“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain (...) Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post-structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique. In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to (...) the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “'Experience'”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post-structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems - as I will maintain - that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept. (shrink)

The challenges posed by postmodern and poststructural theories profoundly disrupt the certainties of feminist and nursing research, yet at the same time offer possibilities for developing new epistemologies. While there are an increasing number of accounts discussing the theoretical implications of these ideas for nursing research, I wish to discuss the practical and the methodological implications of using postmodern feminist theories within empirical research. In particular, I identify the challenges I encountered through an examination of specific aspects (...) of the research process and through examples drawn from empirical research. I conclude that using postmodern feminist theories requires a continuous engagement with, and interrogation of, the modern epistemological and ontological assumptions of qualitative, feminist nursing research and, in so doing, presents the possibility for nurse scholars to begin to develop a ‘passionately interested’ methodological approach to nursing inquiry. (shrink)

Coming from Germany in Europe I am starting with Feminism from a Western point of view but with a perspective of dialogue with Feminisms in other parts of the World. My inquiry deals with problems of the present time, especially how to make Feminism interesting not only to a philosophical or academic public, but to people from all professional fields and disciplines. The political perspective of feminist philosophy can be underlined with the central definition the Austrian philosopher Herta Nagl (...) Docekal gives. According to this definition freedom of women is the main issue of each feminist interrogation. With regard to the development of women’s liberation in Europe and the USA three different movements of feminism can be distinguished: the main issue of the first is the notion of equality, it is also called humanist feminism according to Iris Marion Young; secondly we have the feminism of difference or gynocentrism; the third wave can not so easily be defined, a wide range of variety exists, which may lead to the impression that no more general aim is left. Sometimes it is also called postmodern feminism. But what does this mean: postmodern feminism? Far from an arbitrary attitude, which does not accept any order, postmodern feminism – as postmodern and poststructural philosophy – may be understood as a lesson on how to be different and not to loose the aims women share all over the world. The most important challenge is to find a new balance between the different aims and groups of feminism as well as between feminism in different societies and cultures. Feminisms from the beginnings wanted to overcome step by step the prejudices about men and women, about sex and gender, one of the heritages of our Western tradition. My interpretation of Third Wave may be seen as another step on this way. (shrink)

Coming from Germany in Europe I am starting with Feminism from a Western point of view but with a perspective of dialogue with Feminisms in other parts of the World. My inquiry deals with problems of the present time, especially how to make Feminism interesting not only to a philosophical or academic public, but to people from all professional fields and disciplines. The political perspective of feminist philosophy can be underlined with the central definition the Austrian philosopher Herta Nagl (...) Docekal gives. According to this definition freedom of women is the main issue of each feminist interrogation. With regard to the development of women’s liberation in Europe and the USA three different movements of feminism can be distinguished: the main issue of the first is the notion of equality, it is also called humanist feminism according to Iris Marion Young; secondly we have the feminism of difference or gynocentrism; the third wave can not so easily be defined, a wide range of variety exists, which may lead to the impression that no more general aim is left. Sometimes it is also called postmodern feminism. But what does this mean: postmodern feminism? Far from an arbitrary attitude, which does not accept any order, postmodern feminism – as postmodern and poststructural philosophy – may be understood as a lesson on how to be different and not to loose the aims women share all over the world. The most important challenge is to find a new balance between the different aims and groups of feminism as well as between feminism in different societies and cultures. Feminisms from the beginnings wanted to overcome step by step the prejudices about men and women, about sex and gender, one of the heritages of our Western tradition. My interpretation of Third Wave may be seen as another step on this way. (shrink)

