Geographies of Identity: Geographies of Identity

Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein’s A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman’s Juice, Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.

‘Speaking the Data’: Renegotiating the Digitally-Mediated Body Through Performative Embodied Praxis, Sound and Rhythmic Affect

This article explores an alternative autoethnographic methodological approach, using embodied praxis and sound, for critically re-thinking contemporary subjective health practices of digital ‘self-tracking’; popularized in recent years through the rise in wearable biometric fitness devices, and online socio-cultural movements such as the Quantified Self and Strava platforms, which enable subjects to “share” their quantifiable body-data metrics. Through a performative praxis case study titled Speaking the Data (2017), the author renegotiates the “voice” of subjective agency within the quantitative data-discourse, “speaking the data” that her body is producing in “real-time” on a digital smart-bike machine. This embodied renegotiation, recorded using a sound “data-stream,” produces an alternative subjective data-set which is extended to the reader, who is invited to become “listener” in the theoretical/experiential praxis space. The sound “data-stream” thus proffers an affective expansion to our perceptions of what “body-data” can be, extending the possibilities for the digitally mediated body beyond biometric forms of quantification, through other sensorial registers of embodiment, using sound, rhythmic affect and lived experience.

Emotions in Intergroup Contact: Incidental and Integral Emotions' Effects on Interethnic Bias Are Moderated by Emotion Applicability and Subjective Agency

This research draws from three distinct lines of research on the link between emotions and intergroup bias as springboard to integrative, new hypotheses. Past research suggests that emotions extrinsic to the outgroup (or “incidental”), and intrinsic to the outgroup (or “integral”), produce valence-congruent effects on intergroup bias when relevant or “applicable” to the outgroup (e.g., incidental/integral anger and ethnic outgroups). These emotions produce valence incongruent effects when irrelevant or “non-applicable” to the outgroup (e.g., incidental/integral sadness and happiness, and ethnic outgroups). Internally valid and ecologically sound tests of these contrasting effects are missing; hence we examined them experimentally in meaningful settings of interethnic contact. To this end, we hybridized established research paradigms in mood and intergroup contact research; this approach enabled us to use same materials and induction methods to instigate incidental and integral emotions in a single research design. In Experiment 1, White Australian students (N = 93) in in vivo real face-to-face contact with an ethnic tutor in their classroom displayed less interethnic bias when incidentally sad (vs. happy) or integrally happy (vs. sad). In Experiment 2, White American males' (N = 492) anti-Arab bias displayed divergent effects under incidental vs. integral (non-applicable) sadness/happiness and similar effects under incidental vs. integral (applicable) anger. The role of perceptions of agency in the emotion-inducing situation is also explored, tested, and explained drawing from mainstream emotion theory. As expected, integral and incidental applicable emotions caused valence congruent effects, at the opposite sides of the subjective agency spectrum, by encouraging the generalization of dislike from the outgroup contact partner to the outgroup as a whole. On the other hand, incidental-non-applicable emotions caused valence-incongruent effects on bias, under high agency conditions, by encouraging (non-partner-centered) heuristic processing. Because of the improved methodology, these effects can be regarded as genuine and not the byproduct of methodological artifacts. This theory-driven and empirically sound analysis of the interplay between emotion source, emotion applicability and subjective agency in intergroup contact can increase the precision of emotion-based bias reduction strategies by deepening understanding of the emotion conditions that lead to intergroup bias attenuation vs. exacerbation.

Of Bugs and Masks

This essay examines the entanglement of Galin Tihanov’s three regimes of relevance of literature—literature as art, literature as high-minded social engagement, and literature as popular entertainment—in the encounter between a literary theoretician (Tzvetan Todorov) and a science fiction writer (Stanislaw Lem). The overt clash takes place in a polemical article by Lem, in which he attacks Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. Not so obviously, the writer’s revolt against the theoretician imbues Lem’s masterpiece “The Mask.” Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” plays a considerable role in both Lem’s polemic and in his fictional response, raising questions of genre (and its dependence on the market and the entertainment industry), of subjective agency (and its philosophical and political implications), and of artistic ingenuity vis-à-vis despotic power. Although Lem’s reading of Todorov involves considerable misunderstanding, it nevertheless produces fascinating results and exemplifies the impossibility of relegating literary theory to a single regime of relevance.

More than just a mental stressor: psychological value of social distancing in COVID-19 mitigation through increased risk perception—a preliminary study in China

Social distancing is an effective measure to prevent epidemic infections during a pandemic outbreak, but its psychological value in COVID-19 pandemic mitigation remained less detected. Our study fills this gap by conducting a nationwide survey in China between 12 and 25 February (2020), and a follow-up survey targeting the same participants between 25 and 28 March (2020). We have discovered that perceived increased time staying at home, a subjective agency for social distancing, positively predicts not only risk perception of COVID-19 epidemic at the outbreak and eased stage, but also predicts subjective controllability of COVID-19 epidemic at the eased stage. Given that risk perception indicates potential active engagement of preventative behavior and that subjective controllability associating with self-efficacy could promote individual health behavior, this study preliminarily justifies the value of social distancing from the angle of perceptual factors, adding to existing mounting evidence of its effect on physically controlling pandemic spread.

