Katechontic Democracy? Carl Schmitt and the Restraining Mediation of Popular Power

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s conception of an ‘illiberal’ democracy is based on seemingly contradictory elements of both ‘populism’ and ‘technocratic elitism’, attempting as it does to wed the popular enthusiasm of mass democracy to a concrete order through the principle of a shared homogeneous identity and the somewhat paradoxical idea of a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’. This amalgamation of authoritarianism and popular sovereignty emanates from what can be described as Schmitt’s ‘katechontic impulse’, a name derived from a Biblical figure introduced by St Paul. The Katechon is the principle or the person that restrains lawlessness or ‘the lawless one’, often interpreted as Antichrist and his reign before the end of days. The chapter shows how Schmitt’s apocalyptic imagery of an ordered popular sovereignty can be illustrated by this politico-theological mytheme and further investigates the implications thereof for contemporary democratic politics.

Transnational and Counternational Queer Agencies in Lusophone Cultures: Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies was devised with the aim of addressing issues of (nonnormative) gender and (queer) sexuality in relation to travel, translation, transnational friendships and relationships, posturing and imitation, contagion, promiscuity, and other related themes across the spectrum of modern Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures from the nineteenth century onward. Collectively, the editors and contributors are particularly interested in considering the ways in which queer subjectivities and agencies have counteracted triumphant versions of the nation and nationalism that seek to foreclose any alternatives to patriarchal and heteronormative fictions of progress and homogeneous identity.

“I am I”: Self-constructed transgender identities in internet-mediated forum communication

This article analyses identity constructions and representations of self-identifying transgender individuals on a web-based forum. Although the forum is aimed towards all transgender users, the primary user-group are transfeminine users (intending on) undergoing medico-surgical interventions to align their physiology and identity. The data for this analysis are initial text posts from the forum board used for introductions (i.e. new users of the forum introducing themselves). The article assumes that introductions are the context in which one asserts key identity features; hence, this board is the most pertinent for analysing identity construction. In this article, I use a combination of corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies tools to analyse the use of pronouns and gender-indexical nouns in identity constructions and the representation of social categorisations. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that transgender is not a collective homogeneous identity, and that gender-sex incongruence may not be a salient identity feature for some forum-users. I also examine the ideologies (re)produced in the local forum-communication discourse, and the evaluation of hegemonic practices within transgender discourse and wider gender discourse to further demonstrate the heterogeneity of transgender identity.

“La batalla de Mbororé” Configuraciones narrativas de la identidad y la diferencia en un relato ejemplar en Misiones, Argentina.

Resumo: El presente artículo explora las fijaciones y los desplazamientos en un relato ejemplar emblemático de la memoria cultural misionera, La batalla de Mbororé, enfatizando las ambivalencias y aporías en las configuraciones de una identidad narrativa que inscribe los orígenes del territorio misionero en la genealogía de la nación argentina. Analizamos las estrategias discursivas que en el relato propician un imaginario de pertenencias y rechazos que pretende eludir las fricciones culturales y políticas de un semiosfera mestiza, turbulenta y dinámica. Abstract: This article explores the fixations and movements in an exemplary tale emblematic of the cultural memory in Misiones, Argentina. We emphasize the ambivalences and aporias of this story in the configurations of a narrative identity that connected the origins of Misiones with the genealogy of Argentina. We analyze the rhetorical strategies that in this story created a “homogeneous identity” of this dynamic and mixed semiosphere. Palavras- chaves: Narración – Identidad – Memoria Keywords: Narration – Identity – Memory

“The guys would like to have a lady:” The co-construction of gender and professional identity in interviews between employers and female engineering students

Gender and professional identity are intertwined particularly in professions where women are underrepresented, making gender identities and professional identities simultaneously relevant. A promising area for inquiry into identity construction (and one where the effect of actions to increase the proportion of women in professions such as engineering can potentially be observed) is graduate recruitment, a process designed to put novice professional identities to the test. This paper takes a social constructionist approach in exploring the discursive negotiation of female engineers’ professional identities and how these are co-constructed dynamically in interaction with gender identities in this important gatekeeping context. The analysis, which draws on examples from a dataset of 20 naturally occurring interviews between employers and final-year undergraduates at a university in New Zealand, focuses particularly on the interplay of gender in the necessary synthesis of personal and institutional discourses in constructing a professional identity. Ways in which gender is oriented to explicitly and/or implicitly in these gatekeeping encounters are shown to resonate with existing gender divisions (technical vs relational) in the androcentric professional context of engineering, undermining a pro-women recruitment stance. Central to the validation of professional identities by interviewers was the demonstration of “passion for engineering” but ways in which it was deemed to be demonstrated, such as through reasons for career choice and outside interests, were arguably gender-circumscribed. This further set of normative expectations, on top of the existing competency-discourse-driven requirement to fit candidates into prescribed categories, contributes invisibly to maintaining the homogeneous identity of the engineering profession. The tension between conflicting requirements for “difference” and “sameness” in the professional identities of female engineers is highlighted in a discussion of the ways gender is made relevant in the co-construction of these identities.

The Second Sex in Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir and the (Post)-Socialist Condition

Beauvoir’s work was translated in 1969, a period of change in state socialism: the introduction of some elements of market economy in 1968 (called New Economic Mechanism), the publication of Western bourgeois philosophers as Sartre and Beauvoir, and Marxist philosophers’ efforts to revise orthodox Marxism. ’The woman question’ was declared to be already solved by socialism. The emblematic female identity is of the working mother: free and equal with men by virtue of law, taking part in producing new value as worker and according to her natural role as mother and wife, representing the center of the socialist family. Under these circumstances the reception of The Second Sex is highly interesting: a success (two editions in a high number of copies), but only two contemporary reviews (one friendly, one sharply critical). In this paper, I give a reconstruction of socialist women’s reading of Beauvoir, given their officially propagated homogeneous identity and their unrecognized double burden. They could have identified themselves with Beauvoir’s new, independent woman and at the same time with the traditional woman. Beauvoir’s legacy for us post-socialist women can be derived from this past: to face ambiguities in identity and to vindicate individual freedom.

"Plurality in Unity": European Identity and European Citizenship

In this paper, an argument is developed in favour of further integration of “Europe” and, most importantly, its increased “politicization”. It is not based on any romantic or idealistic vision of a positive European cultural identity, but on an assessment of Europe's reality as already integrated economically, socially and ecologically, however lagging behind politically in terms of democratic government and citizenship. The seemingly endless discussions about Europe's identity, limit, unity, civilization, etc. are not a problem that is yet to be solved, but are, precisely, the core of what makes Europe what it is: a plurality in unity instead of a “unity in plurality”, as one of the official slogans of the European Union (EU) has it. Current social, economic and environmental problems require European solutions as well as a more active European citizenship. However, European civil identity that is to match European societal reality, will not be a unitary and homogeneous identity, but heterogeneous and diverse, covering a plurality of perceptions, preferences and ideals ‐ it will be plural, not as a first step towards unity, but in its core; and it will be divided, but not along national lines.