Material ambitions: self-help and Victorian literature

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2023.2163764
Leeann Hunter
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

sexological thinking. And she too is keen to resist the elision of empire, in part to illustrate that heteronormality is the effect of imperial formations, in part to re-orient the direction of current academic practices. Here she is unequivocal: “I argue that the ongoing dominance of the category of sexuality in mainstream queer approaches, to the neglect of race and empire, is an inheritance of this deliberate separation of sexuality from the racial-imperial conditions of its production” (92). If Patil’s (anti)imperial sociology of sex and gender is aimed at challenging the presumptive whiteness of contemporary critical methodologies, it is also intended as a thoroughgoing critique of the northern hemispheric presumptions of those practices. From the start of the book, she takes up the centrality of global south perspectives to any truly disruptive approach – which raises interesting questions about the role of a vertical-axis view in the context of a horizontal, “webbed connectivities” study. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the book doesn’t address the interesting collisions and convergences that result from acknowledging both the significance of cross-hatched spaces and the enduring machinery of north-south grids and metropole-colony configurations. That said, she saves her real firepower for the last chapter, “The Reordering of Empire and the American Invention of Gender,” which brings us effectively back to Lugones’ coloniality-of-gender paradigm. Here Patil offers a bracing account of how crucial US settler colonial contexts are for understanding how sociological thinkers and the discipline as a whole took up gender, and how gender, with its implicit bias toward anglophone usages and meanings, became enshrined in – and as – a global, universal category. The implication is that gender, as a category of analysis, is itself a carrier of the coloniality of power. This is also not a new claim, though some of the most celebrated gender theorists in the west (Joan Scott, Judith Butler) have recognized it belatedly in terms of their own scholarly production. That is to say, they proceeded for decades to deploy their conceptual frameworks without taking the imperial sociology Patil has materialized into consideration. Given the global impact of their work, Patil is right to call out this hemispheric bias and to make visible the continuous influence of such thinking from the pre-Enlightenment period down to the present, and to remind us what the dangers are of disappearing empire and its highly racial and racializing histories in our practices. While it is sobering to acknowledge such reminders are needed, this book makes clear what the stakes are if we do not continue to foreground the ideological and material work of imperialism, past and present.
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物质野心:自助与维多利亚文学
sexological思考。她也热衷于抵制对帝国的省略,一方面是为了说明异类现象是帝国形成的结果,另一方面是为了重新定位当前学术实践的方向。在这里,她毫不含糊地说:“我认为,在主流酷儿研究方法中,性范畴的持续主导地位,以及对种族和帝国的忽视,是这种有意将性与其产生的种族-帝国条件分离开来的继承”(92)。如果帕蒂尔关于性和性别的(反)帝国社会学旨在挑战当代批判方法的假定白人,那么它也打算作为对那些实践的北半球假定的彻底批判。从书的一开始,她就把全球南方视角的中心地位置于任何真正具有颠覆性的方法中——这提出了一个有趣的问题,即在水平的“网状连接”研究背景下,垂直轴视角的作用。当然,这两者并不是相互排斥的,但这本书并没有提到有趣的碰撞和融合,这些碰撞和融合来自于承认交叉空间的重要性,以及南北网格和大都市殖民地结构的持久机制。也就是说,她在最后一章“帝国的重新排序和美国对性别的发明”中保留了真正的力量,这一章有效地将我们带回了卢戈内斯的性别殖民主义范式。在这里,帕蒂尔提供了一个令人振奋的描述,说明美国定居者殖民背景对于理解社会学思想家和整个学科如何接受性别是多么重要,以及性别是如何以其对英语使用和意义的隐性偏见,被奉为全球普遍范畴的。言下之意是,性别作为一种分析范畴,本身就是权力殖民性的载体。这也不是一个新的主张,尽管西方一些最著名的性别理论家(琼·斯科特(Joan Scott)、朱迪思·巴特勒(Judith Butler))在他们自己的学术成果中认识到了这一点,但为时已晚。也就是说,他们几十年来一直在部署他们的概念框架,而没有考虑到帕蒂尔已经具体化的帝国社会学。考虑到他们的工作对全球的影响,帕蒂尔正确地指出了这种半球偏见,并使这种思想从启蒙运动前时期到现在的持续影响变得可见,并提醒我们消失的帝国及其在我们的实践中高度种族化和种族化的历史的危险。虽然承认需要这样的提醒是清醒的,但这本书清楚地表明,如果我们不继续突出帝国主义过去和现在的意识形态和物质工作,后果将是什么。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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Unremarkable as “the bridge … or the butcher’s wife”: pregnancy, illegitimacy, and realism in Ellen Wood’s A Tale of Sin Fictions of depersonalization: inauthentic feeling at the fin-de-siècle Postsecularism, burial technologies, and Dracula Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer A club of “murder-fanciers”: Thomas De Quincey’s essays “On Murder” and consuming violence in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
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