Subject Formation

Moral philosophy and poststructuralism have long been considered two antithetical enterprises. Moral philosophy is invested in securing norms, whereas poststructuralism attempts to unclench the grip of norms on our lives. Moreover, poststructuralism is often suspected of undoing the possibility of ethical knowledge by emphasizing the unstable, socially constructed nature of our practices and knowledge. This book argues that Judith Butler's work makes possible a productive encounter between moral philosophy and poststructuralism, rethinking responsibility and critique as key concepts at the juncture of ethics and politics. Putting into conversation Butler's earlier and most recent work, this book begins by examining how Butler's critique of the subject as nontransparent to itself, formed thoroughly through relations of power and in subjection to norms and social practices, poses a challenge to ethics and ethical agency. The book argues, in conversation with Butler, Levinas, and Laplanche, that responsibility becomes possible only when we do not know what to do or how to respond, yet find ourselves under a demand to respond, and even more, to respond well to others. Drawing on the work of Butler, Adorno, and Foucault, the book examines critique as a central practice for moral philosophy. It interrogates the limits of moral and political knowledge and probes methods of social criticism to uncover and oppose injustices.

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

Multiculturalismo mágico en una ciudad de Chiapas es una crítica a los proyectos de ciudadanía y nación vigentes. Desde una mirada etnográfica, muestra cómo funcionan los artificios del multiculturalismo en el diario acontecer de una ciudad turística, habitada en su mayoría por población indígena. Lo que en teoría es un proyecto incluyente y de respeto a la diversidad cultural, se revela como un discurso hueco, a la vez que un dispositivo de producción y control de sujetos y espacios, que no sólo no revierte la exclusión, sino que pareciera reforzarla y además producir nuevas desigualdades.
En este libro, la autora rescata las historias de mujeres y hombres indígenas de orígenes diversos que, desde hace ya varias décadas, han habitado la periferia urbana de esta ciudad. Historias de lucha por reconstruir el tejido comunitario y construir un espacio propio en una ciudad marcada por su pasado colonial y su presente multicultural y neoliberal. Todo ello para mostrar la centralidad de estos actores y espacios aparentemente periféricos, y la oportunidad que sus experiencias nos brindan, no solamente para realizar una crítica de la sociedad actual, sino también para pensar en proyectos futuros verdaderamente incluyentes.

Why is it that, at a time when countless state officials are apologizing for historic wrongs and insisting that Canada has entered a period of reconciliation, many settlers continue to act towards indigenous peoples with unabated aggression and resentment? This thesis attempts to explain the continual reproduction of settler colonialism through an investigation of the processes involved in the formation of settlers as political subjects. Developing a Butlerean account of the subject, the author suggests that settlers are produced through colonial regimes as political subjects with deep and often unacknowledged investments in the reproduction of systems of oppression that provide for their material and psychic position of privilege. While the instability inherent in such systems ultimately threatens settlers themselves – as seen in the collapsing North American middle class – the fragility and precarity experienced by settlers who are targeted by neoliberal reforms often leads them to reinvest in, and aggressively defend, those very systems of power as a matter of subjective continuity.
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.

This article discusses the notion of the fluidity of sexual identity in light of Luce Irigaray's account of sexual difference. I examine the historicity of sexual identity fluidity in relation to femininity as discussed in Irigaray's second-wave feminism in order to show that the concept of sexual fluidity has to be configured by the concept of sexual difference if it wants to be productive, creative, and transformative. I will advance this claim with the help of Irigaray's dual (reproductive and productive) notion of mimesis, which will allow me to distinguish between the ontology of sexual difference and the ontology of sexual fluidity. I will show that, from Irigaray's perspective, the philosophical starting point to think sexual identity should not be sexual difference vs. fluidity but rather sexual dissymmetry vs. symmetry. On this account, one ought to acknowledge the historical, symbolic, and material reality of sexual difference.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

'Paul Lawley's excellent discussion of NOT I suggests [...] ways in which a fragmented and placeless body is produced by the text and performance' (Steven Connor).
'Paul Lawley has given a useful account of the counterpointing in the text of fragmented female body and fragmented female subjectivity, re-enacted discursively and figured iconically, he argues, in a Mouth which is also a vagina, figuring femininity as absence and lack' (Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince).

