Lived Body vs Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity

Toril Moi has argued that recent deconstructive challenges to the concept of gender and to the viability of the sex/gender distinction have brought feminist and queer theory to a place of increasing theoretical abstraction. She suggests that we should abandon the category of gender once and for all, because it is founded on a nature–culture distinction and it tends incorrigibly to essentialize women's lives. Moi argues that feminist and queer theories should replace the concept of gender with a concept of the lived body derived from existential phenomenology. In this essay I take up and develop this suggestion, and argue that there are several advantages that a category of the lived body has over a category of gender for feminist and queer theories: (1) no nature–culture distinction is necessary but the body can be described as historically and socially specific; (2) it is not necessary to break out a gendered and "raced" part of identity with this category; (3) differences of sexual desire can be described without recourse to an "inner core" of identity or "sexual orientation." I go on to argue, however, that it is important to retain a concept of gender for a theoretical purpose beyond that which Moi and those she criticizes conceive. In recent years feminist and queer theories have tended to conceive their theorizing as restricted to identity and subjectivity. How large scale social structures differentially position people in relations of privilege and disadvantage has been ignored, relatively. This essay argues then that theorizing structural processes and inequalities is crucial, and that a concept of gender is important for such theorizing. I propose three aspects of gendered social structure that are irreducible to one another: (1) a sexual division of labor (2) normative heterosexuality, and (3) hierarchies of power. In each case I illustrate the social theoretical work these categorizations of gendered structure can and should do.     

Having an Inner Life

We readily recognize the concept of an inner life as a moral category. We struggle to say what an inner life is, though. This essay examines and rejects naturalistic attempts to either dismiss the idea of an inner life or make it a matter of brain states, a sort of efficient causality to behaviour. Relying on Simone Weil's distinction between “the language of the market place and the language of the nuptial chamber,” it distinguishes, as she did, between levels of value. The inner life is a life of dealing with values that demand some kind of personal and intimate response.     

Julian of Norwich: Mysticism and Philosophy

Parts of Julian's Showings are examined for their didactic quality, and her work is briefly compared to that of Mechthild and Hildegard. The commentary of Tobin, Chervin and others is alluded to, and it is concluded that Julian is an exemplary teacher.     

青少年学业成绩、攻击行为与受欢迎程度的关系:一项交叉滞后研究

我国高度重视教育问题,学业被家庭和社会投入了大量的关注,构成了青少年学生时代的主要旋律。学业成绩不仅可以影响青少年的社会性发展,也会被社会性发展所影响。本研究采用交叉滞后设计,通过同伴提名和标准化考试对1283名初中生（M_age=13.43岁,SD=0.65岁,47.7%为女生）进行了为期一年的追踪研究,考察学业成绩和社会性发展（受欢迎程度、攻击行为）之间的相互预测关系。结果表明：（1）T1~T2时间段,学业成绩显著正向预测受欢迎程度;（2）T1~T3时间段,男生学业成绩均显著负向预测随后的攻击行为,但这一关系对于女生而言仅在T1~T2时间段显著,并且在该时间段男生的预测作用强于女生;（3）T1~T2时间段,受欢迎程度显著正向预测学业成绩,但预测强度弱于同时期学业成绩对于受欢迎程度的预测。本研究结果表明,青少年学业成绩、攻击行为与受欢迎程度之间存在着复杂的相互作用,并且这一作用随着性别以及时间的变化有所不同。研究结果对于促进青少年个体发展具有重要的意义。     

Reminiscing together: joint experiences,epistemic groups,and sense of self

In this essay, I consider a kind of social group that I call ‘epistemic’. It is constituted by its members’ possession of perceptually grounded common knowledge, which endows them with a particular kind of epistemic authority. This authority, I argue, is invoked in the activity of ‘joint reminiscing’—of remembering together a past jointly experienced event. Joint reminiscing, in turn, plays an important role in the constitution of social and personal identity. The notion of an epistemic group, then, is a concept that helps explain an important aspect of a subject’s understanding of who she is.

     

Homosexuality and the Practices of Marriage

The essay considers gay and lesbian relationships in terms of Christian practices of marriage. It treats marriage on three levels as it is understood within the Christian tradition: marriage as a set of practices which contribute to the common good, the morality of the sexual act, and Scripture. The essay concludes that sexual orientation is not a sufficient category for judgments about homosexual relationships, and that the practices of marriage provide clearer moral determinations of particular cases.     

