Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism; Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)becoming the Subject

2005 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-432
Author(s):  
J. Williams
Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.


Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110153
Author(s):  
Lara Pecis ◽  
Karin Berglund

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.


Author(s):  
Naomi Zack

The subject of critical race theory is implicitly black men, and the main idea is race. The subject of feminism is implicitly white women, and the main idea is gender. When the main idea is race, gender loses its importance and when the main idea is gender, race loses its importance. In both cases, women of color, especially black women, are left out. Needed is a new critical theory to address the oppression of nonwhite, especially black, women. Critical plunder theory would begin with the facts of uncompensated appropriation of the biological products of women of color, such as sexuality and children.


2021 ◽  
pp. 184-188
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer

In contemporary fiction, modesty comes to reflect the limits of human and critical agency in the Anthropocene. The dilemma of the Anthropocene is, in large part, a cosmological one, for it challenges our total view of the universe and humanity’s place in it. My readings of fiction have highlighted various kinds of modest relations and the differences they make, whether it be J. M. Coetzee’s belief in the power of modesty rhetoric to disrupt the polarized logic of political life or Zadie Smith’s insistence on how readerly modesty transforms our understanding of the relation between critic and work. Entailed in each individual argument for modesty is an account of how a reorientation of attitude transforms and makes possible interventions, resistances, and projects that otherwise might have remained untaken. Each novel offers a kind of testimony to the power of temperament for dealing with the myriad of troubles that humans must confront today. To put it in these terms is to emphasize in a new way the chiasmic relationship between the specific temperament called modesty, which is the subject of the book, and power of a modest temperament as a concept for criticism....


Author(s):  
Elena Sandoval-Lucero ◽  
Tamara D. White ◽  
Judi Diaz Bonacquisti

Reflecting on their mentoring and supervision experiences as Latina and Black women leaders in higher education, this article proposes that Women of Color employees are more effective when supervisors give them space to draw upon their own rich histories and cultural wealth in their professional lives. Viewed through the lens of Relational Cultural Theory, which grew out of the work of Jean Baker Miller and colleagues providing culturally relevant, affirmative supervision is a growth-fostering experience for both employee and supervisor. The tenants of RCT include authenticity, growth-fostering relationships, mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment as aspects of supervision that are particularly effective for employees with multiple intersected identities working in higher education spaces. The authors make recommendations for supervisor training that would allow supervisors to draw upon the cultural capital of their diverse employees to provide healing from oppression and build resilience through validation of cultural assets and approaches to leadership.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Rob Coley

What happens when theory falters? A concern with the anthropocentric limitations of critical thought dominates contemporary cultural theory. For Joanna Zylinska, however, this concern often reflects a longstanding humanist anxiety, one that is today renewed in the form of ‘noir theory’, a reactionary scholarship that redeems the universalist human as the subject of reason. There is, though, more than one mode of noir theory, and a certain tendency of ‘noir’ affords the basis for theorizing another kind of universalism, a non-reactionary account of the real. This article takes seriously the allusion to noir as a particular mode of detection. Its investigation begins with Gilles Deleuze, who commends crime fiction for providing an image of thought that works against humanist orthodoxy. Yet present circumstances demand investigating a blacker kind of noir, one that operates negatively, a noir theory that can be detected in the strange realism of François Laruelle.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 901-905
Author(s):  
Archana Verma

The subject of ‘self’ is a much wider concept which amalgamates the cultural issues and the social issues which eventually leads to the identity crisis of a black women. The study of Kincaid’s novels recapitulates the idea of the fight of an individual self right from the beginning till the end of life. The three novels run in continuation and present the different stages of a woman’s life and the struggle which she encounters at the every phase of life. This paper also contemplates the idea that a woman never fails to strive for her identity even in the adverse circumstances.


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