From Female Daoist Rationality to Kundao Practice

By presenting Cao Wenyi (1039–1119), a female Daoist in the Song dynasty, and Kundao Academy 坤道学院, a training center for female Daoists in contemporary China, this essay challenges Max Weber’s description of Daoism. This analysis criticizes two aspects of Weber’s basic position on Daoism, namely, his claims that it is irrational and egoistical. The essay argues that Weber’s account of “magical and irrational” features in Daoism is due to a deep-seated philosophical framework that fails to appreciate Daoism’s relational rationality, which takes one part in relation to many other parts, as shown in Cao’s work. Weber’s inadequate treatment of Daoism leads him not only to ignore or dismiss the roles of female Daoists in Chinese society but also to describe Daoism as egoistical and lacking in social functions. The investigation of Kundao Academy reveals a living reality in which female Daoists have a deep and immediate commitment and goal to serve the community. The study of past and present female Daoist voices invites us to rethink the very notions of man/male/masculinity and woman/female/femininity and offers a path for investigating relationships between the hegemonic power of social structures and female subjective agency through the interface of classical texts and contemporary contexts.

Arjunopākhyāna: An Idealist Non-dualistic Translation of the Bhagavadgītā

This paper suggests that the narrative retelling of the Bhagavadgītā (BhG) dialogue that occurs in the sixth book of the Mokṣopāya (MU) (ca. 950 CE) known as the Arjunopākhyāna (AU) functions as a polemic style semantic translation that shifts the meaning of the original story with which it shares content, characters, elements and verses, illustrating a different doctrine in the process. Just over thirty quoted verses from the BhG are recontextualized and merged seamlessly with verses that are original to the MU, translating them into the non-dualistic, idealist conceptual language of the MU. The nonduality at the heart of Vasiṣṭha’s teaching in the MU is different from the theistic Sāṃkhya-influenced duality of Kṛṣṇa’s discourse in the BhG. Puruṣa and prakṛti are consistently replaced in the AU by an all-encompassing singular consciousness whose cosmic mind imagines everything, including Kṛṣṇa, all subjective agency, worship and liberation.

Caringly subjective agency of Volunteer Fire Brigade members expressing the benefits of gifts and sacrifice for local communities

In the paper, I undertake the exploration of pro-social subjectivity as a latent feature defining the catalog of instructions made by an individual concerning another human being or toward a wider social environment. These instructions are released in practice in the form of various forms of social action for the common good, shaped in specific situational contexts. I perceive pro-social subjectiv-ity here as an emerging or shaped construct of the predisposition of a subject reflectively acting for the common good. The construct of subjectivity is formed by external social influences embedded in the cultural dimension and showed in the form of numerous gifts. The subject adopts the role of cre-ative influence on the existing situational context, often overcoming structural limitations due to the power of reflectiveness. The person undertakes activities related to the transformation of the social en-vironment, reproduction of resources relevant to the social tissue, demonstrates a commitment to the community, co-shapes changes or implements grassroots initiatives. By pro-social orders, I understand here the tendency of the individual to commit acts of sacrifice, at the sources of which we will find the commitment that leads one to such a pattern of demeanor. These acts are specific determinants of attitudes that should be described as pro-social. In the progress of operationalization, I selected five theoretical types of agency in the field of pro-social activities: 1. the agency of civic involvement, 2. the subjective agency expressing attention for democracy, 3. the agency expressing self-gift, 4. the agency expressing the thing gift and 5. the agency in the interest of common good. The distinguished types of agency reflect the repertoire of attitudes toward the implementation (or lack thereof) of pro-social acts as a special kind of gifts for others. Regardless of the generalizations made, these gifts are given to other people, conducive ― and also demonstrative ― to specific forms of social solidarity. In the prog-ress of empirical research, the model of pro-social subjectivity revealed the existence of seven pro-so-cial orientations showing the reflectiveness of man in relation to the following concerns: 1. the direct involvement in co-creating relatively close social networks, 2. the civic level involvement, 3. expressing concerns for democracy, 4. the bond-forming potential of culture, 5. beneficent and charitable support showing the imperatives of generosity, 6. the strengthening of social bonds, a sense of solidarity and 7. self-gift. The dynamics of pro-social subjectivity shows the orientations of members of the Volunteer Fire Department, the research was conducted out in 2017 on a nationwide experiment of 620 people.

Performers, Structure, and Ways of Knowing

This opening chapter presents the book’s overarching project: the illumination of relations between analysis and performance through theorist-performer collaborations on twentieth-century works. The project is set in the context of two distinct though overlapping disciplines: the tradition of relating analysis and performance within the field of music theory, and the field of musical performance studies. Musical structure, on which the book focuses, is broadly defined as relations among parts and whole, emerging through interactions of objective materials and subjective agency. Ways of knowing that arise in the course of relating analysis and performance are encapsulated by wissen (knowing that), können (knowing how), and kennen (knowing, as in knowing a person). The book’s title and form (a theme and variations) are briefly described. Two rehearsal vignettes (from Crumb’s Four Nocturnes for violin and piano and Shende’s Throw Down or Shut Up!), the first accompanied by a performance video, frame the chapter.