Words that touch2

In this paper the author examines her own use of language as a psychoanalyst and asks: what is the best way to help analysands to find the words to express not only what they are thinking but also what they are feeling and experiencing? In common with other psychoanalysts, the author has observed that each of us simultaneously utilises both advanced psychic mechanisms that are accessible to symbolism and more archaic ones, which are less so. However, she draws a distinction between people who are able to tolerate the perception of their own heterogeneity, even if it is sometimes a source of suffering, and those whom she terms ‘heterogeneous patients’. Patients in the latter category, whose lack of internal cohesion causes them anxiety, are afraid of losing their sense of identity. The author asks how we can understand their language and how we should speak to them. She uses several clinical examples to demonstrate that ‘heterogeneous patients’ need to be touched with a language that does not confine itself to imparting thoughts verbally but also conveys feelings and the sensations that accompany those feelings. It is also an ‘incarnated’ language because the words pronounced by the analyst can awaken, or reawaken, bodily fantasies in the patient. These words may enable him to find an emotional meaning in forgotten sensory or bodily experiences, which may then become a starting point for his work of thinking and of symbolisation.     

A Thirst for God or Consumer Spirituality? Cultivating Disciplined Practices of Being Engaged by God

This essay offers a critique of contemporary popular spirituality, specifically by focusing on Thomas Moore's best-selling book Care of the Soul . Moore's perspective is juxtaposed with Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs, displaying the widely divergent views of God, the self, and the practices of spiritual living. The essay also sketches several reasons which help to explain the popularity of generic spirituality such as Moore's, and it concludes by responding to some potential objections to the account offered in the essay. Overall, the essay displays the marked contrasts between disciplined practices of Christian spirituality and the simulacra of consumer spirituality.     

The Protective Role of Teacher Preference for At‐Risk Children's Social Status

Aggressive behaviors have been associated with social costs (e.g., rejection) and benefits (e.g., popularity) in previous studies. The current study sought to examine the moderating effect of teacher preference on the association between distinct forms of aggressive behavior (i.e., physical aggression and relational aggression) and social status (i.e., rejection and popularity), and to explore whether these associations differed for boys and girls. Fourth and fifth grade students (N = 193) completed peer nomination procedures to assess rejection and aggressive behavior and teachers provided self‐reports of their preferences for their students. Findings indicated that relationally aggressive girls were more likely to be popular with their peers when their teachers also liked them. In addition, both relationally and physically aggressive girls were less likely to be rejected by their peers when their teachers liked them. Although physical aggression was most strongly associated with rejection among boys whose teachers liked them, relational aggression predicted popularity among boys whose teachers disliked them. Results suggest that teacher preferences may be a particularly important factor contributing to both physically and relationally aggressive children's social status (e.g., rejection and popularity), especially for girls. Aggr. Behav. 38:481‐493, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Ghost stories

This essay reflects on the exclusions and invisibilities that haunt academic subjectivities, spaces, and research practices. The exclusion criteria that delimit both scholars and scholarship are not natural or fair; they are the expressions of classed, raced, gendered, and ableist ideals, that privilege separation, order, and certainty. That which is marked as other – the remainder, which must not or cannot be admitted – is not fully excluded, but lurks at or below the waterline of legibility, disrupting academic bodies and departments with its persistent, often affective traces. Rather than trying to explain something that is primarily characterized by its inexplicability, the author brings readers into her department, to try to show them the ghosts that she has (not quite) seen, in order to appeal for more humane, inclusive, ghost-friendly ways of being and working in the academy.     

As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

Preschoolers favor the creator's label when reasoning about an artifact's function

The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact's creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the speaker referred to with the label of a different familiar category (e.g. a key-like object was called a "spoon"). Children who heard the speaker refer to the object as something she made were more likely to assign its function on the basis of the anomalous label she used than those who heard it referred to as something the speaker found. Thus, even very young children expect a unique connection between the label the creator of an artifact uses and the function she intends it to have.     

“A Failure of Curiosity”

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the clinician's defense against and resolution of the experience of boredom in the countertransference as an incident of projective identification in the treatment of a woman with dissociative identity disorder. The essay details the inner mind of the therapist as she discovers both her own feelings and judgements of those feelings. As the essay progresses, she begins to grasp the significance of her discomfort in informing the therapeutic process. We watch as this material is made use of to move forward a stalled therapy into new territory.     