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

The manuscript seeks to inquire into poststructuralist theorizing of the contexts and conditions of the subject’s continuous emergence and focuses on the importance of subject formation with regard to ethical theories on responsibility by reading Butler and her authors. Rather than reading Butler as a theorist of gender and sexuality in a narrow sense -- as has been the prevalent way of engaging her work in the existing literature to this day -- this work strives to understand and demonstrate the pertinence of Butler’s thinking for critical theory and philosophy as these are concerned with ethics and with the question of the subject as more broadly construed. I argue that response and responsibility are crucial modes of subject formation. The trajectory of my dissertation -- inquiring into Butler’s readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Althusser, Levinas, Freud, Foucault, and Kierkegaard -- draws out the implications of what it means to theorize subject formation. Approaching the question of the subject through the question of its emergence offers important avenues to unearth how at their very core subject formation and the enterprise to give an account thereof are ethical questions and have decisive bearings on what kind of ethical theorizing will subsequently become available. Main issues in the manuscript are the precariousness of life, the role of others, desire and the unattainability of satisfaction, the implication and dispossession by social norms that always precede and exceed us, and the primacy of others and their addressing us, which means that responding and responsibility are crucial modalities of subject formation.

The focus of this piece is the complex of practices and their forms. Of particular interest are those that seem to be urgently required to leave behind the fraught state in which the human sociocultural form of life is currently embroiled. As an afterword to an anthology, the reflective task of finding unity among almost forty very diverse chapters is approached through broadening the reference to ‘spirituality’ in the title of the volume by the proposal to analyse the role that the mind – understood in both a micro-macro and an ontogenetic-phylogenetic sense – plays in a variety of different kinds of practices by lending them form. Form is explored through the constitutive and structuring effect of immanent, substantive, cultural models as well as of the immanently rooted yet transcendent, meta-cultural, cognitive order of the sociocultural form of life. In the former case, concrete imaginaries organizing religious, non-theistic, political, aesthetic and subject-forming practices serve as the reference point; and, in the latter case, the largely taken-for-granted presuppositions establishing the meta-context of practices are emphasized. The argument does not for one moment deny the importance that an orientation toward the unconditional as well as self-transformation or subject-formation possess today for the attainment of the urgently needed societal transformation, but it warns against a tendency toward a potentially one-sided understanding of our presuppositions from an exclusively or largely religious or subjective standpoint. Ultimately, the piece seeks to contribute to a fuller understanding of these presuppositions and the dialectical relation between the cognitive order and the cultural models embodied by practices. Such an understanding is indispensable to a social science that is willing to assume responsibility for contributing to the evolution of the sociocultural form of life of which it forms a part.

