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Abstract: This essay connects the mass-produced books of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories since 1930 and the Hardy Boys Adventures since 1927, with the discourses of self-help and self-improvement and argues that the effects these books have on their young readers instigate the formation of a very specific (white, middle class) subjectivity. This modern mode of relating to oneself includes an adjustable, self-assertive, self-monitoring personality, which can be understood as an answer to the challenges of the Second Industrialization and the contingencies connected to the acceleration, fragmentation, de-familiarizations, and individualization of modernity. At the same time, the essay argues, the novels also include a very specific position in terms of gender, race, and class, which, in spite of the figure of Nancy Drew, remains fundamentally linked to the values of patriarchy, the middle class and whiteness. PubDate: 2023-05-06
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Abstract: The new coronavirus strain that spread across the globe in clusters and claimed millions of lives has significantly impacted how subjectivity and power are performed. The scientific committees empowered by the state have become the leading actors, lying at the heart of all responses to this performance. The article critically examines the symbiotic interaction of these dynamics regarding the COVID-19 experience in Turkey. The analysis of this emergency is divided into two basic stages: the pre-pandemic period, during which infra-level healthcare and risk mechanisms evolve, and the early post-pandemic period, during which alternative subjectivities are marginalised to hold a monopoly over the new normal and victims. Pivoting around the scholarly debates about sovereign exclusion, biopower, and environmental power, this analysis concludes that the Turkish case is an encounter in which these techniques are materialised within the body of the 'infra-state of exception.' PubDate: 2023-04-28
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Abstract: The body as a thick and complex materiality has been populating social sciences in the last three decades in a critical mode toward both naturalism and social constructionism. The body has been progressively theorized in terms of what is established, even though flexible. In other words, as the structural metaphor of knowledge. The co-construction of bodies is not reduced to the politics of mirroring, truth-discovery, and what I was interested to highlight is how the cosmetic and photographic tactile gaze operates on the body as a tabula rasa. The focus on the skin allows precisely to challenge the flat/flattering approach to the body that negates its multilayered subjectivity. How does the beauty labour transform the body and attitudes in YouTube skincare culture and cinema' How does the photographic rupture shape the embodied reactions of new digital identities' The present study investigated visual culture through which the skin has become a subject-matter per se in cinema and YouTube. PubDate: 2023-04-28
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This paper focuses on how therapeutic culture is used to reshape the experiences of motherhood. Through childbirth supportive groups, raising children counselling and doulas’ emotional support among other activities, women learn to build their experiences as mothers in terms of personal growth, self-development and spiritual healing. Here, I examine these notions and the creation of new normative ideals that link an experience of personal growth with the experience of motherhood. The article is part of an ongoing qualitative study on the experience of mothers who practice “attachment parenting” and “respectful parenting” in Buenos Aires. This style of parenting involves “full-term breastfeeding”, co-sleeping, baby-led weaning, baby wearing, among the main practices. This paper contributes to understanding the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses in everyday life. PubDate: 2023-03-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00149-8
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Abstract: Whereas the multi-disciplinary literature on subjectivities and government has contributed to the understanding of the constitution and configuration of the subjectivities of a considerable range of governed subjects, it has tended to overlook the subjectivities of governing agents. Based on a genealogical analysis of textual materials on the Jesuit-Guaraní missions of colonial South America, I describe the bodily and spatial-territorial subjectivities of the Jesuit missionaries as governing agents, the general mechanisms and practical and discursive tools through which such subjectivities were formed, and the subjectivities’ contributions to the governmental apparatus displayed across the missions. I argue that conceiving of the transversal subjective complexity of governmental apparatuses problematizes dichotomic views over techniques of domination versus the constitution of selves, and allows for the analysis of continuums of subjectivities across governed and governing agents and within governmental apparatuses themselves. PubDate: 2023-02-20 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00151-0
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Abstract: The concept of “the achievement society” is a framework that has often been used for explaining and addressing an increase in psychological distress among Nordic teenagers, particularly in girls. This article provides an historical account of how “the achievement society” became influential in countries like Norway and Denmark, even giving birth to a generational label (“Generation Achievement”). We show how this framework can help us comprehend why adolescents often struggle to become the right kind of subject in order to live up to the idealised norms, and examine the possibility that this perspective also might lead to overly individualistic framings of youths’ mental health, and correspondingly alluring societal demands for resilience training as a necessary prevention. Finally, we discuss the class implications of this framework. To the extent that achievement is associated with ambitious upper-middle class children, it is vital to show extra awareness of the people who fall outside this description, so that intervention based on this analytical framework does not inadvertently further enhance social inequality under neoliberal rule. PubDate: 2023-02-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00147-w
