Narvaez - Global Inglés

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EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Importante: La realización de este examen implica que Ud. ha leído y acepta las
condiciones estipuladas en el Reglamento de Examen Global de la Cátedra Salceek
Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order.

The Global Dynamics of Disinformation
Gabriele Cosentino
1.3 Forms and Functions of Post-truth
Harsin (2018) identifies three main forms of deceptive communication—rumor bombs, fake
news and lies—as examples of the current post-truth phenomenon. He compares rumor bombs
to “statements whose veracity is unknown or unprovable, and to communication bombs as
longtime forms of information warfare migrating from military to politics” (2018, 8). Rumor
bombs can be elaborate, contradictory and contain ambiguous claims, so that they generate
confusion and disagreement among public opinion. Rumor bombs can break into the news-
cycle after emerging from the subcultural fringes of the Internet or they can be spread by
professionalized disinformation campaigns in the context of political campaigns or military
conflicts.
An example of a rumor bomb that worked as a preamble to the current post-truth era—and
perhaps not incidentally jumpstarted the political career of Donald Trump—is the 2011 ‘birther’
conspiracy theory against Obama, based on the rumor that he was not born in the United States
and thus didn’t meet the requirement to be president. While in the 2008 election cycle the
rumor remained confined to the periphery of the political conversation, after 2011 the birthers
campaign started to be amplified by prominent bloggers and social media, which elevated its
visibility, until it was brought into the mainstream by Donald Trump. As is often the case in post-
truth politics, the debunking of the rumor didn’t completely displace it from public conversation.
Another example or a rumor bomb is the Pizzagate conspiracy theory targeting Hillary Clinton in
the period before the 2016 election. Unlike fake news, which is entirely false, rumors can turn
out to be true or contain a modicum of truth. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory, based on rumors
alleging that Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophiles’ ring active in Washington DC, contained
references to the case of convicted pedophile and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had had
established relations with Bill Clinton.
Fake news is the most popular sub-category of the broader post-truth phenomenon. Unlike
rumor bombs, fake news is patently false or fabricated statements. The term became popular
between 2015 and 2016, during the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US elections, as a catch-all
category identifying various forms of disinformation and misinformation. The term later lost part
of its original meaning as various politicians, including Trump, started to use it to dismiss
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unfavorable coverage and criticism by the relation to post-truth because it frames the problem
as isolated incidents of falsehood (Bennett and Livingston 2018), while others have criticized its
opaqueness and the political connotations that it has acquired (Benkler et al. 2018). Fake news
has also been used to identify producers of false information whose only intention is to leverage
on the social media economy of attention simply in order to generate profit. Such type of fake
or junk news, despite their lack of political intentions, can nonetheless engender political effects,
by entering amplification channels of politically motivated actors.
It is worth pointing out that the term fake news was originally associated with satire news
programs blending information and entertainment such as The Daily Show with John Stewart
and The Colbert Report (Baym and Jones 2012). John Stewart famously attacked CNN in 2004,
blaming legacy media for their failure to perform a necessary watchdog function on the US
government decisions in a sensitive moment such as the post- 9/11 period. The critique of
mainstream news brought forth by satire news shows can thus be seen as a precursor of the
current trust crisis of journalism and of the traditional media outlets. For two decades, satire
news programs have revealed the shortcomings and the codependency of traditional media vis-
à-vis the political establishment, instilling in people’s minds the suspicion that news was
packaged as products to be sold, and that journalistic objectivity was a fabricated myth.
The ‘postmodern’ and skeptical spectator of satire news shows is thus aware, at times cynically,
that mediated reality is a construct. An important aspect of the postmodern sensibility lies in its
fascination with the process of representation, which is often exposed and deconstructed to
reveal the ‘behind the scene,’ the marks of authorship and the blurring of the border between
stage and backstage. The audience becomes knowledgeable and skeptical of televisual
representations, suspicious even, and thus transfers trust onto new and alternative means of
mediation and information that acknowledge this postmodern sensibility. Legacy news media is
thus challenged by satire news programs or by on-line independent news outlets, while the
political outsider is preferred to the professional politician. Populist leader and former Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—himself a television tycoon, thus well versed in the logic of
spectacle and entertainment— was one of the first to intercept this cultural disposition and tap
on it to build a new brand of postmodern politics (Cosentino and Doyle 2010). In a similar vein,
Trump, a former reality TV host and a savvy user of the media, has titillated popular discontent
posing as a political outsider claiming to take on the corruption and inefficiencies of the political
establishment.
As for the third sub-category, lying, Harsin sees it as inherently associated with the posttruth
condition, whose most visible feature is the noticeable increase of deceptive communications
and of discourses around lies and deception, as well as of the instruments and services like fact
checking or rumor-debunking websites, which are part of the new economy of ‘truth-markets’
(Harsin 2018). Lies and deceptions can also be seen as structurally inherent to contemporary
political communication and journalistic practices, as the logic of entertainment has influenced
politics and journalism to the point that tactics of performance, seduction and visibility are
emphasized and cultivated to the detriment of truthfulness and honesty.
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Hate speech, nationalistic tropes, nativist and racist slurs, uttered either in jest—for the lulz—or
to provoke intentionally, spread from the fringes of the Internet to occupy the center of public
conversations. Trolling as a new genre of political speech, promoted by the virality and
popularity incentives of social media, is becoming a salient trait of the new mediated public
discourse. From a fringe political practice to now a mainstream form of political spectacle,
trolling has become a staple of the political discussions enabled by social media (Marwick and
Lewis 2017; Hannan 2018). The alt-right online communities and their media ecosystem, based
on a plurality of platforms such as Breitbart News, Infowars, 4chan and Reddit, have received
significant academic and media attention (Benkler et al. 2018; Marwick and Lewis 2017; Nagle
2017). In Cátedra Salceek - Inglés Global - Modelos de Examen 3 particular, the subcultural
symbols, codes and jargons emerging out of online forums such as 4chan and Reddit seem to
have had a profound impact in shaping the alt-right political sensibilities. Benkler et al. call the
meme wars or ‘memetic warfare’ of the alt-right as a new type of ‘core political speech’ (2018,
12).
The alt-right community and its media have played a significant role in the advent of the post-
truth condition. As pointed out by Bennett and Livingston, the term alt-right has expanded “to
encompass a broader range of interconnected radical right causes and conspiracy theories
promoted through information sites that often mimic journalism in order to distribute strategic
disinformation” (Bennett and Livingston 2018, 125). Such alternative communication spaces
often circulate political narratives advocating for ‘stronger authority, nationalism and anti-
immigration’ policies, which often engender the ‘disinformation–amplification–reverberation’
cycle that allows them to enter the mainstream media and public discourse. While the focus of
Bennet and Livingston is on the American political context, many other nations are currently
suffering a similar problem. In their argument, the trust crisis in democratic institutions is linked
to the hollowing out of mass parties and declining electoral representation. Such breakdown of
essential processes of political representation and engagement makes “national information
systems vulnerable to strategic disinformation campaigns by a plurality of actors” (Bennett and
Livingston 2018, 127), both domestic and foreign.
A further dimension of post-truth is indeed the influence operations carried out by State actors
based on disinformation and media manipulation aimed at destabilizing elections and
governments, or to influence the course of armed conflicts (Woolley and Howard 2018). Such
strategic forms of computational propaganda are aimed at inserting false and polarizing
information and narratives into the political conversations of other nations. Covert influence
tactics operate by leveraging the technological features and affordances of social media, by
taking advantage of the difficulty that lawmakers have in regulating and policing such platforms,
as well as by tapping on popular sentiments of discontent and frustration to further exacerbate
the political crisis of rival countries.
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Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el
texto:
1) Caracterice en palabras propias:

a) el concepto de fake news y los dos momentos en la evolución de su sentido y connotaciones;
b) las posturas de la comunidad académica con respecto al uso del término;
c) la subcategoría derivada del fenómeno fake news.
2) ¿Cuál es el antecedente directo del fenómeno fake news? Explique el proceso en

palabras propias referenciando
a) sus características;
b) sus efectos sobre la opinión pública;
c) sus efectos sobre el proceso de representación;
d) sus efectos sobre la escena política, incluyendo los ejemplos ilustrativos consignados por el
autor.
3) Desarrolle en palabras propias los fundamentos por los cuales Harsin incluye a la
mentira dentro de la condición de la post verdad.

a) el termino alt- right;
b) sus espacios alternativos de comunicación;
c) su incidencia en los medios hegemónicos y el discurso público;
d) el discurso resultante y sus ciclos de difusión.
5) Sintetice la última dimensión de la post verdad que desarrolla el autor.

