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215 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Searching for a Common Place: Thoughts on Crisis, Marginality, and Social Change

by Txetxu Aguado and Annabel Martín

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 40; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020040 - 14 Jun 2017

Viewed by 2759

This essay describes our neoliberal moment of crisis as a displacement of meaning regarding the more established notions of margin-center. Our times paradoxically ‘unite’ in that we are unwittingly governed by a financial logic that privileges personal gain over collective well-being. With this [...] Read more.

This essay describes our neoliberal moment of crisis as a displacement of meaning regarding the more established notions of margin-center. Our times paradoxically ‘unite’ in that we are unwittingly governed by a financial logic that privileges personal gain over collective well-being. With this in mind, the essay will discuss strategies for examining oppression and imagining progress that is multidimensional and intersectional and thinks about the contestatory power in political and intellectual discourses that are linked to a multi-layered, feminist-gendered perspective in order to point to avenues that might lead to incisive political transformation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

230 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Crisis and Consumption: ‘Saving’ the Poor and the Seductions of Capitalism

by Jennifer L. Fluri

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020036 - 02 Jun 2017

Viewed by 3842

Abstract

This article examines the crisis of capitalist seduction through the lens of online shopping platforms that raise funds for international assistance organizations and development celebrity advertising. Consumer-based giving has altered the commodity fetish into cliché, subsequently masking the capitalist produced crisis of endemic [...] Read more.

This article examines the crisis of capitalist seduction through the lens of online shopping platforms that raise funds for international assistance organizations and development celebrity advertising. Consumer-based giving has altered the commodity fetish into cliché, subsequently masking the capitalist produced crisis of endemic poverty and global inequality. Celebrity supported consumer-based giving and product advertising are used to illustrate the seductions of capitalism. This article argues that international assistance organizations are embedded in the substance and lifeblood of capitalisms’ dependence on inequality and poverty to generate profits/wealth. Consumer driven assistance remains a pervasive crisis hidden by seductive shopping platforms camouflaged as compassion. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

236 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Crisis, Change, and the Humanities: Parameters of Discussion

by Annabel Martín and Txetxu Aguado

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 35; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020035 - 01 Jun 2017

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Abstract

Dynamic metacritical, systemic, paradigmatic thinking about our times is a direct outcome of the work of the humanistic disciplines, for they provide us with the language to understand the operative and abusive functioning of power and inequality. The humanities also teach us that [...] Read more.

Dynamic metacritical, systemic, paradigmatic thinking about our times is a direct outcome of the work of the humanistic disciplines, for they provide us with the language to understand the operative and abusive functioning of power and inequality. The humanities also teach us that we internalize these systemic operations as new contradictory “locations”, as new experiences of space and identity, that destabilize and make more difficult our need to feel anchored in our social realities. This prefatory essay outlines a pertinent paradigmatic framing of our neoliberal context and reclaims higher education’s key role in the development of democratic traditions of civic engagement. It offers a hopeful regeneration of our times of crisis through the work of the humanities and highlights the long tradition of cultural critique already in place in gender-sensitive disciplines that opt for a reimagining of the future grounded on social change and justice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

3601 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Times of Crisis, Seeds of Modernity: Women and Popular Revolts in Modern Spain

by Sara Muñoz-Muriana

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020030 - 14 May 2017

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Abstract

In the 18th century, nations began acknowledging the presence of those who belonged to inferior classes and regarding them as the constitutive political subject of the modern state. Paradoxically, even as these marginal individuals were turned into central figures of the state’s political [...] Read more.

In the 18th century, nations began acknowledging the presence of those who belonged to inferior classes and regarding them as the constitutive political subject of the modern state. Paradoxically, even as these marginal individuals were turned into central figures of the state’s political apparatus, they plunged the notion of sovereignty into crisis as they questioned the status quo and embodied an alternative to institutional power. In this light, the present essay explores the idea of crisis and modernity in the Spanish context from a historical, spatial, and gendered perspective. Women occupy a central space as a minority collective at the margins of the citizenry. But with their action and participation in mutinies, wars and revolutions—all landmarks of state crisis—they make themselves visible and open new spaces of agency from which to disrupt and renew traditional norms. By analyzing 18th- and 19th-century newspaper articles, literary works, and a number of visual representations by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, this essay will examine the power of art to reveal how crises allow women to emerge as political subjects and to rewrite a narrative of modernity in which they take the leading role in propelling social change, influencing projects of political citizenship, and shaping a modern nation that needs to tend to all its members, making evident that crisis, while a break in the established order, is also a liberating step towards emancipation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

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3767 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

“Modern Nature”: Derek Jarman’s Garden

by Melissa Zeiger

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020022 - 12 Apr 2017

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 8160

Abstract

The queer filmmaker, artist, activist, and gardener, Derek Jarman, when diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, turned to what may seem like an unlikely form of political and aesthetic expression. His eventually world-famous garden allowed him symbolically and aesthetically to address the political issues [...] Read more.

