USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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"To Persons Defiled and Faithless": The Dichotomy of Pleasure and Shame in Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk
Get PDFThis article explores the complex interplay of pleasure and shame in Paul Mendez’s novel Rainbow Milk (2020), focusing on the protagonist Jesse McCarthy’s journey of self-discovery as a gay Black man navigating the intersections of race, sexuality, and religion. Jesse’s experiences of sexual pleasure are constantly juxtaposed with feelings of shame, rooted in religious indoctrination and racial ideologies. Through an intersectional lens, the article examines how Jesse’s marginalisation as a gay man is intertwined with his experiences of racism. Mendez intricately weaves the narrative around descriptions of cleanliness and dirtiness, exposing the impact of dysfunctional dynamics within Jesse’s family and religious teachings on his self-perception.
The article employs Sally R. Munt’s concept of shame as a mechanism for understanding how shame as an affect impacts the formation of identity and relationships. It explores how shame is regulated, shaping individuals’ self-worth and social belonging. An insight into postcolonial scholarship informs the analysis of racialised shame, highlighting the destructive impact of internalised racism. It delves into the interplay of race, sexuality, and religion, illustrating how shame operates as a tool of control and oppression. Through an analysis of Mendez’s novel, the article illuminates the nuanced politics of shame and its impact on marginalised identities
The Silver Fox of Video Games: Questions of Aging and Masculinity in CD Projekt’s The Witcher Series
Get PDFNew media has become one of the lenses through which we perceive and consume our lived social realities. Video games, as part of the new media (r)evolution, offer perspectives on our socio-cultural realities by engaging us with their (at times fantastical) worlds, not far removed from our own. Herein, games are a valuable addition to further an understanding of how bodies are performed on screen and what this implies for socio-culturally informed imageries of peoples off-screen. This paper specifically looks at the depiction and performance of age and gender as societal categories in CD Projekt’s The Witcher video game series (2007-2021), and discusses their implication for characters inside the games as well as players outside. While focusing on The Witcher series’ protagonist Geralt of Rivia, interlacing issues of heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, (hyper)masculinity, and the progress of successful male aging will be analyzed. Here, the medium of video games plays a pivotal role in comprehending the series’ presentation of heteronormative male aging as both a dynamic performative act between character and player, and an act of spectatorship with Geralt’s aging male body as a body to be consumed. Moreover, as the games turn to present their hero as an ambiguous figure, fluctuating between rogue “silver fox” and socially empowered patriarch, this paper will also consider what happens to the (fictional, digital) aging male body if he is actualized as a successfully aging body. Finally, this paper draws upon discourses in aging studies, gender studies, as well as disability studies, and aims to broaden the discussion on aging male bodies in new media onto video games
On the Very Idea of a (Synthetic) Conceptual Scheme
Get PDFThis article critically engages with M. Beatrice Fazi’s provocative argument that contemporary forms of generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), produce genuine language through acts of philosophical synthesis akin to human cognitive processes. While Fazi proposes a Kantian-inspired model wherein LLMs synthesize self-enclosed, coherent “worlds,” I challenge this idea, questioning the coherence and implications of positing AI as creating separate worlds detached from shared human experience. Drawing on Donald Davidson‘s critique of conceptual schemes, along with insights from the phenomenological tradition, I argue instead for a distributed and open model of synthesis. Without equating computational processes with human agency, I emphasize the inherently mediated and social nature of both human and computational language generation, suggesting that generative AI mediates worldly significance not by synthesizing separate worlds but by intervening in this, the only world. Ultimately, I advocate a nuanced recognition of generative AI’s transformative role within shared forms of life
Review: Thomas R. West. Signs of Struggle. The Rhetorical Politics of Cultural Difference.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Thomas R. West\u27s monograph seeks to provide rhetorical and pedagogical approaches to dealing with difference. His conception of cultural difference is based on Bhabha\u27s (1990) distinction between "cultural diversity" in the multiculturalist sense and the notion of "cultural difference" characterised by the ambivalence originating from the relationship between coloniser and colonised. The title hints at West\u27s attempt to synthesise insights from the fields of rhetoric and composition, cultural and critical theory, and postcolonial studies in order to situate them within a pedagogical framework. His overall concern is to show that culture as well as race, gender, and sexuality have to be understood as signs, or sites of agonistic political struggle and resistance affected by the impact of emotion
Review: Helene Meyers. "Femicidal Fears. Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience." Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.: By Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky, Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Meyers\u27s engaging study on romance and the contemporary appropriation of conventional tropes of the Gothic joins feminist debates about essentialism, victimology, female agency and the body. Instead of dwelling on traditional Gothic trends such as madness and maternity, Meyers argues that feminist critics should turn to the contemporary female Gothic which highlights violent crimes and murder in particular, and which "explores the difficulties of, and the necessity for, taking gender oppression seriously without positioning women as pure victims" (xii). This aspect of her work, essentially the analysis of recent narratives through the grid of the Gothic as well as contemporary debates among feminists and postfeminists, makes the volume particularly valuable in its contribution to cultural studies, feminism, and genre studies. Meyers delineates how women writers have used the Gothic romance to mediate the connection between gender norms and female victimization. The diachronic transformations of the genre are the focus of Meyers\u27s analysis that shows how contemporary women writers adopt Gothic conventions to address the sexual politics of their time
Review: Christina Hughes: Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
The main purpose of Christina Hughes\u27 Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research is to introduce a "conceptual literacy" for social science students. Hughes\u27 differentiated explorations of equality, difference, choice, care, time and experience, which are key concepts in feminist theory, and her balanced overview of sociological and connected studies are based on topical postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches: "Conceptual literacy is no more, and no less, than an act of sensitization to the political implications of contestation over the diversity of conceptual meanings. In this it draws attention to the multiplicity of meanings that are invoked by the use of key terms; to the dualistic framing of language; to the art of deconstruction; and to the salience of focusing on language in use" (3). In her accessible handbook, the author not only provides an overview of the vast amount of literature on feminist theory, but also manages to facilitate access to complex theories and convey the importance of deconstruction in social sciences and related areas
Review: Annamarie Jagose: Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
When reading theory we come into contact with assumptions upon which texts are based, indeed most theory relies on the "self-evidence" of certain beliefs to generate knowledge. In texts such as these, generally what is more interesting than the actual content is the way that the content is assembled - the organizing assumptions in a process which aims not to make assumptions. "Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence" is a text which does not take much for granted, its interventions dissolve the camouflage coating that distracts ideologically-softened minds. In her inimical urbane style Annamarie Jagose pulls apart the "narrative mechanisms of numerical order or chronological progression" (ix) to examine the mechanics of narratives that form separate and hierarchically rendered temporal switches figuring female homosexuality in belated relation to heterosexuality and to male homosexuality
Review: Nancy Ordover: American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
The book jacket of American Eugenics, Nancy Ordover\u27s lucid and unflinching account of the eugenics movement in the United States, makes a provocative claim: "The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice - and the \u27science\u27 that supports it - is still disturbingly alive in America." Fortunately, this is no casual allusion. Ordover argues that the history of eugenics, commonly thought to be the province of foreign fascists, is also grounded in American politics and culture of the past century. Indeed, as her study makes clear throughout, the record of eugenics in the United States is not even strictly historical, but ongoing, persistent, and enjoying a renewed respectability
Frontmatter and Editorial
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The contributions to Gender Queeries explore conceptualisations and representations of queerness in recent literary works and contemporary philosophical thought