Defining Masculinity
Raewyn Connell
Chapter 1 traced the main currents of twentieth-century research and showed that they had
failed to produce a coherent science of masculinity. This does not reveal the failure of the
scientists so much as the impossibility of the task. 'Masculinity' is not a coherent object about
which a generalizing science can be produced. Yet we can have coherent knowledge about the
issues raised in these attempts. If we broaden the angle of vision, we can see masculinity, not as
an isolated object, but as an aspect of a larger structure. This demands an account of the larger
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structure and how masculinities are located in it. The task of this chapter is to set out a
framework based on contemporary analyses of gender relations. This framework will provide a
way of distinguishing types of masculinity, and of understanding the dynamics of change. First,
however, there is some ground to clear. The definition of the basic term in the discussion has
never been wonderfully clear.
All societies have cultural accounts of gender, but not all have the concept 'masculinity'. In its
modern usage the term assumes that one's behaviour results from the type of person one is.
That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable rather than
violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, hardly able to kick a football, uninterested in sexual
conquest, and so forth. This conception presupposes a belief in individual difference and
personal agency. In that sense it is built on the conception of individuality that developed in
early-modern Europe with the growth of colonial empires and capitalist economic relations (an
issue I will explore further in Chapter 8).
But the concept is also inherently relational. 'Masculinity' does not exist except in contrast with
'femininity'. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character
types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern
European/American culture. Historical research suggests that this was true of European culture
itself before the eighteenth century. Women were certainly regarded as different from men, but
different in the sense of being incomplete or inferior examples of the same character (for
instance, having less of the faculty of reason). Women and men were not seen as bearers of
qualitatively different characters; this conception accompanied the bourgeois ideology of
'separate spheres' in the nineteenth century.
In both respects our concept of masculinity seems to be a fairly recent historical product, a few
hundred years old at most. In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing gender' in a
culturally specific way. This should be borne in mind with any claim to have discovered
transhistorical truths about manhood and the masculine. Definitions of masculinity have mostly
taken our cultural standpoint for granted, but have followed different strategies to characterize
the type of person who is masculine. Four main strategies have been followed; they are easily
distinguished in terms of their logic, though often combined in practice.
Essentialist definitions usually pick a feature that defines the core of the masculine, and hang an
account of men's lives on that. Freud flirted with an essentialist definition when he equated
masculinity with activity in contrast to feminine passivity - though he came to see that equation
as oversimplified. Later authors' attempts to capture an essence of masculinity have been
colourfully varied: risk-taking, responsibility, irresponsibility, aggression, Zeus energy... Perhaps
the finest is the sociobiologist Lionel Tiger's idea that true maleness, underlying male bonding
and war, is elicited by 'hard and heavy phenomena' . Many heavy-metal rock fans would agree.
The weakness in the essentialist approach is obvious: the choice of the essence is quite
arbitrary. Nothing obliges different essentialists to agree, and in fact they often do not. Claims
about a universal basis of masculinity tell us more about the ethos of the claimant than about
anything else.
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Positivist social science, whose ethos emphasizes finding the facts, yields a simple definition of
masculinity: what men actually are. This definition is the logical basis of masculinity/femininity
(M/F) scales in psychology, whose items are validated by showing that they discriminate
statistically between groups of men and women. It is also the basis of those ethnographic
discussions of masculinity which describe the pattern of men's lives in a given culture and,
whatever it is, call the pattern masculinity.
There are three difficulties here. First, as modern epistemology recognizes, there is no
description without a standpoint. The apparently neutral descriptions on which these definitions
rest are themselves underpinned by assumptions about gender. Obviously enough, to start
compiling an M/F scale one must have some idea of what to count or list when making up the
items.
Second, to list what men and women do requires that people be already sorted into the
categories 'men' and 'women'. This, as Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna showed in their
classic ethnomethodological study of gender research, is unavoidably a process of social
attribution using common-sense typologies of gender. Positivist procedure thus rests on the
very typifications that are supposedly under investigation in gender research.
Third, to define masculinity as what-men-empirically-are is to rule out the usage in which we

call some women 'masculine' and some men 'feminine', or some actions or attitudes 'masculine'
or 'feminine' regardless of who displays them. This is not a trivial use of the terms. It is crucial,
for instance, to psychoanalytic thinking about contradictions within personality. Indeed, this
usage is fundamental to gender analysis. If we spoke only of differences between men as a
bloc and women as a bloc, we would not need the terms 'masculine ' and 'feminine' at all. We
could just speak of 'men's' and 'women's' , or 'male' and 'female '. The terms 'masculine ' and
'feminine' point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves,
and women differ among themselves, in matters of gender.
Normative definitions recognize these differences and offer a standard: masculinity is what men
ought to be. This definition is often found in media studies, in discussions of exemplars such as
John Wayne or of genres such as the thriller. Strict sex role theory treats masculinity precisely as
a social norm for the behaviour of men. In practice, male sex role texts often blend normative
with essentialist definitions. Normative definitions allow that different men approach the
standards to different degrees. But this soon produces paradoxes, some of which were
recognized in the early Men's Liberation writings. Few men actually match the 'blueprint' or
display the toughness and independence acted by Wayne, Bogart or Eastwood. (This point is
picked up by film itself, in spoofs such as Blazing Saddles and Play it Again, Sam.) What is
'normative' about a norm hardly anyone meets? Are we to say the majority of men are
unmasculine? How do we assay the toughness needed to resist the norm of toughness, or the
heroism needed to come out as gay? A more subtle difficulty is that a purely normative
definition gives no grip on masculinity at the level of personality. Joseph Pleck correctly
identified the unwarranted assumption that role and identity correspond. This assumption is, I
think, why sex role theorists often drift towards essentialism.
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Semiotic approaches abandon the level of personality and define masculinity through a system
of symbolic difference in which masculine and feminine places are contrasted. Masculinity is, in
effect, defined as not-femininity. This follows the formulae of structural linguistics, where
elements of speech are defined by their differences from each other. The approach has been
widely used in feminist and poststructuralist cultural analyses of gender and in Lacanian
psychoanalysis and studies of symbolism. It yields more than an abstract contrast of masculinity
and femininity, of the kind found in M/F scales. In the semiotic opposition of masculinity and
femininity, masculinity is the unmarked term, the place of symbolic authority. The phallus is
master-signifier, and femininity is symbolically defined by lack.
This definition of masculinity has been very effective in cultural analysis. It escapes the
arbitrariness of essentialism and the paradoxes of positivist and normative definitions. It is,
however, limited in its scope - unless one assumes, as some postmodern theorists do, that
discourse is all we can talk about in social analysis. To grapple with the full range of issues
about masculinity we need ways of talking about relationships of other kinds too: about
gendered places in production and consumption, places in institutions and in natural
environments, places in social and military struggles.
What can be generalized is the principle of connection. The idea that one symbol can only be
understood within a connected system of symbols applies equally well in other spheres. No
masculinity arises except in a system of gender relations. Rather than attempting to define
masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioural average, a norm), we need to
focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered
lives. 'Masculinity', to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place
in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender,
and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.

texto:
1) Especifique los dos presupuestos históricos / ideológicos que dan sustento al uso
moderno del término masculinidad.
2) En palabras propias, sintetice

a) las cuatro estrategias de caracterización de la masculinidad;
b) las críticas formuladas por la autora a cada una de ellas.
3) En palabras propias, explique

a) en qué consiste el principio de conexión;
b) de qué manera contribuye a pensar las definiciones de masculinidad.
4) Redacte una breve fundamentación de las siguientes afirmaciones sobre la base

de lo trabajado en el texto:
a) 'Masculinity' is not a coherent object about which a generalizing science can be produced.
b) In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing gender' in a culturally specific way.
8
Gender as a Structure of SocialPractice

