Monsters of Men: Masculinity and the Other in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Series

ABSTRACT

To date, studies of gender issues in young adult dystopian novels have been dominated by a focus on constructions of female subjectivity, girlhood, and the potential for female empowerment. However, little critical attention has been correspondingly dedicated to examining how regimes of masculinity, traditional privileges of male power, and male adolescence are represented and mediated in dystopian fiction for teenagers. Patrick Ness’s exploration of normative and transgressive embodiments of masculinity in his dystopian Chaos Walking series for young adults powerfully addresses tensions between power and vulnerability, autonomy and conformity, and concepts of boyhood and manhood. Through their experiences with the possibilities of telepathy, biotechnology, and interspecies relationships, Ness’s protagonists must negotiate with the simultaneous attraction of the fragmented self and its threat to the regulation of conventional manhood, as male characters struggle to sustain their inherited understanding of themselves and the relation between self and other. Through his problematizing of the boundaries between traditional hegemonic and Other, human and alien codes, and his emphasis on the importance of non-hierarchical and inclusive co-existence, Ness proposes a receptive, expansive, and egalitarian paradigm of masculinity.     

Simone Weil’s Passion Mysticism: The Paradox of Chronic Pain and the Transformation of the Cross

Simone Weil’s theology is deeply connected to her experiences with chronic pain. Pain is paradoxical in that it is an essentially private phenomenon yet it simultaneously demands to be shared with another. Weil’s life and thought exemplify both aspects of this paradox, demonstrating how her pain alienated her from her own body and from others, and how her thought found full expression as she attempted to share experiences with pain. Weil’s experience of pain was transformed in her passion mysticism, the deep connection she felt with the crucified Christ. In this connection, the most unbearable aspect of her pain, the threat, which it presented to her very self through annihilation, was absorbed into the cross and transformed by God’s love. While this did not necessarily diminish Weil’s pain, the meaning it had for her as a person was transformed through an encounter with Christ crucified, in which she experienced God’s suffering along with her.     

Maternal Trauma and Children’s Functioning: The Role of Kinship Social Support

Although research has documented the detrimental effects of maternal trauma on child behavior (Lambert, Holzer, & Hasbun, 2014), the role of extended family support in potentially mitigating the effects of intergenerational transmission of trauma is not clearly understood. With a diverse community sample of 52 trauma-exposed mothers and their children between the ages of 7 and 12, we investigated relationships between kinship social support, maternal trauma exposure severity, maternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, and child behavioral problems. Results showed that kinship social support was negatively related to maternal trauma exposure severity, maternal PTSD symptom severity, child internalizing behaviors, and child externalizing behaviors. Additionally, kinship social support moderated the relationship between maternal trauma exposure severity and child internalizing behaviors. These results have implications in the implementation of interventions aimed at supporting diverse families facing trauma that incorporate extended family networks.     

Triggering Rage: Unresolved Trauma in Women’s Lives

In this qualitative study we sought to explore the triggers involved in women’s rage that are expressed towards their intimate partners. In-depth interviews were conducted with 37 incarcerated women who reported experiencing rage towards their partner. Unresolved trauma from childhood closely linked to current levels of adult rage; specific types of trauma that were reported included experiencing physical and sexual abuse, feeling unprotected by caretakers, and having observed domestic violence within their homes. Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder were described within the stories of rage as women recounted their experiences of intimate partner violence. Common triggers for igniting rage included women perceiving a threat to themselves, a threat to their loved ones, and emotional abuse.     

The Play’s the Thing: Improvisation in Group Psychotherapy

Study of improvisational theater suggests practices that can help us respond more fully in a therapeutic way. Improvisation is a powerful tool that emphasizes present-centered awareness and spontaneity. It helps us respond effectively to present moment processes, a key requirement for psychodynamic group psychotherapy. It enhances our ability to communicate with our patients when traditional interventions fail. Improvisation requires a readiness to play and a willingness to be open to the challenges of non-rational modes of relating. This article provides clinical examples of improvised group interventions.     

