Sociology of Culture Commons^™

Unruly Corporeality: Aids, Immigration And The Imagined Australian Body, Zoë Anderson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Particular bodies within the Australian nation can be seen to threaten to disrupt and destabilize dominant notions of cultural citizenship. Understood through intricate intersections of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, 'Australianness' - and its correlation to the geographical nation - is constantly monitored. Crucial here is the manner in which boundaries of whiteness, and 'true Australianess', are reconstituted, fuelling avoidance of the ambiguities of national belonging and ensuring the enduring pathologisation of the 'un'Australian. In particular, discursive associations between HIV/AIDS and the 'foreign' as perceived contaminates to the nation operate to reinforce these understandings. Here, the threat of disease both informs, …

The Whitening Of Brown Skins And The Darkening Of Whiteness, Elaine Laforteza

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper draws on the interrelation of whiteness and Orientalism to provide a framework for examining the use of skin-bleaching lotions and soaps by some Filipino men and women. Through this focus, I investigate the ways in which skin-bleaching negotiates the "threatening" existence of brown flesh upon the contours of Filipino bodies and within the corpus of western(ised) nations. These threats are negotiated through the skin wherein various chromatic inflections of the flesh become processed as a part of or a threat to normative comfort zones. Skin-colour is thus the site of and for discursive construction and a domain of …

On Chris Lehmann's Revolt Of The Masscult, George Ciccariello Maher

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The good folks at Prickly Paradigm are certainly doing their job. Their stated objective is “publishing challenging and sometimes outrageous pamphlets,” and Lehmann's short piece fulfills this claim brilliantly, evoking intellectual mood swings that span from shouting for joy at a particularly lucid formulation to shouting angrily at the deftness with which Lehmann transforms his lucidity into suspiciously wrongheaded and reactionary assessments. The clinical bipolarity of this work, as we will see, is no coincidence: it is precisely the political entanglement of the subject of mass culture (“masscult”) that leads to both respect for one's opponents and suspicion …

The Game's Afoot: Images Of Infinite Games In Samuel Delany's Trouble On Triton, Marc R. Zaldivar

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Games are frequently used in speculative literature as a metaphor for real-world activities. In Trouble on Triton, Samuel Delany uses several sorts of games in order to explore complex systems of modeling and interrelationships between fiction and reality, extending a tradition in science fiction of placing games at the very center of social reality. Zaldivar's essay seeks to define some of the concepts of game theory that can be used to understand this complex novel and its representation of human social life. In particular, Zaldivar explores finite and infinite games and their uses within a deconstructive theoretical framework. A …

Shooters To The Left Of Us, Shooters To The Right: First Person Arcade Shooter Video Games, The Violence Debate, And The Legacy Of Militarism, Karen J. Hall

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Adult concerns about video games erupted in the 1990s when parents and politicians came forward with claims that Doom, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct and games like them were partially responsible for the rash of school shootings in predominantly white, middle class communities. The author of this chapter argues that arcade games serve the national interest by entertaining consumer-citizens and creating a consumer-based demand for military technology. However, when adolescent shooters disrupt the status quo, it is the games rather than militarist social and economic structures that are criticized by the news media, politicians, and parents. The author of …

Reading Owen's Between Reason And History: Habermas And The Idea Of Progress , Ali Rizvi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From the start Habermas' work has been an attempt at synthesising certain core insights from Kant and Hegel, as it is clearly evident from the beginning chapters of his first major work Knowledge and Human Interest (KHI). In the structure of the book Marx's position is as the mediator of Kant and Hegel and all subsequent authors are considered in order to overcome the shortcomings of this Marxian mediation (KHI: chapter 1-11, Habermas, 1982: 239ff Cf. Kortian, 1980).

A Privatization Of Politics: Anthony Elliot's Concepts Of The Self (2001), Paula Murphy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate image of selfhood in the modern world than that found in Ezra Pound's poem In a Station of the Metro. It is a selfhood which is at once unique and conglomerative, fleetingly visible then tantalizingly out of focus. It is this slippery, indefinable entity that is the subject of Anthony Elliot's book. The title bears witness to the enormous breadth of its subject matter: Concepts of the Self is an attempt to engage with the various contemporary theoretical frameworks through which selfhood is explicated. Elliot's approach is admirably inter-disciplinary, …

