Gender, race and the ethical praxis of slide guitar

This article explores slide guitar as the basis for an ethics of listening. Here, slide guitar serves as a metaphor through which alternative possibilities of hearing, performing, thinking, and living might be explored. By analyzing slide guitar and the particular sonic elements that characterize its tone and techniques of sounding, I argue that sliding—with all of the risks its movement entails—signifies a mode of recursive questioning through which totalizing gestures might be eluded or radically undercut. As a mode of maneuvering that is both interrogative and generative, slide's gestures prompt us to consider the ways in which its poised instability might yield an expanded breadth of critical movement—one whose stakes need to be considered in relation to race and gender's intersectional bearing on its production (or smooth elision) of sonic subjects and objects.     

Masquerading machismo: La India and the staging of chusmería on the salsa scene

This article explores slide guitar as the basis for an ethics of listening. Here, slide guitar serves as a metaphor through which alternative possibilities of hearing, performing, thinking, and living might be explored. By analyzing slide guitar and the particular sonic elements that characterize its tone and techniques of sounding, I argue that sliding—with all of the risks its movement entails—signifies a mode of recursive questioning through which totalizing gestures might be eluded or radically undercut. As a mode of maneuvering that is both interrogative and generative, slide's gestures prompt us to consider the ways in which its poised instability might yield an expanded breadth of critical movement—one whose stakes need to be considered in relation to race and gender's intersectional bearing on its production (or smooth elision) of sonic subjects and objects.     

Messages from a rarely visited island: Duress and lack of consent in marriage

If we fear repetition in the signs that come to us from the world, it is because in that repetition we discover that the world's powers are always there, dozing perhaps, and surely somewhat removed, but still present and ready to swallow us as if we were a word in their language. If we feel strangely uneasy when we note that a word, automatically repeated, seems to lose all connection with its meaning, it is because at the very moment we sense the weakness, the precarious nature of the act on which all culture is based.I would like to thank the following for reading and commenting upon my work at various stages: Kate Green, Jeremy Roche and Qudsia Mirza.     

Manifestations of depressive affect in adolescence

This paper discusses the manifestations and correlates of depressive affect disorders in adolescents. It begins with some definitions and a discussion of the concept (from adult psychiatry) of depression and depressive disorders. The clinical picture of depressive disorders in adults is described, and the interrelationship is considered between them and the depressive disorders of adolescents and prepubertal children. Data are discussed regarding the external validity of adolescent depressive disorders (including their familial and biological correlates, their course and treatment outcome). Finally, the relevance of these data is summarized with regard to the process of establishing a diagnosis of a depressive disorder in adolescents.Received M.D. from Washington University. Research interests are the diagnosis and assessment of childhood psychopathology, especially Attention Deficit Disorder and Depressive Disorders.Received Ph. D. from UCLA. Research interests are language and learning disorders and childhood psychopathology.     

Interpersonal Sensitivity, Romantic Stress, and the Prediction of Depression: A Study of Inner-City, Minority Adolescent Girls

The role of interpersonal sensitivity in the relation between romantic stress and depression was examined in 55 adolescent girls from an inner-city high school. Depression, interpersonal sensitivity, and chronic and episodic romantic stress were measured at two time points, 6 months apart. Interpersonal sensitivity was found to moderate the longitudinal relation between romantic stress (both chronic and episodic) and depression. In contrast, interpersonal sensitivity did not potentiate depressive responses to non-romantic interpersonal stress, suggesting particular importance of stress in the romantic domain for adolescent girls. Results indicate that girls' sensitivities to romantic relationship stress should be specifically addressed in depression prevention and intervention programs.Received her PhD from the University of Southern California. Research interests include the influence of romantic relationship factors, such as romantic stress and dating violence, on the development of depression during adolescence.Received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Research interests include the interplay between adolescent depression, personality disorder symptoms, and interpersonal variables including adjustment in friendships and romantic relationships.Research interests include cognitive and interpersonal factors in adolescent depression.     

Adolescent depression: Why more girls?

