Inhabiting Liminal Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Clough Marinaro
Keyword(s):  
Liminal Spaces

Power through Intersubjectivity: Representing the Resilient Child in Urban Survival Narratives

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Yvonne Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Social Discourse ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Spark Gap ◽  
Urban Survival ◽  
Resilient Child

The problematic relationship between urban dislocation, the proscribed spaces of urban childhood, child marginnalisation and the societal invisibility of under-age citizens is widely thematised in contemporary children's literature. This article examines how childhood agency, as a form of power, becomes aligned with resilience through intersubjectivity in the narrative representations of marginalised child subjects in Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown (1987) and Julie Bertagna's The Spark Gap ( 1996 ). Depictions of child homelessness, which construct resilience in the determination to survive experiences of marginalisation, dislocation and loss, offer an opportunity to examine representations of child subjectivity. This discussion centres on the role of intersubjectivity as an alternative construction to some humanistic frames that privilege the notion of an individual agency divested of childhood's limitations. It identifies the experiential codes which more accurately reflect the choices available to young readers, where liminal spaces of homelessness that first establish social and cultural dependencies are re-interpreted through depictions of relational connection among displaced child subjects. The discussion suggests that these multifocal novels construct dialogic representations of social discourse that affirm intersubjectivity as a form of agency.

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

Productive pleasures across binary regimes: Phenomenologies of bisexual desires among Latino men

Sexualities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Fontdevila
Keyword(s):  
Impression Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sexual Agency ◽  
Latino Men ◽  
Hetero Structure ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
Sex With Men

Modern orders were founded on the repudiation of sexual ambiguity and the confinement of desire within discursive classifications of man/woman and hetero/homosexual binaries. However, the persistence of bisexual practices reveals the unstable nature of these modern binary regimes, which require the “erasure” of bisexuality to perpetuate their status quo. Yet some men negotiate their bisexual desires in productive ways without undermining their sense of masculinity and sexual agency. Based on qualitative interviews I explore the sexualities of a group of these men—Latino men who have sex with men and women in southern California. I find that sex with women involves interactional work that is more demanding on impression management and moral grounds. Sex with men is rougher, adventurous, and less restrained. I conclude that sex with men opens liminal spaces that resist binary definition and are less discursively regulated—relative “anti-structures” à la Victor Turner that decouple agency from (hetero)structure. This transgressive liminality is key to understanding these same-sex spaces' recurrent attraction and productive pleasure. The study challenges monolithic understandings of migrant sexualities by finding great diversity among non-gay identified men, including homoerotic practices combined with strong desire for women.

Digging the Liminal Spaces: Chronotopic Representation of Liminality in Seamus Heaney’s North and Station Island

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
Maryam Soltan Beyad ◽  
Ehsan Kazemi
Keyword(s):  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Irish Identity

AbstractChallenging the established poetic idea of Ireland as a unified whole, new Irish poetry encourages a perspective toward homeland alongside with a corresponding revision of Irish subjectivity as liminality. Introduced by Homi Bhabha as a postcolonial cultural term, the idea privileges hybrid cultures and challenges solid or authentic ones. Moreover, this liminal rationale entails a corresponding chronotopic rendition, as Bakhtin intends to theorize it, whereby the notion of spatio-temporality assists the poet in rethinking the Irish identity. An archeologist shrouded as a poet, Heaney’s early work, North (1975), is an attempt to reterritorialize the Motherland while Station Island (1984) represents the deterritorialization of the land, a collection in which Heaney proposes an alternative notion of Irish identity. The present study seeks to show how Heaney’s aforementioned poetry collections manifest a transition from a patently nationalist reception of land to a tendency to liminal spaces. Hence, a critical juxtaposition of these two works bears witness to an endeavor to move beyond the solid, reductionist perspective of the unified Ireland into a state of liminality with respect to Bhabha’s idea of hybridity. Furthermore, it is argued how Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope can accommodate to the accomplishment of such a poetic project.

