In the context of the apparent closure of neoliberalism, I can think of no more profoundly humanist statement than “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dom...

A Sociological Imagination

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

Europe and the People without History

It can be said that we inhabit a post-human world—an existence characterised by smartphones and social media, genetically modified food and IVF babies, life-extending technologies and prosthetic enhancements. In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers a roadmap for navigating the global effects of this post-human predicament—one in which clear distinctions between the human and the non-human no longer hold, the nature–culture divide is destabilised, and man’s privileged status is under attack. The situation we find ourselves in, Braidotti argues, is neither dystopian technological nightmare nor futuristic fantasy but one that requires complex and nuanced critical responses to issues of subjectivity, ethics and politics. In the four chapters comprising The Posthuman, Braidotti outlines her vision of the post-human future based on an affirmative politics, which ‘combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects’ (54). As a feminist antihumanist, Braidotti expresses little nostalgia for the concept of ‘Man’ and its associated individualism, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Chapter 1 ‘Post-Humanism: Life Beyond the Self’ charts the Humanist/anti-humanist debates to draw attention to the crisis of the human and the opportunity it affords to imagine alternative subjectivities grounded in relationality and the interconnection between the self and others (49). Methodologically, Braidotti adopts a feminist politics of location in her critique of various Humanist traditions. There is a profound reflexivity to her writing as she guides the reader through the intellectual trajectory that has resulted in her nomadic, affirmative politics. It is a legacy that incorporates social movements of the 1960s/1970s, as well as the continental feminism of Irigaray and Kristeva. Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari also feature as philosophical touchstones from which she advances her vision for the posthuman as a ‘relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable’ (49). By framing her argument within the narrative of her own intellectual story, the book conveys an immediacy and intimacy not often found in academic prose. Stylistically, it is as though we are inside her head—a post-human experience, indeed. Her writing is as expansive and impressive as you would expect—a swarm of ideas assuredly curated into a compelling argument for generating new forms of subjectivity and ethical relations to confront the challenges of a post-human existence. Consistent with existing feminist appraisals of the post-human (Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Toffoletti 2007), Braidotti acknowledges the complexity of the post-human predicament, seeking alternative frameworks to think about post-human subjectivity in non-dualistic ways. What Braidotti brings to these debates is an emphasis on materialism by way of Spinozist monism. In championing the relational, embodied and embedded qualities of post-human existence, Braidotti reprises the concept of zoe—a generative and vitalist force that allows for connections and affinities to be made across

Book review : the posthuman

▪ Abstract The study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' resp...

http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~hajek/ski/kolokvium/projekty2007/cista_strava_spravna_strava/Mintz%20et%20al%20(2002)%20%20The%20anthropology%20of%20food%20and%20eating.pdf

The Anthropology of Food and Eating

Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes

The biological definition of family at the root of functionalist kinship theory has been rightly criticized by contemporary feminist and symbolic anthropologists, but in retreating into an antinatural position such critiques simply recapitulate the limitations of an opposition between nature and culture in which the former is prior and essential, the latter secondary and historical. From the perspective of Zumbagua, where people become parents by feeding and caring for children over extended periods of time, both schools of thought are not only inadequate to explain fully the material bases of local practice but are representative of a specific Western-bourgeois ideology that indigenous people actively oppose.

making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions

Cholas and Pishtacos are two provocative characters from South American popular culture - a sensual mixed-race woman and a horrifying white killer - who show up in everything from horror stories and dirty jokes to romantic novels and travel posters. In this book, these two figures become vehicles for an exploration of race, sex, and violence. Mary Weismantel's theory of race and sex begins not with individual identity but with three forms of social and economic interaction: estrangement, exchange and accumulation. She maps the barriers that separate white and Indian, male and female - barriers that exist not in order to prevent exchange, but rather to exacerbate its inequality. Weismantel weaves together sources ranging from her own fieldwork and the words of potato sellers, hotel maids, and tourists to classic works by photographer Marin Chambi and novelist Jose Maria Arguedas.

Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes

Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies

This article asks the question: What is a reproductive act? Ceramics produced by the South American Moche (A.D. 150- 800) depict a wide variety of sex acts but rarely feature vaginal penetration. The cross-cultural literature, especially from Melanesia and Amazonia, is used here to argue that the relationship between sex and reproduction has been variably defined, with many acts- including anal and oral sex-sometimes perceived as reproductive. It contrasts notions of time found in Western ideas of procreation and in pornography to the expanded reproductive time frame of kin- and lineage-based societies and argues that Moche ceramics, with their emphasis on the movement of fluids between bodies, do in fact portray a reproductive process. In the stratified context of Moche society, where these pots were produced for elite consumers who often placed them in tombs, these representations solidified the power of ancestors, elders, and elites. (Keywords: Moche, sex, reproduction)

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/moche/moche-sex-pots.pdf

Mary J Weismantel

Papers

Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes

making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions

Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes

Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies

Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America