Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

doi:10.4324/9780203828274

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Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

Book•DOI•

Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

01 May 1995-Contemporary Sociology (Routledge)-Vol. 24, Iss: 3, pp 331

TL;DR: In this article, the Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary are discussed, as well as the Assumption of Sex, in the context of critical queering, passing and arguing with the real.

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Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Part 1: 1. Bodies that Matter 2. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary 3. Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex 4. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Part 2: 5. 'Dangerous Crossing': Willa Cather's Masculine Names 6. Queering, Passing: Nella Larsen Rewrites Psychoanalysis 7. Arguing with the Real 8. Critically Queer. Notes. Index

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Journal Article•DOI•

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

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Karen Barad¹•Institutions (1)

University of California¹

01 Mar 2003-Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

TL;DR: The ubiquitous puns on "matter" do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them, rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of "fact" have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here).

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Abstract: L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?

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4,728 citations

Book•

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

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Marianne Winther Jørgensen, Louise Jane Phillips

18 Aug 2002

TL;DR: Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method as discussed by the authors is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research, which brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries.

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Abstract: Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. It brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, in order to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries. The book introduces the three approaches in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, explaining the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach as well as the methodological guidelines and tools they provide for empirical discourse analysis. The authors also demonstrate the possibilities for combining different discourse analytical and non-discourse analytical approaches in empirical study. Finally, they contextualize discourse analysis within the social constructionist debate about critical social research, rejecting the view that a critical stance is incompatible with social constructionist premises and arguing that critique must be an inherent part of social research.

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3,598 citations

Book•

The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

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Judith Butler¹•Institutions (1)

University of California, Berkeley¹

01 Jan 1997

TL;DR: The Psychic inceptions Index as mentioned in this paper is a collection of psychics who have appeared in the last few hundred years, including: 1. Stubborn attachment, bodily subjection 2. Circuits and bad conscience 3. Subjection, resistance, resignification 4. 'Conscience doth make subjects of us all' 5. Melancholy gender/refused identification keeping it moving 6.

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Abstract: Introduction 1. Stubborn attachment, bodily subjection 2. Circuits and bad conscience 3. Subjection, resistance, resignification 4. 'Conscience doth make subjects of us all' 5. Melancholy gender/refused identification keeping it moving 6. Psychic inceptions Notes Index.

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3,002 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research

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Chaim Noy¹•Institutions (1)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem¹

11 Sep 2008-International Journal of Social Research Methodology

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors attend to snowball sampling via constructivist and feminist hermeneutics, suggesting that when viewed critically, this popular sampling method can generate a unique type of social knowledge which is emergent, political and interactional.

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Abstract: During the past two decades we have witnessed a rather impressive growth of theoretical innovations and conceptual revisions of epistemological and methodological approaches within constructivist‐qualitative quarters of the social sciences. Methodological discussions have commonly addressed a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing empirical material, yet the critical grounds upon which these were reformulated have rarely been extended to embrace sampling concepts and procedures. The latter have been overlooked, qualifying only as a ‘technical’ research stage. This article attends to snowball sampling via constructivist and feminist hermeneutics, suggesting that when viewed critically, this popular sampling method can generate a unique type of social knowledge—knowledge which is emergent, political and interactional. The article reflects upon researches about backpacker tourists and marginalized men, where snowball sampling was successfully employed in investigating these groups' organic social ne...

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2,208 citations

Book•

Questions of Cultural Identity

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Stuart Hall

04 Apr 1996

TL;DR: Hall and Donald as discussed by the authors discuss the history of identity in a short history from Pilgrim to tourist, from Tourist to Tourist, and the role of identity as a marker of identity.

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Abstract: Introduction - Stuart Hall Who Needs 'Identity'? From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity - Zygmunt Bauman Enabling Identity? - Marilyn Strathern Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies Culture's In-Between - Homi K Bhabha Interrupting Identities - Kevin Robins Turkey/Europe Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is? - Lawrence Grossberg Music and Identity - Simon Frith Identity, Genealogy, History - Nikolas Rose Organizing Identity - Paul du Gay Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management The Citizen and the Man about Town - James Donald

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2,090 citations

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References

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Journal Article•DOI•

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

[...]

