A project for research on the peasant revolution of our time

Up to the present my work has centred on economic aspects of the peasantry. Starting from an analysis of the nature of collective farms (kolkhoz), which I found to consist of peasant agricultural units agglomerated rather than really structured, I was led to the study of peasant economy itself: its internal organisation, its specific rationality, its relations with the surrounding economy. The results of my enquiries brought home to me, on the one hand, the capacity of the peasant unit to adapt to the different economic systems in which it exists, and on the other hand, the pervasive stamp the peasantry impresses upon these systems. Accordingly, I believe it would be valuable at this point to study the consequences of the peasant imprint in the social and political as well as economic spheres, particularly in the socialist countries. Of course I myself could undertake only a small part of the research programme sketched in the following pages.     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.     

the scent of memory: strangers,our own and others

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’ and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.     

与时俱进:从小康到全面小康

全面建设小康社会的目标是对邓小平提出的小康社会目标的继承和发展,具有与时俱进的实践精神和理论勇气。这一目标正确把握了时代的要求,立足于我国社会主义建设和发展的阶段性特征,多维度地阐释了全面建设小康社会目标的深刻内涵。这是一种对邓小平全面发展思想层次递进的新的文明的发展观。     

Other forms of conviviality: The best and least of which is our daily care and the host of which is our collaborative work

In this collaboratively written essay, artists Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos take a queer materialist feminist approach to the entanglement of dependency and reproductive labor, disability, intimacy, and the impossibility of exchanging incommensurables. The text merges the authors' experiences receiving and providing one another care with their artistic practices, and includes instructive performance scores for past, rather than future, events.     

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

This paper explores the use of European erotic death imagery produced in the Death and the Maiden (D&M) genre in two time periods. It compares and contrasts D&M imagery produced by the Germanic-speaking proto/early-Reformation artists, Hans Baldung (alias Grien) (c1484–1545), Niklaus Manuel (known as Deutsch) (c1484–1530) and Sebald Beham (known as Hans Sebald Beham) (1500–1550) which highlighted the folly, futility and transience of earthly vanities during the transition from Roman Catholic to Protestant Christianity, with contemporary calendar art produced by Cofani Funebri (from 2003) and Lindner (from 2010) which advertise coffins manufactured in the increasingly secular countries of Italy and Poland. Drawing on Biblical narrative, Augustinian theology and European socio-cultural perceptions of gender, this paper argues that these D&M images are highly eroticised and place woman as signifiers of transcient life (vanitas) and earthly pleasure (voluptas), juxtaposing her with a masculine/male representation of death; Death being imaged as an individual in the sixteenth century, and as a coffin in the contemporary works. The paper also contextualises the imagery in terms of traditional European Christian notions of life and death, as informed by the Biblical Fall narrative, with its elucidations of sin, concupiscence and punishment. It thus asserts that both socio-cultural and religious attitudes towards gender are highly significant in D&M imagery and indeed in terms of the artworks, argues that the masculine signifier of Death can be placed as Adam, whilst the Maiden, as fecund life, represents Eve. However, the overt eroticism of both sets of artworks also allows for a reading that draws on Messaris' [(1997). Visual persuasion; the role of images in advertising. London: Sage] notion that visual images ‘make a persuasive communication due to iconicity; the emotional response to the visual image presented’. Thus, this paper contrasts D&M imagery produced over 400 years apart to examine consciously erotic gendered thanantological allegories of women as vanitas and voluptas, and the male/masculine as representations of Death.     

debilitating times: compulsory ablebodiedness and white privilege in theory and practice

In this paper I take up a critical position in regard to the theme of debility around which this collection is framed. I argue that theorisations of ‘debility’ do little to progress theory and policy in regard to disability and share many of the problems inherent to the social model. I also suggest that the theorisation of debility is rooted in and reinforces ablebodied privilege. I begin with a critical analysis of the social model of disability and explore the dualisms by which it either negates the body altogether or can only conceive the disabled body in negative terms. I then go on to explore how Puar’s work on debility continues this negation of the disabled body. From this position I use the work of Inahara to excavate the foundations of ablebodied privilege. In Inahara’s work gender is the analytic starting point, but for me white privilege is a much more effective mechanism through which to understand the impact and reproduction of ablebodied privilege—what McRuer refers to as ‘compulsory ablebodiedness’—which I argue underpins Puar’s work. I conclude with some reflections upon how a critical analysis of ablebodied privilege might function and I reiterate its importance for a critical theory that goes beyond the mere repetition of binary structures of ablebodiedness and disability.     

Queer love economies: Making trans/feminist film in precarious times

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.     

The Capitalocene,Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.     

The lives of our mad mothers: Aging and contemporary performance

This paper investigates representations of aging in contemporary British and Irish theatre. The turn towards portraits of female, as opposed to male, aging in theatre, popular television comedy, and literature is notable. It is the purpose of this paper, therefore, to excavate the politics that lie beneath this cultural development. While, of course, older women have long populated the stage, it is the contention of this article that it is recent years that one can witness a concern to stage particular aspects of the lived experiences of older women's lives in contemporary British and Irish society. Through an examination of stereotype, comedy, illness roles, acting, intergenerational heritage, tragedy, and politics, this paper seeks to better understand the politics of staging age.     

Queering it up,strutting our threads,and baring our souls: genderqueer individuals negotiating social and felt sense of gender

This article draws from data of a year-long qualitative study on the lived experiences of genderqueer individuals. Two critical questions helped aide in thinking about the lived experiences of genderqueer individuals: (1) What does it mean to claim a genderqueer identity? and (2) How is genderqueer experienced, embodied, and understood? The principal work of José Muñoz, Gayle Salamon, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Jasbir Puar was used to support the theoretical frame and qualitative data analysis. What makes a person genderqueer is not clearly defined, but is organic and personal, and brings forth negotiations of social and felt sense of gender, and internal and external oppression. Specifically, the ways in which genderqueer individuals negotiate their identity related to the social construction of gender, the felt sense of gender, and gender as becoming are analyzed and discussed.