Week 4 Communication, Community, and the Body Politic

Question 1

Liberal feminism (past)

Answer 1

To transform society by incorporating women, creating awareness of inequalities. And producing laws and policies

Question 2

Radical feminism (current)

Answer 2

To dismantle and rebuild social structures and practices for equality

Question 3

Radical feminism (current)

Answer 3

To dismantle and rebuild social structures and practices for equality

Question 4

Similarities between liberal and radical feminism

Answer 4

Viewed gender as preexisting

Question 5

New form of feminism

Answer 5

Views gender as performative and productive of power relations

Question 6

How can the new form of feminism produce power relations in different ways?

Answer 6

• Linguistically embedded
• Co-constructed with techno-science
• Co-produced by colonizer and colonized
• Internet enabled

Question 7

New form of feminism can produce a power relation by organizing for social change and justice in what types of feminisms?

Answer 7

• Poststructural
• Techno-feminist
• Postcolonial
• Transnational feminism

Question 8

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)

Answer 8

Power, sexuality, communication

Question 9

Queer theorists acknowledge its negative history but changes it to change the wt that we think about sexuality

What does “queer” challenge?

Answer 9

Binary way of thinking about sexualities

Queer embrace non-normative, antiessentialist way of sexual identity

Question 10

Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

Unconscious fears and deliberate weaponization of gender

Answer 11

• “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

Question 12

Nations are a ______ that evolve over time

Answer 12

Cultural construct

Not natural, are result of historical processes

Question 13

Before the nation state

Answer 13

• Religious communities: multi-ethnic, geographic diversity
• Dynastic realm: monarchies

Question 14

Main characteristics of nation/nationalities as a cultural construct

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

Capitalism/ Printing/ Language

Answer 15

• Decline of Latin as dominant language of elites
• Impact of reformation: reaching people in their vernacular languages
• Spread of vernacular languages for administrative purposes

Question 16

Print-Capitalism

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

Key ideas

Answer 17

• Nations are cultural constructs
• History is contested
• The public sphere evolved over time

Question 18

1619 Project

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What is the public sphere? (Habermas)

Answer 19

• 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)

Question 20

Public opinion (Habermas)

Answer 20

• Refers to functions of criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exercises

Question 21

Public sphere mediates between ______ and _____

Answer 21

State; society

Question 22

Public sphere is critical ideal of inclusive, rational and undistorted _____

Answer 22

Discussion

Question 23

Public sphere is the condition for what?

Answer 23

Democratic self-government

Question 24

How did public sphere evolve?

Answer 24

• 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”

Question 25

Criticism, who is excluded?

Answer 25

• Working class
• Women
• Ethnic and racial groups
• Intersectional identities

Question 26

Challenge I: Refeudalism

Answer 26

Public communication shaped by political organization and lobbies, performed in front of an audience instead of enacted

Question 27

Challenge II: Social exclusion

Answer 27

Dominated by white, affluent, male elites

Question 28

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”

Answer 28

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