In this article I consider the field of HIV treatment and prevention in light of poststructural feminist critiques of the self-evidence of matter. Both HIV and poststructural feminist theory are viewed in relation to the current state of HIV scientific research of which it has been said: ‘much remains left to the imagination’ (McCune, 2001, emphasis added). Importantly, it is in the absence of ‘real’ knowledge of bodily matter and virus, that imagination is presumed by science (...) as a fall back. Paradoxically, recent debate within feminist theory provides an almost perverse counter to this way of characterizing the struggle against HIV. Rather than considering imagination as something outside or external to the ‘real’, there is now substantial argument suggesting that imagination is always already present and inherent to the ‘real’. In the course of this paper, these differing positions of science and feminist theory are used to challenge and extend each other. The empirical matter of HIV medical science is shown as evidence of matter beyond the normative insistence of (human) language. On this basis, a theory of performativity - devised by Judith Butler and extended by Karen Barad - is argued as grounds for a methodologically expanded science. (shrink)

Starting with the premise that feminist approaches to the study and practice of religion need to be transgressive, this article explores the implications of challenging the boundaries which determine difference. It understands and respects the view that anti-foundational theories might rob feminist projects of their political agency. At the same time, however, it maintains that postmodern and poststructural theories, if appropriated on our own terms, have something to offer feminists in our struggle to enable praxis which dismantles (...) the patterns and structures of domination. The argument is presented from a post-realist thealogical perspective. This entails claiming that the vital contribution of feminist reflection upon the sacred lies not in formulating credal statements but in refiguring the social and cultural imaginary. This article contends that the conscious use of female images for the divine and 'Goddess-talk' has an important part to play in constructing narratives of the sacred which enable relationality and socio/political transformation. It is suggested that a valuable aspect of this process might be to understand spirituality as process and sacrality as performative. (shrink)

The question of individual agency lies at the heart of any political and social theory aiming to analyse the social conditions that shape reality. Drawing mainly on the works of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, this book endeavours to provide an account of agency as a mode of life in which social transformation and personal transformation meet and influence one another.<BR> The book describes the shortcomings of associating agency with resisting social norms or institutions, arguing that (...) agency, as a way of life, is a dynamic of self-creation inspired by a horizon of well-being. As part of this new account of agency the book re-evaluates several key concepts, thus far under-theorized in poststructural theory. First, it addresses the question of how we might understand well-being within a post-modern framework. Second, it presents a notion of 'desire to be', designating the motivational force that drives people to act in order to create a different world. And finally, it addresses the question of how a life of transformative political practices might constitute a sense of identity, both individual and collective. (shrink)

Around the globe people are confronted daily with intransigent problems of space and place. Educators have historically called for place-based or place-conscious education to introduce pedagogies that will address such questions as how to develop sustainable communities and places. These calls for place-conscious education have included liberal humanist approaches that evolved from the work of Wendell Berry (Ball & Lai, 2006) and critical place-based approaches such as those advocated by David Gruenewald (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b). In this paper I will (...) propose a reconceptualized framework of place as a pedagogical practice that draws on contemporary feminist poststructural and postcolonial philosophies as a basis for an alternative place pedagogy for 'global contemporaneity' (Carter, 2006, p. 683). Within this reconceptualized concept of place I will outline three key principles for a reconceptualised place pedagogy: our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations; place learning is local and embodied; and deep place learning occurs in a contact zone of contestation. These principles give rise to new emergent arts-based methodologies for developing and practising place-responsive pedagogies. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

This paper articulates a feminist poststructural philosophy of education by combining the work of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault. This acts as an underpinning for a philosophy of desire (McWilliam, 1999) in education, or as a minor philosophy of education where multiple movements of bodies are enacted through theoretical methodologies and research. These methods include qualitative analysis and critical discourse analysis; where the conjunction Irigaray-Foucault is a paradigm for dealing with educational phenomena. It is also a rigorous materialism (...) (Braidotti, 2005) that opens up the way in which we think about philosophical bodies in education with language. This simultaneously creates gaps in our thinking about the problems associated with philosophical bodies in education, where the imagination may intercede and Eros can do his work, ‘For if Eros possessed all that he desires, he would desire no more’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 22). (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education 1 and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education . 2 These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary (...) that dominates ECE and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)

