americana.Palavras-chave: Françoise Ega; escritoras diaspóricas; literatura antilhana.Abstract: This paper presents the biography and works of Martinican writer, laborer and social activist Françoise Ega (1920-1976), seeking to shed light on her life story and her lesser known publications among Brazilian academic and literary circles. Firstly, we present the writer’s biography, focusing on her relocations and political engagement. Secondly, we introduce Ega’s works Le temps de madras (1966), Lettres à une noire (1978) and L’Alizé ne soufflait plus (2000), and their relationship with both her life and the Martinican society. Ultimately, from a perspective which compromises literature and society, acknowledging the specific socialization history of diasporic women of African descent, we propose a reflection on the role of black women intellectuals in the history of Latin American literature.Keywords: Françoise Ega; diasporic writers; Antillean literature.


Author(s):  
Christoph Schwarz

Abstract This chapter analyzes the transitions to adulthood of young university graduates in Morocco, more precisely, activists of the unemployed graduates movement. Their protests offer a case in point to shed light on how youth transitions in the region are institutionalized and brokered. Based on particpant observation and life story interviews, this chapter applies a ‘youth transitions regime’ perspective in order to highlight he political dimension of youth transitions. How is the structure of these transitions and the hegemonic cultural definitions of ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ implicit in them linked to class, gender, social exclusion and precariousness? Has the ‘Arab Spring’ impacted the Moroccan youth transitions regime and the strategies of the unemployed graduates?


Author(s):  
Omnia El Shakry

This chapter traces a debate spawned by professor of criminal psychology Muhammad Fathi, while paying particular attention to the social role of the criminal at midcentury. It argues that the convergences or divergences found between psychoanalysis and the law were in part related to disputes regarding the causal nature of crime. Further complicating these debates was the juridical status of psychoanalysis itself as it struggled to assert its autonomy as a field of therapeutic practice within the Egyptian legal system. At the center of all of these arguments lay the criminal, themselves increasingly enmeshed within new legal and forensic practices, as well as multiple legal regimes over the course of the twentieth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
RACHEL ELIN NOLAN

Since Giorgio Agamben's influential critique of the liberal-democratic state, scholars have offered a more fulsome engagement with the ways that this formation extends Foucauldian biopolitical discourses by foregrounding the emergence of biological existence as “the new political subject.” InHomo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare LifeAgamben argues that it is impossible to understand the development, vocation, and contradictions of the modern state “if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject, but, above all, man's bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested in the principle of sovereignty.” Bare or pure life is the human as animal in nature without political definition or mediation. It is the isolation of the metaphysical from the various forms of concrete life that defines and conditions Western politics. Projects that imagine political communities as grounded in belonging or endeavor to found political rights in the citizen are in vain. The figure of thehomo sacer – the “sacred man” who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” – is one of the most distinctive elements of Agamben's project of redefining sovereignty in biopolitical terms. Contra notions of collective political sovereignty as the basis of state politics, the figure of thehomo sacerattends to a more authoritarian model that pivots on the role of state authorities in simultaneously conditioning and dis/avowing the movement from bare life to rights-bearing subject.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 411
Author(s):  
Mukodi Mukodi ◽  
Afid Burhanuddin

