iZombie Cyborg Dancers

Compulsive smartphone users’ psyches, today, are increasingly directed away from their bodies and onto their devices. This phenomenon has now entered our global vocabulary as “smartphone zombies,” or what I will call “iZombies.” Given the importance of mind to virtually all conceptions of human identity, these compulsive users could thus be productively understood as a kind of human-machine hybrid entity, the cyborg. Assuming for the sake of argument that this hybridization is at worst axiologically neutral, I will construct a kind of phenomenological psychological profile of the type of cyborg which engages in these patterns of behavior. I follow Judith Butler in seeing this identity as the result of performance practices, which as such can be modified or replaced using other performances. Pursing one such alternative, I compose a dancing critique that “reverse engineers” the choreographies implied by these cyborgs’ survival practices. The upshot of this critique is that their movement patterns do indeed align closely to those of horror cinema’s zombies. I therefore conclude by suggesting a few possible choreographic imperatives to facilitate more enabling ways of being for iZombie cyborgs today.

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Gênero como Modalidade Existencial

PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDIES - Revista da Abordagem Gestáltica ◽

10.18065/2021v27n1.5 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 47-55

Author(s):

Matheo BERNARDINO

Keyword(s):

Open Field ◽

Judith Butler ◽

Simone De Beauvoir ◽

Ways Of Being

Gender discussions are still fundamental to (trans)feminist struggles and have an open field to new reflections that contribute to the topic. This issue is important to phenomenology from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and other contemporary feminist phenomenologists. Considering the contributions already unveiled by these authors, this paper aims to rethink the conceptualization of gender through the concept of existential modality found in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger in a non-systematic theoretical review. The concept of existential modality implies possibilities as fundamental in the ontological structure of being. Here, possibility has existential and open characteristics that describe ways of being, of linking, meaning and make possible being and meaning. Gender as an existential modality reveals a spectrum of potencies that is realized and established in the corporeal and situated existence of being. This work allows a dialogue with the reflections already made by the feminist authors and the opening to deepen the discussions about gender. Palavras-chave : Gender; Existential Modality; Phenomenology.

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Timing Problems: When Care and Violence Converge in Stephen King's Horror Novel Christine

Hypatia ◽

10.1111/hypa.12322 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 32 (2) ◽

pp. 397-414 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Stacy Clifford Simplican

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Judith Butler ◽

Physical Injury ◽

Social Worlds ◽

Human Identity ◽

Stephen King ◽

Care Theory ◽

Horror Genre ◽

Starting Point

Judith Butler, Joan Tronto, and Stephen King all hinge human experience on shared ontological vulnerability, but whereas Butler and Tronto use vulnerability to build ethical commitments, King exploits aging, disability, and death to frighten us. King's horror genre is provocative for the imaginative landscape of feminist theory precisely because he uses vulnerability to magnify the anxieties of mass culture. In Christine, the characters' shared susceptibility to psychic and physical injury blurs the boundary between care and violence. Like Butler, King depicts our social worlds encrusted with normative violence: the mundane ways that norms police gender, race, class, and disability identities. And like Butler, King makes undecidability a key feature of human identity: the idea that needs and identities are uncertain. Normative violence and undecidability trouble the starting point of Tronto's care theory—attentiveness to needs—because both concepts invest interdependency with ambiguity and conflict. But like Tronto, King recognizes that care‐actors must act, even amid ambiguity and even when their actions make care and aggression converge. Christine's supernatural plot details the psychic possession of an American teenager, but the novel's more terrifying story is about interdependency and how normative violence is not the antithesis of care, but its dark underbelly.

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Antigone, Empire, and the Legacy of Oedipus: Thinking African Decolonization through the Rearticulation of Kinship Rules

Hypatia ◽

10.1111/hypa.12482 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (3) ◽

pp. 464-484

Author(s):

Azille Coetzee

Keyword(s):

Judith Butler ◽

Western Thought ◽

Feminist Scholarship ◽

Life And Death ◽

The World ◽

Ways Of Being

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought (Butler 2000). In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world.

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The Development of Swallowing Respiratory Coordination

Perspectives on Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders (Dysphagia) ◽

10.1044/sasd18.1.19 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 19-24

Author(s):

Maggie-Lee Huckabee

Keyword(s):

Cortical Activation ◽

First Year ◽

Healthy Children ◽

Nasal Airflow ◽

Single Session ◽

Primary Finding ◽

Patterns Of Behavior ◽

Cortical Modulation ◽

First Year Of Life ◽

Swallowing Apnea

Abstract Research exists that evaluates the mechanics of swallowing respiratory coordination in healthy children and adults as well and individuals with swallowing impairment. The research program summarized in this article represents a systematic examination of swallowing respiratory coordination across the lifespan as a means of behaviorally investigating mechanisms of cortical modulation. Using time-locked recordings of submental surface electromyography, nasal airflow, and thyroid acoustics, three conditions of swallowing were evaluated in 20 adults in a single session and 10 infants in 10 sessions across the first year of life. The three swallowing conditions were selected to represent a continuum of volitional through nonvolitional swallowing control on the basis of a decreasing level of cortical activation. Our primary finding is that, across the lifespan, brainstem control strongly dictates the duration of swallowing apnea and is heavily involved in organizing the integration of swallowing and respiration, even in very early infancy. However, there is evidence that cortical modulation increases across the first 12 months of life to approximate more adult-like patterns of behavior. This modulation influences primarily conditions of volitional swallowing; sleep and naïve swallows appear to not be easily adapted by cortical regulation. Thus, it is attention, not arousal that engages cortical mechanisms.

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