Every day, in professional work and in our personal lives, we reproduce by words and behaviors particular understandings of life and how it works. This includes understandings about what is ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’ masculinity and who are ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’ boys and men. Being marginalized or outcast from the norm is rarely a free choice. The language that constructs normal and abnormal is not innocent and does not simply arrive in our minds transparently reflected in our behavior or (...) in our client advice or student education. Examining words and behaviors from adolescent boys and from media sources, this research explores the role of cultural discourses in producing normative and marginalized masculinities. It builds upon recent scholarship that questions cultural prescriptions for masculinity and traditional male norms. Feminist, poststructural, psychoanalytic discourse analysis and multiple methods were used to explore links between cultural discourses of masculinity and performativity of masculinity. Practices of heterosexuality, homophobia, athleticism, economic privilege, toughness, and violence provided pathways toward achieving and/or maintaining status as the hegemonic masculine norm in adolescence. ‘Popularity’ signified the norm and ‘outcasts’ from the norm signified marginalized masculinities. (shrink)

This qualitative study examines the discourses that 25 preservice secondary social studies teachers create surrounding whether to include themes of sexual violence in the formal curriculum. As part of their first methods course, the participants read Harriet Jacobs's 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and planned a unit using it as the central text. Using discourse analysis and feminist poststructural theory, the author finds that no singular discourse prevails but that the participants struggled with (...) whether to include or exclude historical accounts of sexual violence in the formal curriculum. Implications for researchers, teacher educators, and teachers are discussed. (shrink)

Around the globe people are confronted daily with intransigent problems of space and place. Educators have historically called for place‐based or place‐conscious education to introduce pedagogies that will address such questions as how to develop sustainable communities and places. These calls for place‐conscious education have included liberal humanist approaches that evolved from the work of Wendell Berry (Ball & Lai, 2006) and critical place‐based approaches such as those advocated by David Gruenewald (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b). In this paper I will (...) propose a reconceptualized framework of place as a pedagogical practice that draws on contemporary feminist poststructural and postcolonial philosophies as a basis for an alternative place pedagogy for ‘global contemporaneity’ (Carter, 2006, p. 683). Within this reconceptualized concept of place I will outline three key principles for a reconceptualised place pedagogy: our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations; place learning is local and embodied; and deep place learning occurs o in a contact zone of contestation. These principles give rise to new emergent arts‐based methodologies for developing and practising place‐responsive pedagogies. (shrink)

It is possible to be ‘irrational’ without being ‘uneconomic’? What is the link between ‘Value’ and ‘values’? What do economists do when they ‘explain’? We live in times when the economic logic has become unquestionable and all-powerful so that our quotidian economic experiences are defined by their scientific construal. This book is the result of a multifaceted investigation into the nature of knowledge produced by economics, and the construction of the category that is termed ‘economic’ with its implied exclusions. It (...) is an attempt to think economics Otherwise, that is, a questioning of economics as if difference mattered. Nitasha Kaul re-examines certain understood ways of thinking about economics as a discipline, especially in elation to questions of identity and difference. This book explores the notion that economics is not a timeless, universal, objective science but a changing response to the problems of knowledge and administration. The epistemological inheritance of economics is ‘rooted’ in the enlightenment, and it also inherits the liberal paradoxes of that age. Kaul argues that the juxtaposition of identity with economic is essential, and can only be achieved by critiquing establishment economists’ discourse on identity, and taking feminist poststructural and postcolonial work seriously. The author challenges the assumption that there is a simple linkage between the category economic, the entity economy and the study of economics. She envisions an economics in the plural: contextual, social, political—econo-mixes. The book brings together some of the most urgent topics of the day—the power of economics as a discipline, the questions of difference and the politics of identity, and feminist perspectives on this. It will be particularly relevant to heterodox economists, feminist theorists, postcolonial studies scholars, social and cultural theorists, philosophers and history of ideas or intellectual history of thought scholars. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary (...) that dominates ECE and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)

