Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.     

Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory.     

Corporate power in the agro-food system and the consumer food environment in South Africa

This contribution maps the South African agro-food system with a focus on corporate ownership and power, inspired by value chain work applied to the food system as a a whole. Corporations tend to dominate some nodes, for example input supply, grain storage and handling, and feedlots. Other nodes have a corporate core but with a wide number of smaller economic actors, for example agricultural production, food manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and consumer food service. This wide number of actors points to possible areas of intervention to boost livelihoods by supporting their economic activities. The paper considers the influence of corporations in structuring consumer perceptions on food quality and health, from input into apparently neutral dietary-based guidelines to advertising. Financialisation in the food system, including the institutionalisation of share ownership and the rise of agri-investment companies, and the multi-nationalisation of South African agro-food capital especially into Africa, have implications for the ability of the nation state to regulate activities in the agro-food system. The paper concludes with some recommendations for further work.     

The Japanese consumer finance market and its institutional changes since the 1980s

Abstract

We assert, in this article, that the joint transformation of public perception about households’ over-indebtedness and financial deregulation had important implications on the government decision to reform overall consumer credit between 2005 and 2010. On the one hand, the development of collective actions by groups of lawyers to defend borrowers from moneylenders’ abusive practices represents a source of change in the public opinion about over-indebted individuals in the context of long economic stagnation. A systematic press article analysis from 1977 to 2006 shows that the rising number of these collective actions since the early 1990s may have gradually increased the political salience of social issues related to the unsecure loan market. On the other hand, financial deregulation has been a source of change by allowing banks to enter the consumer finance market since the early 2000s. Banks entry into this market transformed the logic of complementarity among traditional consumer credit actors (Shinpan, credit card companies and sarakin) in a general context of legal consumers’ protection reinforcement. Thus, evolution of Japanese consumer finance's regulation is particularly relevant to illustrate the forces of institutional change and its consequences.     

我国台湾地区消费者权益司法保护方法简析

消费者权益是一种分散的、弱小R权益,对其进行司法保护需要建立特别的诉讼制度。我国台湾地区借鉴西方国家的先进经验,建立了小额诉讼、选定当事人诉讼、团体诉讼和民事公诉制度,形成了消费者、消费者保护团体和政府共同参与维护消费者权益诉讼的司法保护体系。我们应当借鉴台湾地区的作法,完善我国消费者权益司法保护制度。     

我国农村消费市场存在的问题及其对策

目前,由于农民的收入低且增长缓慢,消费观念滞后,以及农村商品结构不合理、基础设施落后等原因,使我国农村市场存在消费不旺等问题。因此,我们必须有针对性地采取措施,提高农民的消费水平,以促进国民经济持续、健康而快速地发展。     

Experiencing Critique<Superscript>⋆</Superscript>

Over the past two centuries, criticism has assumed an indispensable role in the production of truth in many academic contexts. Furthermore, a dominant conception of critique emerged out of disciplinary truth regimes – evident as much in right wing think tanks as in critical theories. This ‘grammar of critique’ requires critics to judge specific contexts against founded criteria. However, in an epistemological ethos beset by obdurate uncertainty, where disciplinarity is increasingly under attack, a judgmental grammar faces intractable challenges. For one thing, intransigent ambiguities defy the silencing required to achieve certainty, or universal agreement, on ‘founded criteria’. This predicament creates a distinctive semantic disquiet and a unique opportunity to prize critique loose from its previously privileged grammar. Allegorically referring to Derrida’s images of hospitality, this paper offers a different grammar of critique as an experience of imagined prospects, a promise that rallies against ossified thought systems of the now. This experience is structured through the impossible to the extent that it defies absolute definition, finitely encounters infinite possibilities, involves preconceptions, and opens critics up to promises that never fully arrive. As such, critical experiences invite existential anticipations whose contours, paradoxically, are imagined from within, and yet promise an escape from, local historical circumstances.A version of this paper was presented at Birkbeck, University of London, 24th September, 2004. I would like to thank Peter Fitzpatrick, Claire Valier, Ronnie Lippens, Costas Douzinas and Julia Chryssostalis for their helpful comments.     

投资者到金融消费者的角色嬗变

金融产品的日益抽象化、复杂化和金融交易模式的日益综合化、专业化，导致金融市场投资者群体的身份转化与角色嬗变。非专业投资者或者大众投资者逐渐与消费者融合，成为一类新的市场主体即金融消费者。金融消费者是为满足非营业性的个体金融需要而购买或使用金融商品或者享受金融服务的自然人。对于金融消费者存在其中的法律关系，需要建构体现特殊宗旨或调整方法的法律规范。我国可以在保留现有证券、银行、保险、信托分业监管和分业立法的格局下，建构以保护金融消费者权益为核心的金融服务法或金融消费者权益保护法。     

European Human Rights Law and the Normalisation of the ‘Closed Material Procedure’: Limit or Source?

Once a legal abnormality that was criticised on human rights grounds, the closed material procedure (CMP) has now become the main mechanism for dealing with allegedly sensitive security information in the UK. This article considers the role of European human rights law in that process. It argues that the CMP can be conceptualised as the product of human rights law, which has developed so as to legalise and normalise its use, and that this process is symptomatic of a deeper inter‐relationship between human rights law and the preservation of states' security interests, which renders the former inherently unsuitable for dealing with security phenomena.