scholarly journals Sexing the Archive

2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 (142) ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
João Florêncio ◽  
Ben Miller

Abstract Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.

Author(s):  
Fatma Nazlı Köksal ◽  
Hasan Doğan

Beyond being a shelter, houses are such structures which obtain meanings shaped by the influence of culture, particularly reflecting the society’s socio-cultural structure. As a time-khronos and space-topos pattern, the houses reflect the characteristics of the culture or ethnic group which they are part of, while on the other hand, they reflect the images of the individual’s essence as a communicative action. The effect of climate and typology, which are physical components of culture, as well as social components of culture, such as value systems, belief, lifestyle and habits, are cardinal factors in the formation of traditional houses. In this respect, traditional structures are visual representation spaces that narrates their own story, like verbal culture, and they convey their unique codes through visuality. This study, which discusses traditional architecture as a cultural text, aims to reveal traditional Urfa houses through analytical readings, within the context of visual semiology.. The samples selected within the scope of the study will be evaluated according to the context of stylistic features they are part of, such as plan and spatial perspective, the location of the houses, and detections regarding the visual culture will be discussed through the cultural and architectural design approach of Umberto Eco.


2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-54
Author(s):  
Jerzy Kosiewicz

Abstract In the presented text the author points out to anthropological as well as axiological foundations of the boxing fight from the viewpoint of Hegel’s philosophy. In the genial idealist’s views it is possible to perceive the appreciation of the body, which constitutes a necessary basis for the man’s physical activity, for his work oriented towards the self-transformation and the transformation of the external world, as well as for rivalry and the hand-to-hand fight. While focusing our attention on the issue of rivalry and on the situation of the fight - and regarding it from the viewpoint of the master - slave theory (included in the phenomenology of spirit), it is possible to proclaim that even a conventionalised boxing fight - that is, restricted by cultural and sports rules of the game - has features of the fight to the death between two Hegelian forms of selfknowledge striving for self-affirmation and self-realisation. In the boxing fight, similarly as in the above mentioned Hegelian theory, a problem of work and of the development of the human individual (that is, of the subject, self-knowledge, the participant of the fight) appears. There appears also a prospect of death as a possible end of merciless rivalry. The fight revalues the human way in an important way, whereas the prospect for death, the awareness of its proximity, the feeling that its close and possible, saturates the life with additional values. It places the boxer, just like every subject fighting in a similar or a different way, on the path towards absolute abstraction - that is, it brings him closer to his self-fulfilment in the Absolute, to the absolute synthesis. The Hegelian viewpoint enables also to appreciate the boxing fight as a manifestation of low culture (being in contrast with high culture), to turn attention to the relations which - according to Hegel - take place between the Absolute and the man, as well as to show which place is occupied by the subject both in the process of the Absolute’s self-realisation and in the German thinker’s philosophical system. Independently of the dialectical, simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic overtone of considerations connected with the very boxing fight (regarding destruction and spiritualisation on a higher level), it is possible to perceive farreaching appreciation of the human individual in Hegel’s philosophy since the Absolute cannot make its own self-affirmation without the individual, without the human body, without the fight aimed at the destruction of the enemy and without the subjective consciousness and the collective consciousness which appear thanks to this fight. Thus, it is justified to suppose that the foundation of the whole Hegel’s philosophy is constituted by anthropology and that in the framework of this anthropology a special role is played by the fight and by work, which changes the subject and his(her) environment. Admittedly Hegel does not emphasise it explicitly, nevertheless his views (with their centre, which, according to Hegel himself and his interpreters, is constituted by the Absolute) have, as a matter of fact, an anthropocentric character and the main source of the subject’s development is the struggle which, irrespectively of its result, always primarily leads to the destruction or even to the death of one of the sides, just like in the boxing fight. However, it is also a germ of the positive re-orientation of the subject, the beginning and a continuation of that what the phenomenology of the spirit describes as a movement towards absolute abstraction.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Imogen Thirlwall

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Imogen Thirlwall

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-500
Author(s):  
Robert Stănciulescu

Abstract The programme of training in the field of military physical education is directed towards developing an efficient motor capacity by ensuring superior development gauges for basic motor skills and for the motor skills and aptitudes specific to the military system, as well as towards developing the body resilience to stress, enhancing productivity and the mental alarm state of mind, elements playing an important role in improving the combat capacity. In the economy of the formative process, the basic motor and utility-applicable skills represent the essence of an advanced level of training in the field of physical education, so that their development, strenghening and improvement will always be a constant priority objective of training.


1994 ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Caroline Evans ◽  
Kathleen Adler ◽  
Marcia Pointon ◽  
Lynda Nead
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

Author(s):  
Fatma Nazlı Köksal ◽  
Hasan Doğan

Beyond being a shelter, houses are such structures which obtain meanings shaped by the influence of culture, particularly reflecting the society’s socio-cultural structure. As a time-khronos and space-topos pattern, the houses reflect the characteristics of the culture or ethnic group which they are part of, while on the other hand, they reflect the images of the individual's essence as a communicative action. The effect of climate and typology, which are physical components of culture, as well as social components of culture, such as value systems, belief, lifestyle and habits, are cardinal factors in the formation of traditional houses. In this respect, traditional structures are visual representation spaces that narrates their own story, like verbal culture, and they convey their unique codes through visuality. This study, which discusses traditional architecture as a cultural text, aims to reveal traditional Urfa houses through analytical readings, within the context of visual semiology. The samples selected within the scope of the study will be evaluated according to the context of stylistic features they are part of, such as plan and spatial perspective, the location of the houses, and detections regarding the visual culture will be discussed through the cultural and architectural design approach of Umberto Eco.


Augustinianum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-135
Author(s):  
Nello Cipriani ◽  

In De immortalitate animae Augustine is not satisfied with completing his proof of the immortality of the soul – which had been left open in the second book of the Soliloquies –; he also answers some possible objections, demonstrating that the rational soul cannot cease to exist, it cannot die, nor can it change into an irrational body or soul. Furthermore, remaining faithful to the programmatic declaration of never wanting to stray from the authority of Christ (Acad. 3, 20, 43), he specifies the ontological status of the soul by affirming that it is, in itself, mutable and therefore not of a divine nature, as Varro had argued. Nor is it a substance foreign to the body, as the Platonists claimed, because the soul has an appetitus ad corpus and, if it questions itself, it easily discovers that it desires nothing else «except to do something, to know with intelligence or with the senses, or only to live, as far as this is in its power» (nisi agendi aliquid, aut sciendi, aut sentiendi, aut tantummodo vivendi in quantum sua illi potestas est).


Author(s):  
Sergey A. Kucherenko ◽  

The article is focused around ontological status of state in modern political real­ism. It seems that possibility of moral evaluation depends on the existence of the evaluated object. Only the real objects can be fully valuable. The article demon­strates that theoretical abstraction of social world can function as values only by being the ends that have to be fulfilled. The notion of state plays crucial role in re­alist theory, while states themselves are basic units of international system. This puts the state in an ambivalent position. On the one hand realists view state as a mere theoretical abstraction without proper existence. On the other hand state acts as a value in analysis of statesmen motives. The author claims that realism, be­ing an “understanding” social theory, is stuck between scientific and political value systems. This problem is possible to solve by splitting the concept of state (and re­lated notions), based on the context of its usage.


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