Skip to main content

Budapest W2: Feminist Research - Psychology, Postmodernity and the Popular


Walkerdine, Valerie: "Psychology, Postmodernity and the Popular" in S. Pile & N. Thrift (eds.) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, Routledge, 1995. 


"in the wake of 1968 the failure of the Left to have a theory of the subject seemed very important: in understanding why the workers had not joined the students in great force, why a revolution had not happened." p.283 This is because the working-class are/were not all revolutionaries.

"Thompson had argued that working-class consciousness was produced out of shared experience of oppression." p.283

"For Foucault, psychological stories were not false or pseudo-science but fictions which function in truth, scientific stories whose truth-value had a central place in the government and regulation of the modern and postmodern order." p.284

"the individual was understood as produced by means of a set of apparatuses of social regulation, management of populations in which scientific knowledges about what the social and subjective was were fictions which were central in the production of a management which sought to regulate through self-regulation." p.284

Population self-management among the working class is described as
"everything in moderation
much wants more
manage
cope
don't break down
don't get into debt" p.286

"For feminism, class was often presented in a debate about capitalism versus patriarchy, class versus gender, as though it were possible to be either one or the other and always, as usual, as though class only referred to one class: the pathologised Other, not the normalised middle class." p.287

"For Althusser, the working class was constructed not in the real relations of production but in a set of imaginary relations in which bourgeois fantasies, especially those of the mass media, had produced the very mirrors in which the workers' identity was formed." p.287 Depictions of what working-class is, made the working-class

 "the working class increasingly came to be identified as being totally formed in ideologies, in mass media" p.288

 "A fiction, in Foucault's terms, functioning in truth, very powerful truths that constitute and regulate modern forms of government. In this scenario, the working class always exists as a problem, to be transformed one way or another." p.288

 "the way that the working class is created as an object of knowledge is central to the strategies which are used for its creation as a mode of classification and regulation" p.288-289

 "the truth is constructed inside the fertile bourgeois imagination, an imagination that sees threat and annihilation around every corner because of its shaky position in between the aristocracy and the proletariat. The truth about the working class then is the mirror of the fears and hopes of the bourgeoisie" p.289

 "In Freud's view, therefore, civilisation is against the mass. It is the mass which is closer to the body, to pleasure, to animality." p.289

 "The mass then that is at once becoming more educated, is in danger of swamping the world with its easy consumption, its authoritarian parenting, its passive television viewing, it's escapism." p.290

 "Perhaps the love/hate fantasy about the working class always said more about the desire of an intellectual Left for the masses to do the transforming, the dirty work as usual, while they could write, think, lead." p.290

 "The class becomes a place to leave. And why on earth would you not want to leave it for the life that is being offered?" p.290

 "what is visible here already is a version of the mass subject with an identity defined by that mass consumption." p.291

 "As usual, the normal middle classes are all right because they see through mass consumption, they talk to their children about television, they buy healthier foods and, of course, but nobody seems to remember this, they have more money and they have access to a culture which they regard as infinitely superior to the one that the poor unfortunates are dragged into." p.291

 "So busy have some of the intellectuals been in creating the stories of the working class to fit their fears and their desires that they do not seem to have been the least interested in addressing questions about the constitution and survival of oppressed peoples." p.294-295

 "Middle-class people often only see the working class in relations of service or as frightening others in areas of town that they do not want to enter. Their defences are cross-cut by the way in which the Other is made to signify and the fictions in which they are inscribed." p.296

 "Oppressed groups, such as the working class, have to survive but survive in a way which means that they must come to recognise themselves as lacking, deficient, deviant, as being where they are because that is who they are, that is how they are made, an insidious self-regulation, while individual effort is allowed to those clever enough to plan an escape" p.297

 "As Pheterson remarks, genocidal persecution is not required to elicit psychic defence; daily humiliation will do." p.297

 "It has long been women who have had an injunction to speak about the personal, to tell their secrets, just as it has always been the working class who have been asked to tell of their lives, to explain their pathology, while the fact that it takes two to tango appears to have escaped the notice of those who constantly ask us to tell it like it is." p.300

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

B2 W5: Theory and Critical Research - Queerness as Horizon

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32. Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20 Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic. "The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thesis reading: Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy

Pateman, Carole "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy" in  The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory . Stanford University Press: California. 1989 118-133 "Benn and Gaus’s account assumes that the reality of our social life is more or less adequately captured in liberal conceptions. They do not recognize that ‘liberalism’ is patriarchal-liberalism and that the separation and opposition of the public and private spheres is an unequal opposition between women and men." p.120 "One reason why the exclusion [of women] goes unnoticed is that the separation of the private and public is presented in liberal theory as if it applied to all individuals in the same way. It is often claimed - by anti-feminists today, but by feminists in the nineteenth century, most of whom accepted the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’- that the two spheres are separate, but equally important and valuable. The way in which women and men are differentiall...
Post a Comment
Read more

B2 W3: Somatechnics - Imagined futures

Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24. Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2 "If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2 "the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3...
Post a Comment
Read more