Gender Policing in the Clinical Setting: Discussion of Sandra Silverman’s “The Colonized Mind: Gender,Trauma, and Mentalization”

This is a discussion of Sandra Silverman’s clinical paper “The Colonized Mind: Gender, Trauma, and Mentalization.” Her patient, David née Ava, started early in life as a gender variant child. In adolescence, she became more stereotypically gender conforming. She entered treatment with Silverman as a young adult who was feeling great shame about both her past and present gender dysphoria. This discussion focuses on the clinical problem of gender policing, its external and internal manifestations as well as its appearance in the countertransference.     

The poet’s school and the parrot’s cage: the educational spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate, was a man of myriad gifts, but he sought to articulate a single global vision. He believed that for our flourishing we must strive towards ‘the other and the beyond’. In so doing we discover that, as we seek, we are ourselves being sought. Tagore believed that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationships one with another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is. We must be liberated, Tagore believed, from the bounds of our separateness and so discover a wholeness larger than our individual well‐being. That wholeness is ultimately realised in our union with the eternal Divine Spirit. In the establishment of his ‘poet’s school’ at Shantiniketan Tagore sought to make his ideals come true. This paper will focus on Tagore’s understanding of childhood and on the pattern of education by which, he believed, the spirit of the child may be nurtured. It will also enter a plea that we return to someone whose neglect in the West has been much to its loss.     

Sex Differences in the Contribution of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia and Trauma to Children’s Psychopathology

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a marker of parasympathetic activity, has been shown to moderate the relation between adversity and child behavioral outcomes; however, this work has been conducted in primarily Caucasian samples and limited in focus to family-level adversity. The current analysis extends the previous literature to examine the co-contribution of exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs), baseline RSA, and RSA withdrawal to internalizing and externalizing behavior in a sample of primarily African American youth (n = 92) recruited using neighborhood mapping techniques from communities high in epidemiological indicators of adversity. Exposure to PTEs was associated with lower baseline RSA. Complex interactions were observed between sex of the child, baseline RSA and RSA withdrawal, and PTE exposure predicting to internalizing behaviors. Among girls with high (4+) levels of PTEs, high baseline RSA and RSA withdrawal predicted higher internalizing; for RSA withdrawal only, the inverse was observed for girls with low PTE exposure, for whom high RSA withdrawal predicted lower internalizing. No associations were observed from RSA to externalizing, or among boys to internalizing. Findings are consistent with distinct patterns among primarily African American samples and suggest the need for sex-specific conceptualizations of the link between environmental adversity, physiological reactivity, and internalizing behaviors.     

The Value in Storytelling: Women’s Life-Stories in Confucianism and Judaism

This essay retells the stories of four exemplary women from Confucianism and Judaism, hoping that the tension these stories exhibit can teach us something about women’s lives within the boundaries of tradition, then and now. It refers to two ideal “family caretakers”: Meng Mu 孟母, who devoted her life to her son’s learning, and Rachel, who devoted her life to her husband, the famous Rabbi Akiva. Then it tells the stories of two almost completely opposing exemplary figures: The sages Ban Zhao 班昭 and Bruriah, who dedicated their lives to learning and self-cultivation. It stresses that there is more than one dichotomized resolution to inner conflicts within the traditional framework in both Confucianism and Judaism, and, moreover, the plurality of resolutions is inherent in the traditions. Through reading a story and appreciating the complexities in others’ lives, while reflecting on our own, we can attain a level of abstraction that enables better sensitivity and more responsibility for the life we live.     

“Uterus Loquitur”: Trauma and the Human Organism in Ferenczi’s “Physiology of Pleasure”

The paper reconstructs Ferenczi’s unique and largely neglected physiology of pleasure. It highlights the prominent place of the libido in Ferenczi’s writings, the transition from the physiology of use to the physiology of pleasure and the role of trauma in Ferenczi’s work with a special emphasis on the beauty and plasticity of the body, the relations between its organs as well as the adaptive potential, the Orphic powers, and the natural vigor of the human organism. Ferenczi’s theoretical assumptions and his powerful images of the human organism are examined in the light of Goethe’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Nietzsche’s philosophies.     

