Materializing Democracy

Materializing Democracy PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822329381
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term “democracy.”/div

Materializing Democracy

Materializing Democracy PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238390X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy. They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia. Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy. Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

Democratic Discourses

Democratic Discourses PDF Author: Michael Bennett
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813535739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
'Democratic' Discourses shows the ways that abolitionist writing shaped a powerful counterculture within a slave-holding society. Drawing on discourses about the body, gender, economics, and aesthetics, this study encourages readers to reconsider the reality and roots of freedoms experienced in the US.

Hegemony and Heteronormativity

Hegemony and Heteronormativity PDF Author: María do Mar Castro Varela
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122852
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This book reflects on 'the political' in queer theory and politics by revisiting two of its key categories: hegemony and heteronormativity. It explores the specific insights offered by these categories and the ways in which they augment the analysis of power and domination from a queer perspective, whilst also examining the possibilities for political analysis and strategy-building provided by theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Moreover, in addressing these issues the book strives to rethink the understanding of the term "queer", so as to avoid narrowing queer politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. By looking at the interplay between hegemony and heteronormativity, this ground-breaking volume presents new possibilities of reconceptualizing 'the political' from a queer perspective. Investigating the effects of queer politics not only on subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also on institutions, socio-cultural processes and global politics, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of critical theory, gender and sexuality, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist political theory.

Democracy's Spectacle

Democracy's Spectacle PDF Author: Jennifer Greiman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823231011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
"What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.

Transcendental Resistance

Transcendental Resistance PDF Author: Johannes Voelz
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 158465936X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A timely and engrossing critique of the New Americanists

The Reification of Desire

The Reification of Desire PDF Author: Kevin Floyd
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816643954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukâas, Herbert Marcuse and Frederic Jameson.

Democracies in America

Democracies in America PDF Author: Civilian Associate Professor of English Gregory Laski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198865694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Ask someone their thoughts about "democracy" and you'll get many different responses. Some may presume it a thing once established yet now under threat. Others may believe that democracy has always been compromised by the empowered few. In the contemporary United States, marked by constituencies across the political spectrum believing that their voices have gone unheard, "democracy" gets wielded in so many divergent directions as to be rendered nearly incoherent. Democracies in America reminds us that this reality is nothing new. Focusing on the various meanings of "democracy" that circulated in the long nineteenth century, the book collects twenty-five essays, each taking up a keyword in the language we use to talk about democracy. Penned by a group of diverse intellectuals, the entries tackle terms both commonplace (citizenship and representation) and paradigm-stretching (disgust and sham). The essays thus consider the relationship between "America" and "democracy" from multiple disciplinary angles and from different moments in a major historical period-amidst the vitality of the revolutionary epoch, in the contentious lead-up to the Civil War, and through the triumphs and failures of Reconstruction and the early reforms of the Progressive Era-while making both forward and backward glances in time. The book frames its keywords around a series of enduring democratic dilemmas and questions, and provides extensive resources for further study. Ultimately the volume cultivates, for students and teachers in classrooms, as well as citizens in libraries and cafés, a language to deliberate about the possibilities and problems of democracy in America.

Same-Sex Marriage and Social Media

Same-Sex Marriage and Social Media PDF Author: Rhonda Gibson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351717359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
According to polls, from the early noughties to now, public support for same-sex marriage has increased dramatically. Same-Sex Marriage and Social Media asks how such a rate of attitude change came about and, more specifically, what role social media played. Digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have proved to be useful outlets for political expression, and Rhonda Gibson explores how this came to benefit the marriage equality movement. Drawing on a wealth of movement-related discourse, the book looks at: how marriage equality was framed by news companies online and in print; the digital strategies deployed by LGBT+ rights organizations and their opponents to gain support; the corporate response to the same-sex marriage debate; the effect of perceived public opinion and the concept of social identity on how the debate evolved online. This book seeks to demonstrate how the unique ability of social networks to share personal stories on a mass scale, connect like-minded individuals regardless of geography, and leverage the bandwagon effect of viral content contributed to a seismic shift in visibility and public opinion around the issue of marriage equality. Students and researchers will find this a timely and accessible introduction to the impact of online networks on LGBTQ rights.

The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism

The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism PDF Author: Moritz Ege
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000877388
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This book examines the highly ambivalent implications and effects of anti-elitism. It draws on this theme as a cross-cutting entry point to provide transdisciplinary analysis of current conjunctures and their contradictions, drawing on examples from popular culture and media, politics, fashion, labour and spatial arrangements. Using the toolboxes of media and discourse analysis, hegemony theory, ethnography, critical social psychology and cultural studies more broadly, the book surveys and theorizes the forms, the implications and the ambiguities and limits of anti-elitist formations in different parts of the world. Anti-elitist sentiments colour the contemporary political conjuncture as much as they shape pop cultural and media trends. Populists, right-wing authoritarian ones and others, direct their anger at cultural, political and, sometimes, economic elites while supporting other elites and creating new ones. At the same time, "elitist" knowledge and expertise, decision-making power and taste regimes are being questioned in societal transformations that are discussed much more positively under headlines such as participation or democratization. The book brings together a group of international, interdisciplinary case studies in order to better understand the ways in which the battle cry "against the elites" shapes current conjunctures and possible future politics, focusing on themes such as nationalist political discourse in India, Austria, the UK and Hungary, labour struggles and anti-oligarchy rhetoric in Russia, tax-avoiding elites and fiscal imaginaries, working-class agency, Melania Trump as a celebrity narrative in Slovenia, aesthetic codes of the Alt-Right, football hooliganism in Germany, "hipster hate" in German political discourse or the politics of expertise and anti-elite iconography in high fashion internationally. The book is intended for undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development

The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development PDF Author: Sharon Lamb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108120806
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development is a carefully curated conversation that brings together the top researchers in child and adolescent sexual development to redefine the issues, conflicts, and debates in the field. The Handbook is organized around three foundational questions: first, what is sexual development? Second, how do we study sexual development? And third, what roles might adults - including the institutions of the media, family, and education - play in the sexual development of children and adolescents? As the first of its kind, this collection integrates work from sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, education, cultural studies, and allied fields. Writing from different disciplinary traditions and about a range of international contexts, the contributors explore the role of sexuality in children's and adolescents' everyday experiences of identity, family, school, neighborhood, religion, and popular media.