Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231186661
Sian Supski
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Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188186
M. Warin, Natali Valdez
This article explores the circulation of #MyBodyMyChoice in a series of deeply divisive political debates – abortion rights and mask wearing during COVID-19. We trace the appropriation of this slogan for differing ideological purposes, and its shifts from collective political action concerning pro-choice to the rights of individuals to refuse to comply with mask mandates. Underpinning the values of each is a white liberal racism that operates to uphold dominant gender, class and economic structures.
{"title":"#My(white)BodyMyChoice","authors":"M. Warin, Natali Valdez","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188186","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the circulation of #MyBodyMyChoice in a series of deeply divisive political debates – abortion rights and mask wearing during COVID-19. We trace the appropriation of this slogan for differing ideological purposes, and its shifts from collective political action concerning pro-choice to the rights of individuals to refuse to comply with mask mandates. Underpinning the values of each is a white liberal racism that operates to uphold dominant gender, class and economic structures.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"71 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46998059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188178
C. S. Veric
What is everyday life like under a militarized pandemic where the brute force of the state is deployed to contain an outbreak? What lifeworld is generated against the backdrop of authoritarian control? What holds us together when our lives are quarantined? I will answer these questions by looking at the practice of mass listening. In particular, I look at a recorded prayer to provide a picture of an island life. In this essay, I call attention to what may be termed the vernacular will to life in a carceral regime in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the oratio imperata as a case study, I think more broadly about the meaning of freedom, restraint, and contingency. Namely, I describe the lifeforce buried in everyday acts of praying wherein repressive social forces, be they the police or religious authorities, come to enable world-making possibilities for ordinary lives in paradoxical ways. I argue that the recorded prayer helps us to grasp the dynamics of repression and agency. Using memoir and ethnography, I propose the theory of vernacular biopoetics to explore the possibility of freedom in a carceral condition wherein the constriction of spaces becomes an opening for alternative forms of imagination.
{"title":"Praying in the pandemic, and after","authors":"C. S. Veric","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188178","url":null,"abstract":"What is everyday life like under a militarized pandemic where the brute force of the state is deployed to contain an outbreak? What lifeworld is generated against the backdrop of authoritarian control? What holds us together when our lives are quarantined? I will answer these questions by looking at the practice of mass listening. In particular, I look at a recorded prayer to provide a picture of an island life. In this essay, I call attention to what may be termed the vernacular will to life in a carceral regime in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the oratio imperata as a case study, I think more broadly about the meaning of freedom, restraint, and contingency. Namely, I describe the lifeforce buried in everyday acts of praying wherein repressive social forces, be they the police or religious authorities, come to enable world-making possibilities for ordinary lives in paradoxical ways. I argue that the recorded prayer helps us to grasp the dynamics of repression and agency. Using memoir and ethnography, I propose the theory of vernacular biopoetics to explore the possibility of freedom in a carceral condition wherein the constriction of spaces becomes an opening for alternative forms of imagination.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"94 - 102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46944455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188176
G. Therborn
This is a global comparative analysis of the social, political and economic experiences, effects and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of it was written during an early stage of the pandemic and captures some of the initial reactions of competitive international panic. It demonstrates the new class structuration resulting from the management of the viral onslaught. It distinguishes coping and failing states of the pandemic world, and discusses the reasons for them. It highlights the widespread and rapid abandonment of neoliberal economic policies, a change spearheaded by the former vanguard of neoliberalism, the USA and the UK. The end of neoliberalism is also related to the change of the political economy of the world, from capitalist globalization to imperial and national geopolitics. The decisive reason for the turn was the realization by the US elite in the 2010s that China was winning the game of competitive market globalization. In the new game of geopolitics state interests, state security and state power are paramount. This process had started earlier but was accentuated during the pandemic, and accelerated with the Ukraine war, which also has clarified that the new geopolitical era may be the beginning of the endgame of the semi-millennial western domination of the world. The western powers draw closer together, after the early pandemic free-for-all, while the rest of world increasingly asserts its independence. The article ends with a discussion of the post-pandemic near future in terms of historical post-crisis parallels from European history. Finding ‘1945’ and ‘1932’ inappropriate, in contrast to early hopes and assessments, the conclusion is that the current world of the North most resembles a before- rather than an after-moment, the summer of 1914, when the world ‘sleepwalked’ into the mass slaughter of the First World War.