Man on Wire: Walking the Therapeutically Transformative Tightrope of the Analyst’s Cancer

Almost nothing was clear to me when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that I intended to inform all of my patients about my illness. But how could the focus remain on their needs when my mortality was so at risk? Unexpectedly, I discovered that I coped with my fears most effectively in my office. It was the one place where I could maintain a grasp on a holistic sense of myself and hold conflicting intense emotions. Additionally striking was the corresponding capacity of my patients to remain in treatment while addressing the unpredictable dyadic changes generated by my sickness. In this paper, I address this point of intersubjective transformation—the interactive contributions that generated each treatment’s unique rhythm. I also discuss the temporality of illness and how my continuing reconfigurations of self-experience impacted my ability to maintain authenticity and analytic balance both during and after treatment.     

The Subject’s New Clothes: Immanent Transcendence and the Moral Self in the Modern Confucian Discourses

In Modern Confucian philosophy the notion of the moral Self which is expressed through the natural moral substance (xingti 性體) represents both the foundation of each individual and the core of the universal reason. The indivisibility of the moral Self from its concrete activities within the social sphere differs in many various aspects from prevailing Western political and philosophical theories that are based on the separation of the empirical and transcendent subject. Hence, this holistic special feature of the moral Self is closely related to one of the basic paradigms of Chinese intellectual history, i.e. the paradigm of immanent transcendence, which is also known as the paradigm of ‘radical’ or ‘pure’ transcendence. The present article introduces and analyses both above-mentioned, mutually intertwined traditional notions through the lens of modern interpretations, focusing upon the philosophical work written by the representatives of the second generation of Taiwanese Modern Confucians.     

Recollection and phantasy: The problem of the truth of memory in Husserl’s phenomenology

The epistemological problem of the truth of memory cannot be resolved without establishing a clear distinction between recollection and phantasy. Husserl’s position in this regard is both paradoxical and compelling. It is paradoxical because Husserl repeats his antiskeptical intention many times; but nevertheless in his phenomenology, recollection and phantasy are almost completely identical. Perhaps no philosopher has so radically approached the experience of remembering and the experience of fantasizing as Husserl. But at the same time, the recognition of this fundamental similarity is precisely what allows the phenomenologist to avoid empiricist misunderstandings and thus approach the problem of the distinction between recollection and phantasy in a much more persuasive way than the traditional one. In this paper, I will first try to show how and why Husserl approaches recollection and phantasy. Then I will try to show how it is possible to establish a clear distinction between these two phenomena without misunderstanding the possibility of false memory.     

Aquinas’s Transformation of the Virtue of Courage

Courage is an important moral virtue for both Aristotle and Aquinas. For Aristotle, courage is a virtue that belongs to warriors who are ready for a noble death on the battlefield. As a Christian theologian as well as an Aristotelian expert, Aquinas aims to give this Aristotelian moral virtue a fully theological expression. This paper analyzes the differences between Aquinas’s conception of courage and Aristotle’s, as well as explores Aquinas’s transformation of Aristotelian courage through a three part process. Firstly, based on Aristotle’s paradigm of courageous warriors in battle, Aquinas extends the scope of “battle” from the military sense to a broader one. By doing so, Aquinas expands the range of application of courage. Secondly, Aquinas explicitly defines endurance as the chief act of courage based on the reason that endurance is more difficult than aggression, thereby shifting our attention from the attack aspect of courage to the endurance aspect. Finally, Aquinas defines the principal act of perfect courage as martyrdom thereby pointing to Christ, who was the perfect martyr, as the paradigm of a courageous person. The result of this transformation is a successful theological virtue of courage.     

Birobidzhan in Khrushchev’s Thaw: the soviet and the western outlook

The present article looks into the little-researched period in the nine-decade long history of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), which is still present atavistically in the administrative-territorial structure of contemporary Russia. The region in the Siberian Far East, better known by the name of its main town, Birobidzhan, never turned into what it was supposed to be, namely the centre of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the low-statused JAR played a key and essentially detrimental role in determining the entitlements that the Jews had in the Soviet pecking order. The government consistently used the Birobidzhan-centered model of Jewish life as an instrument for justifying internationally its active assimilationist policy. In the 1950s, rumours – first about the liquidation of Jewish autonomy and then about a planned expulsion of Jews to the JAR – attracted the attention and concern of the foreign press and Jewish organizations. International pressure forced Moscow to modify its Jews-related policy, but changed little in the JAR. The 1959 census revealed 14,269 Jews in the JAR’s population. Compared with 1939, the number of Jews in the region had decreased almost by a fifth. This decline continued in the coming years.