8: Competency,Relevance, and Empowerment

Children's programs should be restructured so as to provide social systems that vigorously support child and youth care rather than hinder it. Specifically, programs should be reoriented so as to promote normal growth and development, i.e., competency, particularly interpersonal competencies. Programs should be made more relevant to community, rather than institutional, living. Democratizing programs by empowering children and those who care for them will make the programs more effective and appropriate for raising and treating children and youth. Restructuring as a strategy for change is also examined.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

Andrea Cox: Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017, 4181 pp,Series: Critical issues in crime and society,LCCN: 2017007405

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

Senthorun Sunil Raj: Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury,Intimacy, Identity

Feminist Legal Studies -     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Study in blue: trauma,affect, event

As contemporary student activists in the United States embrace a vocabulary of trauma and microaggressions, some critics on the left consider this a depoliticizing move symptomatic of the university’s growing thralldom to neoliberalism. The author argues that such criticism neglects how talk of trauma and microaggressions attempts to affectively manage structural violence’s failure to manifest in the form of discrete, identifiable, and extraordinary events. To illustrate this, she turns to the poetry of Claudia Rankine and the performance art of Emma Sulkowicz as aesthetic treatments of racial microaggression and sexual trauma, respectively. Rankine’s and Sulkowicz’s works belong to an emergent genre the author calls the coincidence report, in which subjects with no proof of structural violence except for their own feelings must cope with what happens when an event doesn’t. Ultimately, both artists sideline attempts to reconstruct the event in favor of redistributing specific affects throughout their respective publics. In both cases, these affects are blue – that is, depressive (Rankine) and obscene (Sulkowicz). Subjects in the blue find themselves ambivalently attached to living politically in the shadow of an event even as they detach from the fantasy that political life is less disappointing, depressing, or deflating than it actually is.