Ce mémoire a pour but d’identifier les manières par lesquelles l’idéologie influence la formation du sujet, principalement par le discours et par ses ancrages dans les corps. Pour se faire, nous mobiliserons les écrits de Pierre Bourdieu et de Judith Butler sur la question, représentant respectivement les positions structuralistes et postmodernes de la formation du sujet (lecture classique). Nous tâcherons de comprendre, à l’aide de la conception de l’idéologie de Louis Althusser, s’il est possible de trouver un terrain d’entente entre nos auteur.es lorsqu’on s’attarde à l’émancipation du sujet et, ainsi, nuancer leurs positions. La théorie bourdieusienne a été critiquée pour son déterminisme latent, alors que la performativité de Butler a été accusée de volontarisme et d’ignorer la matérialité des corps. C’est en explorant les critiques faites à nos auteur.es et les possibilités de réunions entre l’habitus de Bourdieu et la performativité que nous constaterons le rôle de l’idéologie dans la mise au monde du sujet, mais également dans sa libération. Si les structures se retrouvent dans les corps sous la forme de dispositions et que la corporalité ainsi que la parole sont indissociables, ne faudrait-il pas trouver un moyen de penser la libération par le corps? Là où il est difficile de théoriser l’émancipation chez Bourdieu, sa pensée sur le corps contient plusieurs outils pour penser une subversion ne relevant pas exclusivement du discours. La performativité, dont l’objectif est la libération politique et l’habitus gagneraient donc à dialoguer. Nous verrons que la phénoménologie queer a le potentiel les réunir.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the ways in which ideology influences the formation of the subject, primarily through discourse and its embedding in bodies. To this end, we will mobilize the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler on the question, representing respectively the structuralist and postmodernist positions on subject formation (following a classical reading). We will try to understand, with the help of Louis Althusser's conception of ideology, if it is possible to find a common ground between our authors regarding the emancipation of the subject, and attempt to nuance their positions. Bourdieusian theory has been criticized for its latent determinism, while Butler's performativity has been accused of voluntarism and of ignoring the materiality of bodies. It is by exploring the criticisms made to our authors and the possibilities of convergence between Bourdieu's habitus and Butler’s performativity that we will be able to recognize the role of ideology in the making of the subject, but also in its liberation. If structures can be found within the bodies in the shape of dispositions, and if corporality and speech are inseparable, should we not find a way to think liberation through the body? Whereas it is difficult to theorize emancipation in Bourdieu's work, his thought on the body contains several tools for thinking a subversion that is not exclusively a matter of discourse. Performativity, whose objective is precisely political liberation, and habitus would thus gain from being brought into dialogue. We will see that queer phenomenology has the potential to bring them together.

New Desires, New Selves " is an exceptional study of the gendered, sexualized, and classed processes of self-making among the youth and offers a highly significant contribution to the sociological literatures on sex and gender and globalization, as well as youth and religion. Drawing upon interview, focus group, and survey data, the author explores the romance and sex narratives of Turkey's millennial youth who navigate a " fractured desire " (p.3) for seeking sexual autonomy while remaining connected to their families and larger communities in a country marked by a legacy of secularist state feminism and a present of religiously accentuated gender conservatism. This work constitutes the very first research-based, book-length sociological study on sexualities in Turkey and one of the very few in the larger Middle East. The book enriches our understanding of how gendered and sexual subjects, and the larger processes of subject formation, are transformed in an era of neoliberal globalization

Moving between hegemony and counter hegemony this thesis adds to the field of food politics by contributing to a further understanding of current hegemonic relations within this topic and counter-hegemonic theory in general. In the form of an interview study it draws upon the narratives of radical leftist activists in Lund and Malmö in order to outline a hegemonic framework within food politics in Sweden. By arguing that contemporary dietary hegemony is constituted by discourses that produce specific body ideals and eating disorders, the author suggests that hegemonic reality plays into an agenda of subjective differentiation; safeguarded by societal systems such as capitalism, sexism, racism and speciesism. Moreover, the workings of power are examined in order to conceptualize how hegemonic norms are enforced, as well as to provide a theory of agency that fits counter-hegemonic goals. Finally, the thesis consults the interview narratives in providing examples of counter hegemony within this hegemonic framework. The argument states that counter hegemony is possible, but characterized by ambivalence and paradoxes.

Organizadores: Patricia Bieging e Raul Inácio Busarello

“Cultura, história de vida e memória: lugares de enunciação”,
trata de dar espaço aos discursos singulares da vida, das experiências e das subjetividades dos sujeitos participantes das pesquisas apresentadas nesta obra. Falar de memória e de história de vida é dar voz, muitas vezes, a fatos que perpassam as histórias ditas oficiais de cada sociedade ou espaço institucional

Editora: Pimenta Cutural (2018)

ISBN:  978-85-66832-78-5 (eBook PDF)