Robert D'Amico

20 Jun 1978-Telos

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present La Volonté de Savoir, the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality, which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as human sciences, the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the "other" in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.

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Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.

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15,794 citations

"Bodies that matter : on the discurs..." refers background in this paper

...in such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [I'enonciation].(10)...
[...]
...Some recent race theory has underscored the use of "race" in the service of "racism," and proposed a politically informed inquiry into the process of racialization, the formation of race.(10) Such an inquiry does not suspend or ban the term, although it does insist that an inquiry into formation is linked to the contemporary question of what is at stake in the term....
[...]
...The truncated "W" introduces an abbreviated Willa into the text, and connects her with the loose waves of the letter, linking the question of grammatical morphology with the morphological figure of the snake that bears the movements of desire.(10) But this partial emergence from the hole, this breaking through of the supporting fiction of this! narrative, can be only a "circus monstrosity," a spectacle, entertaining and terrifying....
[...]
...Without recognizing that Larsen was struggling with the conflict produced, on the one hand, by such exotic and racist renderings and, on the other hand, by the moral injunctions typified by Du Bois, Du Bois himself praises her writings as an example of uplift itself.(10) And yet, one might argue that Passing exemplifies precisely the cost of uplift for black women as an ambiguous death/suicide, whereas Quicksand exemplifies that cost as a kind of death in marriage, where both stories resolve on the impossibility of sexual freedom for black women....
[...]
..." Although resistance constitutes a temporary escape from the constituting power of the law, it cannot enter into the dynamic by which the symbolic reiterates its power and thereby alter the structural sexism and homophobia of its sexual demands.(10) The symbolic is understood as the normative dimension of the constitution of the sexed subject within language....
[...]

Journal Article•DOI•

Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

[...]

Julia Kristeva, Leon Samuel Roudiez, Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine

23 Jan 1982-Poetics Today

TL;DR: Roudiez as mentioned in this paper discusses the Ethics of Linguistics, the Bounded Text, Word, Dialogue, and Novel, and the Novel as Polylogue as a Polynomial.

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Abstract: PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction by Leon S. Roudiez1. The Ethics of Linguistics2. The Bounded Text3. Word, Dialogue, and Novel4. How Does One Speak to Literature?5. From One Identity to an Other6. The Father, Love, and Banishment7. The Novel as Polylogue8. Giotto's Joy9. Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini10. Place NamesIndex

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1,306 citations

"Bodies that matter : on the discurs..." refers background in this paper

...Kristeva argues that the materiality of the spoken signifier, the vocalization of sound, is already a psychic effort to reinstall and recapture a lost maternal body; hence, these vocalizations are temporarily recaptured in sonorous poetry which works language for its most material possibilities.(14) Even here, however, those material sputtenngs are...
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...Further, prohibitions can themselves become objects of eroticization, such that coming under the censure of the law becomes what Freud called a necessary condition for love.(14) In the above analysis of the symbolic, we considered that certain way ward identifications functioned within that economy as figures for the very punishments by which the assumption of sexed positions were compelled The phallicized dyke and the feminized fag were two figures for this state of gender punishment, but there are clearly more: the lesbian femme who refuses men, the masculine gay man who challenges the presumptions of heterosexuality, and a variety of other figures whose characterizations by conventional notions of femininity and masculinity are confounded by their manifest complexity....
[...]
...That the body which one "is" is to some degree a body which gains its sexed contours in part under specular and exteriorizing conditions suggests that identificatory processes are crucial to the forming of sexed materiality.(14) This revision of Freud and Lacan continues in the third chapter, "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex....
[...]
...useful to rethink the notion of gender-as-drag in terms of the analysis of gender melancholia.(14) Given the iconographic figure of the melancholic drag queen,...
[...]
...Cather wrote her story about Tommy Shirley, a young woman whose very name inverts the patronymic expectation not only by placing the boy's name first, but by taking Charlotte Bronte's coinage of "Shirley" as a girl's name and coining it again as a patronym.(14) The terms "Tom" and "Tommy" had accrued a number of meanings by the time Cather used the name in her story....
[...]