Raewyn Connell
In this section I will set out, as briefly as possible, the analysis of gender that underpins the
argument of the book.
Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered. In gender processes, the everyday conduct
of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and
processes of human reproduction. This arena includes sexual arousal and intercourse, childbirth
and infant care, bodily sex difference and similarity. I call this a 'reproductive arena' not a
'biological base' to emphasize the point that we are talking about a historical process involving
the body, not a fixed set of biological determinants.
Gender is social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not social
practice reduced to the body. Indeed reductionism presents the exact reverse of the real
situation. Gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine the social. It
marks one of those points of transition where historical process supersedes biological evolution
as the form of change. Gender is a scandal, an outrage, from the point of view of essentialism.
Sociobiologists are constantly trying to abolish it, by proving that human social arrangements
are a reflex of evolutionary imperatives.
Social practice is creative and inventive, but not inchoate. It responds to particular situations
and is generated within definite structures of social relations. Gender relations, the relations
among people and groups organized through the reproductive arena, form one of the major
structures of all documented societies. Practice that relates to this structure, generated as
people and groups grapple with their historical situations, does not consist of isolated acts.
Actions are configured in larger units, and when we speak of masculinity and femininity we are
naming configurations of gender practice. Taking a dynamic view of the organization of
practice, we arrive at an understanding of masculinity and femininity as gender projects. These
are processes of configuring practice through time, which transform their starting-points in
gender structures.
We find the gender configuring of practice however we slice the social world, whatever unit of
analysis we choose. The most familiar is the individual life course, the basis of the
commonsense notions of masculinity and femininity. The configuration of practice here is what
psychologists have traditionally called 'personality' or 'character'. Such a focus is liable to
exaggerate the coherence of practice that can be achieved at any one site. It is thus not
surprising that psychoanalysis, originally stressing contradiction, drifted towards the concept of '
identity' .
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Post-structuralist critics of psychology such as Wendy Hollway have emphasized that gender
identities are fractured and shifting, because multiple discourses intersect in any individual life.
This argument highlights another site, that of discourse, ideology or culture. Here gender is
organized in symbolic practices that may continue much longer than the individual life (for
instance: the construction of heroic masculinities in epics; the construction of 'gender
dysphorias' or 'perversions' in medical theory).
Chapter 1 noted how social science had come to recognize a third site of gender configuration,
institutions such as the state, the workplace and the school. Many find it difficult to accept that
institutions are substantively, not just metaphorically, gendered. This is, nevertheless, a key
point. The state, for instance, is a masculine institution. To say this is not to imply that the
personalities of top male office-holders somehow seep through and stain the institution. It is to
say something much stronger: that state organizational practices are structured in relation to
the reproductive arena. The overwhelming majority of top office-holders are men because there
is a gender configuring of recruitment and promotion, a gender configuring of the internal
division of labour and systems of control, a gender configuring of policymaking, practical
routines, and ways of mobilizing pleasure and consent.
The gender structuring of practice need have nothing biologically to do with reproduction. The
link with the reproductive arena is social. This becomes clear when it is challenged. An example
is the recent struggle within the state over 'gays in the military', i.e., the rules excluding soldiers
and sailors because of the gender of their sexual object-choice. In the United States, where this
struggle was most severe, critics made the case for change in terms of civil liberties and military
efficiency, arguing in effect that object-choice has little to do with the capacity to kill. The
admirals and generals defended the status quo on a variety of spurious grounds. The
unadmitted reason was the cultural importance of a particular definition of masculinity in
maintaining the fragile cohesion of modern armed forces.
It has been clear since the work of Juliet Mitchell and Gayle Rubin in the 1970s that gender is an
internally complex structure, where a number of different logics are superimposed. This is a fact
of great importance for the analysis of masculinities. Any one masculinity, as a configuration of
practice, is simultaneously positioned in a number of structures of relationship, which may be
following different historical trajectories. Accordingly masculinity, like femininity, is always liable
to internal contradiction and historical disruption.
We need at least a three-fold model of the structure of gender, distinguishing relations of (a)
power, (b) production and (c) cathexis (emotional attachment). This is a provisional model, but
it gives some purchase on issues about masculinity.
a) Power relations: The main axis of power in the contemporary European/American gender
order is the overall subordination of women and dominance of men - the structure Women's
Liberation named 'patriarchy' . This general structure exists despite many local reversals (e.g.,
woman-headed households, female teachers with male students). It persists despite resistance
of many kinds, now articulated in feminism. These reversals and resistances mean continuing
difficulties for patriarchal power. They define a problem of legitimacy which has great
importance for the politics of masculinity.
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b) Production relations: Gender divisions of labour are familiar in the form of the allocation of
tasks, sometimes reaching extraordinarily fine detail. (In the English village studied by the
sociologist Pauline Hunt, for instance, it was customary for women to wash the inside of
windows, men to wash the outside.) Equal attention should be paid to the economic
consequences of gender divisions of labour, the dividend accruing to men from unequal shares
of the products of social labour. This is most often discussed in terms of unequal wage rates,
but the gendered character of capital should also be noted. A capitalist economy working
through a gender division of labour is, necessarily, a gendered accumulation process. So it is not
a statistical accident, but a part of the social construction of masculinity, that men and not
women control the major corporations and the great private fortunes. Implausible as it sounds,
the accumulation of wealth has become firmly linked to the reproductive arena, through the
social relations of gender.
c) Cathexis: As I noted in Chapter 2, sexual desire is so often seen as natural that it is commonly
excluded from social theory. Yet when we consider desire in Freudian terms, as emotional
energy being attached to an object, its gendered character is clear. This is true both for
heterosexual and homosexual desire. (It is striking that in our culture the non- gendered object
choice, 'bisexual' desire, is ill-defined and unstable.) The practices that shape and realize desire
are thus an aspect of the gender order. Accordingly we can ask political questions about the
relationships involved: whether they are consensual or coercive, whether pleasure is equally
given and received. In feminist analyses of sexuality these have become sharp questions about
the connection of heterosexuality with men's position of social dominance.
Because gender is a way of structuring social practice in general, not a special type of practice,
it is unavoidably involved with other social structures. It is now common to say that gender '
intersects' - better, interacts - with race and class. We might add that it constantly interacts with
nationality or position in the world order.
This fact also has strong implications for the analysis of masculinity. White men's masculinities,
for instance, are constructed not only in relation to white women but also in relation to black
men. White fears of black men 's violence have a long history in colonial and post-colonial
situations. Black fears of white men's terrorism, founded in the history of colonialism, have a
continuing basis in white men's control of police, courts and prisons in metropolitan countries.
African-American men are massively overrepresented in American prisons, as Aboriginal men
are in Australian prisons.
Similarly, it is impossible to understand the shaping of working class masculinities without giving
full weight to their class as well as their gender politics. An ideal of working-class manliness and
self-respect was constructed in response to class deprivation and paternalist strategies of
management, at the same time and through the same gestures as it was defined against
working-class women. The strategy of the 'family wage' , which long depressed women's wages
in twentieth-century economies, grew out of this interplay.
To understand gender, then, we must constantly go beyond gender. The same applies in
reverse. We cannot understand class, race or global inequality without constantly moving
towards gender. Gender relations are a major component of social structure as a whole,and
gender politics are among the main determinants of our collective fate.
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texto:
1) Fundamente en palabras propias la afirmación “Gender is a scandal, an outrage, from the

point of view of essentialism. Sociobiologists are constantly trying to abolish it, by proving
that human social arrangements are a reflex of evolutionary imperatives.”
2) Sintetice los argumentos expuestos por la autora para postular los procesos de género
como «arena reproductiva» y enumere las distintas maneras en las que el Estado se organiza
en función de esta arena reproductiva.
3) Sintetice en palabras propias los tres sitios de configuración de género desarrollados por
la autora.
4) ¿Qué ejemplo proporciona la autora para ilustrar el vínculo social entre la estructuración
de género y la arena reproductiva?
5) Caracterice en palabras propias el modelo tridimensional de estructura de género que

propone la autora.
6) Desarrolle en palabras propias las variables de interseccionalidad del género en tanto

estructurante de la práctica social y su gravitación en el análisis de las masculinidades.