​DOI: 10.31560/pimentacultural/2018.785

Decentralized natural resource governance in African nations has been accompanied by mounting struggles over resource entitlements framed around social identities. Dominant groups have justified exclusive control of resources by linking ethnic, gender, and generational status with claims about who is a responsible resource-user and who is a despoiler. The literature on environmentality has highlighted the central role that "environmental subjects" play in decentralized resource regimes. Yet too often, critical scholarship on environmental beliefs and practices has framed power in terms of Preprint; forthcoming in Geoforum 2 domination and resistance, neglecting the ways that individuals' embrasures of environmental subject positions entail multivarious power relations. This paper situates environmental subjectivities as a constituent part of the politics of identity, property, and authority, drawing on feminist theories of subjectivity and the framework of articulating identity. Through an ethnographic investigation of community forest management in central Senegal, I examine how villagers constructed subject positions incorporating environmental discourses and their own identity-inflected experiences and interests. Two main subject positions emerged: a group of senior men positioned themselves as community custodians, while autochthonous-identifying villagers asserted their status as environmental citizens. These subject positions had important political effects: by serving as custodians, senior men partially reconstituted their patriarchal authority over kin; meanwhile, environmental citizenship helped autochthonous groups to exclude "second-comers" from village lands. This paper argues that research on environmental subjectivities should look beyond governmental projects and situate subject formation as part of long-term, place-based struggles over identities, rights, and authority.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being--especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence--work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of new media and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the Black allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

This article investigates the production of regulated Christian bodies in the Heidelberg Catechism in the light of Foucault’s views on the regulatory body. It reexamines how bodies are denigrated, desired, governed, and normalized through the Christian religious practices that the Heidelberg Catechism counsels. It highlights the body as site of the exercise of social power in the individualizing process that produces individuality and docile individuals around the body. Making the body a nodal point for critical inquiry then means to ask how bodies and desires become socially and politically recognizable, to which ends, in relation to what they become important, and which bodies and desires are rendered unlivable, as even the ‘liberation’ of a particular nature of the body works to make these bodies and their desires even more vulnerable
to regulation and governmental control. Hence, we need to inquire how these body-knowledges are produced, what their relation to political and religious practices is, and how bodies become the site where politics and religion are negotiated. We might consider bodies and desires in religious, social, and political practices as critical categories by which we examine how these practices work, what kinds of subjects they produce, what kinds of bodies they condemn to liminal lives.

As I work through different components of the debate surrounding the growing use of drones in various guises, it seemed necessary to think through the ways that artists and others are using the visualities of drones to present competing understandings of this technology. What I have written as a thought piece, 'Drone Imaginaries' is the start of a larger piece on drones and their visualities as I work through how different people see with and through drones.

Modern Chinese history can be recounted in terms of three seemingly contradictory narratives: forced secularization; religious resilience and revival; and the sacralisation of the nation and its secular state. Secularization, de-secularization and sacralisation have been simultaneous and often mutually reinforcing processes. Reviewing the relationship between Chinese political movements and religious impulses in the late imperial, Republican, Mao and Reform-eras, we argue that this apparent paradox derives from a uni-linear understanding of secularization vs. de-secularization. China's encounter with secular modernity cannot be adequately understood as a trend towards a "more" or "less" religious society, but ought to be described in terms of a changing configuration of four "poles" of religious subject formation: the sacred/profane and the enchanted/secular. This shifting configuration has led to the sacralisation of the Communist Party, the profanation of society, and the growth of an "enchanted underbelly" of religious networks and practices in the local interstices of the nation-state.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

Turkey's 2013 Gezi protests brought together divergent constituencies, from nationalists to liberals, from secular to pious, from left to right. Anti-capitalist Muslims, who offer an alternative reading of religious texts and rituals for mobilizing resistance against capitalism, also participated in these protests. In this chapter, I address discourse and practices of Anti-capitalist Muslims with a particular focus on their activities during Gezi protests. Based on semi-structured interviews with members, discourse analysis of public declarations and statements on social media, and participant observation during Gezi protests. I particularly focus on how they reinterpret religious symbols and rituals for mobilizing resistance against  Justice and Development Party (AKP) and capitalist order. This analysis opens room for further reflections on Anti-capitalist Muslims and Gezi protests as well as on Turkey's sociopolitical landscape and trajectories.