The queer filmmaker, artist, activist, and gardener, Derek Jarman, when diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, turned to what may seem like an unlikely form of political and aesthetic expression. His eventually world-famous garden allowed him symbolically and aesthetically to address the political issues with which he had always passionately concerned himself: environmental degradation, nuclear expansion, homophobia, consumer culture, and AIDS. Each of these issues entailed a crisis of political response in the late twentieth century, and in the garden, Jarman addresses this crisis on a number of levels, but always as elements of a terminal condition without any prospect of a “cure.” Using literary analysis to examine the garden and Jarman’s writing about it, in addition to a cultural studies perspective to place these topics in a broad context, this essay undertakes a study of the garden’s codes and effects. Consulting Sarah Ensor and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, both of whom describe terminality as a temporality with its own powers and ways of being, I focus on Jarman’s efforts in what he acknowledges as a damaged, post-natural landscape. Rather than seeing crisis only as a moment of emergency, Jarman imagines other more reflective responses to crisis that, I argue, complement more interventionist approaches. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

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194 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Moving Beyond Retribution: Alternatives to Punishment in a Society Dominated by the School-to-Prison Pipeline

by Christine Miguel and Jennifer Gargano

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020015 - 07 Apr 2017

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 8150

Abstract

There is a growing national trend in which children and adolescents are funneled out of the public school system and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems—where students are treated as criminals in the schools themselves and are expected to fall into this [...] Read more.

There is a growing national trend in which children and adolescents are funneled out of the public school system and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems—where students are treated as criminals in the schools themselves and are expected to fall into this pattern rather than even attempt to seek opportunities to fulfill the ever elusive “American Dream”. There is a blatant injustice happening in our schools, places that ironically should be considered safe havens, places for knowledge, and means of escape for children who have already been failed by the system and sequestered to under-resourced, overcrowded, and over-surveilled inner cities. Focusing on the damage the public education system has caused and the ways in which policies and practices have effectively made the school-to-prison pipeline a likely trajectory for many Black and Latinx students, we hope to convey the urgency of this crisis and expose the ways in which our youth are stifled, repeatedly, by this form of systematic injustice. We will describe models of restorative justice practices—both within and beyond the classroom—and hope to convey how no matter how well intentioned, they are not adequate solutions to a phenomenon tied to neoliberal ideologies. Thus, we ultimately aim to exemplify how a feminist approach to education would radically restructure the system as we know it, truly creating a path out of this crisis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

218 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Identity, Power, and the California Welfare-Rights Struggle, 1963–1975

by Allison Puglisi

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020014 - 02 Apr 2017

Viewed by 3722

Abstract

This article explores the work of welfare-rights activists in 1960s and 70s California. These activists were mostly working-class black and some white mothers, and the majority of them were themselves welfare recipients. As welfare recipients, women of color, and working-class people, they faced [...] Read more.

This article explores the work of welfare-rights activists in 1960s and 70s California. These activists were mostly working-class black and some white mothers, and the majority of them were themselves welfare recipients. As welfare recipients, women of color, and working-class people, they faced a wave of policies and ideologies that stigmatized them, policed their behavior, and made receiving benefits increasingly difficult. These policies were but one element of a larger political crisis, wherein the California government stoked racialized and gendered fears in order to shrink the welfare state. Rather than simply acquiesce to this reality, welfare-rights groups in California refused to accept it. Though scholars have studied welfare-rights groups in Washington, D.C., Nevada, New York, and other US states, almost no attention has been given to groups in California. In this article I use state legislation, newspaper articles, organizational records, and archived interviews to illustrate how California’s welfare-rights movement challenged anti-welfare policy and ideology. I argue that they did more than simply reject punitive legislation. They emphasized childcare, rebuked middle-class complacency, questioned the primacy of the nuclear family, and dismissed gender roles. In the process, they raised crucial, enduring questions about the nature of economic-justice organizing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

248 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

“I Do, I Don’t”: The Benefits and Perils of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage in the United States—One Year Later

by Kristina B. Wolff

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020012 - 30 Mar 2017

Viewed by 8932

Abstract

In 1970, a gay male couple applied for and was given a marriage license in Minnesota. The license was eventually rescinded by court order. Forty-five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, limiting the [...] Read more.

In 1970, a gay male couple applied for and was given a marriage license in Minnesota. The license was eventually rescinded by court order. Forty-five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, limiting the federal definition of marriage to consist of one man and one woman, was unconstitutional. The result was the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of establishing the right for same-sex couples to legally marry. It outlines the benefits and costs to LGBT communities one year after the establishment of same-sex marriage in the U.S. This paper explores the limits of utilizing a rights-based approach when advocating social change. The recommendation is for LGBT individuals, communities and allies to shift tactics to adopt a capabilities approach to organizing and mobilizing people, groups, and organizations around issues of injustice. A capabilities framework addresses the complexities of individual and community needs while providing a foundation for coalition building and lasting positive social change. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

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148 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperEssay

One Message Leading to Another

by John Berger

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020034 - 26 May 2017

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Abstract

The wonderful American poet, Adrienne Rich, pointed out in a recent lecture that: “This year a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 1 out of every 136 residents of the United States is behind bars—many in jails, unconvicted.”[...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

163 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperEssay

Action, Passion, Crises

by Denis Goldberg

Humanities 2017, 6(2), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020024 - 18 Apr 2017

Viewed by 2451

Abstract

The title of this speech is taken from a remark of the renowned Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “When we were young our hearts were touched with ﬁre...[and as]...life is action and passion, it is required of [one] that [one] should share the [...] Read more.

The title of this speech is taken from a remark of the renowned Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “When we were young our hearts were touched with ﬁre...[and as]...life is action and passion, it is required of [one] that [one] should share the passion and action of [one’s] time, at the peril of being judged not to have lived [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation)

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