Week 4 Communication, Community, and the Body Politic Flashcards
Liberal feminism (past)
To transform society by incorporating women, creating awareness of inequalities. And producing laws and policies
Radical feminism (current)
To dismantle and rebuild social structures and practices for equality
Radical feminism (current)
To dismantle and rebuild social structures and practices for equality
Similarities between liberal and radical feminism
Viewed gender as preexisting
New form of feminism
Views gender as performative and productive of power relations
How can the new form of feminism produce power relations in different ways?
- Linguistically embedded
- Co-constructed with techno-science
- Co-produced by colonizer and colonized
- Internet enabled
New form of feminism can produce a power relation by organizing for social change and justice in what types of feminisms?
- Poststructural
- Techno-feminist
- Postcolonial
- Transnational feminism
Gender studies is a critical approach to the analysis of relation between gender and with what other things? And of the intersection of these relations with other hierarchies of power (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, age, disability)
Power, sexuality, communication
Queer theorists acknowledge its negative history but changes it to change the wt that we think about sexuality
What does “queer” challenge?
Binary way of thinking about sexualities
Queer embrace non-normative, antiessentialist way of sexual identity
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
- Gender is a empty signifier because it is absorbing wildly different ideas of what threatens the world from social history and political discourse
- Gender is important because it exists in everyday imagination, way of living
- Syntax is putting elements of language together to make sense of the world
Unconscious fears and deliberate weaponization of gender
- “This phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions”
- Laplanche: primal fantasies + cultural codes = ideology
Nations are a ______ that evolve over time
Cultural construct
Not natural, are result of historical processes
Before the nation state
- Religious communities: multi-ethnic, geographic diversity
- Dynastic realm: monarchies
Main characteristics of nation/nationalities as a cultural construct
- Imagined: communities are not face-to-face, mediated
- Limited: encompasses a particular group of people
- Sovereign: not created by religion, but result of self declaration
- Communal: horizontal comradeship
Capitalism/ Printing/ Language
- Decline of Latin as dominant language of elites
- Impact of reformation: reaching people in their vernacular languages
- Spread of vernacular languages for administrative purposes
Print-Capitalism
- Access to knowledge
- Unified fields of exchange and communication in languages other than Latin
- Created fixity of language
- Channeled political power
- Result: evolution of national communications often bound by dominant language and culture
Key ideas
- Nations are cultural constructs
- History is contested
- The public sphere evolved over time
1619 Project
R examines US history through lens of slavery. 1619 is when slaves where first brought to the US and therefore can claim it as the birth year of the US
What is the public sphere? (Habermas)
- Domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed
- Access is open in principle to all citizens
- Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to the coercion; guaranteed that they may assemble and unite freely and express and publicize their opinions freely
- Larger public: means of dissemination (to spread) and influence (media)
Public opinion (Habermas)
- Refers to functions of criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exercises
Public sphere mediates between ______ and _____
State; society
Public sphere is critical ideal of inclusive, rational and undistorted _____
Discussion
Public sphere is the condition for what?
Democratic self-government
How did public sphere evolve?
- Feudal ruler: representative publicness
- 18th century: bourgeois elite displaces aristocracy and discusses issues of common concern
- Late 19th and early 20th century: demise of critical public sphere and emergence of “manufactured publicity”
Criticism, who is excluded?
- Working class
- Women
- Ethnic and racial groups
- Intersectional identities
Challenge I: Refeudalism
Public communication shaped by political organization and lobbies, performed in front of an audience instead of enacted
Challenge II: Social exclusion
Dominated by white, affluent, male elites
Who said that “The main point of difference between Habermas and his “exclusion critics” is whether the power structures that lead to social exclusion are ‘always there’, unavoidable and ever-present”
Wessler
Also said that as Habermas contends, exclusion can be redressed through self-transformation in order to come closer to the ideal version of public debate
