An Study on the Performance and its Influencing Factors of the Community Building Project

This article examines debates on nudity, sexism, and pornography in the Canadian gay and lesbian newspaper The Body Politic, tracing its use of images and people’s responses to them over time. In the 1970s, concerns about sexism and the objectification of the body shaped discussions over sexual and erotic imagery. In the 1980s concerns about pornography were more current, since they mirrored the then-contemporary debates over pornography and censorship. Drawing upon archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that TBP’s visual culture—particularly its sexual and erotic imagery—played a key role in the paper’s community-building project. The article also shows how responses to images reflect a deep ambivalence, and the conflicting perspectives shaping the paper’s production and reception. While liberationist politics, feminist theory, and ideas of a “gay community” influenced the paper throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the meanings that people ascribed to such concepts were diverse and sometimes incompatible.

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W(h)ither the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN)? W(h)ither constructivism? Fixity of norms and the ASEAN Way

International Relations ◽

10.1177/0047117819830469 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 33 (3) ◽

pp. 413-432

Author(s):

Alan Collins

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle ◽

Practice Theory ◽

East Asian ◽

Community Building ◽

Social World ◽

Constitutive Norms ◽

The Social ◽

Building Project ◽

Shared Understandings

This article uses the reflection on the direction (whither) and health (wither) of constructivism and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that was witnessed in 2017 to see what these deliberations reveal about the fixity of norms and their contestation. The argument presented is that constitutive norms create fixed parameters of shared understandings but that within those parameters the meaning and application of the norm can be contested and debated. This insight helps to bridge the gap between conventional and critical constructivists and shows that the premise of jettisoning the ASEAN Way as necessary for ASEAN to achieve its ambitious community-building project is flawed. The argument relies on insights from the constructivist literature on norm degeneration to show how contestation is not one part of a norm’s life cycle but rather a constant companion. However, norms are not just contested, but they have fixity, and here practice theory can help show that the social world is just as much about continuity as it is change. The ASEAN case study is timely as introspection about the efficacy of its constitutive norms – the ASEAN Way – was prominent in 2017 as ASEAN turned 50.

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Theatre, Community, and Development: The Performance Activism of the Castillo Theatre

TDR/The Drama Review ◽

10.1162/dram_a_00596 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 60 (4) ◽

pp. 68-91

Author(s):

Dan Friedman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Social Change ◽

York City ◽

Community Building ◽

Political Theatre ◽

Performance Activism ◽

Building Project

The Castillo Theatre’s three decades of making theatre as part of an ongoing politically progressive community-building project in New York City is a new concept/practice of political theatre. Its radical statement is located not primarily in what’s presented onstage, but with those who make the theatre collaboratively, approaching social change activism performatively rather than ideologically.

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