Green your groin: Sustainability, men’s underwear and the wild

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Allan
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reparative Reading

Men and the environment, it seems, have a tenuous relationship. This article considers the challenge of men’s underwear and sustainability by focusing on advertisements designed to sell ecologically friendly underwear. One of the challenges that I highlight is how we are to ‘read’ these advertisements. This article takes it as a given that images are polysemous. Drawing on queer theory, I propose a series of readings that align with Sedgwick’s practice of paranoid and reparative reading. In the case of the paranoid reading, I show how these advertisements might be read as indicative and proof of hybrid masculinity theory. From this vantage, I move to a reparative reading that imagines other possibilities, particularly around nature and the wild. The goal of these readings is not to have one dominate over the other, but to show the nuance and complexity of masculinities in/and nature.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
The Third ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sexual Part ◽  
The One ◽  
And Behavior

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.

The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
History Of

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

Queer as Materialism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Noyé ◽  
Gianfranco Rebucini
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
The Social

Since the 2000s, forms of articulation between materialist and Marxist theory and queer theory have been emerging and have thus created a “queer materialism.” After a predominance of poststructuralist analyses in the social sciences in the1980s and 1990s, since the late 1990s, and even more so after the economic crisis of 2008, a materialist shift seems to be taking place. These recompositions of the Marxist, queer, and feminist, which took place in activist and academic arenas, are decisive in understanding how the new approaches are developing in their own fields. The growing legitimacy of feminist and queer perspectives within the Marxist left is part of an evolution of Marxism on these issues. On the other side, queer activists and academics have highlighted the economic and social inequalities that the policies of austerity and capitalism in general induce among LGBTQI people and have turned to more materialist references, especially Marxist ones, to deploy an anticapitalist and antiracist argument. Even if nowadays one cannot speak of a “queer materialist” current as such, because the approaches grouped under this term are very different, it seems appropriate to look for a “family resemblance” and to group them together. Two specific kinds of “queer materialisms” can thus be identified. The first, queer Marxism, seeks to theorize together Marxist and queer theories, particularly in normalization and capitalist accumulation regimes. The second, materialist queer feminism, confronts materialist/Marxist feminist thought with queer approaches and thus works in particular on the question of heteropatriarchy based on this double tradition.

scholarly journals The Queerness in Shikhandi: Concerning Devdutt Pattanaik’s Shikhandi and Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-171
Author(s):  
Ambili M
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Women's Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Controversial Subject ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Important Character

Queer theory is a realm of critical theory that developed within/in the early 1990s, out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Shikhandi is an important character in the Mahabharata. Hindu tales have many references to queerness; one among them is the story of Shikhandi, a woman who became a man. The gender of Shikhandi is a controversial subject, in epics especially in Mahabharata, men are considered as great warriors, full of masculinity and resilience. But while approaching the text from a postmodernist perspective, we can analyze the gender of Shikhandi as the ‘other gender’, Mahabharata, which means great India have much popularity in India, as Homer’s poems over the Greeks. This paper seeks to examine, how the character of Shikhandi in Mahabharata,who is neglected in the society, the queerness in Shikhandi which is flexible and fluid made him/her a remarkable character in the great epic.

Fy, skam dig ikke! Skam som sanktioneret og konstruktiv følelse i den offentlige debat

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (78) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Lisa Storm Villadsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Press ◽  
Public Reaction

This article contributes to scholarship on emotions in political rhetoric by way of complicating commonly held ­views on which types of emotions are appropriate in public debate. The article examines the feeling shame from two perspectives, each rhetorically and critically oriented: one is analytical, the other theoretical. The case material comes from Danish politics where a group of celebrities stated to the press that they felt ashamed on account of Denmark’s policy regarding refugees and immigrants. Based in analysis of the public reaction from the Prime Minister I show how the feeling shame and those who felt it were marked as inappropriate from public debate. In the latter part of the article I theorize on negative emotions and shame in public rhetoric. Drawing on contemporary political philosophy and feminist and queer theory I argue for a more nuanced view on appeals to the emotion ­shame. Closer reflection suggests that it does not necessarily imply the destructive social distancing one would ordinarily expect but that it has potential as a marker of solidarity with the collective and as such can drive ethical reconsideration

scholarly journals Foucault On Psychoanalysis: Missed Encounter or Gordian Knot?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (28) ◽  
pp. 96-119
Author(s):  
Mark G. E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
The Other ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Psychoanalytic Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Psychiatric Power

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights.

Henry James's Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-313
Author(s):  
Gert Buelens
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
The Erotic

The focus of this paper is on The American Scene, which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indeterminate. The desire for literal, physical mastery over the other is here rechanneled into an identification with the scene of desire that can dispense with the erotic object. This complex psychosexual mechanism, which I call oblique possession, thrives on a disruption of the dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has questioned. In tracing the circuits of oblique possession, the paper articulates a queer perspective on Henry James's work outside any necessary relationship between two individuals.

Henry James's Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-313
Author(s):  
Gert Buelens
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
The Erotic

The focus of this paper is on The American Scene, which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indeterminate. The desire for literal, physical mastery over the other is here rechanneled into an identification with the scene of desire that can dispense with the erotic object. This complex psychosexual mechanism, which I call oblique possession, thrives on a disruption of the dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has questioned. In tracing the circuits of oblique possession, the paper articulates a queer perspective on Henry James's work outside any necessary relationship between two individuals.

How to Do Things with Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Amico
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
Stylistic Elements ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

This article explores the potentials and perils of reading queerness in relation to cultural products, performances, and places outside the site of the theory’s genesis. Beginning with an examination of audiovisual and discursive transgressions in the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian band Kamon!!!, putatively “stylistic” elements are shown as intimately related to a political sociocultural realm. This move to the political, and to queer politics, necessitates an interrogation of the politics of queerness, and the risks of intellectual colonialism that perpetuates cultural hierarchies and stereotypes (the “backward,” pragmatic East versus the fluid, utopian West). Approaching queer theory through the lens of performativity—a textual assimilation which “queers” the other—the dynamics of musical notation and transcription are engaged in order to highlight the possible asymmetries engendered via transcultural queering, suggesting that only through mutually transformative dialog can queerness fulfill its liberatory potential.

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