IVF as lottery or investment: contesting metaphors in discourses of infertilityThis paper reports an aspect of a poststructural feminist study in which I explored the discursive formations within which women for whom in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was unsuccessful constitute themselves. In my exploration I draw on data from interviews with women who discontinued infertility treatment, print media material and infertility self‐help books. Specifically, I highlight a metaphor of lottery in discourses of infertility, arguing that it is hegemonic and (...) showing how when women are situated as gamblers, the metaphor is instrumental in polarising them into ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ in relation to the subjectivity of motherhood. I further deconstruct these subjectivities, showing how ‘winners’ are valorised and ‘losers’ are pathologised. But importantly, I show how infertile women who are not mothers resisted locating themselves as ‘losers’ in a metaphor of lottery and instead situated themselves in a contesting metaphor of investment as diligent ‘workers’ and as active agents in choosing the best employment of their bodily and monetary resources. This paper therefore amplifies the marginalised perspective of infertile women who are not mothers. (shrink)

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are socially constructed as more ‘dirty’ than other gynaecological conditions. This article analyses women’s accounts of interactions with clinicians, subsequent to a diagnosis of genital herpes simplex virus or human papilloma virus. Women conceptualised consultations as a ‘moral event,’ different from other consultations. This moral component is highlighted drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘the confessional.’ Additionally, Douglas’ anthropological construction of ‘dirt’ is used to consider why these consultations are ‘confessional’ experiences. Email interviews were conducted with 26 (...) women diagnosed with a viral STI and 12 sexual health clinicians. Data were analysed thematically using a feminist, poststructuralist approach. Findings indicated that discourses of morality shape sexual health consultations. Five themes were identified in relation to the moral ‘work’ in clinical consultations about a viral STI diagnosis: the particular ‘dirtiness’ of viral STIs, clinicians as moral agents, the ‘non‐judgmental’ clinician, women juggling truth‐telling and risk and clinicians prescribing moral work. Clinicians support and educate women more effectively if they recognise subjective, moral aspects of sexual health consultations rather than assuming that effective clinical teaching is rational, scientific and non‐judgmental. (shrink)

Combining knowledge of social policy and practice with insights from poststructural and feminist theory, the text demonstrates how democratic citizens and the political are continually recreated.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Turning Kant Against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty to Community Pat J. Gehrke Communication ethics scholars afford Immanuel Kant significantly less attention than one might expect. This may be because, as Robert Dostal notes, Kant argues that rhetoric merits no respect whatsoever (223). This rejection of rhetoric, Dostal writes, is grounded in the significant emphasis (...) given to Kant's concept of autonomy (232). The focus on autonomy and, hence, rhetoricians' relative neglect of Kant's ethical theory are both connected to the separation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (hereinafter CPuR) from his subsequent ethical and moral philosophy. Kenneth Burke writes that Kant's first critique has no ethical implications, "no 'wills,' 'oughts,' 'shoulds,' or 'thou shalt nots'... nothing but an inevitable is, a description of conditions as they necessarily are for human experience" (191; emphasis in original). Such readings lose much of the richness and complexity of Kant's thought and tend instead to produce simple moral duties, such as Mike Markel's assertion that technical communicators must be truthful.Perhaps the most critical element of Kant's work lost in our focus on autonomy is his articulation of a ground for a duty to community. While Kant makes clear the importance of community for his metaphysics in the first critique (CPuR), the importance of community in Kant's moral philosophy often is overlooked. Some scholars claim that an ethical duty to community is either rejected by Kant's emphasis on the autonomy of will or simply ignored. This article combines a reading of Kant's metaphysics of experience with his moral philosophy to articulate a communication ethic grounded in community. This argument is made in three parts: first, the community of objects in experience—the Third Analogy of Experience—is an organizing principle of and a necessary condition for the possibility of all experience; second, this metaphysical principle of community is relevant [End Page 1] to community as developed in Kant's ethical writings; and finally, Kant's own work undermines the primacy of autonomy and better supports a communication ethic grounded in a duty to community.Scholars interested in Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action have special reason to take note of Kant's work. Kant is not only a figure that Habermas sees reflected in his own work, 1 but a constant point of contrast. Craig Calhoun writes that much of Habermas's own philosophy emerges by rejecting Kant's epistemology and elements of his metaphysics while still giving credence to Kantian moral philosophy (2). However, like most communication scholars and philosophers, Habermas believes that autonomy governs Kantian ethics: "Formalistic ethics (Kant) binds the criterion of generality of norms to the further criterion of autonomy, that is, independence from contingent motives" (Habermas, Legitimation 89). Since autonomy excludes or represses the contingent, if our readings of Kant give primacy to autonomy we leave little room for any notion of community as manifest in experience. In no small part, it is the criticism of Kant for privileging autonomy that has given Habermasians their break from Kantian ethics. However, if we turn to the first critique to guide our reading of the moral philosophy, there is another way to understand the role of autonomy and community in Kant's thought. By linking Kant's metaphysics with his moral philosophy, this article turns Kant away from the primacy of autonomy and uses Kant's own works to argue that autonomy is but one half of an antinomy that is organized under the principle of community. Thus, this article recuperates the possibility of deploying Kantian metaphysics and moral philosophy together as grounds for a communication ethic that privileges community and recovers the value of rhetoric.For rhetorical scholars, the resistance to the priority of autonomy may be related to the frequent expression of community through appeal to commonality, sameness, or identification. Today, feminist, race, postmodern, and poststructural communication scholars are questioning the value of commonality as a ground for ethics (e... (shrink)

