Youth Life Writing, Networked Media, Climate Change: The Challenge of Testimony to the Future

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

Stereotype Application at the Intersection of Body Shape, Gender/Sex, and Sexual Orientation

Though much work has examined how sexual orientation and body shape are jointly constituted, less has examined the joint perception of body shape, gender/sex, and sexuality. We draw upon multifarious person perception approaches to examine how personality and sexuality-related traits are attributed to bodies of varying shape (skinny, average, fat) when presented with differing social identities along the axes of gender/sex (male, female) and sexual orientation (heterosexual, lesbian/gay). In a sample of 991 participants, we found robust evidence that trait application varied by both body shape and sexual orientation. Further, supporting our hypotheses, we found that gay male bodies were perceived as more feminine than heterosexual male bodies, and skinny male bodies were perceived as more feminine than other body shapes. Supporting additional hypothesizing, we found lesbian female bodies were perceived as more masculine than heterosexual female bodies, and fat female bodies were perceived as the most masculine across sexual orientations. Partially supporting our hypotheses, we found that average bodies were perceived as the most typical for all identities; further, as hypothesized, we found that most bodies perceived as less typical of their social identity category were perceived as experiencing heightened prejudice on the basis of body shape.

Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda since the 1994 Genocide

The social categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi” have long been central to Rwandan politics, though never more so than during the 1994 genocide, when they formed the ultimate divide: kill (Hutu) or be killed (Tutsi). Since then, the Rwandan government has sought to eliminate these categories and replace them with a new, national identity category of “Rwandan.” This chapter draws on theories of state symbolic power and legibility to analyze how top-down projects of remaking Rwandans are being received from below. Specifically, we examine ordinary Rwandans’ responses to gacaca, a community justice practice central to the state’s National Unity and Reconciliation Program, and find Rwandans resent efforts to “unmake race” in favor of “nation” because the state’s account of genocide in gacaca does not allow them to sincerely express their experiences; it activates traumatic pasts for what they feel is superficial national reconciliation; and it detracts from their material needs. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between compliance and conviction in research on state efforts to transform civilian subjectivities. They also suggest directions for further research. Namely, future research on state symbolic power should attend to how individual experiences with violence mediate topdown efforts at remaking civilian subjectivities, to how different forms of governance shape civilian resistance to state categorization and classification projects, and to what kinds of interests are likely to motivate people to alter their self-perceptions. We conclude by arguing for more work on state race and nation-making from the perspectives of its targets.

COVID-19 immunity (or vaccine) passports: a documentary overview and analysis of regimes of health verification within the coronavirus pandemic

PurposeIntroducing immunity or vaccine passports is one non-pharmaceutical intervention that governments are considering to exempt immune, vaccinated or otherwise risk-free individuals from lockdowns and other public health restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. The primary objective of these documents would be to begin reopening societies, restarting economies and returning to a pre-pandemic normalcy. This article aims to present the start of a conceptual documentary analysis of (proposed and existing) COVID-19 immunity passports in order to more fully center their documentary status within research, considerations and conversations about their potential roles, impacts and implications.Design/methodology/approachInspired by Paula A. Treichler's argument for the importance of theoretical thought for untangling the socio-cultural phenomena of epidemics, and drawing upon interdisciplinary theories of documentation, identity and public health, combined with recent news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, this article provides a contemporary overview and conceptual analysis of emerging documentary regimes of COVID-19 immunity verification involving immunity or vaccine passports.FindingsThree major interconnected objectives could be fulfilled by immunity passports. First, they would establish and materialize an official identity of COVID-19 immune for people possessing the formal document. Second, they would serve as material evidence establishing and verifying individuals' immunity, vaccination or risk-free status from the coronavirus that would, in term, determine and regulate their movements and other privileges. Third, they would create tangible links between individuals and governments' official or recognized identity category of COVID-19 immune. Immunity passports would, therefore, help enable and enforce governmental authority and power by situating individuals within documentary regimes of COVID-19 immunity verification.Research limitations/implicationsIn the expanding interdisciplinary literature on COVID-19 immunity passports, sometimes also called certificates, licenses, or passes, there appears to be only minimal reference to their documentary instantiations, whether physical, digital, and/or hybrid documents. As yet, there is not any specific documentary approach to or analysis of immunity passports as kinds of documentation. A documentary approach helps to illuminate and emphasize the materiality of and ontological considerations concerning the coronavirus pandemic and its associated kinds of immunity or vaccination.Social implicationsBy beginning an exploration of what makes immunity passports thinkable as a public health response to the coronavirus pandemic, this article illuminates these health and identity documents' material implications for, and effects on, individuals and societies. This article, therefore, helps shed light on what immunity passports reveal about the complicated and contested intersections of identity, documentation, public health and socio-political control and discipline.Originality/valueThis article contributes the start of a documentary analysis of (proposed and existing) COVID-19 immunity passports in order to more fully center their documentary status within research and conversations about them.