Gender Trouble. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions

Judith Butler
Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point
of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as
the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the
case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of
“women.” But is there a political shape to “women,” as it were, that precedes and prefigures the
political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? How is that identity shaped,
and is it a political shaping that takes the very morphology and boundary of the sexed body as
the ground, surface, or site of cultural inscription? What circumscribes that site as “the female
body” ? Is “the body” or “the sexed body” the firm foundation on which gender and systems of
compulsory sexuality operate? Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with strategic
interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?
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The sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalization
of “the body” that preexists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This “body” often appears
to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as
“external” to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to
question “the body” as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior
to discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the
emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand “the body” as so much
inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state:
deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine. There are many
occasions in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work where “the body” is figured as a mute facticity,
anticipating some meaning that can be attributed only by a transcendent consciousness,
understood in Cartesian terms as radically immaterial. But what establishes this dualism for us?
What separates off “the body” as indifferent to signification, and signification itself as the act of
a radically disembodied consciousness or, rather, the act that radically disembodies that
consciousness? To what extent is that Cartesian dualism presupposed in phenomenology
adapted to the structuralist frame in which mind/body is redescribed as culture/nature? With
respect to gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within
the very descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit
hierarchy? How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or
surface upon which gender significations are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to
significance?
Wittig suggests that a culturally specific epistemic a priori establishes the naturalness of “sex.”
But by what enigmatic means has “the body” been accepted as a prima facie given that it
admits of no genealogy? Even within Foucault’s essay on the very theme of genealogy, the body
is figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription: “the body is the inscribed surface
of events.” The task of genealogy, he claims, is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history.”
His sentence continues, however, by referring to the goal of “history”—here clearly understood
on the model of Freud’s “civilization”—as the “destruction of the body”. Forces and impulses
with multiple directionalities are precisely that which history both destroys and preserves
through the Entstehung (historical event) of inscription. As “a volume in perpetual
disintegration”, the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of
history. And history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires
the subjection of the body. This corporeal destruction is necessary to produce the speaking
subject and its significations. This is a body, described through the language of surface and
force, weakened through a “single drama” of domination, inscription, and creation. This is not
the modus vivendi of one kind of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, “history” in its
essential and repressive gesture.
Although Foucault writes, “Nothing in man [sic]—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve
as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men [sic]”, he nevertheless points to
the constancy of cultural inscription as a “single drama” that acts on the body. If the creation of
values, that historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the body, much as the
instrument of torture in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” destroys the body on which it writes, then
there must be a body prior to that inscription, stable and self- identical, subject to that sacrificial
13
destruction. In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an
inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this
inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated
into a sublimated domain of values. Within the metaphorics of this notion of cultural values is
the figure of history as a relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must
be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge.
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger suggests that the very contours of “the body” are established
through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence. Any discourse that
establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain
taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is
that constitutes bodies:
ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main
function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the
difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that
a semblance of order is created.
Although Douglas clearly subscribes to a structuralist distinction between an inherently unruly

nature and an order imposed by cultural means, the “untidiness” to which she refers can be
redescribed as a region of cultural unruliness and disorder. Assuming the inevitably binary
structure of the nature/culture distinction, Douglas cannot point toward an alternative
configuration of culture in which such distinctions become malleable or proliferate beyond the
binary frame. Her analysis, however, provides a possible point of departure for understanding
the relationship by which social taboos institute and maintain the boundaries of the body as
such. Her analysis suggests that what constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material,
but that the surface, the skin, is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions;
indeed, the boundaries of the body become, within her analysis, the limits of the social per se. A
poststructuralist appropriation of her view might well understand the boundaries of the body as
the limits of the socially hegemonic. In a variety of cultures, she maintains, there are
pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic
breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows
from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of
structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined. A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic]
has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which should not have
been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone.
In a sense, Simon Watney has identified the contemporary construction of “the polluting
person” as the person with AIDS in his Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media. Not
only is the illness figured as the “gay disease,” but throughout the media’s hysterical and
homophobic response to the illness there is a tactical construction of a continuity between the
polluted status of the homosexual by virtue of the boundary-trespass that is homosexuality and
the disease as a specific modality of homosexual pollution. That the disease is transmitted
through the exchange of bodily fluids suggests within the sensationalist graphics of
homophobic signifying systems the dangers that permeable bodily boundaries present to the
social order as such. Douglas remarks that “the body is a model that can stand for any bounded
system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” And
14
she asks a question which one might have expected to read in Foucault: “Why should bodily
margins be thought to be specifically invested with power and danger?”
Douglas suggests that all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are
accordingly considered dangerous. If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a
site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a
site of pollution and endangerment. Since anal and oral sex among men clearly establishes
certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic order, male
homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of view, constitute a site of danger and
pollution, prior to and regardless of the cultural presence of AIDS. Similarly, the “polluted” status
of lesbians, regardless of their low-risk status with respect to AIDS, brings into relief the dangers
of their bodily exchanges. Significantly, being “outside” the hegemonic order does not signify
being “in” a state of filthy and untidy nature. Paradoxically, homosexuality is almost always
conceived within the homophobic signifying economy as both uncivilized and unnatural.

texto:
1) ¿Cuáles son los interrogantes que plantea la autora con respecto a la construcción
identitaria del feminismo?
2) Desarrolle en palabras propias las críticas de la autora a las representaciones del cuerpo
en las categorizaciones teóricas.
3) Contextualice y explique la siguiente afirmación: “This is not the modus vivendi of one
kind of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, “history” in its essential and
repressive gesture.”
4) Desarrolle en palabras propias el concepto de “history as a relentless writing instrument”.
5) ¿En qué consiste el concepto de “cultural unruliness and disorder” propuesto por Mary
Douglas? ¿Cuáles son sus limitaciones y su valor epistemológico según la autora?
6) Explique en palabras propias la relación entre enfermedad , márgenes corporales y

contaminación en el contexto de los sistemas de significación de la homofobia.
15
The Society of Positivity

Byung- Chul Han
No buzzword dominates contemporary public discourse so much as “transparency.” Above all, it

