Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Liminality as a lens on social meaning: A cross-variable analysis of gender in New Zealand English

<p>The variationist sociolinguistic enterprise has been successful in developing models of structural (i.e., language-internal) drivers of variation and change, but one of the barriers preventing the development of a parallel model accounting for social drivers is the difficulty in operationalising salience. Using a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews collected in Auckland, New Zealand between 2013 and 2015, this project examines the relationship between language variation and gendered identity, and proposes an analytical approach of liminality – of examining the linguistic practices of people who have crossed a culturally-reified category boundary – as a possible solution to the problem of identifying socially salient variables. The participants in this study are straight, queer, and transsexual native speakers of New Zealand English (NZE), representing two age groups that straddle the period of social change in the 1980s that saw a destabilisation of traditional gender roles in New Zealand. Variation in three linguistic systems is examined: adjectival modifiers (intensifiers and moderators), sibilants (/s/, /z/ and /ʃ/), and the vowels of NZE. The project uses established variationist and sociophonetic methodologies, as well as introducing a new metric for making comparisons across the vowel space as a whole. The findings show that speakers are able to encode their gendered identity across multiple variables, and that subtle linguistic signals can be used to affiliate with (or distance from) particular groups. The two most ‘distant’ groups are older straight men and younger [straight, queer, and transsexual] women, which this thesis argues is a reflection of the general societal criticism directed at young women by hegemonic masculinities. There is also evidence that the mainstreaming of queer identities in the wake of the 1986 decriminalisation of homosexuality has decreased the linguistic distance between straight and queer urban New Zealanders, demonstrating the relative rapidity with which social changes can be incorporated into the linguistic system. This study highlights the utility of studying variation across linguistic systems rather than in variables in isolation, and proposes a typology of variation based on the boundedness and dimensionality of the linguistic systems under investigation. The framework of liminality is found to be productive with respect to the role of gender in language variation, although future research will have to test whether this framework can be generalised to other dimensions of social identity that are perceived as categorical (e.g., ethnicity and heritage culture in immigrant communities).</p>

Liminality as a lens on social meaning: A cross-variable analysis of gender in New Zealand English

<p>The variationist sociolinguistic enterprise has been successful in developing models of structural (i.e., language-internal) drivers of variation and change, but one of the barriers preventing the development of a parallel model accounting for social drivers is the difficulty in operationalising salience. Using a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews collected in Auckland, New Zealand between 2013 and 2015, this project examines the relationship between language variation and gendered identity, and proposes an analytical approach of liminality – of examining the linguistic practices of people who have crossed a culturally-reified category boundary – as a possible solution to the problem of identifying socially salient variables. The participants in this study are straight, queer, and transsexual native speakers of New Zealand English (NZE), representing two age groups that straddle the period of social change in the 1980s that saw a destabilisation of traditional gender roles in New Zealand. Variation in three linguistic systems is examined: adjectival modifiers (intensifiers and moderators), sibilants (/s/, /z/ and /ʃ/), and the vowels of NZE. The project uses established variationist and sociophonetic methodologies, as well as introducing a new metric for making comparisons across the vowel space as a whole. The findings show that speakers are able to encode their gendered identity across multiple variables, and that subtle linguistic signals can be used to affiliate with (or distance from) particular groups. The two most ‘distant’ groups are older straight men and younger [straight, queer, and transsexual] women, which this thesis argues is a reflection of the general societal criticism directed at young women by hegemonic masculinities. There is also evidence that the mainstreaming of queer identities in the wake of the 1986 decriminalisation of homosexuality has decreased the linguistic distance between straight and queer urban New Zealanders, demonstrating the relative rapidity with which social changes can be incorporated into the linguistic system. This study highlights the utility of studying variation across linguistic systems rather than in variables in isolation, and proposes a typology of variation based on the boundedness and dimensionality of the linguistic systems under investigation. The framework of liminality is found to be productive with respect to the role of gender in language variation, although future research will have to test whether this framework can be generalised to other dimensions of social identity that are perceived as categorical (e.g., ethnicity and heritage culture in immigrant communities).</p>

Silencing and Breaking the Silence: Resisting Patriarchy in Brajaki’s “Annapurna’s Feast” and Thakuri’s “War”

The aim of this paper is to analyse Manu Brajaki’s story “Annapurna’s Feast” and Maya Thakuri’s “War,” using the resistance theory. It explores the nature of resistance and its significance presented in the stories. The paper argues that both female protagonists of the stories resist injustice happened in their life due to their gendered identity as women, but the way they resist is different: one directly shows the courage and declares to fight against it whereas another silently inherits all the patriarchal value although her silence speaks out loud and gives agency to her voice. To elucidate this statement, Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner’s concepts on resistance is used. Both stories depict the life of the housewives who are victimized due to existing patriarchal values. The female protagonist of Brajaki seems so resilient whereas Thakuri’s protagonist directly speaks out for the injustice. Both stories present the female protagonists’ silence and courage to speak out as their ways to resist and expose their difficulties to speak out.