Weaving together her most influential writings of the 1990s, Bronwyn Davies offers a unique engagement with poststructuralism that defies the boundaries between theory and embodied practice. Whereas poststructuralists are often accused of excessive abstraction, Davies' sophisticated and nuanced discussions of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, feminism, and power are embedded in vital depictions of lived experience and empirical research. A renowned scholar of education and gender formation, Davies shows the importance of poststructural perspectives for her own research in classrooms, on playgrounds, (...) with literary texts, and her own life history. Lucid prose—accessible for students and refreshing for researchers and theorists alike—makes postructural concepts usable as conceptual frameworks for interpreting and analyzing the social world. (shrink)

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether through trauma (...) or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not take (...) its wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

This article examines and presents examples of contemporary advertising within the medical and health professions that continue the process and organisation of knowledge about women and their reproductive bodies. It draws on feminist and poststructural perspectives to inform a critical evaluation of the visual representations of menopausal women and hormone replacement therapy. These representations work to construct certain definitions of the feminine that sustain and support existing contradictory cultural meanings and values about menopause. I argue that the images (...) continue to misrepresent and define what forms of femininity and sexual gender are desirable and acceptable for menopausal women. The article addresses the problems of gender discrimination and bias within the advertising industry, and illustrates the ways in which readers of visual texts may be influenced by stereotypic assumptions concerning a woman's lived experience of menopause. It illustrates how specific symbolic images directed towards men and women for hormone replacement therapy, testosterone deficiency and sexual dysfunction influence the viewer's decision making and action responses. (shrink)

Issues of desire in music education are integral and anathema to the profession. Constituted of and by desire, we bodily engage music emotionally and cognitively; yet references to the body are limited to how it may be better managed in order to produce more satisfactory (desired) sounds, thus disciplining desire as we focus on the content of teaching (music) to the virtual exclusion of its subjects (students)—and our selves. Developing embodied senses of learning and teaching where students’ and educators’ subject (...) formation may be understood in terms of their/our desire holds potentialities of fully engaging us in music education, even as it also implicates music education practices in the production of desire as positivity rather than lack, and requires political pedagogies locating us as mindful bodies in relationship with each other, music, and the social world. My discussion is framed by poststructural feminism and affirmative postmodernism, and I argue that desire as production is integral to socially grounded and responsible subject positions claimed in, through, and as performative music literacies. (shrink)