is emphatically invoked in connection with freedom of information. The omnipresent demand
for transparency, which has reached the point of fetishism and totalization, goes back to a
paradigm shift that cannot be restricted to the realm of politics and economics. Today the
society of negativity is yielding to a society that progressively dismantles negativity in favor of
positivity. Accordingly, the society of transparency manifests itself first and foremost as a society
of positivity.
Matters prove transparent when they shed all negativity, when they are smoothed out and
leveled, when they do not resist being integrated into smooth streams of capital,
communication, and information. Actions prove transparent when they are made operational—
subordinate to a calculable, steerable, and controllable process. Time becomes transparent
when it glides into a sequence of readily available present moments. This is also how the future
undergoes positivization, yielding an optimal presence. Transparent time knows neither fate nor
event. Images are transparent when—freed from all dramaturgy, choreography, and
scenography, from any hermeneutic depth, and indeed from any meaning at all—they become
pornographic. Pornography is unmediated contact between the image and the eye. Things
prove transparent when they abandon their singularity and find expression through their price
alone. Money, which makes it possible to equate anything with anything else, abolishes all
incommensurability, any and all singularity. The society of transparency is an inferno of the
same.
Whoever connects transparency only with corruption and the freedom of information has failed
to recognize its scope. Transparency is a systemic compulsion gripping all social processes and
subjecting them to a deep-reaching change. Today’s social system submits all its processes to
the demand for transparency in order to operationalize and accelerate them. Pressure for
acceleration represents the corollary of dismantling negativity. Communication reaches its
maximum velocity where like responds to like, when a chain reaction of likeness occurs. The
negativity of alterity and foreignness—in other words, the resistance of the Other—disturbs and
delays the smooth communication of the Same. Transparency stabilizes and speeds the system
by eliminating the Other and the Alien. This systemic compulsion makes the society of
transparency a calibrated society. Herein lies its totalitarian trait.
16
Transparent language is a formal, indeed, a purely machinic, operational language that harbors
no ambivalence. A world consisting only of information, where communication meant circulation
without interference, would amount to a machine. The society of positivity is dominated by the
transparency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event. Compulsion for
transparency flattens out the human being itself, making it a functional element within a system.
therein lies the violence of transparency.
Clearly the human soul requires realms where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other.
It claims a certain impermeability. Total illumination would scorch it and cause a particular kind
of spiritual burnout. Only machines are transparent. Eventfulness and freedom, which constitute
life fundamentally, do not admit transparency. The ideology of “postprivacy” proves equally
naïve. In the name of transparency, it demands completely surrendering the private sphere,
which is supposed to lead to see-through communication. The view rests on several errors. For
one, human existence is not transparent, even to itself. According to Freud, the ego denies
precisely what the unconscious affirms and desires without reserve. The id remains largely
hidden to the ego. Therefore, a rift runs through the human psyche and prevents the ego from
agreeing even with itself. This fundamental rift renders self-transparency impossible. A rift also
gapes between people. For this reason, interpersonal transparency proves impossible to
achieve. It is also not worth trying to do so. The other’s very lack of transparency is what keeps
the relationship alive.
Compulsive transparency lacks this same “sensitivity”—which simply means respect for
Otherness that can never be completely eliminated. Given the pathos for transparency that has
laid hold of contemporary society, it seems necessary to gain practical familiarity with the
pathos of distance. Distance and shame refuse to be integrated into the accelerated circulation
of capital, information, and communication. In this way, all confidential spaces for withdrawing
are removed in the name of transparency. Light floods them, and they are then depleted. It only
makes the world more shameless and more naked.
Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings. Consequently, one loses the ability
to handle suffering and pain, to give them form. For Nietzsche, the human soul owes its depth,
grandeur, and strength precisely to the time it spends with the negative. Human spirit is born
from pain, too. The society of positivity is now in the process of organizing the human psyche in
an entirely new way. In the course of positivization, even love flattens out into an arrangement
of pleasant feelings and states of arousal without complexity or consequence. Alain Badiou’s In
Praise of Love quotes the slogans of the dating service Meetic: “Be in love without falling in
love!” Or, “You don’t have to suffer to be in love!” Love undergoes domestication and is
positivized as a formula for consumption and comfort. Even the slightest injury must be avoided.
Suffering and passion are figures of negativity. On the one hand, they are giving way to
enjoyment without negativity. On the other, their place has been taken by psychic disturbances
such as exhaustion, fatigue, and depression—all of which are to be traced back to the excess of
positivity.
17
Theory in the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity, too. It makes a decision
determining what belongs and what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws
a line of distinction. On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent. Without the negativity of
distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this respect, theory borders on the
ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the uninitiated. It is mistaken to assume that the
mass of positive data and information—which is assuming untold dimensions today— has made
theory superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of models. Theory, as
negativity, occupies a position anterior to positive data and information. Data- based positive
science does not represent the cause so much as the effect of the imminent end of theory,
properly speaking. It is not possible to replace theory with positive science. The latter lacks the
negativity of decision, which determines what is, or what must be, in the first place. Theory as
negativity makes reality itself appear ever and radically different; it presents reality in another
light.
Politics is strategic action. For this reason alone, it inhabits a realm of secrecy. Total
transparency cripples it. Only politics amounting to theatocracy can do without secrets. In such a
case, however, political action gives way to mere staging. It follows that the end of secrecy
would be the end of politics. As the party of transparency, the Pirate Party1 is continuing the
move toward the postpolitical; this amounts to depoliticization. It is an antiparty, a party without
color. Transparency is colorless. Convictions do not gain entry as ideologies, but only as
ideology- free opinions. Opinions are matters of no consequence; they are neither as
comprehensive nor as penetrating as ideologies. They lack cogent negativity. Therefore, today’s
society of opinion leaves what already exists untouched. “Liquid democracy” displays flexibility
by changing colors according to circumstance. The Pirate Party represents a colorless party of
opinion. Here politics yields to administrating social needs while leaving the framework of socio-
economic relations unchanged and clinging to them. As an antiparty, the Pirate Party proves
unable to articulate political will or to produce new social coordinates.
Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is

inherently positive. It does not harbor negativity that might radically question the political
economic system as it stands. It is blind to what lies outside the system. It confirms and
optimizes only what already exists. For this reason, the society of positivity goes hand-in-hand
with the postpolitical. Only depoliticized space proves wholly transparent. Without reference,
politics deteriorates into a matter of referendum.
The general consensus of the society of positivity is “Like.” It is telling that Facebook has
consistently refused to introduce a “Dislike” button. The society of positivity avoids negativity in
all forms because negativity makes communication stall. The value of communication is
measured solely in terms of the quantity of information and the speed of exchange. The mass
of communication also augments its economic value. Negative judgments impair
communication. Further communication occurs more quickly following “Like” than “Dislike.” Most
importantly, the negativity that rejection entails cannot be exploited economically.
18
Transparency and truth are not identical. Truth is a negative force insofar as it presents and
asserts itself by declaring all else false. Further information—or simply an accumulation of
information— produces no truth. It lacks direction, that is, sense. Precisely because of the lacking
negativity of what holds true, positivity proliferates and propagates. Hyperinformation and
hyper communication attest to lack of truth—indeed, to lack of being. More information, or more
communication, does not eliminate the fundamental absence of clarity of the whole. If anything,
it heightens it.
1 Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties in different countries. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct democracy
(including e-democracy) or alternative participation in government, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharing of knowledge
(open content), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, free speech, anti-corruption and net neutrality.

texto:
1) ¿Qué características tiene el proceso dentro del cual se enmarca la transparencia?
2) Fundamente en palabras propias la aseveración: «The society of transparency is an

inferno of the same».
3) Explique en palabras propias las formas en que la aceleración incide sobre la

transparencia y su relación con el totalitarismo.
4) ¿Qué relación se plantea entre lenguaje y violencia?
5) ¿Qué críticas formula el autor a la ideología de la posprivacidad?
6) ¿A qué se refiere el autor con el concepto de «pathos of distance» y cuál es su

importancia?
7) Explique en palabras propias la relación que traza el autor entre la positividad, el

agotamiento y la depresión.
8) Desarrolle los fundamentos expuestos por el autor para postular el fin inminente de la
teoría.
9) ¿Qué caracterizaciones formula el autor en su definición de la democracia líquida?
10) ¿Cómo vincula el autor la transparencia con la pos política?
11) ¿De qué manera incide la positividad en la comunicación?
12) ¿Qué espacio ocupa la verdad en la configuración presentada por el autor en este
fragmento?
19
An Agonistic Model
Chantal Mouffe
It is in the context of the ever-present possibility of antagonism that I have elaborated what I
call an ‘agonistic’ model of democracy. My original intention was to provide a ‘metaphoric
redescription’ of liberal democratic institutions– a redescription that could grasp what was at
stake in pluralist democratic politics. I have argued that in order to understand the nature of
democratic politics and the challenge that it faces, we needed an alternative to the two main
approaches in democratic political theory.
One of those approaches, the aggregative model, sees political actors as being moved by the
pursuit of their interests. The other model, the deliberative one, stresses the role of reason and
moral considerations. What both of these models leave aside is the centrality of collective
identities and the crucial role played by affects in their constitution.
My claim is that it is impossible to understand democratic politics without acknowledging

‘passions’ as the driving force in the political field. The agonistic model of democracy aims to
tackle all the issues that cannot be properly addressed by the other two models because of
their rationalist, individualistic frameworks.
Let me briefly recall the argument I elaborated in The Democratic Paradox. I asserted that when
we acknowledge the dimension of ‘the political’, we begin to realize that one of the main
challenges for pluralist liberal democratic politics consists in trying to defuse the potential
antagonism that exists in human relations. In my view, the fundamental question is not how to
arrive at a consensus reached without exclusion, because this would require the construction of
an ‘us’ that would not have a corresponding ‘them’. This is impossible because, as I have just
noted, the very condition for the constitution of an ‘us’ is the demarcation of a ‘them’.
The crucial issue then is how to establish this us/them distinction, which is constitutive of
politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism. Conflict in liberal
democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist
democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic
politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries
whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be
questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of
an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between
adversaries).
20
For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the
‘adversary’, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic
principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing about their interpretation.
Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to
become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right
to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between adversaries is what
constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.
A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If this is

missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a
confrontation between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of identifications. Too
much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion towards confrontations, leads to apathy
and to a disaffection with political participation. This is why a liberal democratic society requires
a debate about possible alternatives. It must provide political forms of identification around
clearly differentiated democratic positions. While consensus is no doubt necessary, it must be
accompanied by dissent. Consensus is needed on the institutions that are constitutive of liberal
democracy and on the ethicopolitical values that should inform political association. But there
will always be disagreement concerning the meaning of those values and the way they should
be implemented. This consensus will therefore always be a ‘conflictual consensus’.
In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political

