Browsing by Subject "Cultural Studies"
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Item Open Access Discounted life: Social time in relationless Japan(Boundary 2, 2015-08-01) Allison, AThe essay takes on recent news stories of “missing elderly” (elderly whose deaths go unrecorded) and “lonely death” (bodies discovered days or weeks after someone has died all alone) to consider how life, death, and the bonds/debts of social relationality are getting recalibrated in postcrisis Japan. In what has become a trend toward singular living and solitary existence—sometimes called Japan's “relationless society” (muen shakai)—those without human or economic capital are put at risk. The precarity of living/dying without a safety net of others is one sociological fact examined in this essay. But I also consider another: the emergence of new practices for postmortem care/memorial that relieve social intimates (notably family) of the responsibilities of tending to the dead. In an era where privatization and “self-responsibility” now extend to death, how does sociality get played out in an everyday limited to the present?Item Open Access Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself(Differences, 2015-01-26) Wiegman, RResponding to the theme of the special issue, Queer Theory without Antinormativity, “Eve’s Triangles” returns to the work of one of queer theory’s most important foundational figures to consider critical sensibilities that are incompatible with the dyadic approach to power and politics now institutionalized in queer studies under the rubric of antinormativity. By focusing on Sedgwick’s appetite for incoherence, the double bind, and nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Sedgwick’s work in order to value queer critical intuitions that have been subordinated to antinormativity’s allure.Item Embargo From Fishy Past to Fishy Future: Thinking through the Aquarium(2024-05) Zhang, QiyunThis project explores various ways of how the aquarium mediates the relationship between human beings and nature. The methods include tracing the historical trajectory of the aquarium since its invention as a naturalist’s instrument in the 19th century, and reflecting on the author’s own embodied experience at contemporary public aquariums. In particular, the author asks: Can the aquarium become a heterogeneous space for both the human and non-human? Can we have differentiation without domination? The author concludes that the aquarium is simultaneously the site of domination and the site of resistance. On the one hand, the development of the aquarium is inseparable from the progress of Enlightenment, capitalism, and scientific positivism. On the other hand, when Enlightenment seeks to demystify, the aquarium presents wonder; when capitalism enforces reification, the aquarium counters with vitalism; when science tries to “solve it all”, the aquarium opens up to unknowability. Therefore, thinking through the aquarium may contribute to an ethics of co-becoming, with other humans, animals, and machines.Item Open Access Introduction: Antinormativity's Queer Conventions(differences, 2015-01-26) Wiegman, R; Wilson, EACan queer theory proceed without an allegiance to antinormativity? The introduction to this special issue establishes the value of this question by staging an encounter with the most widely held assumption in queer theory today: that the political value of the field lies in its antinormative commitments. The first section of this introduction demonstrates how profoundly the history of queer theorizing has been shaped by an antinormative sensibility, one that has organized the multiple and at times discordant itineraries of analysis that comprise the queer theoretical archive into a field-forming synthesis. In part 2, the authors offer a more studied consideration of the character of norms. By articulating the difference between a norm and the terms that often define it—domination, homogenization, exclusion, hegemony, identity, or more colloquially, the familiar, status quo, or routine—this section demonstrates the importance of renewing queer theoretical attention to the conceptual and political particularity of normativity as a distinct object of inquiry. The authors’ aim is not to dismiss the political agenda that antinormativity has come to represent for queer inquiry, but to channel some of the field’s energies toward analyzing the critical authority it now wields. This entails promoting scholarship that not only rethinks the meaning of norms, normalization, and the normal but that also imagines new ways to approach the politics of queer criticism altogether. In the final section, the authors describe the specific contribution of each of the volume’s essays to this endeavor.Item Open Access Introduction: Now, not now(Differences, 2019-01-01) Wiegman, RItem Open Access Inventing the Zen Buddhist Samurai: Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and Japanese Modernity(Journal of Popular Culture, 2016-10-01) Van Overmeire, BItem Open Access Sex and Negativity, Or What Queer Theory has for You(Cultural Critique, 2016) Wiegman, RItem Open Access The borders of sense: Revisiting iracema, uma transa amazonica (1974)(Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2013-12-01) Furtado, GPA landmark of Brazilian cinema, Iracema: Uma transa Amazônica (1974), by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna, remains an underexplored film. This fiction-documentary hybrid is a visual reflection on territoriality, mobility, and borders-borders that are inherently paradoxical, limits constituted by contact, lines of division drawn by virtue of the possibility of their crossing. This article considers the significance of the film as a form of sociopolitical critique carried out by narrative and allegorical components. The film, however, also contains elements that resist interpretation, relating to the filming of unplanned and improvised encounters between film and lived, historical world. This article explores the implications of this dual gesture and proposes ways to appreciate the elements in the film that do not bear intended meaning but are highly significant. © 2013 Taylor and Francis.Item Open Access The subject in question(Journal of Material Culture, 2017-12) Morgan, D