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

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Pp. xxii + 196, preface, introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $24.95 cloth, $15.95 paper) Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism is meant as a guide for identifying and confronting complex ethical issues in a multi-perspectival world. Its author, an Oxford-educated philosopher of Ghanaian-British parentage, bridges worlds. The term cosmopolitanism - the author prefers it over globalizations narrow association with economics and multiculturalismi observed tendency to prescribe - encompasses two core values: "the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even formal ties of a shared citizenship," and the idea "that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" (xv). Terms such as tolerance, kindness, and pluralism are central to cosmopolitan thinking. Appiah presents a wide range of issues that can serve as frames through which to examine how we as individuals and professionals make ethical decisions - essential for the humanities scholar, student, and public-sector folklorist: How real are values? What do we talk about when we talk about differences? Is any form of relativism right? When do morals and manners clash? Can culture be owned? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity? And all this is good... and yet, and yet. Too often, the resolutions Appiah proposes for these key issues are so one-sided and misleading, so bolstered by irrelevant, erroneous, and outdated sources, that they are of little help in sorting through the paradoxical interfaces of pluralism and autonomy, diversity and democracy, and globalization and protection of what is valuable in the local. In his central chapter, "Cosmopolitan Contamination," Appiah proposes a change of priorities - away from purity, peoples, authenticity, tribalism, and cultural protection, and toward individuals, mixture, modernity, rights, and what he calls contamination (his term for healthy hybridization) . His philosophical underpinning ("The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals - not nations, tribes or 'peoples' - as die proper object of moral concern" [Appiah 2006] ) is a hallmark of rightist thought and practice. The left emphasizes social, political, and environmental factors that can constrain the ability of individuals to choose freely. Both perspectives are needed, but only one is developed in this book. Many folklorists are familiar with issues of cultural change and preservation as discussed at UNESCO and WIPO. Appiah reveals no understanding of the complexities of diese dynamics. He wrongly assumes many anthropologists to be cultural relativists who tolerate such practices as female genital mutilation (15) and that UNESCO's Declaration of Cultural Diversity celebrates a pluralism that could embrace the likes of the KKK conveniently ignoring Article IV: "No one may invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human right. …

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of “treating the social facts as things” (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an “axiological neutrality” (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck (Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir a l’ere de la mondialisation, 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points hat make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science.

The cosmopolitan vision

Every word to utter from the writer involves the element of this life. The writer really shows how the simple words can maximize how the impression of this book is uttered directly for the readers. Even you have known about the content of some of my best friends so much, you can easily do it for your better connection. In delivering the presence of the book concept, you can find out the boo site here.

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The limits of liberty

Summary Patriarchal discourse continually reproduces the division between culture and nature, a division of obvious importance to the colonial enterprise, whose success demands the preservation of dichotomies such as civilized and primitive, white and black, masculine and feminine. The emigration of British women to the colonies served a variety of social and economic purposes; it also neutralized the potential threat to patriarchal discourse of the idea of “surplus women”, which exceeded the limits of “femininity”. The idea of “frontierswoman” in the colonies posed an additional threat, which was again neutralized by the patriarchal demands regarding femininity and the other cultural imperatives placed upon colonial women. This essay scrutinizes some of these cultural imperatives, namely that women act as “bearers of culture” and as “mediators”, and it suggests how women were used by the patriarchal and imperialist system to reproduce the crucial dichotomies, and how they were, in the process, redefined ...

‘Woman’ as sign in the South African colonial enterprise

Although Zoe Wicomb's four works of fiction deploy realist techniques, they show a deep and increasingly self-conscious interest in using the strategies of textualism, in which the real is seen to be grounded in discourse, materiality is inscribed in allegorising ciphers or signs, and the presented world has the status of textuality rather than being representational. Her short stories and novels address, adjust and re-imagine history – not simply by interrogating the intersecting discourses by means of which certain historical concepts are conventionally managed and understood but also by undoing the apparent opposition between history and text. These strategies constitute what is, in effect, a struggle over the sign. In the process, Wicomb's fiction moves in what may be called a double aesthetic and political direction. Her fiction yearns for a writing released from ‘history’ and ‘meaning’ and yet directed to truth-telling about varieties of subordination; it also yearns for a world in which human subje...

Dorothy Driver

Papers

‘Woman’ as sign in the South African colonial enterprise

The Struggle Over the Sign: Writing and History in Zoë Wicomb's Art

History's Intimate Invasionas: Yvonne Vera's 'The Stone Virgins'

History's intimate invasions: yvonne vera's the stone virgins

Nadine Gordimer : the politicisation of women