principles are not only legitimate but also necessary. They allow for different forms of
citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics. When the agonistic dynamics
of pluralism are hindered because of a lack of democratic forms of identifications, then passions
cannot be given a democratic outlet. The ground is therefore laid for various forms of politics
articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or ethnic type, and for the
multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable moral values, with all the manifestations of
violence that such confrontations entail.
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress once again that this notion of ‘the
adversary’ needs to be distinguished sharply from the understanding of that term found in
liberal discourse. According to the understanding of ‘adversary’ proposed here, and contrary to
the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated, but ‘sublimated’. In fact, what
liberals call an ‘adversary’ is merely a ‘competitor’. Liberal theorists envisage the field of politics
as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the positions of power, their
objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place, without putting into question
the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the relations of power. It is simply a
competition among elites.
In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what is at
stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled
rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. It is a real confrontation, but one that is played
out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries.
21
I contend that it is only when we acknowledge ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension that
we can pose the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace liberal theorists, is
not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how to reach a
‘rational’, i.e. fully inclusive, consensus without any exclusion. Despite what many liberals want to
believe, the specificity of democratic politics is not the overcoming of the we/they opposition,
but the different way in which it is established. The prime task of democratic politics is not to
eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational
consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’ those passions by mobilizing them
towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic
objectives.
I am aware that the current zeitgeist is not favourable to such an understanding of ‘the political’,
as the tendency to envisage this domain in ethical terms is much more popular. Several authors
coming from different theoretical horizons could provide examples of this ‘ethical turn’, but I
have chosen to say a few words about Alain Badiou. Badiou distinguishes between the political
and politics, but his distinction differs from my own. He uses the term ‘le politique’ (the political)
to refer to traditional political philosophy, and the term ‘la politique’ (politics) to designate his
own position. In his view, a political philosophy which advocates the plurality of opinions and
excludes the notion of truth is bound to end up promoting the politics of parliamentarism.
Against the characterization of the political as a plurality of opinions, Badiou asserts the
singularity of politics produced by subjects who are defined by their singular relation to a truth
event and not by their mutual exchange of opinions.
Politics, he claims, is the order of truth and the event, and he is adamant that, to allow for the
event to occur, it is necessary to leave aside all the facts and to be faithful to something which
is not a given act of reality. Indeed, an event is an evanescent interruption of the real. The
decision of a subject to remain faithful to an event is what produces a truth. This is how he puts
it: ‘I shall call “truth” (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity
produces in the situation.’
According to the approach that I am advocating, the domain of politics is not and cannot be the
domain of the unconditional because it requires making decisions in an undecidable terrain. This
is why the type of order which is established through a given hegemonic configuration of power
is always a political, contestable one; it should never be justified as dictated by a higher order
and presented as the only legitimate one.
As I argued earlier, to institute an order, frontiers need to be drawn and the moment of closure
must be faced. But this frontier is the result of a political decision; it is constituted on the basis
of a particular we/they, and for that very reason it should be recognized as something
contingent and open to contestation. What characterizes democratic politics is the
confrontation between conflicting hegemonic projects, a confrontation with no possibility of
final reconciliation. To conceive such a confrontation in political, not ethical, terms requires
asking a series of strategic questions about the type of ‘we’ that a given politics aims at creating
and the chain of equivalences that is called for.
22
This cannot take place without defining an adversary, a ‘they’ that will serve as a ‘constitutive
outside’ for the ‘we’. This is what can be called the ‘moment of the political’, the recognition of
the constitutive character of social division and the ineradicability of antagonism. This is why
theorists who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this dimension cannot provide an
effective guide for envisaging the nature of radical politics.

texto:
1) Explique la visión de la autora sobre el rol del conflicto y su relación con el consenso en
una democracia plural.
2) Caracterice la categoría que la autora propone como condición principal de la

democracia.
3) ¿Cómo funciona el consenso conflictual y por qué la autora lo considera necesario para
una democracia plural?
4) Desarrolle las dos conceptualizaciones contrapuestas de «adversario» y explique la

importancia de esta categoría para el modelo postulado en este fragmento.
5) Fundamente la siguiente afirmación: «According to the approach that I am advocating,

the domain of politics is not and cannot be the domain of the unconditional because it
requires making decisions in an undecidable terrain.»

The Democratic Paradox

Chantal Mouffe
Albeit in different ways, all the essays collected in this volume deal with what I call 'the paradox'
of modern democracy and they try to examine its diverse political and theoretical implications.
My reflection begins with an enquiry into the nature of modern democracy, which I think is far
from having been properly elucidated. The novelty of modern democracy, what makes it
properly 'modern', is that, with the advent of the 'democratic revolution', the old democratic
principle that 'power should be exercised by the people' emerges again, but this time within a
symbolic framework informed by the liberal discourse, with its strong emphasis on the value of
individual liberty and on human rights. Those values are central to the liberal tradition and they
are constitutive of the modern view of the world. Nevertheless, one should not make them part
23
and parcel of the democratic tradition whose core values, equality and popular sovereignty, are
different. Indeed, the separation between church and state, between the realm of the public
and that of the private, as well as the very idea of the Rechtsstaat, which are central to the
politics of liberalism, do not have their origin in the democratic discourse but come from
elsewhere.
It is therefore crucial to realize that, with modern democracy, we are dealing with a new
political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different
traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence
of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition
whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed, and popular
sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a
contingent historical articulation. Through such an articulation, as C. B. MacPherson was keen to
emphasize, liberalism was democratized and democracy liberalized. Let's not forget that, while
we tend today to take the link between liberalism and democracy for granted, their union, far
from being a smooth process, was the result of bitter struggles. The dominant tendency today
consists in envisaging democracy in such a way that it is almost exclusively identified with the
Rechtsstaat and the defence of human rights, leaving aside the element of popular sovereignty,
which is deemed to be obsolete. This has created a 'democratic deficit' which, given the central
role played by the idea of popular sovereignty in the democratic imaginary, can have very
dangerous effects on the allegiance to democratic institutions. The very legitimacy of liberal
democracy is based on the idea of popular sovereignty and, as the mobilization of such an idea
by right- wing populist politicians indicates, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the
time has come to relinquish it. Liberaldemocratic institutions should not be taken for granted: it
is always necessary to fortify and defend them. This requires grasping their specific dynamics
and acknowledging the tension deriving from the workings of their different logics. Only by
coming to terms with the democratic paradox can one envisage how to deal with it.
As my discussion of Carl Schmitt's theses in Chapter 2 makes clear, democratic logics always
entail drawing a frontier between 'us' and 'them', those who belong to the 'demos' and those
who are outside it. This is the condition for the very exercise of democratic rights. It necessarily
creates a tension with the liberal emphasis on the respect of 'human rights', since there is no
guarantee that a decision made through democratic procedures will not jeopardize some
existing rights. In a liberal democracy limits are always put on the exercise of the sovereignty of
the people. Those limits are usually presented as providing the very framework for the respect
of human rights and as being nonnegotiable.
In fact, since they depend on the way 'human rights' are defined and interpreted at a given
moment, they are the expression of the prevailing hegemony and. thereby contestable. What
cannot be contestable in a liberal democracy is the idea that it is legitimate to establish limits to
popular sovereignty in the name of liberty. Hence its paradoxical nature.
A central argument in this book is that it is vital for democratic politics to understand that liberal
democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible in the last instance
and that there is no way in which they could be perfectly reconciled.
24
This is why the liberaldemocratic regime has constantly been the locus of struggles which
have provided the driving force of historical political developments. The tension between its two
components can only be temporarily stabilized through pragmatic negotiations between
political forces which always establish the hegemony of one of them. Until recently, the
existence of contending forces was openly recognized and it is only nowadays, when the very
idea of a possible alternative to the existing order has been discredited, that the stabilization
realized under the hegemony of neoliberalism -with its very specific interpretation of what
rights are important and non-negotiable- is practically unchallenged.
Once it is granted that the tension between equality and liberty cannot be reconciled and that
there can only be contingent hegemonic forms of stabilization of their conflict, it becomes clear
that, once the very idea of an alternative to the existing configuration of power disappears,
what disappears also is the very possibility of a legitimate form of expression for the resistances
against the dominant power relations. The status quo has become naturalized and made into
the way 'things really are'. This is of course what has happened with the present Zeitgeist, the
so-called 'third way', which is no more than the justification by social democrats of their
capitulation to a neoliberal hegemony whose power relations they will not challenge, limiting
themselves to making some little adjustments in order to help people cope with what is seen as
the ineluctable fate of 'globalization'.
I want to stress that my aim in the essays collected in this volume is at the same time political
and theoretical. From the political standpoint what guides me is the conviction that the
unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism represents a threat for democratic institutions. Neo-
liberal dogmas about the inviolable rights of property, the allencompassing virtues of the
market and the dangers of interfering with its logics constitute nowadays the 'common sense' in
liberaldemocratic societies and they are having a profound impact on the left, as many left
parties are moving to the right and euphemistically redefining themselves as 'centre- left'. In a
very similar way, Blair's 'third way' and Schroder's 'neue Mitte', both inspired by Clinton's
strategy of 'triangulation', accept the terrain established by their neo-liberal predecessors.
Unable -or unwilling- to visualize an alternative to the present hegemonic configuration, they
advocate a form of politics which pretends to be located 'beyond left and right', categories
which are presented as outdated. Their objective is the creation of a 'consensus at the centre',
declared to be the only type of politics adapted to the new information society, all those who
oppose their 'modernizing' project being dismissed as 'forces of conservatism'.
However, as I show in Chapter 5, when we scratch behind their rhetoric, we quickly realize that
in fact they have simply given up the traditional struggle of the left for equality. Under the
pretence of rethinking and updating democratic demands, their calls for 'modernization',
flexibility' and 'responsibility' disguise their refusal to consider the demands of the popular
sectors which are excluded from their political and societal priorities. Worse even, they are
rejected as 'anti- democratic', 'retrograde' and as remnants of a thoroughly discredited 'old left'
project. In this increasingly 'one-dimensional' world, in which any possibility of transformation of
the relations of power has been erased, it is not surprising that right- wing populist parties are
making significant inroads in several countries. In many cases they are the only ones
denounceing the 'consensus at the centre' and trying to occupy the terrain of contestation
deserted by the left. Particularly worrying is the fact that many sectors of the working classes
feel that their interests are better defended by those parties than by social democrats. Having
25
lost faith in the traditional democratic process, they are an easy target for the demagogues of
the right.
The political situation just described. characterized by the celebration of the values of a
consensual politics of the centre, is what informs my theoretical questioning. This is why I put
special emphasis on the negative consequences of envisaging the ideal of democracy as the
realization of a 'rational consensus' and on the concomitant illusion that left and right have
ceased to be pertinent categories for democratic politics. I am convinced, contrary to the claims
of third way theorists, that the blurring of the frontiers between left and right, far from being an
advance in a democratic direction, is jeopardizing the future of democracy.