The Latecoming Of The Posthuman, Or, Why 'We' Do The Apocalypse Differently, 'Now', Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The paper takes its cue from a brief but pointed passage in Specters of Marx, in which Jacques Derrida describes as latecomers those who discuss the apocalypse in a manner that disregards previous discussions of the theme within philosophy and theory. Especially concerned with tracing Derrida's wariness of the beguilements of narratives of the end, Callus and Herbrecther analyze the implications of that wariness for any study of the vexed relation between the apocalyptic and the posthuman, doing so on the basis of reference to a number of the relevant essays by Derrida, but in particular to …

Post·Hum·An·Ous, C. Jason Smith, Geoff Klock, Ximena Gallardo-C.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Death of the Human is in many ways one of those characteristic intellectual bids for attention, in the vein of Lacan's Woman does not exist or Baudrillard's the Gulf War never happened. Flashy and rhetorically misleading, such assertions nevertheless create a discursive space in what otherwise appears to be a closed, natural(ized) system. Posthumanism, like any other movement or -ism, is difficult to introduce, first and foremost, because of this kind of rhetoric: its first infiltrating tactic is to call the time of death on the current age. Perhaps the most salient example of this self-defined loss …

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Review Of Subject, Society, Culture, By Roy Boyne, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes, & Selves, Deirdre Heddon

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For some time now I have been interested in autobiographical performance -- some form of the theatrical, in which performers explicitly use personal material in their work. Within this general field of autobiography and performance, one area of research concerns performances that are dependent on being located in personalised space -- what could be called, then, site-specific autobiographical performance. A recent example of this would be the performance Bubbling Tom (2000), by the UK based performer Mike Pearson, which saw Pearson return to the village of his childhood, to reflect upon and re-enact certain memories, events and persons …

Rorty's Complicit American Neo-Pragmatism, Haidar Eid

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite the obvious French origin of poststructuralism, its paradigmatic resonance can be found in the American philosophical scene, an essential part of which is Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism -- the theoretical basis of American (post)modernism. However, different from poststructuralism's apparent antagonism to the authoritarian establishments, Rorty adopts the Derridean poststructuralist motifs of the decentering of the subject, and the disappearance of meaning and truth in order to defend the establishment -- or rather, the status quo.

On Guillermo Gomez-Peña's El Mexterminator And Cyber Vato, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

While attending Bowling Green State University in 1997 I had an experience that changed my worldview. I was a teaching assistant in the Popular Culture department and part of my responsibilities included teaching Introduction to Popular Culture (POPC 100) and Introduction to Mass Media (POPC 165). I had been struggling to engage my students in examining the way in which social reality is represented to them through popular entertainments [2]. The majority of my students were white, middle class students from the surrounding Northern regions of Ohio. My students were well-versed in the ongoing controversy over whether or …

The Ruse Of The Social: Human Waste And The Gated Community, Liam Mcnamara

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

One of the central problems of contemporary society is that of “the social”: how it is defined, constituted, conjured into existence, and supported. Jean Baudrillard has employed the term “the social” in his work, but it is never explicitly defined; it is best understood as a form of simulation that has sprung into existence in the absence of symbolic social relations. The social is constituted of all the phenomena that are generally studied by sociology, so is therefore ideologically conceived of as an organic structure that is waiting for analysis. The “social” is society, both as it stands …

On Steven Duncombe's Cultural Resistance Reader (2002), Adam Reed

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

While the debates over the dis/connections between theory and practice have become essentially metaphysical, it is still useful to distinguish between micro, grassroots struggles and macro, ideological political agendas. In a world in which one of the Left's (old, new and contemporary) main achievements has been to merge the micro and macro in the popular imaginary, this distinction helps one appreciate the myriad of forces affecting social change that are condensed in primarily ideological narratives. A similar perspective is called for when one turns to cultural forms of resistance, which are usually erased by political narratives or mystified …

Ideology And Public Sphere: A Preliminary Bibliography, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Bibliography accompanies Bertellini & Sellors article Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory

Geek Culture: An Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography, William L. Svitavsky

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In recent years, there have been numerous studies on science fiction fans, role-playing games, comic book fans, and the culture of those strongly interested in computers. When a study profiles a group engaged in one of these activities, it is not unusual for the group's participation in the other activities to be mentioned as well. In popular culture (as opposed to studies of popular culture), this overlap has been recognized all along. Each of these groups has been ridiculed as geeks or nerds, and each has subverted those terms into proud self-identification. In his work on media fandom, …

Review Of Punktown, By Jeffrey Thomas, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.