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Abstract: Behavioural advertising and algorithmic data trade found fertile ground in Turkey in 2014 as government sponsored corporations demanded “image adjustment”. Based on five months of participant observation and work as a “digital strategist” in a digital advertising agency, JazzRabbit, I analyze the significance of algorithmic data in relation to workers who negotiate work and life through predictions based on data traces and consumer categories. Devaluing their embodied labour, they construe online interactions as fungible things while social classes are rendered as tangible digital collectivities. I demonstrate that visions of corporate social welfare and workspace control precarious working conditions against the background of an economy undergirded by high youth unemployment and flexible digital labour markets. I argue that the conditions of digital work reproduce the differential constitution of algorithmic technologies and worker subjectivity. I call for research about multiple histories of algorithmic work and how they give rise to specific imaginations about social classes. PubDate: 2023-02-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00148-9
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Abstract: Is vulnerability a poisoned conceptual chalice from which only individualized notions of suffering and responsibility can emerge' What would the concept of vulnerability have to do in order to be considered valuable in advancing social justice' In this article I utilize critique of the ‘vulnerability turn’ in child and youth policy as a launch pad into rethinking an emboldened account of vulnerability. In particular, I am drawn to the urgency of vulnerability, understood as an immediate openness to wounding, and find ethical and practical value in the unfinished business of struggling to justly define what constitutes vulnerability and who counts as vulnerable. Grounding theoretical exploration in reflections on unique Australian research on unaccompanied homeless children, the article seeks to advance vulnerability as a potentially radical tool for research and welfare policy that can grip the lived complexity of systemic and personal adversity. PubDate: 2023-01-18 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00146-3
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Abstract: Figurations of the living machine in film and television map contemporary crises of subjectivity. Centered on readings of Person of Interest and Westworld, this essay describes figurations of living machine subjectivity that foreground traumatic memory. In these texts, trauma is used as a means of territorializing subjectivity, allowing for the imposition of a figuration of a disciplined individual subject in the face of the dividual swarming of societies of control. PubDate: 2022-11-29 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00143-6
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Abstract: The EU is generally understood in terms of its construction as a normative power. The 2020 democratic crisis in Belarus, however, shows an EU that is unwilling to exercise its responsibility as such. With a response to the crisis that can be summed up as a series of targeted sanctions and some restrictive measures, the EU’s resistance towards deeper involvement in the democratic crisis of a bordering state is notable. At the same time, the EU continues to articulate a discourse that necessitates its involvement. Drawing on Jason Glynos’ work on how fantasmatic narratives structure affective investment, I explore the misalignment between the EU’s discursive response and its actual response, and discuss the impact of such upon the capability of the EU to produce the emotional investment into its ideas necessary for its constitution as a community. PubDate: 2022-10-08 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00142-7
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Abstract: In this article, I develop the notion of self-othering defined as the affective orchestration of different voices-of-the-self as an important self-constitutive practice of neoliberal subjectivity. I posit that neoliberal subjectification relies on othering those facets—skills, attributes, bodily properties—that do not conform to idealised notions of the self. By applying this conceptual lens to empirical material drawn from a qualitative research project on women’s identity negotiations, my aim is to show that affect, notably what feels right/wrong, plays a crucial role in aligning the body with neoliberal culture. The affective-discursive approach to analysing the dialogical self I propose is based on a problematisation of neoliberal logic and thus draws attention to the normativity of affect. The analysis of practices of self-othering lays bare how certain voices and ways of being become unsayable. However, their presence in people’s self-constructions also suggests that they could be re-articulated to formulate a counter ideal. PubDate: 2022-09-27 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00141-8
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Abstract: For nearly four decades, neoliberalism has established itself as a new modernizing project amidst the salience of other narratives of modernization, especially in "underdeveloped" societies. Thus, the subject of neoliberalism has had to interact with conceptions of the subject pertaining to other narratives of modernization, such as nationalism. The purpose of this article is then to analyze the interaction between different conceptions of the subject brought about by competing narratives of modernization; that is, by different lineal stories about the progress towards the elusive ideal of civilization. Through the findings derived from a content analysis of Qatar National Vision 2030, which is a government development plan aimed to transform Qatar's economy from hydrocarbon-based to knowledge-based, the article shall illustrate the tensions created by the interaction between different subjectivities enacted by competing narratives of modernization in the Third World, as well as some of their implications for gendered bodies. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00140-9
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Abstract: How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape subjectivity' This paper is concerned with contributing to theorising subjectivity at an ontological level. It draws on a feminist new materialist understanding of subjectivity as an intra-active becoming of human-non-human matter that includes smell. Smellwalks are mobilised to apprehend how subjectivity is altered via restrictions around movement and social connection during lockdown. This sensory method recognises knowing is not simply a cognitive practice and that odour actively shapes understandings of ourselves and the world. The varying presence and absence of odours in and out of lockdown eventuate a re-arrangement of subjectivity which draws on Vannini’s (2020) notion of atmospheric dis-ease. Lockdown produces a subjectivity of dis-ease which generates changes in perception of self and others, as sources of potential viral contagion. Lockdown’s material conditions engender a ‘socially flattened’ and ‘suspended subjectivity’ as our ‘normal’ selves are experienced as being put on hold until the global crisis abates. PubDate: 2022-08-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-022-00132-9
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