Although there has been evidence for some time of a sex difference in depression, relatively little research has examined the developmental process by which women come to be at greater risk than men for depression. In this paper, the developmental pattern of depressed affect is examined over early and middle adolescence, with a special focus on the patterns of boys as compared to girls. In addition, a developmental model for mental health in adolescence is tested for its power in explaining the emergence of gender differences in depression. Longitudinal data on 335 adolescents randomly selected from two school districts were used to test the hypotheses. Results revealed that girls are at risk for developing depressed affect by 12th grade because they experienced more challenges in early adolescence than did boys. The sex difference in depressed affect at 12th grade disappears once early adolescent challenges are considered.This research was supported in part by grants MH30252/38142 to A. Petersen. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of study participants and staff. Portions of this material were presented in a symposium at the 1988 meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and one at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.Received Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1973. Research interest in biopsychosocial development in adolescence, with a focus on sex differences in mental health.Research interests include adolescent mental health, and parent and peer relationships.Received Ph.D. in psychology from The Pennsylvania State University. Research interests include development of affective and conduct disorders, especially sex differences in these problems.     

An Interview with Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in the Arabic language. Her work is therefore very significant in the context of Arab women's writing and feminism. Her novels express a unique understanding of social and political events, and convey the impact of these events on individuals by combining love stories with political and social history, fused together in present time. The interview examines Ahlam Mosteghanemi's novels and the impact of colonization and post-colonization on Mosteghanemi, her writing, Algeria and the Algerian people. Mosteghanemi's decision to write in Arabic and the themes of her novels are directly informed by the Algerian war of independence and as such can be seen both as a statement of independence from the Eurocentric homogenization of language and discourse, and as a feminist political statement. The interview seeks to deconstruct the widespread image of feminist literature as a genre that attempts to explore the female experience through an unnuanced binary focus on the opposition between the male and female within a patriarchal society. The interview pays particular attention to the rich symbolism of Mosteghanemi's novels. Even in the English translation there is a strong sense of the historical and geographical reality of Algeria, an ancient country repeatedly invaded by colonizing forces, and struggling again in the modern world to establish an independent identity. The interview looks at some of the significant themes raised by Mosteghanemi in her novels. In addition to this, the interview pays particular attention to the issue of translation in Mosteghanemi's novels and to her attitudes towards her readership.     

Re-reading ELIZA: Human–machine Interaction as Cognitive Sense-ability

ABSTRACT

This article re-reads ELIZA, the famous computer program of early artificial intelligence created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to test the possibility of intelligent interaction between humans and machines through language. Given newly emerging intelligent gadgets such as smart-home assistants that operate through natural language, I argue firstly for the timeliness of this program and explore the ways in which ELIZA stimulated debates concerning whether it could be considered an interlocutor for humans or a failure in exactly this regard. Secondly, I develop a feminist technoecological account of interaction at the ELIZA/user interface. In so doing, I seek to challenge the dualisms between body/mind, rationality/affectivity, and subject/object, thereby avoiding a reductionist perspective that calls into question the human subject as an autonomous agent.     

Becoming a Naxalite in rural Bihar: Class struggle and its contradictions

Ever since its inception during the 1960s, the Naxalite movement in India has been the focus of scholarly interest and political analysis. In spite of internal splits and external repression by the state, this agrarian mobilization continues to gain ground in Bihar and elsewhere. Both achievements and contradictions of such Maoist-inspired agency and ideology are examined via the life story of a Naxalite – an organic intellectual – from the Dalit community. Of particular interest are the difficulties of having to protect family members, as well as positive developments, such as shifts in the language of struggle (from caste to class), and negative ones at the level of political consciousness (the persistence of traditional beliefs, receipt of pro-poor funding from the state).     

Theme: Making us Modern: Australian Writing in Modernity

‘Making us Modern’ brings together articles concerned with the scene of Australian writing and the relevance of ‘modernity/ies’ and ‘modernism/s’ for contemporary writing and reading practices. What is the ‘modern’, who are its subjects, and how has the modern made us—as ‘postmodern’, perhaps? And, who is this ‘us’, anyway? Attempts to theorise modernity and its aesthetics have often taken the white Western male as their subject. Intervening in these theories, however, are the efforts of feminist critics, among others, who seek to install those troubled terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ at the centre of their considerations of modernity, modernism, and reading and writing subjects. The articles in ‘Making us Modern’ contribute to these debates. Twentieth-century Australian modernities have been seen as holding together a mix of trauma and pleasure, constraint and release, sometimes represented in literary texts in seemingly impossible relation. For Esther Faye, writing on the short stories of Australian-Jewish writer Rosa Safransky, the subjective experiences of post-war Australian modernity are characterised by the traumatic dislocation of human subjects in time and space. In Safransky's stories of family and domesticity is seen the trauma experienced by gendered and racialised subjects in the particular context of the Shoah and its aftermath. Although, as she says, ‘the canonical status of the Shoah as the paradigmatic modernist event is increasingly contested’, through a Lacanian reading of Safransky's texts, Esther Faye shows the ways that the Holocaust's radical disruption of time and its dislocation of the Jewish subject in history echoes in its logic the wider deracination of the subject in modernity. It testifies ‘to the traumatic structure of subjectivity itself’, and it testifies, too, to the particular kind of ‘pleasure’ that is constituted in inextricable relation to trauma. In this way, as Esther Faye argues, being Jewish after Auschwitz is a question for all of us.     

