scholarly journals Serial Killing as a Defence Mechanism: A Study of Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs”

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Jerrin Aleyamma John
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Defence Mechanism ◽  
Multiple Viewpoints ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contextual Framework ◽  
Serial Killing ◽  
Detective Stories

The literary canon carries with it a huge array of possible writings exploring the various contours of fiction, the genre of Detective fiction is one such umbrella term. The effect of mystery and suspense and the surprise factors being hidden away in the pages, keeps the readers glued to detective fiction. This paper explores the plot line of one of the prominent detective stories, Thomas Harris’s ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ in search of certain existential questions regarding the named serial killer in the plot. The social evil of killing the lives of many for the purely pleasure aspect is viewed from multiple viewpoints and a new reading of the plot by placing it within relevant contextual framework is carried out. A traversal through the psychological, behavioural and social norms of the context is explores within the paper.

scholarly journals The social nature of serial murder: The intersection of gender and modernity

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Louise Wattis
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Murder ◽  
The Political ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Serial Killing

The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire Ripper case, it emphasizes how in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation.

When the closet is the grave: A critical review of the Bruce McArthur case

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072110001
Author(s):  
Amar Wahab
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sexualized Violence ◽  
Serial Killing ◽  
Lgbt Media

The article investigates the social impossibilities and constructed killability of brown queers. It critically focuses on the Bruce McArthur case, which involved the serial killing of predominantly brown queer men between 2010 and 2017 in Toronto. The author analyzes mainstream (LGBT) media representations of the white serial killer as “ordinary, yet aberrant,” the queer victims of color as sexually and socially fuckable, and the murderous racism of the Canadian state. The article centers the concept of (queer)necropolitics in conversation with discourses of antiimmigration, anti-Muslim racism and racialized sexualities to situate the generative force of racialized sexualized violence in the case.

Interpreting Heidegger on das Man (1995)

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mode Of Being

In their debate over Dreyfus’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of das Man in Being and Time, Frederick Olafson and Taylor Carman agree that Heidegger’s various characterizations of das Man are inconsistent. Olafson champions an existentialist/ontic account of das Man as a distorted mode of being-with. Carman defends a Wittgensteinian/ontological account of das Man as Heidegger’s name for the social norms that make possible everyday intelligibility. For Olafson, then, das Man is a privative mode of Dasein, while for Carman it makes up an important aspect of Dasein’s positive constitution. Neither interpreter takes seriously the other’s account, though both acknowledge that both readings are possible. How should one choose between these two interpretations? Dreyfus suggests that we choose the interpretation that identifies the phenomenon that the work is examining, gives the most internally consistent account of that phenomenon, and shows the compatibility of this account with the rest of the work.

Can Humanism be the Social Norm?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon D. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Social Norm ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The Social

Assaults on truth and divisions about the nature of wise governance are not momentary political challenges, unique to particular moments in history. Rather, they demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in human reasoning and core dangers in ways of construing both individual freedom and cohesive communities. It will remain an ongoing challenge to learn to deal rationally with what is an intrinsic irrationality in human cognition and with what is an intrinsic tendency toward domination and violence in human collectivities. In times of intense social divisions, it is vital to consider the ways in which humanism might function as the social norm by, paradoxically, functioning in a way different from other social norms. Humanism is not the declaration that a certain set of values or norms are universally valid. At its best and most creative, humanism is not limited to a particular set of norms, but is, rather, the commitment to a certain process in which norms are continuously created, critically evaluated, implemented, sustained or revised. Humanism is a process of connection, perception, implementation, and critique, and it applies this process as much to itself as to other traditions.

scholarly journals When time becomes personal. Aging and personal identity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Sternad
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Physical Process ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
The Social ◽  
Future Self ◽  
Social Level

AbstractAging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the phenomenological method: time, embodiment, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and even the social norms that grow into the very notion of aging as such. In my article, I delineate a phenomenological analysis of aging and show how such an analysis connects with the debate concerning personal identity: I claim that aging is not merely a physical process, but is far more significantly also a spiritual one as the process of aging consists in our awareness of and conscious relation to our aging. This spiritual process takes place on an individual and on a social level, whereas the latter is the more primordial layer of this experience. This complicates the question of personal identity since it will raise the question in two ways, namely who I am for myself and who I am for the others, and in a further step how the latter experience shapes the former. However, we can state that aging is neither only physical nor only spiritual. It concerns my bodily processes as it concerns the complex reflexive structure that relates my former self with my present and even future self.

scholarly journals Composing Individuals: Ethnographic Reflections on Success and Prestige in the British New Music Network

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
HETTIE MALCOMSON
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
New Music ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Art Worlds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scant Attention

AbstractIn contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created ‘interesting’ music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related ‘art worlds’. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting.

scholarly journals Readings Behind the Early Christian Queer Experiences

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Larisa Orlov Vilimonović
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
Body Modifications

This paper deals with the ideas of queer experiences in the Early Christian movement, seen through early Christian epistemologies of gender and patristic thought focused on sex differences. The lives and passions of transgender nuns are used in discussing various aspects of gender fluidity in early Christianity. Theoretically, the paper rests on the idea of the performativity of gender, that is, on the ways gender was constructed and how body modifications enabled renegotiation of gender categories. It also focuses on the social context of queer experiences in the late antique period with regard to Roman social norms.

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