{"title":"The pandemic experience and the post-pandemic world prospects","authors":"G. Therborn","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188176","url":null,"abstract":"This is a global comparative analysis of the social, political and economic experiences, effects and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of it was written during an early stage of the pandemic and captures some of the initial reactions of competitive international panic. It demonstrates the new class structuration resulting from the management of the viral onslaught. It distinguishes coping and failing states of the pandemic world, and discusses the reasons for them. It highlights the widespread and rapid abandonment of neoliberal economic policies, a change spearheaded by the former vanguard of neoliberalism, the USA and the UK. The end of neoliberalism is also related to the change of the political economy of the world, from capitalist globalization to imperial and national geopolitics. The decisive reason for the turn was the realization by the US elite in the 2010s that China was winning the game of competitive market globalization. In the new game of geopolitics state interests, state security and state power are paramount. This process had started earlier but was accentuated during the pandemic, and accelerated with the Ukraine war, which also has clarified that the new geopolitical era may be the beginning of the endgame of the semi-millennial western domination of the world. The western powers draw closer together, after the early pandemic free-for-all, while the rest of world increasingly asserts its independence. The article ends with a discussion of the post-pandemic near future in terms of historical post-crisis parallels from European history. Finding ‘1945’ and ‘1932’ inappropriate, in contrast to early hopes and assessments, the conclusion is that the current world of the North most resembles a before- rather than an after-moment, the summer of 1914, when the world ‘sleepwalked’ into the mass slaughter of the First World War.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"76 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47733578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-13DOI: 10.1177/07255136231186642
Sophie Chao
This article revisits French sociologist Marcel Mauss’ notion of ‘techniques of the body’ to analyze the emergence of corporeal and behavioral norms instituted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Centering its analysis on the early stages of COVID’s global spread, the article examines a range of everyday, micro-practices that reveal how the pandemic changed our awareness, uses, and assessments of our own and others’ bodies. In a context where to not touch was to care, people often struggled to find a balance between maintaining social civility and sustaining collective health. Failure to adapt the body to pandemic conditions, or instances of COVID faux-pas, resulted in discomfort, embarrassment, or annoyance on the part of those who perceived this behavior as irresponsible, dangerous, and selfish. Changing bodily practices thus became subject to judgment in ways that sometimes obscured the uneven distribution of risk and protection afforded to differently privileged or vulnerable human communities as they grappled with the uncertain phenomenologies of pandemic living and dying. COVID-19 corporealities, both fleshly and virtual, thus reveal the conjoined articulation of the social, biological, cultural, moral, and psychological in our bodily movements, expressions, and assessments. In contrast to Mauss’ theorization, many techniques of the body in the Covidscape were experienced as new, contextual, shifting, and improvised. They spoke to necessity and challenge of articulating a different relationship to the world and to others, enacted in the minute and mundane practices of everyday life, through which macro-level processes and forces are embodied and evaluated.
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We discuss the way the early quarantine period during the coronavirus crisis illuminated some aspects of previous daily life in downtown São Paulo. Changes in our surroundings and withdrawal into confinement elicited a new relationship to the senses and to imagination. With that, it became apparent the degree to which the free use of these faculties is repressed by violence and inequality, as they are usually manifest in the city center. We explore the idea that some of the changes in social interaction, as they became widespread during the pandemic, were already prefigured in the relationship between social classes in this part of town. We then discuss the dependency this has on the spacialization of social inequalities in the urban fabric.
