scholarly journals On Not to be Gay: Aversion Therapy and Transformation of the Self in Postsocialist China

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongwei Bao
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
South China ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Experiences ◽  
Self Formation

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologising’ practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.

scholarly journals On Not to be Gay: Aversion therapy and transformation of the self in Postsocialist China

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
H Bao
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
South China ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Experiences ◽  
Self Formation

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologizing’ practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

The Passions

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Jay L. Garfield
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Senses

This chapter begins the exploration of Book II of the Treatise. It explores and explains the distinctions between calm and violent passions and between direct and indirect passions, as they are drawn in Book II, and connects Hume’s accounts to those of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, demonstrating both the senses in which he follows their respective accounts, and those in which he differs. It also discusses the nature of the self as the object of the passions, and explains how Hume takes the passions to be involved in the social construction of the person, showing that Hume does believe that persons are real, and are constructed socially.

Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna J. Guy
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
Modern State ◽  
National Society ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
National Period

This article discusses gender and sexuality during the national period and the shift from women's history to the study of the social construction of both femininity and masculinity and of various forms of sexuality. It argues that this has problematized “the notion of universalized female oppression,” a trend in line with the general historiographical emphasis on individual and collective agency since the 1980s. Gender here is both a topic and a category of analysis. The discussion thus sheds much light on other aspects of—in this case, national—society, such as notions of nationality and citizenship, the nature of the modern state and law, populism, and revolutionary and feminist politics.

Constructing the digital self in the Global South

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Campbell ◽  
Nell Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Global South ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Self ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Self Formation

Abstract The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document