texto:
1) Explique en qué consiste la paradoja democrática y qué procesos le dan origen según la
autora.
2) Proporcione detalles acerca de los posibles efectos de la paradoja democrática sobre las
democracias contemporáneas.
3) Caracterice el concepto de «consenso de centro» según lo desarrolla la autora y explique

cómo se articula con la construcción de sentido común en las democracias liberales.
4) Desarrolle los corrimientos y transformaciones generados por el consenso de

centro en el espectro político.
26
27
Cátedra Narváez- Salceek
The Society of Positivity

Byung- Chul Han
No buzzword dominates contemporary public discourse so much as “transparency.” Above all,

it is emphatically invoked in connection with freedom of information. The omnipresent
demand for transparency, which has reached the point of fetishism and totalization, goes back
to a paradigm shift that cannot be restricted to the realm of politics and economics. Today the
society of negativity is yielding to a society that progressively dismantles negativity in favor of
positivity. Accordingly, the society of transparency manifests itself first and foremost as a
society of positivity.
Matters prove transparent when they shed all negativity, when they are smoothed out and
leveled, when they do not resist being integrated into smooth streams of capital,
communication, and information. Actions prove transparent when they are made
operational—subordinate to a calculable, steerable, and controllable process. Time becomes
transparent when it glides into a sequence of readily available present moments. This is also
how the future undergoes positivization, yielding an optimal presence. Transparent time
knows neither fate nor event. Images are transparent when—freed from all dramaturgy,
choreography, and scenography, from any hermeneutic depth, and indeed from any meaning
at all—they become pornographic. Pornography is unmediated contact between the image and
the eye. Things prove transparent when they abandon their singularity and find expression
through their price alone. Money, which makes it possible to equate anything with anything
else, abolishes all incommensurability, any and all singularity. The society of transparency is
an inferno of the same.
Whoever connects transparency only with corruption and the freedom of information has
failed to recognize its scope. Transparency is a systemic compulsion gripping all social
processes and subjecting them to a deep-reaching change. Today’s social system submits all
its processes to the demand for transparency in order to operationalize and accelerate them.
Pressure for acceleration represents the corollary of dismantling negativity. Communication
reaches its maximum velocity where like responds to like, when a chain reaction of likeness
occurs. The negativity of alterity and foreignness—in other words, the resistance of the
Other—disturbs and delays the smooth communication of the Same. Transparency stabilizes
and speeds the system by eliminating the Other and the Alien. This systemic compulsion
makes the society of transparency a calibrated society. Herein lies its totalitarian trait.
Transparent language is a formal, indeed, a purely machinic, operational language that

harbors no ambivalence. A world consisting only of information, where communication meant
circulation without interference, would amount to a machine. The society of positivity is
1
dominated by the transparency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event.
Compulsion for transparency flattens out the human being itself, making it a functional
element within a system. therein lies the violence of transparency.
Clearly the human soul requires realms where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other.
It claims a certain impermeability. Total illumination would scorch it and cause a particular
kind of spiritual burnout. Only machines are transparent. Eventfulness and freedom, which
constitute life fundamentally, do not admit transparency. The ideology of “postprivacy” proves
equally naïve. In the name of transparency, it demands completely surrendering the private
sphere, which is supposed to lead to see-through communication. The view rests on several
errors. For one, human existence is not transparent, even to itself. According to Freud, the
ego denies precisely what the unconscious affirms and desires without reserve. The id remains
largely hidden to the ego. Therefore, a rift runs through the human psyche and prevents the
ego from agreeing even with itself. This fundamental rift renders self-transparency
impossible. A rift also gapes between people. For this reason, interpersonal transparency
proves impossible to achieve. It is also not worth trying to do so. The other’s very lack of
transparency is what keeps the relationship alive.
Compulsive transparency lacks this same “sensitivity”—which simply means respect for
Otherness that can never be completely eliminated. Given the pathos for transparency that
has laid hold of contemporary society, it seems necessary to gain practical familiarity with the
pathos of distance. Distance and shame refuse to be integrated into the accelerated circulation
of capital, information, and communication. In this way, all confidential spaces for
withdrawing are removed in the name of transparency. Light floods them, and they are then
depleted. It only makes the world more shameless and more naked.
Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings. Consequently, one loses the ability
to handle suffering and pain, to give them form. For Nietzsche, the human soul owes its
depth, grandeur, and strength precisely to the time it spends with the negative. Human spirit
is born from pain, too. The society of positivity is now in the process of organizing the human
psyche in an entirely new way. In the course of positivization, even love flattens out into an
arrangement of pleasant feelings and states of arousal without complexity or consequence.
Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love quotes the slogans of the dating service Meetic: “Be in love
without falling in love!” Or, “You don’t have to suffer to be in love!” Love undergoes
domestication and is positivized as a formula for consumption and comfort. Even the slightest
injury must be avoided. Suffering and passion are figures of negativity. On the one hand, they
are giving way to enjoyment without negativity. On the other, their place has been taken by
psychic disturbances such as exhaustion, fatigue, and depression—all of which are to be traced
back to the excess of positivity.
Theory in the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity, too. It makes a decision
determining what belongs and what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws
a line of distinction. On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent. Without the negativity
2
of distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this respect, theory borders on
the ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the uninitiated. It is mistaken to assume
that the mass of positive data and information—which is assuming untold dimensions today—
has made theory superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of models.
Theory, as negativity, occupies a position anterior to positive data and information. Data-
based positive science does not represent the cause so much as the effect of the imminent end
of theory, properly speaking. It is not possible to replace theory with positive science. The
latter lacks the negativity of decision, which determines what is, or what must be, in the first
place. Theory as negativity makes reality itself appear ever and radically different; it presents
reality in another light.
Politics is strategic action. For this reason alone, it inhabits a realm of secrecy. Total
transparency cripples it. Only politics amounting to theatocracy can do without secrets. In
such a case, however, political action gives way to mere staging. It follows that the end of
secrecy would be the end of politics. As the party of transparency, the Pirate Party1 is
continuing the move toward the postpolitical; this amounts to depoliticization. It is an
antiparty, a party without color. Transparency is colorless. Convictions do not gain entry as
ideologies, but only as ideology- free opinions. Opinions are matters of no consequence; they
are neither as comprehensive nor as penetrating as ideologies. They lack cogent negativity.
Therefore, today’s society of opinion leaves what already exists untouched. “Liquid
democracy” displays flexibility by changing colors according to circumstance. The Pirate Party
represents a colorless party of opinion. Here politics yields to administrating social needs
while leaving the framework of socio-economic relations unchanged and clinging to them. As
an antiparty, the Pirate Party proves unable to articulate political will or to produce new social
coordinates.
Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is