This article argues for a non-binary model of subjection formation in Marie's Old French lay "Yonec" by analyzing the lay individually and within the context of MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 2168, a collection of diverse Old French texts. The role of gender and power in subjection emerges in particular focus through comparison of "Yonec" with the anonymous "Narcisus and Dané" and "Aucassin and Nicolette."

In 1954, Hubertus Strughold began simulating space flights for the United States Air Force using a modified pressure chamber he called a “space cabin simulator”. Sealed inside the cramped, windowless box at the USAF School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, human subjects were monitored around the clock via closed circuit television cameras, concealed microphones, and an array of biometric instruments. The only contact with the outside for the duration of the “flight” or “journey” was via a control panel adorned with lights and switches, through which various commands were issued: “Begin Work”, “Stop Work”, “Meal Period”. Strughold, the founder of space medicine in America who later became controversial when his work for the Luftwaffe during World War Two was publicized, used the space cabin simulator to study the bodies and minds of future astronauts, and to test how these could best be included in the information and environmental “loops” of tiny space capsules then on the drawing board.

After a brief overview of low-pressure chamber and sealed-cabin technology in space medicine, the paper will focus on one high-profile space cabin experiment: a simulated “flight to the Moon and back” that took place in Feburary, 1958. In the immediate wake of the Sputnik scare, a twenty-two year-old airman spent seven days sealed inside under Strughold’s watch. Stepping out of the space cabin simulator, the ‘astronaut’ was met by flash blubs, military brass, Strughold, and then-Senator Lyndon Johnson—an early version of the post-splashdown ritual Americans would begin to see on TV three years later.

Adding to scholarship in the history of technology and space history about the evolving technical role and occupational identity of the astronaut, from ‘active’ military test-pilot to a ‘passive’ systems monitor (Mindell, 2008; Hersch, 2013), as well as the constructive power of trainer and simulator technology in aviation (Weber, 1999; Jeon, 2015), this paper examines how the emerging relationship between ‘ground controllers’ and ‘astronauts’ was shaped by design choices built in to the simulator. Part environmental systems check, part medical experiment, part psychological test of human tolerance to isolation, confinement, and monotony, these rehearsals influenced the image and role of future astronauts without ever leaving Earth.

This study will also contribute to work in cold war studies about historical anxieties over how humans would factor into complex technological systems (Jones- Imhotep, 2012), and function in newly strategic extreme environments (Farish, 2013)— would humans be the strongest, or weakest link? An important focus will be the experimenters’ obsession with fostering and measuring an instrumental form of “vigilance” in their military subjects, which was seen as crucial to cold war strategy.

I will also assess the cultural work of this technology in the suddenly space- interested press and popular culture of the late 1950s, and trace its transfer into wider use. Produced by defense contractors like Honeywell, Vought, and McDonnell-Douglas in the 1960s, space cabin simulators became key tools for NASA space scientists and military researchers, and are the technological precursors to isolation simulators still in use today.