Bodies, borders, babies: Birthing in liminal spaces

2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062110202
Author(s):  
Alison Mountz
Keyword(s):  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Many

This commentary responds to Bagelman and Gitome’s (2021) ‘Birthing Across Borders’. I discuss some of the many contributions and insights of their article and address new lines of inquiry and potential gaps that remain to be addressed, including the need to attend to the material realities of birthing bodies, to conduct research on birthing in other liminal spaces across borders, and to understand the subsequent lives of babies birthed in these spaces.

scholarly journals Problematizing leadership learning facilitation through a trickster archetype: An investigation into power and identity in liminal spaces

Leadership ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 174271502199822
Author(s):  
Gareth Edwards ◽  
Beverley Hawkins ◽  
Neil Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Development ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Learning Facilitation ◽  
Reflective Conversations ◽  
Permanent Resident ◽  
Shadow Side ◽  
Learning Development

This study uses the archetype of a ‘trickster’ to reflect back on, and hence problematize, the role of the educator/facilitator identity in leadership learning. This is based on the view that a trickster is a permanent resident in liminal spaces and that these liminal spaces play an important role in leadership learning. Our approach was based on the reading of the trickster literature alongside reflective conversations on our own experiences of facilitation of leadership learning, development and education. We suggest that paying attention to the trickster tale draws attention to the romanticization of leadership development and its facilitation as based on a response to crisis that leads to a further enhancement of the leader as a hero. Hence, it also offers ways to problematize leadership learning by uncovering the shadow side of facilitation and underlying power relations. We therefore contribute by showing how, as facilitators, we can use the trickster archetype to think more critically, reflectively and reflexively about our role and practices as educators, in particular, the ethical and power-related issues. In our conclusions, we make recommendations for research, theory and practice and invite other facilitators to share with us their trickster tales.

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kuffner
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Sexuality And Space ◽  
Female Picaresque

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

Using Text via Dialectical Journals to Nurture Liminal Spaces in Teacher Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 154134462110581
Author(s):  
Stephanie L. Dodman ◽  
Nancy Holincheck ◽  
Rebecca Brusseau
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Transformational Learning ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Teacher Inquiry ◽  
Graduate Course ◽  
Practicing Teachers ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Reflective Development

This article shares the findings of a study examining the use of dialectical journals as liminal spaces for the development of critical reflection in practicing teachers. In an online graduate course on critical teacher inquiry designed to foster teachers as antiracist multicultural educators, teachers engaged in dialogue with themselves as they responded to self-selected text segments in assigned readings throughout the course. Using Mezirow’s theory of transformation and specifically the typology of critical reflection of assumptions and critical self-reflection of assumptions, we analyzed the online dialectical journals of 23 teachers to better understand how their engagement with key texts both represented and influenced their reflective development and engagement in transformational learning. We conclude the journals to be powerful liminal spaces for teachers to engage in reframing of their assumptions.

“Reopening the Grave”: Reading Trauma and Abjection in Hibakusha Poetry

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-396
Author(s):  
Alyson Miller
Keyword(s):  
Liminal Spaces

Abstract Representations of the devastation of nuclear annihilation are undoubtedly confrontational, yet crucial to understanding the ongoing trauma and impact of atomic warfare. In examining how survivors “translate into words an extraordinarily painful landscape” (Tōge 1952), this paper explores the abject imagery utilized by hibakusha poets in order to express the violent horrors of the A-bomb. It focuses on how explicitly grotesque images function to give shape to events regarded as ineffable, and to make potently real the experiences of those whose identities were defined by shame and revulsion. Drawing upon Kristevan notions of abjection, and the poetry of hibakusha such as Kurihara Sadako, Tōge Sankichi, Kawamura Sachiko, and Shōda Shinoe, it contends that by seeking to graphically confront that which is ineffable, hibakusha poets are able to contest the liminal spaces to which their bodies and experiences have been relegated; indeed, by “reopening the grave” (Gotō, qtd. in Treat 1995, 29), survivor poets refuse silence, and give form and shape to trauma.

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