Depression as a Moderator of Sociocultural Influences on Eating Disorder Symptoms in Adolescent Females and Males

This study aimed to explore the role of depression as a moderator of sociocultural influences on eating disorder symptoms. A sample of 509 adolescents (56% female) completed self-report questionnaires assessing depression, body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, bulimic symptoms and sociocultural influences on appearance from family, peers and the media. Both girls and boys displaying high levels of depressive symptoms perceived stronger media and peer influences on appearance. Among girls, eating disorder symptoms were directly affected by sociocultural influences, in particular media influences, as well as by depression. However, depression played only a limited role as a moderator of these relationships. Among boys, sociocultural influences and depression revealed fewer direct effects on eating disorder symptoms. However, depression had a greater moderating effect on these relationships. Future research into the role of depression may increase the understanding of gender differences in body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimic symptoms.     

Multidimensional Family Therapy in Theory and in Practice

This article reviews the family therapy case of an adolescent substance abuser through the lens of multidimensional family therapy (MDFT). Initially, the adolescent presented with suicidal ideation, depression, academic difficulties, and behavior problems. The family experienced chronically high levels of conflict, which related to the mother's depression, the father's harsh discipline, and the adolescent's sister's frequent suicidal threats and outbursts. Family therapeutic interventions helped to decrease family conflict and improve the adolescent's grades and behavior. In particular, conjoint work with the parents had a stabilizing effect on the family system. As predicted by MDFT, this stabilizing effect was shown to place the adolescent on a healthier developmental trajectory. Limitations of the case and implications for future research are also presented.     

Taking It Out on the Body? A Phenomenological Study of Young Adults’ Gendered Experiences of Depression and Antidepressant Use

In this article, we use in-depth interviews with young adults in Sweden to explore the gendered and embodied experiences of depression and antidepressant use. Building upon previous phenomenological research, we analyse being depressed and on antidepressants as altered embodied states, in which corporealization—experiencing the body as a material object—is central. Feminist interventions by Toril Moi and Iris Marion Young inform our analysis of embodiment as gendered. The bodily facets of depression include the weight of the anxious body in crying and not sleeping, as well as the weakened or distorted relationship between body, mind and world in brooding thoughts and hopelessness. These experiences of corporealization are not expressed in gendered terms but, when acted out in depression, they do appear to be gendered. The female body becomes “the first battleground”—as the socially endorsed object upon which to act destructively. In contrast, male behaviour is not expressed as self-destructive, but projects in the world are emphasized at the cost of (bodily) well-being. Although antidepressants lift the corporeal weight of anxiety and low mood, they install a new, and in some respects more profound, corporealization of the body. This is expressed as feeling and caring less and being like a thing or machine. It can be understood in terms of an increased distance from the world—not articulated in gendered terms. As a way of existing in the world, the medicated state bears strong similarities to the depressed state from which it was originally an effort to escape. Thus, taking medication can be seen as yet another way of acting on the body as object. Furthermore, it could be suggested from our findings that when the body is not felt—when there is a breakdown of the meaningful relationship between the body and the world—the experience is less gendered.     

Irish/woman/artwork: Selective readings

This paper concentrates upon particular artworks from Irish women artists. It demonstrates that there are certain themes which recur in their artwork. These include dislocation, particularities about place and contestation around language, all of which are rooted in the lived experience of being Irish, being female and being an artist. At the same time the paper provides readings of this artwork which demonstrate that these experiences are diverse, and that the areas of representation within which the artists are working are socially produced constructs. There is therefore no romantic essentialist category of ‘Irish woman artist’, but rather the richly interplaying histories, readings and contexts of Irish/woman/artwork.     