{"title":"Outside now: A postcard from quarantine in downtown São Paulo, 2020","authors":"Matheus Capovilla Romanetto, Isabela Capovilla Romanetto","doi":"10.1177/07255136231186650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231186650","url":null,"abstract":"We discuss the way the early quarantine period during the coronavirus crisis illuminated some aspects of previous daily life in downtown São Paulo. Changes in our surroundings and withdrawal into confinement elicited a new relationship to the senses and to imagination. With that, it became apparent the degree to which the free use of these faculties is repressed by violence and inequality, as they are usually manifest in the city center. We explore the idea that some of the changes in social interaction, as they became widespread during the pandemic, were already prefigured in the relationship between social classes in this part of town. We then discuss the dependency this has on the spacialization of social inequalities in the urban fabric.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"89 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44196320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231179793
Joshua M Makalintal
As the discipline of the social sciences finds itself at a crossroads hedged in by the remnants of empire, with the ‘decolonisation’ of its conceptual and methodological foundations being the only productive path forward, the question is no longer whether to take this route, but how. In their recent book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood offer a stimulating and resourceful guide to this objective, setting forth a provocative approach in disrupting and radically reinterpreting dominant sociological understandings of modern world society. The following book review essay discusses the authors’ interventions by highlighting their interrogations of the canonical figures who would shape the problematic trajectory of the discipline for generations. I assess the book’s core argument of advocating for a need to recentre imperial encounters and relations at an explanatory level in the shaping of capitalist modernity, concluding with considerations for a reflexive and epistemic reconstruction of the sociological canon.
随着社会科学学科发现自己处于被帝国残余包围的十字路口，其概念和方法基础的“非殖民化”是唯一富有成效的前进道路，问题不再是是否走这条路，而是如何走这条路。在他们的新书《殖民主义和现代社会理论》中，Gurminder K Bhambra和John Holmwood为实现这一目标提供了一个令人振奋和足智多谋的指导，提出了一种颠覆和彻底重新解释现代世界社会主流社会学理解的挑衅方法。下面的书评文章讨论了作者的干预，突出了他们对权威人物的质疑，这些人物将塑造几代人的学科问题轨迹。我评估了这本书的核心论点，即主张在资本主义现代性形成的解释层面上重新审视帝国遭遇和关系的必要性，并以对社会学经典的反思性和认识论重建的考虑作为结论。
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231179796
C. Barker
Hanna Pitkin explains that Arendt’s defense of collective political action tends to reify and mystify an opposing concept Arendt calls ‘the Social’. Was Arendt actually right about the rise of ‘the Social’? Does the deep-set global mass entertainment culture tend to sap action even when it purportedly celebrates it? And what can viewing publics and counter-publics tell us about the meaning and reception of ‘the Social’, especially in this massively online era? This article surveys different ways of thinking about the basic problem presented by American popular action cinema, and especially big-budget Hollywood action films, through an Arendtian lens. In presenting this overview, the article looks to reorient traditional philosophical concerns about screen violence and its censorship, and to offer a holistic reappraisal of ‘the Social’ and ‘action’ by placing democratic theory in closer dialogue with film studies.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231182221
A. Feenberg
Ian Angus’s Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World renews a trend that was influential in the 1960s and 1970s. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Karel Kosik, Enzo Paci and the Yugoslavian ‘Praxis’ group opened Marxism to western philosophy in this period. Although phenomenology plays a lesser role in his work, Herbert Marcuse should also be included in this trend. Edmund Husserl developed phenomenology as a descriptive science of lived experience, the so-called ‘lifeworld’. These phenomenological Marxists, writing at a time of rising social conflict, argued that Marxism required a comparable theory to explain the revolution in consciousness happening around them. Angus’s (2021) goal is ‘to develop a phenomenological Marxism adequate to the cultural and ecological crisis of the twenty-first century’. His approach is based on a critique of formalism in science and social life. Both Marx and Husserl contrast lived experience with the formalized order of modern society. The task is to recover the meanings borne by experience in the face of the all-conquering abstractions of capitalist modernity. In this review I will articulate Angus’s approach with Lukács’s critique of reification, which underlies my own work on science and technology. Reification refers to the reduction of social relations to ‘things’ (res), that is, to impersonal interactions mediated by law-like social systems. The model for reification in this sense is the reduction of the social relation between producers and consumers to the exchange of money for goods on the market. The parallel Angus identifies between formalism in science (Husserl) and
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