Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

This essay contests the antinarrative foundations of queer literary studies. Antinarrativity understands narrative as a conservative form that abets heteronormativity by imposing a coherence and linearity on subjectivity and meaning. By contrast, this essay reframes narrative as a relational form rife with affordances for figuring and sustaining queer bonds. I trace these affordances through contemporary queer kinship narratives, including Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and Renee Gladman's Calamities. These texts reveal unexpectedly queer potentials within address, contiguity, closure, and even linearity, which queer theory misses when it defines narrative as inherently teleological and when it locates queerness primarily in transgressive ruptures. This essay discovers queerness instead within mundane and messy attachments that endure across time and space. Queer narrative theory thus emerges in this essay as a relational formalism well-suited to debates about the shapes queerness takes now.

Subjective Character as the Origo a Quo of Phenomenal Consciousness

This article contributes to the debate on self-consciousness, inner awareness, and subjective character. Philosophers puzzle over whether subjective character has a monadic or a relational form. But the present article deploys formal ontology to show that this is a false dichotomy. From this vantage, a common objection to non-relational views is deflated. The common objection is that one-level, non-relational views are either unexplanatory or smuggle in resources from higher-order and/or relational views. The author uses an argument from formal ontology to suggest that such objections stem from a category error. The result is that first-order non-relational views need not lapse into higher order or relational views – subjective character can be a structured and intrinsic feature involved in the ontological constitution of mental acts. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the need to conceive of subjective character as the source of intentionality, and not the result of a prior intentional relation.

IDSM ChemWebRDF: SPARQLing small-molecule datasets

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), together with well-defined ontologies, significantly increases data interoperability and usability. The SPARQL query language was introduced to retrieve requested RDF data and to explore links between them. Among other useful features, SPARQL supports federated queries that combine multiple independent data source endpoints. This allows users to obtain insights that are not possible using only a single data source. Owing to all of these useful features, many biological and chemical databases present their data in RDF, and support SPARQL querying. In our project, we primary focused on PubChem, ChEMBL and ChEBI small-molecule datasets. These datasets are already being exported to RDF by their creators. However, none of them has an official and currently supported SPARQL endpoint. This omission makes it difficult to construct complex or federated queries that could access all of the datasets, thus underutilising the main advantage of the availability of RDF data. Our goal is to address this gap by integrating the datasets into one database called the Integrated Database of Small Molecules (IDSM) that will be accessible through a SPARQL endpoint. Beyond that, we will also focus on increasing mutual interoperability of the datasets. To realise the endpoint, we decided to implement an in-house developed SPARQL engine based on the PostgreSQL relational database for data storage. In our approach, data are stored in the traditional relational form, and the SPARQL engine translates incoming SPARQL queries into equivalent SQL queries. An important feature of the engine is that it optimises the resulting SQL queries. Together with optimisations performed by PostgreSQL, this allows efficient evaluations of SPARQL queries. The endpoint provides not only querying in the dataset, but also the compound substructure and similarity search supported by our Sachem project. Although the endpoint is accessible from an internet browser, it is mainly intended to be used for programmatic access by other services, for example as a part of federated queries. For regular users, we offer a rich web application called ChemWebRDF using the endpoint. The application is publicly available at https://idsm.elixir-czech.cz/chemweb/.

Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret

Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.

Bourdieu and Collins on the reproduction of elites

In this paper I compare and contrast the reproduction of elite strata in Randall Collins’s path-breaking book, The Credential Society (1979), with Pierre Bourdieu’s important discussion found in The State Nobility (1996). Although both approaches draw on Weber and Durkheim, focus on the interaction between material and cultural processes, subscribe to a relational form of analysis, and share a similar political world-view – social democrat and radical republican respectively – they also differ. These differences relate to their respective philosophical anthropology, the nature of their long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged – Algeria and the post-war constellation and early Cold War period – and the divergent nature of the broader substantive sociological problems they are engaged with. In terms of their dissimilarities, not only is each approach useful for criticizing the other, but it will be argued that these divergences need to be synthesized into a broader, more powerful explanatory theory.

The scenographic, costumed chorus, agency and the performance of matter: A new materialist approach to costume

This article presents the performativity of costume as generated through materially discursive iterative processes that embed meaning in the production itself through the analysis of the chorus costumes for the 2018 Opéra du Rhin production of Eugene Onegin. It argues that a new materialist approach can reveal the ethical concerns, around gender, toxic masculinity and compliance to reactionary social conventions, that lie at the core of this costuming of an opera chorus, particularly when perceived through the multiple forms that shape its distinct materializations over three successive acts. In addition, a focus on the agential actions of materials will draw attention to the work of the costume department, which to date has remained largely unaddressed by analytical approaches that are solely based on spectatorship, semiotics or phenomenological perspectives. Identifying the agential actions that materials perform enables the articulation of the costume specialist’s response to the performativity of materials. Adopting a new materialist approach, ‘costuming’ is found to be an evolving and relational form that emerges from a complex process of meaning-making that addresses, through a distribution of agency, how materials connect to wider concerns.

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Different Forms of Bullying Perpetration, Bullying Victimization, and Their Co-occurrence

Bullying comes in different forms, yet most previous genetically-sensitive studies have not distinguished between them. Given the serious consequences and the high prevalence of bullying, it is remarkable that the aetiology of bullying and its different forms has been under-researched. We present the first study to investigate the genetic architecture of bullying perpetration, bullying victimization, and their co-occurrence for verbal, physical and relational bullying. Primary-school teachers rated 8215 twin children on bullying perpetration and bullying victimization. For each form of bullying, we investigated, through genetic structural equation modelling, the genetic and environmental influences on being a bully, a victim or both. 34% of the children were involved as bully, victim, or both. The correlation between being a bully and being a victim varied from 0.59 (relational) to 0.85 (physical). Heritability was ~ 70% for perpetration and ~ 65% for victimization, similar in girls and boys, yet both were somewhat lower for the relational form. Shared environmental influences were modest and more pronounced among girls. The correlation between being a bully and being a victim was explained mostly by genetic factors for verbal (~ 71%) and especially physical (~ 77%) and mostly by environmental factors for relational perpetration and victimization (~ 60%). Genes play a large role in explaining which children are at high risk of being a victim, bully, or both. For victimization this suggests an evocative gene-environment correlation: some children are at risk of being exposed to bullying, partly due to genetically influenced traits. So, genetic influences make some children more vulnerable to become a bully, victim or both.