<p><strong>Abstract:</strong> <em>The dominance is a term that is owned by a variety of entities ranging from the lowest social strata up to those who have the highest power in public domain, even in the global public organization. The domination of the lowest domain up to the highest one can be transformed into a variety of issues including the role of someone in the public domain. Problems will arise when the role of men are much more dominant than women as shown in Samin community in Blora. Based on  the concept of gender, this study tried to dismantle and explore the myths of Samin  community and the commodity of Saminisme in Blora.</em> <em>The women of  Samin were still placed as a sub-ordinate of  men, that is, the Samin community in the village of Kelopo Dhuwur, called Wong</em> <em>Sikep (people of Sikep); Wong Samin who, in a particular level, still showed strong patriarchal culture in daily life, especially the issue of the concept of matchmaking in marriage and marriage itself.</em> <em>This condition was as a result of low level of their education which led to weakness of involvement of Samin women in public spaces. The local culture of this community had constructed domestication of women. Samin women's empowerment efforts had been done in two ways</em> by<em> its stakeholders, namely, Samin myth demolition and removal Saminisme commodities. The success and the positive effect of these two efforts had reached their attainment, although the results still  showed  the minimum  ideal outcome.</em><strong></strong></p><p dir="RTL"><strong>الملخص</strong> :إن موضوع "الهيمنة" أصبح لشتى الجهات من المجتمعات، من الجهة الإجتماعية السفلى إلى ولاية السلطة العليا بل وفي المنظمات العالمية. ظهرت هذه الهيمنة – من المستوى السافل إلى العالي – في شتّى الأشياء ومنها دور المرء في المجتمع. نشأت المشكلة إذا كانت هيمنة الرجل على المرأة أشد بالنسبة للمرأة، كما وقع هذا في المجتمع "سامين" بلورا. حاولت هذه الدراسة – بالمنظور الجنسي- كشف وعرض ودراسة أسطورة مجتمع "سامين" وبضاعة "السامينية" في بلورا. -كانت المرأة في المجتمع "سامين " إلى الآن تحت هيمنة الرجل . أظهر المجتمع الساميني في – جوانب خاصة – قوة ثقافة الهيمنة في حياتهم اليومية، خاصة في اختيار الزوجة والنكاح. وقع هذا بسبب قلتهم الحصول على التربية وأدى إلى ضعف دور المرأة السامينية في المجتمع. صوّرت الثقافة المحلية لهذا المجتمع " أن المرأة ربّة البيت". توالت المحاولات من الجهات المعنية لترقية النساء السامينيات عن طريقتين، 1) نسف وإزالة أسطورة "السامين"، 2) وإزالة بضائعية السامين. نجحت هذه المحاولات إلى حدّ ما، لكن لم يكن مقنعا للجميع.</p><p><strong>Abstrak:</strong><strong><em> </em></strong><em>Dominasi<strong> </strong>merupakan terma yang dimiliki oleh beragam entitas dari mulai ranah sosial terendah sampai pada wilayah kekuasaan tertinggi, bahkan dalam ranah oraganisasi global. Dominasi dari ranah terendah sampai tertinggi ini dapat menjelma dalam beragam hal termasuk peran seseorang dalam ranah publik. Problem akan muncul ketika </em><em>dominasi peranan kaum laki-laki begitu kontras dibandingkan kaum perempuan sebagaimana nampak dalam masyarakat Samin di Blora. Melalui konsep gender kajian ini mencoba untuk membongkar dan megeksplorasi mitos masyarakat Samin dan komoditi Saminisme di Blora. Kaum perempun Samin hingga kini masih ditempatkan sebagai sub-ordinat laki-laki. komunitas Samin di </em><em>Desa Kelopo Dhuwur, yang disebut dengan Wong Sikep, Wong Samin dalam tataran tertentu masih menampilkan kuatnya budaya patriarki dalam kehidupan keseharian khususnya persoalan perjodohan dan  perkawinan. Kondisi ini akibat dari rendahnya tingkat pendidikan yang memicu lemahnya keterlibatan perempuan Samin di ruang publik. Budaya lokal komunitas ini mengkonstruksikan domestikasi perempuan. Upaya pemberdayaan perempuan Samin oleh para pemangku kepentingan masih tetap dilakukan melalui dua cara, yakni pembongkaran mitos Samin, dan penghilangan komiditi Saminisme. Keberhasilan dan efek positif dari dua upaya ini telah terbukti, walaupun belum menunjukkan capaian yang ideal.</em></p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>domestifikasi perempuan, Samin Surosentiko, Blora, Islam modern. </p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 89 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 80-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Soares Severo ◽  
Jennifer Beatriz Silva Morais ◽  
Taynáh Emannuelle Coelho de Freitas ◽  
Ana Letícia Pereira Andrade ◽  
Mayara Monte Feitosa ◽  
...  

Abstract. Thyroid hormones play an important role in body homeostasis by facilitating metabolism of lipids and glucose, regulating metabolic adaptations, responding to changes in energy intake, and controlling thermogenesis. Proper metabolism and action of these hormones requires the participation of various nutrients. Among them is zinc, whose interaction with thyroid hormones is complex. It is known to regulate both the synthesis and mechanism of action of these hormones. In the present review, we aim to shed light on the regulatory effects of zinc on thyroid hormones. Scientific evidence shows that zinc plays a key role in the metabolism of thyroid hormones, specifically by regulating deiodinases enzymes activity, thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRH) and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) synthesis, as well as by modulating the structures of essential transcription factors involved in the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Serum concentrations of zinc also appear to influence the levels of serum T3, T4 and TSH. In addition, studies have shown that Zinc transporters (ZnTs) are present in the hypothalamus, pituitary and thyroid, but their functions remain unknown. Therefore, it is important to further investigate the roles of zinc in regulation of thyroid hormones metabolism, and their importance in the treatment of several diseases associated with thyroid gland dysfunction.


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