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On niqabs and surgical masks: a trajectory of covered faces
Get PDFThe face is pivotal in our cultural practices and language, as well as a central topic of debate in the realm of society: the early 2010s were marked by a diatribe around Islamic facial covering, both in Arabo-Persian countries and in the West and, today, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics all over the globe brought another facial supplement to the discussion — the surgical mask. Niqabs and surgical masks have more in common than their function of covering the face: they are united by their image of Otherness, related to Middle- and Far-Asian countries, but also to a project of transcendence of our natural condition. Saniotis (2012) analyses the matter of Transhumanism and Islam as problems of body techniques which, like the two systems, meet at their roots: our analysis adds to his investigation by examining face veiling and facial covering as transhuman praxes, both concerning the discursive and narrative levels of the Greimasian theory reaching beyond their cultural meanings, while also debating the matters of Otherness and Alterity emerging from those supplements, utilising the socio-semiotic works of Oliveira and Landowski as our framework of analysis. The article reflects on the manners in which both objects, the niqab and the surgical mask, operate through similar enunciative mechanisms and construct similar narrative utterances; nevertheless, culture invests polemic contracts in these objects, creating a ‘false binary’ system around them, which is largely emerging from their plastic configuration. Through our analysis, a series of ‘false binaries’ — such as religion and technology — are explored with the goal of reflecting on the assimilation and rejection of cultural customs and the manners in which the many goals of transcendence, divine or scientific, are centred around the control of the bodies and the emergence of authoritative orders that fix subjects in thematic roles
The varsity drag: gender, sexuality and cross-dressing at the University of Cambridge, 1850-1950
Get PDFThe records of student societies show that cross-dressing was a very popular practice at Cambridge University from the second half of the nineteenth century not only in drama but at a wide range of social events. Male and female students were segregated from one another in single-sex colleges because of the perceived moral dangers of co-education. One result of this was that plays were acted entirely by men or by women. Men’s performances of female glamour were sexualized in ways that appeared to confirm cross-sex desire but also contained the potential for flirtation with same-sex eroticism. Some student male actors began to accentuate knowingly queer elements of cross-dressing during the 1920s at a time when homosexuality was becoming more widely discussed in association with gender inversion. The authorities, meanwhile, had become less worried about preventing romantic liaisons between members of the opposite sex than they were about the possibility of same-sex scandals. Drama societies that recruited from across the University began to debate the admission of women members as a way of preventing the student stage from becoming associated with homosexuality and effeminacy. Productions in which men and women only performed as their own sex restored an appearance of heterosexual normality. Cross-dressing had a long afterlife in burlesque reviews in which the audience could be led to understand that it was camp homosexuality that was being parodied
The G20: accelerating the transition to a global circular economy
No full textThis book collects contributions from international leading experts on how the Italian Presidency of the G20 in 2021 could advance a renewed global governance agenda. The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted every nation in the world, highlighting how globally interconnected we are. To mitigate the health, social and economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis, the world needs effective global responses. However, multilateral cooperation has been facing dramatic headwinds before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The G20 could play a key role in revitalizing multilateral cooperation, by pushing for new ways and means to deal with global challenges. In this context, the authors explore four key areas which would require fresh global coordination: global trade, digitalization, demographic patterns and circular economy.
This book has been realized in the framework of the project “The Role of the G20 in Promoting Global Governance: Challenges and Opportunities of the Italian Presidency in 2021”
Understanding post-pandemic travel behaviours–China's Golden Week
Get PDFThis study provides a prompt understanding of actual travel behaviours during and after a real time pandemic building on an earlier published study of intended behaviours. Quantitative online survey data gathered during China's first national multi-day holiday - Golden Week (October 2020) - since the lifting of the country's stringent travel restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed for actual post-pandemic travel behaviours to be investigated. The survey carried out for this purpose included decisions in favour or against travel, motivations, means of travel, as well as changes in terms of travel duration, travel distance and spending. A taxonomy is developed for actual tourist behaviours within a post-pandemic domestic tourism context to understand factors influencing these behaviours, including perceived risk, anxiety, trust and financial constraints
Introduction: everyday struggles and contestations around care
Get PDFWhile acknowledging that care creates social bonds and glues societies together, this chapter discusses the value of care and struggles to provide care that simultaneously reveal the alienated conditions in which they occur. The discussion contributes a spatial perspective on the crossovers of care and caring relations by casting a light on how care materializes in urban space. We argue that it is the struggle of distribution across the private-public boundary and its negotiation that makes care, as well as struggles and contestations over care, tangible. As capitalism cuts away at social relationships and reduces capacities to care, it also abstracts care as a commodified category, which it then materializes in urban space as a provision or service whose task is to simultaneously ensure the reproduction of society and consolidate asymmetries in power relations. In such an environment, we argue that affective caring relations matter all the more because they build agency and agency to contest
Queering Constructivism: the legacy of Marlow Moss
No full textArticle for Art UK during LGBTQ+ Month.
Art UK (the Public Catalogue Foundation) is the online home for every public art collection in the United Kingdom.
Marlow Moss (1889–1958) is a figure of great significance to the histories of modern art, and the LGBTQ+ community specifically. She was a London-born British artist who undertook her seminal training in interwar Paris, and was closely associated with the Neo-Plasticist Piet Mondrian. She lived and worked between France, the Netherlands, and Cornwall in the UK.
Her practice as a Constructivist encompassed painting, sculpture and drawing. Although she is not extensively represented in British public art collections, she is now often included in survey books and exhibitions of neglected female and queer artists
Metaphorical Materialism: Art in New York in the Late 1960s
No full textIn Metaphorical Materialism: Art in New York in the Late 1960s, Dominic Rahtz returns to a period when the materiality of art was thematized and theorized according to varying conceptions of matter and form, and consciously related to materialisms held as wider philosophical and political positions and attitudes. The book consists of a volume of essays on the relationships between materiality and materialism, informed by definitions of labour, process, corporeality, and language, in the work of Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Lawrence Weiner
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