Black women, identity, and cultural theory: (un)becoming the subject

2004 ◽  
Vol 42 (01) ◽  
pp. 42-0171-42-0171
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
The Subject

Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biological Ontology ◽  
Health Discourse

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

scholarly journals Hidden in the limelight: A feminist engagement with innovation studies

Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110153
Author(s):  
Lara Pecis ◽  
Karin Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Innovation Studies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Space Race ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Positively Charged ◽  
Blind Spots

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.

Gender Theory in Philosophy of Race

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Zack
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
White Women ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Race ◽  
The Subject

The subject of critical race theory is implicitly black men, and the main idea is race. The subject of feminism is implicitly white women, and the main idea is gender. When the main idea is race, gender loses its importance and when the main idea is gender, race loses its importance. In both cases, women of color, especially black women, are left out. Needed is a new critical theory to address the oppression of nonwhite, especially black, women. Critical plunder theory would begin with the facts of uncompensated appropriation of the biological products of women of color, such as sexuality and children.

Mentoring and Supervision for Women of Color Leaders in North American Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-45
Author(s):  
Elena Sandoval-Lucero ◽  
Tamara D. White ◽  
Judi Diaz Bonacquisti
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Supervisor Training ◽  
Cultural Wealth ◽  
Black Women Leaders ◽  
Mutual Empowerment

Reflecting on their mentoring and supervision experiences as Latina and Black women leaders in higher education, this article proposes that Women of Color employees are more effective when supervisors give them space to draw upon their own rich histories and cultural wealth in their professional lives. Viewed through the lens of Relational Cultural Theory, which grew out of the work of Jean Baker Miller and colleagues providing culturally relevant, affirmative supervision is a growth-fostering experience for both employee and supervisor. The tenants of RCT include authenticity, growth-fostering relationships, mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment as aspects of supervision that are particularly effective for employees with multiple intersected identities working in higher education spaces. The authors make recommendations for supervisor training that would allow supervisors to draw upon the cultural capital of their diverse employees to provide healing from oppression and build resilience through validation of cultural assets and approaches to leadership.

scholarly journals In Defence of ‘Noir Theory’: Laruelle, Deleuze, and Other Detectives

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Rob Coley
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mode Of Detection ◽  
The Subject

What happens when theory falters? A concern with the anthropocentric limitations of critical thought dominates contemporary cultural theory. For Joanna Zylinska, however, this concern often reflects a longstanding humanist anxiety, one that is today renewed in the form of ‘noir theory’, a reactionary scholarship that redeems the universalist human as the subject of reason. There is, though, more than one mode of noir theory, and a certain tendency of ‘noir’ affords the basis for theorizing another kind of universalism, a non-reactionary account of the real. This article takes seriously the allusion to noir as a particular mode of detection. Its investigation begins with Gilles Deleuze, who commends crime fiction for providing an image of thought that works against humanist orthodoxy. Yet present circumstances demand investigating a blacker kind of noir, one that operates negatively, a noir theory that can be detected in the strange realism of François Laruelle.

scholarly journals Search for ‘Self’ in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Lucy and See Now Then

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 901-905
Author(s):  
Archana Verma
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
End Of Life ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Search For Self ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Individual Self

The subject of ‘self’ is a much wider concept which amalgamates the cultural issues and the social issues which eventually leads to the identity crisis of a black women. The study of Kincaid’s novels recapitulates the idea of the fight of an individual self right from the beginning till the end of life. The three novels run in continuation and present the different stages of a woman’s life and the struggle which she encounters at the every phase of life. This paper also contemplates the idea that a woman never fails to strive for her identity even in the adverse circumstances.

scholarly journals Postmigration. Mod et nyt kritisk perspektiv på migration og kultur

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (122) ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
Anne Ring Petersen ◽  
Moritz Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Transformative Impact

The classical canon of ‘critical theory’ – the early Frankfurt School, Marxist and post-Marxist theories – has lead to a tradition of understanding cultural critique solely as a subversive critique directed against Western confidence in progress, normative concepts of the subject and identity formation, the culture industry etc. In studies of migration and culture, this notion of critique has manifested itself as a preference for the so-called ‘spaces in-between’ and a general rejection of all identity and subject constructions. Our own work in this field has made it increasingly clear to us that critical cultural theory and analysis can also be severely hampered by the subversive approach. Today, critical practice must thus entail taking the next step: to develop and discuss alternatives that can open new perspectives. In this spirit, the article accounts for the idea of a postmigrant perspective that aims at overcoming the dichotomy between ‘majority’ and ‘minorities’, and which makes it possible to take a fresh, but still critical, approach to the transformative impact of migration on society. After unpacking the idea of the ‘postmigrant’, the article proceeds to reflect on how a critical cultural analysis that applies a postmigrant perspective can contribute to developing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of recognition and structural discrimination, thereby revitalising two classical themes in critical theory: suppression and recognition.

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