Bad Blood, Black Desires: On the Fragility of Whiteness in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling

This essay reads Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (ca 1622) as a meditation on the fragility of white privilege. The anxieties about blood in the play are situated by how the English viewed Spain as the least white nation within Europe. The trope of blackness impacts the way others read Beatrice-Joanna’s sexual transgressions, ultimately questioning her chastity and challenging her privileges as a white woman. Rather than seeing whiteness as a stable identity category, I argue that the privileges of whiteness were particularly unstable for white women in the early modern period.

Demographic Diversity of the Aromantic/Asexual Spectrum in Japan: Findings from the 2020 Aro/Ace Survey

In Western countries, studies using representative surveys and community surveys have begun to reveal the size and the diversity of the asexual population. On the other hand, in Japan, there are only a few studies using representative surveys, and the detailed realities of the asexual population are yet to be explored. This article analyzed a web survey “Aromantic/Asexual Spectrum Survey 2020,” conducted by the Aro/Ace Survey Executive Committee. Most of the respondents tended to be cisgender women, young people, and residents of the southern Kanto region. Many identified as aromantic and asexual, but some identified as other aro/ace identities. We also conducted an analysis on “nonsexual,” an identity category unique to Japan. While masturbation and sex drives were found in a certain number of asexual respondents, the proportion of those who would like to have sexual contact with others was particularly low among asexual respondents. We conclude that sexual contact with others has important implications for self-identification.

“You’re One or the Other”

A central defining feature of deeply divided societies is binary division: two contrasting segments of a population that represent a cleavage significant enough to impact a wide range of issues. Deeply divided societies, delineated by difference from the “other,” can be seen as intractable identity conflicts. To reduce our understanding of social identities in Northern Ireland to religion—Protestant or Catholic—is dangerously misleading. In reality, the issue is one of national identity, where Protestant becomes shorthand for unionist (those supporting Northern Ireland’s constitutional status within the United Kingdom and opposing the involvement of the Irish Republic in Northern Ireland) and Catholic for nationalist (those believing that Northern Ireland is part of the Irish nation and opposing the imposition of British rule that prevents a united Ireland). To the Protestant-unionist and Catholic-nationalist identities are often added a third identity category—loyalist or republican.

Crip teleportation: the animal that therefore I am—or I am not

This paper examines how disabled body-minds are discursively dehumanized or superhumanized. It draws on Critical Disability Studies and the Crip Studies scholarship and focuses on invisible mental disabilities, mainly those of the neurodiversity spectrum. The efforts of animalization and super-humanization draw on a mechanism that resonates with Parmenides’s Zeno paradox. As the autistic scholar Melanie Yergeau (2018) discusses, a neuroqueer body-mind is always in constant motion, being relocated from one identity category to another, from humanity to animality and vice-versa, subject to an excessively strict rhetoric model. Concomitantly, animals in slaughtering facilities are humanized to make their deaths seem smoother. To short-circuit the models that evaluate how fit human and animal bodies are for the neoliberal guidelines of productivity, the paper also brings Jasbir Puars’s intersectional approach on capacity and debility into the discussion. Keywords: Animal studies. Neurodiversity. Neurodivergence. Crip studies. Demirhetoric.

Negotiating LGBTQ rights in Singapore: The margin as a place of refusal

The complex diversity of urban life in cities is often the cause of social friction but it can also spark change. Densely populated cities are places where individuals find community but they are also places where some communities become marginalised and excluded. In the city-state of Singapore community-based activism is an important strategy for minority groups claiming a right to their place in the city. Conceptualising the margin as a place of refusal, the paper focuses on how Singapore’s LGBTQ communities have contested and negotiated from their place at the margins of the city-state, calling into question the Singapore State’s hegemonic narratives of family and community for heteronormative nation-building. These contestations have resulted in strategies that both adopt and elide individual rights-based narratives that have centred primarily on the repeal of Section 377A of Singapore’s penal code. While the repeal of 377A remains critical, the paper focuses on three examples of Sayoni’s community advocacy, Pink Dot and education, which extend the discourse beyond the issue of repeal, and the single identity category of sexuality. Even as the fight for repeal continues, LGBTQ subjects are resisting, negotiating and advocating against violence, discrimination and making space for love and community in ways that co-opt and destabilise social norms in Singapore, thus occupying the margin as a place of radical openness.