Still Just Hegemonic After All These Years?

Men and boys are commonly viewed as perpetrators and/or facilitators of relational violence, but this biological essentializing oversimplifies “masculinity” as “bad.” Connell illustrated the complex roles of bodies, structural order maintenance, and “pupils as agents, school as setting” (Connell 2000: 161) in shaping masculinity processes. Our study examined these factors by examining how peer perceptions of gendered identity threats relate to beliefs negatively affecting power relations. Students (N = 87; n = 36 males, 51 females) from four classes at two high schools in Connecticut provided pre- and post-test data for a Sexual Violence Prevention Program. Results show unhealthy attitudes related to peer perceptions as a basis for violence scenarios. We discuss primary-prevention curricular implications by addressing masculinities as social relationships involved in adolescents facilitating healthy relational practices.

Still Just Hegemonic After All These Years?

Men and boys are commonly viewed as perpetrators and/or facilitators of relational violence, but this biological essentializing oversimplifies “masculinity” as “bad.” Connell illustrated the complex roles of bodies, structural order maintenance, and “pupils as agents, school as setting” (Connell 2000: 161) in shaping masculinity processes. Our study examined these factors by examining how peer perceptions of gendered identity threats relate to beliefs negatively affecting power relations. Students (N = 87; n = 36 males, 51 females) from four classes at two high schools in Connecticut provided pre- and post-test data for a Sexual Violence Prevention Program. Results show unhealthy attitudes related to peer perceptions as a basis for violence scenarios. We discuss primary-prevention curricular implications by addressing masculinities as social relationships involved in adolescents facilitating healthy relational practices.

Hustling, cycling, peacebuilding: Narrating postwar reintegration through livelihood in Liberia

Ex-combatant youth originated the commercial motorcycling sector in Liberia and have played a dominant role in its development. This article collates key insights narrated by one of Liberia's young ex-combatants-turned-commercial motorcyclists, Edwin Nyankoon, to build narrative accounts of peacebuilding around conceptualisation of youth livelihood, identity, and politics after war. The article contributes to diverse literatures on youth agency by emphasising the need for narrative and subject-led methodologies that anchor research questions and data analysis to research participants’ own language and narrated experiences of post war. It applies insights about everyday peace to interpret hustling as bottom-up peacebuilding, in opposition to dominant top-down peacebuilding accounts of ex-combatants. These latter accounts largely fail to see youth actors as peacebuilding agents, constructing them instead as troublemakers and interpreting their livelihood activities in terms of criminality and threat. Additionally, it argues that hustling also constitutes a peacebuilding style. More than a coping strategy or an indicator of peace, hustling-as-peacebuilding-style is performative: relational, embodied, contradictory, and recognisable to its adherents as peace-promoting even if (and arguably because) outsiders construct it as peace-negating. This analysis problematises agency, social relations, gendered identity, and collective security as they relate to ex-combatant and conflict-affected youth during peace processes.

Women’s scarcity in academic governance. Gendered identity or gendered processes?

This article contributes to the empirical evidence for women’s scarcity in academic governance. The study evaluates to what extend women lean towards non-management careers and dismiss opportunities to attain executive roles in Colombian public universities, as well as the support received when they break the paradigm. The purpose was to determine whether gendered practices are ingrained in the designation process or whether women’s scarcity is the outcome of individual attributes/choices and collective perceptions of inadequacy. Data was collected from universities’ proceedings, opinion polls of rectors’ designations, and candidates’ curricula. Findings show low female candidacy rate but high public support for female candidates to the rector’s seat among all universities examined. Also, curricula’s in-depth analyses display women’s preference for male-dominated careers and analogous academic/administrative experience to that of male candidates. Hence, the results challenge explanations presented by human capital and congruity prejudice theories, while leaning towards gendered processes and identities.

Old Father, Old Artificer: Female Sexuality and Male Authorship in Les Fleurs du mal and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This paper examines the troubling relationship between the identity of the male artist and female sexuality during the rise of early modernism by comparing two literary works: Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal and James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Portraying prominent female characters as a means to define the authors’ own modern aesthetics, both Baudelaire and Joyce perceive underlying tensions between biological reproduction and artistic creativity, prompting them to explore in detail the relationships between gender, sexuality, and the production of literature. For Baudelaire, the male poet as flaneur derives voyeuristic pleasure from his imaginary lesbian narratives, and his aesthetic awareness of the self that emerges is contrasted with the “sterile” nature of female homosexuality. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, on the other hand, adopts a more ambivalent relationship towards women: like Baudelaire’s speaker, Stephen usurps the generativity of women by replacing meaningful relations with imaginary ones, subsequently deriving literary inspiration; at the same time, however, these attempts bespeak deeper anxieties towards his inability to attain artistic autonomy, ultimately reflecting increasing vulnerabilities in the modern male artist’s perceptions of self-contained subjectivity. Published half a century apart, these two works marked critical junctures in the emergence of modernism, and a comparative approach thus allows us to trace shifting ideologies of modern personhood and gendered identity.