How Is Critical Ontology Possible? Toward the Foundation of the General Theory of the Categories, Part One (1923)

This is a translation of an early essay by the German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950). In this 1923 essay Hartmann presents many of the fundamental ideas of his new critical ontology. He summarizes some of the main points of his critique of neo-Kantian epistemology, and provides the point of departure for his new approach in an extensive criticism of the errors of the classical ontological tradition. Some of these errors concern the definition of an ontological category or principle, and others concern the relations among categories themselves. The outline for the new ontology is sketched through the correctives Hartmann appends to the treatment of each error, prefiguring his mature ontological system.     

Psychoanalysis in later life

After decades of heeding Freud's admonition against taking patients older than fifty years of age into psychoanalytic treatment, psychoanalysts began to treat them and to report encouraging experiences. This essay is another in a series of case reports that confirms and extends the nature of changes possible in the analytic treatment of elderly patients. In order to demonstrate both specific changes and the possibility of satisfactory terminations with patients of advanced age, the author describes his analytic work with a woman who first consulted him when she was sixty-eight years old.     

“Pleasure and Joy in the Work”: Using Simone Weil in the Classroom

Richard Rorty once wrote that inspired teaching “is the result of an encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made a difference to the [teacher’s] conception of who she is, what she is good for, what she wants to do with herself: an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes.” In a teaching career more than three decades long, no author has influenced me more profoundly as a teacher and as a human being than Simone Weil. She has changed how I think about myself, my relationships, the world around me and ultimately about what transcends me. And this could not help but change how I am in the classroom. This essay is a reflection on how Simone Weil has changed my life, both in and out of the classroom.     

Volatile Reasons

I argue for the existence of a category of practical reasons which I call ‘Deliberation-Volatile Reasons’ or ‘DVRs’. DVRs have the distinguishing feature that their status as reasons for action is diminished when they are weighed in deliberation by the agent. I argue that DVRs are evidence of ‘deliberative blind spots’. I submit that an agent manifests a peculiar kind of practical irrationality in so far as she endeavours to find a deliberative path to what she has reason to do, when the discovery of such a path renders the destination inaccessible.     

Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions in preschoolers

Adults perceive emotional facial expressions categorically. In this study, we explored categorical perception in 3.5-year-olds by creating a morphed continuum of emotional faces and tested preschoolers’ discrimination and identification of them. In the discrimination task, participants indicated whether two examples from the continuum “felt the same” or “felt different.” In the identification task, images were presented individually and participants were asked to label the emotion displayed on the face (e.g., “Does she look happy or sad?”). Results suggest that 3.5-year-olds have the same category boundary as adults. They were more likely to report that the image pairs felt “different” at the image pair that crossed the category boundary. These results suggest that 3.5-year-olds perceive happy and sad emotional facial expressions categorically as adults do. Categorizing emotional expressions is advantageous for children if it allows them to use social information faster and more efficiently.     

Holocaust Abuse

This essay reconsiders the category of “Holocaust denial” as the marked indicator of ethical transgression in Holocaust historiography within American civil religion. It maintains that the present category excludes and thereby enables other violations of responsible Holocaust historiography. To demonstrate the nature and gravity of such violations, the essay engages the widespread claim that Hajj Muhammad Amin al‐Husayni, the former mufti of Jerusalem, was an instigator, promoter, or “driving spirit” of the Nazi genocide against Jews, and the associated suggestions of wider Arab and Muslim complicity. The essay uncovers the history of the Husayni narrative in question, the dramatic circumstances in which it emerged, its role in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its rediscovery and misuse within American popular and political circles over the past two decades. Such misuse, it concludes, corrodes Holocaust recognition within American civil religion and demonstrates the need for a revision of the socially accepted ethical boundary for responsible Holocaust historiography.     

Surviving Evils and the Problem of Agency: An Essay Inspired by the Work of Claudia Card

Claudia Card did not live long enough to complete her work on surviving evils. Yet she left us an invaluable body of work on this topic. This essay surveys Card's views about the nature of evils and the ethical quandaries of surviving them. It then develops an account of survival agency that is based on Card's insights and in keeping with the agentic capacities exercised by Yezidi women and girls who have escaped from ISIS's obscene program of trafficking in women and sexual violence. Card holds that true survival requires not only staying alive and as healthy as possible but also preserving your good moral character. The essay maintains that while exercising agency to elude evil and protect yourself often depends on your own skills and personality traits, exercising agency to restore or develop your moral character often depends on social support.