Four Gestures toward a Trans-Mad Aesthetic of Space

Social Text ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Lucas Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mental Health Treatment ◽  
Health Treatment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Government Legislation

Abstract This article argues for what the author calls a trans-mad aesthetic of space, defined as designs or artworks that embark, sense, emote, and collect, in ways that queerly disrupt the norms of the public sphere. These four aesthetic operations resist, in turn, four current affective/spatial norms of mental health treatment: confinement, rationality, repression, and an individualizing model of madness. As part of unfolding this model for a trans-mad aesthetic, the article asserts that the link between transgender and madness (as categories) is not merely one of addition—say, people who are both transgender and mad—but, rather, one of mutual constitution. To make these suggestions, the article engages an eccentric archive that includes posters that advocate transgender depathologization, Greek mythologies of gendered madness, government legislation about sexual sterilization, and psych ward design protocols. Its two key case studies, however, are artistic: Hannah Hull and James Leadbitter's “Madlove: A Designer Asylum” and the oeuvre of Montreal performance artist Coral Short.

Word, Image, Sound

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-152
Author(s):  
Matthew Engelke
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract This essay introduces the special section “Word, Image, Sound,” a collection of essays on public religion and religious publicities in Africa and South Asia. The essays cover case studies in Myanmar, Zambia, Senegal, Rwanda, and Egypt. The introduction situates the essays in relation to the broader fields of work on the public sphere and publics, especially as they relate to recent work in the human sciences that focus on materiality, the senses, and media.

Liminal Participation: Young People’s Practices in the Public Sphere Between Exclusion, Claims of Belonging, and Democratic Innovation

2021 ◽  
pp. 0044118X2110408
Author(s):  
Ilaria Pitti ◽  
Yagmur Mengilli ◽  
Andreas Walther
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Youth Participation ◽  
European Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Public ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Innovation And Change

Existing understandings of youth participation often imply clear distinctions from non-participation and thus boundaries between “recognized” and “non-recognized” practices of engagement. This article aims at questioning these boundaries. It analyzes young people’s practices in the public sphere that are characterized by both recognition as participation and misrecognition or stigmatization as deviant and it is suggested to conceptualize such practices as “liminal participation.” The concept of liminality has been developed to describe transitory situations “in-between”—between defined and recognized status positions—and seems helpful for better understanding the blurring boundaries of youth participation. Drawing on qualitative case studies conducted within a European research project, the analysis focuses on how young people whose practices evolve at the margins of the respective societies position themselves with regard to the challenges of liminality and on the potential of this for democratic innovation and change.

Playing (Safely) with Fire

2021 ◽  
pp. 218-234
Author(s):  
Mary Angela Bock
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Human Capability ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This chapter reviews the project’s argument, that social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages in embodied and discursive ways. Digitization has vastly expanded the encoding capabilities of everyday citizens, allowing them to render their expression of democratic voice visible, even as the ethical rules for visual expression are inchoate. The project’s case studies demonstrate the way grounded practices produce representations that support the authority of the criminal justice system, and together they invite three theoretical discussions: (1) on the way visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, (2) on the importance of image indexicality as a discursive affordance in the public sphere, and (3) on the digital public sphere as visual, and participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability. As a whole, the project offers insight into the construction of the criminal justice system’s literal and metaphorical image.

scholarly journals Blogging as Popular History Making, Blogs as Public History: The Singapore Case Study

2007 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Ho
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Public History ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Blogging is a twenty-first century phenomenon that has heralded an age where ordinary people can make their voices heard in the public sphere of the Internet. This article explores blogging as a form of popular history making; the blog as a public history document; and how blogging is transforming the nature of public history and practice of history making in Singapore. An analysis of two Singapore ‘historical’ blogs illustrates how blogging is building a foundation for a more participatory historical society in the island nation. At the same time, the case studies also demonstrate the limitations of blogging and blogs in challenging official versions of history.

The Guilty Brelfie

Screen Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mari E. Ramler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Public ◽  
Female Breast ◽  
The Public Sphere

Breastfeeding mothers and their babies are simultaneously in the public sphere and hidden from public view. Although social media has the potential to normalize attitudes toward breastfeeding by increasing visibility, Facebook and Instagram maintain an unpredictable censorship policy toward “brelfies”—female breast selfies—which has undermined progress. Combining Iris Marion Young’s “undecidability” of the breasted experience with Brett Lunceford’s rhetoric of nakedness, this article investigates what breastfeeding mothers communicate online via digital images when they expose their breasts. By deconstructing controversial case studies, this article concludes that brelfies have increased breastfeeding’s accessibility and acceptability in the material world.

Women in the Public Sphere

Making Icons ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Coates
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Positive Affect ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Girl ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Post War

Chapter 5 analyses positive motifs related to hope and healing in the characterization of nurse and schoolteacher roles. This positive affect contrasts with the threatening representation of young women in the public sphere embodied by the ‘modern girl,’ or moga character. The second part of this chapter contextualizes this post-war character in relation to the pre-war moga, making a case for the post-war gangsters molls played by Mihara Yōko as a post-war equivalent. Case studies include One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki nichiyōbi, Kurosawa Akira, 1947), Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, Kurosawa Akira, 1948), Twenty Four Eyes (Nijushi no hitomi, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1954), and the Line series (Ishii Teruo, 1958-1961).

scholarly journals Television and the Public Sphere:  Relationships of Power and Resistance in Contemporary  New Zealand Television

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Frances Cook
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Public Sphere

<p>This thesis considers New Zealand television’s public sphere role, by analysing three television programmes in terms of how they enable the exercise of power or resistance. The programmes 7 Days, Campbell Live, and Shortland Street were used as case studies of typical public sphere spaces that are available to the New Zealand public. These programmes were analysed in terms of Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance as active exercises that are present in all interrelations. The research found that the programmes were sites of both the exercising of power and the possibility of resistance, as they each worked to circulate competing discourses that subjects could take up to reinforce existing power structures or to resist the exercise of power upon them. Despite this conflicted nature, each programme was found to circulate these competing discourses in a manner that accommodated critical positions and discourses, as well as reinscribing normative power relations.</p>

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