Introduction: the warp, woof, and weave of American gun violence

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Justin A. Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Dime Novel ◽  
American Law ◽  
Foucauldian Theory

This introductory chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the forgoing analyses, taking many cues from legal studies, U.S. Supreme Court cases and Foucauldian theory. In the world of the Western, the procedural focus of American law gets in the way of justice. The genre embraces justice by gun violence rather than by trial, and has therefore often been read as ‘anti-law’. From the early dime novel fascination with such outlaws and renegades as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, through depictions of lynching in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, and the film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), to the guns-blazing heroics of films such as Rio Bravo (1959), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), through the darker critiques of The Gunfighter (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Unforgiven (1992), to the postmodern pastiche of Django Unchained (2012), the Western has nourished a vision of social organisation and a means for delivering justice that operates outside the official parameters of American law, relying on a gunslinging hero to uphold order. This chapter argues, in fact, that this opposition is progressively undone in the genre’s formulaic shootouts. The cherished antipathy between ‘the law’ and the Western’s ‘law of the gun’ is, in short, unfounded.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilge Yesil
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Media System ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Cultural Tensions

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to provide a systematic analysis of Turkey's media system, its reconfiguration under domestic and international dynamics, the political and cultural tensions it harbors, and the trajectories it shares with other media systems around the world. The book highlights the push-pull forces of a centralized state authority and its democratization demands, the interpenetration of state and capital, and the overlapping of patronage structures with market imperatives. The remainder of the chapter discusses Turkey's media industry, its political system, and its authoritarian neoliberal order. These are followed by descriptions of the scope of the present study, the theoretical framework and methods, and an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Gunslinging justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin A. Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Dime Novels ◽  
The World ◽  
American Law ◽  
American Legal System

Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly “anti-law” than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose "the law," but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth century texts like Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction era dime novels, through early twentieth century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Eaton
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Party System ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Policy Regime ◽  
Policy Regimes ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
World Today ◽  
System Collapse ◽  
The World

In addition to conceptualizing the two types of subnational policy challenges that are examined in the book, this introductory chapter explores the distinctive possibilities and limitations of subnational neoliberalism and subnational statism as two prominent types of subnational policy regimes. It also examines the causes that have made subnational policy challenges more common around the world today and specifically within Latin America, including globalization, democratization, decentralization, party system collapse, and indigenous mobilization. Next, the chapter assesses the importance of the shift toward greater territorial heterogeneity by analyzing the possible advantages and disadvantages of this shift, including when it results in cases of policy regime juxtaposition. The chapter ends with a brief overview of the theoretical framework, which stresses the importance of structural, institutional, and coalitional factors to explain variation in the success of subnational policy challenges.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The World

The introductory chapter presents the major themes of the book. After exploring a series of vignettes in which human and nonhuman reproduction or replication operate together to produce a nostalgic, yet effective, mode of mass democratic political engagement, it goes on to defend the book’s primary claims: that biopolitics need not be dead to scholarship, that embryos and alphabets are politically vital in remarkably similar ways, and that nostalgia is neither a purely human state nor politically enervating as a mode of engaging with the world. In the process, this chapter begins to situate the book’s conclusions within the scholarly fields with which it engages: feminist theory, political theory, science and technology studies, bioethics, and legal studies.

Getting Real?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Norms

Chapter 3 engages with realist political theory throughcritical dialogues with leading realist theorists. It argues that realist political theories are much more susceptible to conservatism, distortion, and idealization than their proponents typically acknowledge. Realism is often not very realistic either in its descriptions of the world or in its political analysis. While realism enables the critical analysis of political norms (the analysis of power and unmasking of ideology), it cannot support substantive normative critique of existing social relations or enable prescriptive theorizing. These two types of critique must be integrated into a single theoretical framework to facilitate emancipatory social transformation.

Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Prime Elements ◽  
Cultural Turn

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

Post-work society as an oxymoron: Why we cannot, and should not, wish work away

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110121
Author(s):  
Jean-Philippe Deranty
Keyword(s):  
Social Organisation ◽  
Alternative Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Work And Employment

In recent years, theorists have contended that we should move to a mode of social organisation where work and the values attached to it are no longer central, a ‘post-work society’. For these theorists, the modern ideology of work is intrinsically unjust, even irrational and no longer suited to the challenges of our time. The article presents an alternative response to the problems of work and employment. Rather than moving to a ‘post-work’ society, the article argues that we should transform the world of work, precisely by keeping in view why working is important to individuals and the community. In fact, it is not realistic to believe that human societies could ever do without work. Because human societies are by necessity work societies, and work, if organised correctly, entails many goods, we cannot really, and we should not, wish work away.

Unstoppable Decay and Relentless Hope: Study of Alterity in Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Adrien Ordonneau
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Consequences of capitalism’s crises and their manifestations in arts have deeply modified the way we can approach mental health. As Mark Fisher pointed out in 2009 with his book Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism is using mental illness as a way to keep existing. The capacity to think a way out of alienation is deeply linked with arts and popular culture. The article proposes to study the uncanny dialogue between arts and politics in relationships to people, and mental health. The theoretical framework will show how arts are trying to build a way out of alienation, since 2009. The article will illustrate this research with the study of many artistic practices, including our own. The findings will show how the ambiguous and uncanny relationships with the world is used by artists as a way out of alienation, despite the difficulties occurring with mental health in time of crisis.

Islamic International Relations Towards a Theoretical Framework

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).

Masculinities and School Gun Violence in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Deane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Shootings ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Interaction ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
The Impact

Schools are sites of personal, political, and symbolic violence. In the United States acts of rampage school gun violence, themselves symbolic, are connected to acts of personal violence via the inscription of social gender norms. Carried out by White teenage boys rampage school shootings call us to grapple with the ways in which schools form and discipline gendered subjectivities. Central to the field of masculinity studies is R. W. Connell’s theory of masculinity which draws on a Gramscian theory of hegemony rather than a Foucauldian theory of power. Whereas Gramsci focuses the ways in which power moves down, Foucault studies the impact of small interaction on our subjective sense of self. When addressing the phenomena of rampage school gun violence where White teenage boys target their schools in acts of gendered rage, a Foucauldian theory of power helps us to take seriously the significance of everyday interaction in legitimating gendered ontologies. Jointly Foucault and the contemporary works of Jane Roland Martin, Amy Shuffelton, and Michel Kimmel point towards an avenue that may afford us the opportunity to root out practices and environments wedded to hegemonic masculinity (and thus rampage school gun violence): the everyday celebration of gender-inclusive and egalitarian ways of learning and living.

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