Working within the tradition of continental philosophy, this article argues in favour of a phenomenological understanding of language as a crucial component of bioethical inquiry. The authors challenge the ‘commonsense’ view of language, in which thinking appears as prior to speaking, and speech the straightforward vehicle of pre-existing thoughts. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908–1961) phenomenology of language, the authors claim that thinking takes place in and through the spoken word, in and through embodied language. This view resituates bioethics as a (...) matter of bodies that speak. It also refigures the meaning of ethical self-reflexion, and in so doing offers an alternative view on reflexivity and critique. Referring to the Kantian critical tradition and its reception by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, we advance a position we call ‘critical ethical reflexivity’. We contend that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language offers valuable insight into ethical reflexivity and subject formation. Moreover, his understanding of language may foster new qualitative empirical research in bioethics, lead to more nuanced methods for interpreting personal narratives, and promote critical self-reflexion as necessary for bioethical inquiry. (shrink)

This article is a critical methodological reflection on the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) initiated in the context of a qualitative research project on the experience of seclusion in a psychiatric setting. It addresses an explicit gap in the IPA literature to explore the ways that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can extend the remit of IPA for noncognitivist qualitative research projects beyond the field of health psychology. In particular, the article develops Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived-body, language, and embodied speech, with (...) specific attention to the ethical implications of body and place. It concludes with a discussion on phenomenological reflexivity and prompts a reconsideration of phenomenological methods across a wide range of qualitative research projects concerned with subjectivity and ethical practice, including critical health studies, critical bioethics, and cultural studies that employ a qualitative empirical research design. (shrink)

The concept of citizenship is becoming more and more prominent in specific fields, such as psychiatry/mental health, where it is constituted as a solution to the issues of exclusion, discrimination, and poverty often endured by the mentally ill. We argue that such discourse of citizenship represents a break in the history of psychiatry and constitutes a powerful strategy to counter the effects of equally powerful psychiatric labelling. However, we call into question the emancipatory promise of a citizenship agenda. Foucault's concept (...) of governmentality is helpful in understanding the production of the citizen subject, its location within the 'art of government', as well as the ethical and political implications of citizenship in the context of mental health. (shrink)

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann , the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in (...) an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we will locate the points of convergence among the factors (the war on terror, sovereignty, and the media) that have produced and reconstituted the legal and ethical status of Guantánamo detainees. (shrink)

Inspirée d’un cadre poststructuraliste, cette étude qualitative de « réception d’un médium » nous a permis de mettre en lumière les « lectures » que font une vingtaine de consommateurs de pornographie des notions de masculinité, de race et ethnicité, du milieu gai et du genre en lien avec la pornographie qu’ils consomment. Les résultats qui émergent de notre analyse critique de discours sont à l’effet que les lectures des consommateurs sont majoritairement dominantes, reproduisant ainsi les stéréotypes présents en société (...) et qui sont re/produits et véhiculés dans la pornographie qu’ils consomment. Les récits des participants attestent du fait que ces derniers remettent peu en question ce qu’ils voient dans le matériel pornographique ; matériel pouvant avoir certaines répercussions sur des indicateurs de santé mentale en accentuant et perpétuant certaines formes de stigmatisation chez certains groupes sociaux. Inspired by a poststructuralist perspective, our qualitative exploratory media reception study offers a critical discourse analysis of 20 male pornography consumers, focusing on their readings of masculinity, race/ethnicity, the gay world, and gender in relation to the pornography they consume. For the most part, results show dominant readings of these categories, which suggests that social stereotypes are produced, reproduced, and transmitted through the medium of pornography. Participant narratives reveal individuals who rarely question what is shown in pornographic material; the latter having potential implications for certain mental health indicators, as well as perpetuating and accentuating forms of stigmatization among specific social groups. (shrink)