New Books in Critical Theory

Psychoanalysis is a queer theory. That’s what Tim Dean said, according to Eve Watson in the afterword to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (Punctum Books, 2017), a new book that she co-edited with Noreen Giffney. In her interview for this podcast, Watson qualifies that declaration by saying that psychoanalysis isn’t always a queer theory, but it should be. “There are many psychoanalyses.” Queer theory challenges the conventional approach to sexuality that many clinicians absorbed from their training. These clinicians run the risk of imposing outdated and oppressive sexual norms upon their clients. Until the mid-70’s, homosexuality was officially a mental illness and many psychoanalysts continued to try to cure homosexuals of their sexual pathology long after the DSM corrected its culturally determined diagnostic judgment in 1973. Queer theorists argue that this error was not an isolated incident but rather a trend within institutionalized psychoanalysis that continues to limit the effectiveness of psychoanalytic practice today, and in the worst cases, to harm its consumers. In fact, the paragraphs above may give a distorted view of the book which does not pursue an argument but presents a stimulating conversation among queer theorists and clinicians about psychoanalysis, sexuality, gender, identity, and discourse. The conversation can fly high at times, especially for those who are new to this kind of literature, but the variety of contributors speak in many voices and every reader will find something valuable in this book for deepening their psychoanalytic vision. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

28 Kesä 201853min

How do emotions affect participation in protests, and in politics more generally? In The Emotions of Protests (University of Chicago Press, 2018), James M. Jasper develops a solid critique to approaches that present political action as strictly rational and emotions as something outside the realm of strategy. Instead, Jasper speaks about feeling-thinking processes to highlight the interaction between strategic thinking and emotions, and the impact they have on participation in politics. Jasper divides emotions in five categories: reflex emotions (what we normally thinking of when we refer to emotions), urges, moods, affective commitments, and moral commitments. Through an extensive elaboration of these five concepts and the different emotions associated with each of them, Jasper builds a solid ground for the development of what he terms a ‘theory of action’. This book will stimulate sociologists and political scientists interested in social movements and protests, as well as anyone attracted by debates about rationality. Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

28 Kesä 20181h 7min

How can art change the world? In Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018), Paula Serafini, a Research Associate at the University of Leicester’s CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, explores art activism, looking at the power, potential, and problematics of art for political and social change. The book draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, including the author’s own art activism, to show the complexity as well as the importance of art activism. Moreover, the book offers a major theoretical contribution, fusing work on the public sphere, theories of aesthetics and politics, social movements theory, and theories of emotions and the body, with case studies including the high profile Art Not Oil coalition. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in art, politics, and the potential to challenge and change our institutions and our politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

28 Kesä 201839min

How to theorize what goes without saying? In The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Rob Sullivan develops a general theory of everydayness as the necessary, if elusive, starting point for social and spatial theorists across disciplines. Proceeding in stepwise fashion, Sullivan builds an account of this concept that scopes over space, place, history, time itself, social and biological reproduction, embodiment, the object world, and the neural and perceptual dimensions of experience, folding high-level theorizing together with an eclectic range of empirical engagements. The book generously synthesizes insights from Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Marx, Torsten Hägerstrand, Jane Bennett, and other thinkers on or just off the map of critical geography today. It is an ambitious but conversational text, a committed work of exposition that might dovetail with many a seminar in geographic thought. As Sullivan sees it, materializing our own entwinement with the environment — accepting the complexity of “The TimeSpacePlace Thing” — just might incline future geographers to a richer, more affirmative sense of ethics and politics beyond the hermetic models of selfhood that, on his reading, still have wide appeal, even in an age when the costs of anthropocentrism seem all the more immediate. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

20 Kesä 201854min

In The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic measures in Argentina of 2001-2002. Through the lens of cultural production (films, novels, short stories, artwork and music), the author explores two of the country’s so-called exceptionalisms: whiteness and economic success. These myths, heavily endorsed by the military dictatorship during the 1970s and early 1980s, created a sense of homogeneity and uniqueness that came into question at the time of the crisis. All of the cultural products studied by the author show different aspects of what was actually a crisis in the exceptionality myths that linked race with progress. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Kesä 201859min

In this episode, I speak with Aaron M. Kuntz about his book, The Responsible Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, and Social Justice (Left Coast Press, 2015). This book offers a thorough and much-needed interrogation of the role of research methodologist in today’s neo-liberalist era. Kuntz reflects upon the social and cultural structure that gave rise to the conventional role of a methodologist, a technocrat and middle-manager of knowledge production. He urges social and educational researchers in general, and research methodologists in particular, to move away from such a morally indifferent position and to encompass a social justice oriented approach to research. In his book, Kuntz also mobilizes the latest social theories from post-structuralism to new materialism to reconceptualize the meaning of truth and the responsibility of researchers. This thought-provoking and beautifully executed book will bring the readers to the central issues and debates with which contemporary researchers and research methodologists have been wrestling. It will be of interest to research methodologists, social and educational researchers, and professionals doing social justice work across different domains. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Kesä 20181h 5min

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism. In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Mohammed Merah,”  a fictionalized account of the 2012 Toulouse attacks, told from the point of view of the murderer. We also talk about earlier influential figures, such as Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and discuss how the vocabularies they invented, which they used to retool ideas of evil, transgression, and “our common inhumanity,” come to be recoded in service of a new “moralistic turn.” Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

11 Kesä 20181h 12min

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of her book. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2017) interrogates the role of sexual difference in the management of racialized populations, making this book a necessary read for understanding the history of such current social movements as Black Lives Matter and the trans* exclusionary “Pussy hat” feminism. From the very beginning of the book, our conceptions of nineteenth-century science are challenged. For much of the century,  many US scientists championed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck over Charles Darwin as their most prominent influence. In their quest to refute determinist theories of heredity, the neo-Lamarckians of the American School of Evolution advocated for a self-directed version of evolution. These scientists argued that Anglo-Saxons  have the most adaptable features and impressionable heredity. This impressionability was what made Whites more sentimental and civilized than other races, who were not as impressionable and seen as largely stuck in a prior stage of progressivist evolution, according to E.D. Cope and the American School of Evolution. Whites were also seen as having greater sexual dimorphism than other races, while women of color were not seen as achieving true womanhood. Kyla therefore finds the origin of binary sex enveloped in racialized difference. Beyond the subject of evolutionary science, this book introduces us to the Black uplift project of Frances Harper, the vagina politics of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker, the biophilanthropy of Charles Loring Brace, and the assemblage theories of W.E.B. DuBois. The Biopolitics of Feeling is packed with interesting, and sometimes shocking, historical anecdotes, such as Walker’s sex advice book to men in 1878, E.D. Cope’s sometimes destructive and violent rivalry with O.C. Marsh, and the “orphan trains” that took two hundred thousand kids out West for educational and labor purposes. The breadth of this book shouldd be of interest to a number of scholars interested in the history of science, literature, and medicine. Meanwhile, Kyla’s engagement and challenge to New Materialist theories is likely to be canonical for future Feminist STS scholars. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

1 Kesä 201858min