From Labov’s (1963) finding that the centralization of the /ay/ and /aw/ diphthongs in Martha’s Vineyard was emblematic of resistance to local economic and social change, to Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) finding that variation in the realization of the /I/ vowel corresponds to gang affiliation among Latina girls in a Northern California high school, identity has been at the center of sociolinguistic analysis and theory for nearly a half century. Despite the centrality of this construct, sociolinguists have rarely stopped to ask about the epistemological, theoretical, and even political implications of identity. This dissertation offers a sustained, interdisciplinary critique of identity, as articulated both in linguistics and in contemporary poststructuralist theory more generally. Through engagements with anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and linguistics, this critique calls attention to identity’s epistemological baggage and theoretical tendencies and suggests, instead, a turn to poststructuralist theory of subject formation. Within the this framework, identity has its analytic place among equally important theoretical constructs, including subject type, subject position, discourse, and subjectivity, as described in the work of social theorists such as Foucault (1965, 1975, 1978) and Butler (1990, 1991, 2004).
Two empirical studies of adolescent language use – one, a case study of a single speaker, the other an ethnography conducted in a middle school – are presented and findings are considered in light of poststructuralist theory of subject formation. The first study focuses on the speech of one adolescent Mexican American female, “María,” whose patterns of language use underwent reorganization over a three-year period coinciding with a change in community, school, and peer group. Segmental and suprasegmental variables were analyzed from data collected from two time periods. In order to account for modifications in “María’s” vocalic production, two vowel variables were selected for acoustic analysis: pre-nasal and non-pre-nasal allophones of /æ/. Midpoint measurements were taken for F1, F2, and F3 for a minimum of 25 tokens of each variable from T1 and T2 using PRAAT phonetics software (Boersma & Weenink 2009). Maria’s production of prosodic rhythm was also analyzed using the Pairwise Variability Index (Lowe & Grabe 1995). Over 400 measurements of syllable duration were made for the analysis of prosodic rhythm.
Changes in F1 and F2 for both vocalic variables were statistically significant—both allophones of /æ/ were lowered and backed. Conversely, no statistically significant difference was found in rhythm. These findings are analyzed in the context of two social processes: interpellation and racialization, and the role of agency is considered in light of these processes.
The second study is an ethnographic investigation of a ‘majority minority’ middle school in North Carolina that took place over a five-month period. Detailed ethnographic fieldnotes and unscripted interviews with 50 African American, white, and Latino speakers in social groups identified during observation constitute the data for this study. The analysis focuses on the subjectivizing effects of the institution, particularly the discourses of ‘choice’ and ‘value,’ on the cultural and linguistic practices of its students. The analysis shows that talk by students across all major social divisions is inflected by institutional discourses. A complementary analysis considers the subjectivizing function of language ideology as it pertains to three distinct discursive formations about language: ‘proper talk,’ ‘ghetto talk,’ and Spanish. Finally, a quantitative, variationist analysis is presented of four core features of African American English: verbal –s absence, preterit copula leveling, copula deletion, and invariant be. The sociolinguistic patterning is complex, with African Americans and Latinos demonstrating different levels of usage for all four variables, with significantly different interactional effects between social variables (gender, popularity, gang affiliation) and linguistic variables (structure type, grammatical environment).

Organizadores: Patricia Bieging e Raul Inácio Busarello “Cultura, história de vida e memória: lugares de enunciação”, trata de dar espaço aos discursos singulares da vida, das experiências e das subjetividades dos sujeitos participantes das pesquisas apresentadas nesta obra. Falar de memória e de história de vida é dar voz, muitas vezes, a fatos que perpassam as histórias ditas oficiais de cada sociedade ou espaço institucional Editora: Pimenta Cutural (2018) ISBN: 978-85-66832-78-5 (eBook PDF) ​DOI: 10.31560/pimentacultural/2018.785

Modern Chinese history can be recounted in terms of three seemingly contradictory narratives: forced secularization; religious resilience and revival; and the sacralization of the nation and its secular state. Secularization, de-secularization and sacralization have been simultaneous and often mutually reinforcing processes. Reviewing the relationship between Chinese political movements and religious impulses in the late imperial, Republican, Mao and Reform-eras, we argue that this apparent paradox derives from a uni-linear understanding of secularization vs. desecularization. China’s encounter with secular modernity cannot be adequately understood as a trend towards a “more” or “less” religious society, but ought to be described in terms of a changing configuration of four “poles” of religious subject formation: the sacred–profane and the enchanted–secular. This shifting configuration has led to the sacralization of the Communist Party, the profanation of society, and the growth of an “enchanted underbelly” of religious networks and practices in the local interstices of the nation-state.