Feminist Theory and that Critical Edge

The purpose of this article is to provoke much‐needed discussion on the uses by feminists, in particular feminist political scientists, of the language of discourse, discourses and discursive. The terms, it argues, have become ubiquitous, with considerable confusion about intended meanings. A particular concern is the growing tendency among some feminist political scientists to use “discourse” as shorthand for ways of talking about an issue. Critical to sorting through different meanings of discourse, it argues, is the question of subject “agency”—the extent to which subjects can use discourses or are constituted by them. As a way forward the article advances a dual‐focus agenda that builds bridges across discourse traditions; identifying both the ways in which interpretive and conceptual schemas delimit understandings, and the politics involved in the intentional deployment of concepts and categories to achieve specific political goals.     

where do women ‘stand’ in Islam? negotiating contemporary Muslim prayer leadership in North America

The article analyses programmes against gender-based violence (GBV) in Cambodia in order to understand what notions of power, agency and resistance reside within these programmes. The text relies on in-depth interviews with four different organisations in Cambodia. The interviews display a number of hands-on practices of resistance against GBV, which require a broad discussion of identity in order to be fully understood. In particular, the organisations emphasize the importance of approaching men—in men's groups, as trainers and role models—in the resistance against GBV. In their approach to Cambodian men, the trainers mixed representations of a more ‘particular’ character with representations of a more ‘universal’ appearance. Both in the establishment of new subject positions and new discourses, the Cambodian trainers leaned upon and alternated between universal and particular notions. In addition, men's ‘particular’ subject positions became the very lens through which they considered ‘universal’ notions of violent masculinities. New aspects of the resistance against GBV thus become visible as the concepts of universalism and particularism are put in use. It is in the nexus between ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ representations that a non-violent masculinity is fostered.     

FROM OBAMA TO ABBOTT

Abstract This article analyses how politicians' use of emotion is gendered. Key Australian, US and UK politicians studied include Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Cameron, Rudd, Abbott and Gillard. Emotions analysed range from fear to compassion. A particular focus is placed on issues of masculinity; however, the implications for constructions of both femininity and masculinity will be considered, including arguments that female politicians face particular problems in utilising emotion, for example, in projecting an image of being both tough and compassionate. It will be argued that it is not just that politicians' use of emotion intersects with issues of gender but that particular gendered identities are a key vehicle via which emotion is deployed. Consequently, the analysis contributes new insights to both the literature on the politics of emotion and the literature on masculinity and gender.     

frailty and debility

Drawing on empirical research from two focus groups, this article investigates the narratives and discourses that emerged around pregnancy, technology, birth and motherhood. In so doing, the article engages in some long-standing debates within feminism around embodied and maternal subjectivity, agency and identity. Seen here, the focus groups serve initially to remind us of the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the continual ambiguity of, and anxieties around, maternal subjectivity. The focus groups reconfigure these issues through a technological lens, which in turn seems to offer new spaces where agency can be (momentarily, problematically) claimed. This in turn extends existing debates in new directions through the particular framework of technology that is variously figured here as an object, as information and as imaginary digital space. All of these constructions, however, become problematic as they—despite their promises—nevertheless ultimately and profoundly return the women to an emplaced, embodied subjectivity that has been at the heart of feminist debate for so long.     

A shift in emphasis: Adolescent psychotherapy and the psychology of the self

The methodology of both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, which is that of introspection and empathy, is simply not the same as that of chemistry and physics. We are part of the system and we cannot observe without participation. Although this is a fact that we all are quite aware of, usually we treat it as an unfortunate contaminant and this then leads us to try to ignore its theoretical import. Classical psychoanalysis would do away with or minimize it by interpretation; the viewpoint of Kohut would replace it by transmuting internalizations as well as interpretations; but in psychotherapy we have an added task of assessing just how much we must work on the need for the elimination of the functional role of the therapist. To be sure, one must differentiate and clarify the so-called transference reactions related to the incestuous objects of childhood from those directed to self objects. In truth, this is an easier job in analysis, where the focus of the neurosis is enhanced and encouraged. In therapy, such clarity often is lacking or confused. The psychology of the self best allows us to determine how and when we are utilized by our patients, and to test how well they can handle our absence. The major advantage given to us by this perspective is that of being aware of the mirroring and idealizing aspects of self development.Presented as the Judith Baskin Offer Memorial Lecture. From the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training of the Michael Reese Medical Center, Chicago, October 31, 1976.also is in private practice. Received his M.D. from the University of Illinois. Main interest is psychoanalysis.