Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In \"Doing What Comes Naturally,\" Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through.

Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

In \"The Company We Keep\", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds', 'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interdisciplinary approach. Through the research we identify a set of social values associated with desirable energy futures in the UK, where the values represent identifiable cultural resources people draw on to guide their preference formation about particular aspects of energy system change. As such, we characterise public perspectives as being underpinned by six value clusters relating to efficiency and wastefulness, environment and nature, security and stability, social justice and fairness, autonomy and power, and processes and change. We argue that this ‘value system’ provides a basis for understanding core reasons for public acceptance or rejection of different energy system aspects and processes. We conclude that a focus on values that underpin more specific preferences for energy system change brings insights that could provide a basis for improved dialogue, more robust decision-making, and for anticipating likely points of conflict in energy transitions.

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Public values for energy system change

Studies of societal engagement with socio-technical change are undergoing a systemic turn. Rather than simply viewing public engagement in science, policy and behavioural change in terms of discrete cases, key social theories in deliberative democracy, practice theory, socio-technical transitions and co-productionist scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) are moving to consider how diverse forms of participation interrelate in wider systems. In this paper we take stock of these advances to develop a conceptual framework for understanding ecologies of participation in socio-technical and democratic systems, grounded in relational co-productionist theory in STS. The framework is illustrated through empirical analysis of a systematic mapping of participation in UK energy system transitions between 2010 and 2015. This provides the first insights into system-wide patternings, diversities and inequalities of energy participation, the significant types of interrelation between practices of public engagement within wider ecologies of participation, and their mutual construction with political cultures and constitutions. The value and implications of adopting an ecologies of participation approach are considered with respect to the theoretical, empirical and practical challenges of understanding and building more inclusive, responsible and just socio-technical (energy) transitions.

Ecologies of participation in socio-technical change: The case of energy system transitions

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Modern Children’s Literature

Reading history in children's books offers a critical account of historical Books about Britain written for children, including realist novels, non-fiction, fantasy and alternative histories. It is also an original investigation of the literary, ideological and philosophical challenges involved In writing about the past for child readers. Butler and O'Donovan develop a number of case studies centred on different periods, including the Roman invasion of Britain, the age of Arthur, and the Home Front in World War II, and use these as the basis of an analysis that takes in anachronism; ideology and point of view; History and myth; History's relationship with memory; and narratives about the possible pattern of history as a whole. They also offer observations on the ways In which these factors are reflected In the Reading experience available to children today, both in and beyond the classroom.

Reading History in Children's Books

Most children’s books about the past, be they fiction or non-fiction, tend to concern themselves with particular periods of history rather than with providing a larger perspective on history in general, and our discussion so far has followed them in this. In this chapter we consider in a more sustained way those aspects of books about the past that relate not just to the periods being represented but to the conception of history as a whole. As our approach in this volume is literary-critical rather than pedagogic, our primary focus will be on the ways that such texts model history as part of the experience of reading, but we will give due weight to the close two-way relationship between that experience and the educational encounters of children striving to make sense of the nature and significance of the past. For our purposes we will distinguish three interrelated features of ‘history as a whole’: sequence, causation and finally that sense of history’s having a shape, a pattern or a direction which can be summed up (to borrow Hayden White’s term) as emplotment. We may consider these three as constituting a logical sequence, in that some grasp of each is a necessary precondition for the understanding of the next, and for this reason will discuss them in order.

Patterns of History

Energy Biographies created a bespoke social science methodology that draws on insights from lifecourse studies, practice theory, and geographical studies of community and place. In bringing together these insights, it recognizes that what people do and how they understand themselves are multiply conditioned. Rather than simply being an outgrowth of more or less rational choices based on available information about the likely consequences of their actions, actions and beliefs are actively moulded by the technological infrastructure on which everyday life depends, the shared practices in which people are participants, the relationships and experiences which shape their biographies, and the evolution of the different communities (of place and of interest) in which they are located.

Energy Biographies findings identify several overlooked influences on how energy use changes across the lifecourse and within different community contexts. They suggest that the dominant foci of policy on energy demand (e.g. technology-enabled changes in individual behaviour) may be misplaced, and offers openings towards alternative pathways for change.

Energy Biographies Research Report

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Catherine Butler

Papers

Modern Children’s Literature

Reading History in Children's Books

Patterns of History

Energy Biographies Research Report

Modern children’s fantasy