inherently positive. It does not harbor negativity that might radically question the political-
economic system as it stands. It is blind to what lies outside the system. It confirms and
optimizes only what already exists. For this reason, the society of positivity goes hand-in-hand
with the postpolitical. Only depoliticized space proves wholly transparent. Without reference,
politics deteriorates into a matter of referendum.
The general consensus of the society of positivity is “Like.” It is telling that Facebook has
consistently refused to introduce a “Dislike” button. The society of positivity avoids negativity
in all forms because negativity makes communication stall. The value of communication is
measured solely in terms of the quantity of information and the speed of exchange. The mass
of communication also augments its economic value. Negative judgments impair
communication. Further communication occurs more quickly following “Like” than “Dislike.”
Most importantly, the negativity that rejection entails cannot be exploited economically.
1
Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties in different countries. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct
democracy (including e-democracy) or alternative participation in government, reform of copyright and patent
law, free sharing of knowledge (open content), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, free
speech, anti-corruption and net neutrality.
3
Transparency and truth are not identical. Truth is a negative force insofar as it presents and
asserts itself by declaring all else false. Further information—or simply an accumulation of
information— produces no truth. It lacks direction, that is, sense. Precisely because of the
lacking negativity of what holds true, positivity proliferates and propagates. Hyperinformation
and hypercommunication attest to lack of truth—indeed, to lack of being. More information,
or more communication, does not eliminate the fundamental absence of clarity of the whole.
If anything, it heightens it.
Word count: 1573
Realizar las siguientes actividades:
1) ¿Qué características tiene el proceso dentro del cual se enmarca la transparencia?

2) Fundamente en palabras propias la aseveración: «The society of transparency is an
inferno of the same».
3) Explique en palabras propias las formas en que la aceleración incide sobre la
transparencia y su relación con el totalitarismo.
4) ¿Qué relación se plantea entre lenguaje y violencia?
5) ¿Qué críticas formula el autor a la ideologia de la posprivacidad?
6) ¿A qué se refiere el autor con el concepto de «pathos of distance» y cuál es su
importancia?
7) Explique en palabras propias la relación que traza el autor entre la positividad, el
agotamiento y la depresión.
8) Desarrolle los fundamentos expuestos por el autor para postular el fin inminente de la
teoría.
9) ¿Qué caracterizaciones formula el autor en su definición de la democracia líquida?
10)¿Cómo vincula el autor la transparencia con la pospolítica?
11) ¿De qué manera incide la positividad en la comunicación?
12) ¿Qué espacio ocupa la verdad en la configuración presentada por el autor en este
fragmento?
4
Cátedra Narváez- Salceek
Gender Trouble. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions
Judith Butler
Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable
point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of
identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics
itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the
interests, the perspectives, of “women.” But is there a political shape to “women,” as it
were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic
point of view? How is that identity shaped, and is it a political shaping that takes the very
morphology and boundary of the sexed body as the ground, surface, or site of cultural
inscription? What circumscribes that site as “the female body” ? Is “the body” or “the sexed
body” the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate?
Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body
bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?
The sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a
generalization of “the body” that preexists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This
“body” often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a
cultural source figured as “external” to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed
body, however, ought to question “the body” as a construct of suspect generality when it is
figured as passive and prior to discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to
such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century,
understand “the body” as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically,
signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of
hell and the eternal feminine. There are many occasions in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s
work where “the body” is figured as a mute facticity, anticipating some meaning that can be
attributed only by a transcendent consciousness, understood in Cartesian terms as radically
immaterial. But what establishes this dualism for us? What separates off “the body” as
indifferent to signification, and signification itself as the act of a radically disembodied
consciousness or, rather, the act that radically disembodies that consciousness? To what
extent is that Cartesian dualism presupposed in phenomenology adapted to the
structuralist frame in which mind/body is redescribed as culture/nature? With respect to
gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within the very
descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit hierarchy?
How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface
upon which gender significations are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to
significance?
1
Wittig suggests that a culturally specific epistemic a priori establishes the naturalness of
“sex.” But by what enigmatic means has “the body” been accepted as a prima facie given
that admits of no genealogy? Even within Foucault’s essay on the very theme of genealogy,
the body is figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription: “the body is the
inscribed surface of events.” The task of genealogy, he claims, is “to expose a body totally
imprinted by history.” His sentence continues, however, by referring to the goal of
“history”—here clearly understood on the model of Freud’s “civilization”—as the
“destruction of the body”. Forces and impulses with multiple directionalities are precisely
that which history both destroys and preserves through the Entstehung (historical event) of
inscription. As “a volume in perpetual disintegration”, the body is always under siege,
suffering destruction by the very terms of history. And history is the creation of values and
meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body. This corporeal
destruction is necessary to produce the speaking subject and its significations. This is a
body, described through the language of surface and force, weakened through a “single
drama” of domination, inscription, and creation. This is not the modus vivendi of one kind
of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, “history” in its essential and repressive
gesture.
Although Foucault writes, “Nothing in man [sic]—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to
serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men [sic]”, he nevertheless
points to the constancy of cultural inscription as a “single drama” that acts on the body. If
the creation of values, that historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the
body, much as the instrument of torture in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” destroys the body
on which it writes, then there must be a body prior to that inscription, stable and self-
identical, subject to that sacrificial destruction. In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche,
cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium,
indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must
itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values. Within
the metaphorics of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as a relentless
writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured
in order for “culture” to emerge.
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger suggests that the very contours of “the body” are
established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence.
Any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating
and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of
exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies:
ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main
function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the
difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a
semblance of order is created.
Although Douglas clearly subscribes to a structuralist distinction between an inherently
2
unruly nature and an order imposed by cultural means, the “untidiness” to which she refers
can be redescribed as a region of cultural unruliness and disorder. Assuming the inevitably
binary structure of the nature/culture distinction, Douglas cannot point toward an
alternative configuration of culture in which such distinctions become malleable or
proliferate beyond the binary frame. Her analysis, however, provides a possible point of
departure for understanding the relationship by which social taboos institute and maintain
the boundaries of the body as such. Her analysis suggests that what constitutes the limit of
the body is never merely material, but that the surface, the skin, is systemically signified by
taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become, within
her analysis, the limits of the social per se. A poststructuralist appropriation of her view
might well understand the boundaries of the body as the limits of the socially hegemonic. In
a variety of cultures, she maintains, there are
pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic breaking of
that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that
pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or
social, are clearly defined.
A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic] has developed some wrong condition or simply
crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger
for someone.
In a sense, Simon Watney has identified the contemporary construction of “the polluting
person” as the person with AIDS in his Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the
Media. Not only is the illness figured as the “gay disease,” but throughout the media’s
hysterical and homophobic response to the illness there is a tactical construction of a
continuity between the polluted status of the homosexual by virtue of the boundary-trespass
that is homosexuality and the disease as a specific modality of homosexual pollution. That
the disease is transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids suggests within the
sensationalist graphics of homophobic signifying systems the dangers that permeable bodily
boundaries present to the social order as such. Douglas remarks that “the body is a model
that can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which
are threatened or precarious.” And she asks a question which one might have expected to
read in Foucault: “Why should bodily margins be thought to be specifically invested with
power and danger?”
Douglas suggests that all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all
margins are accordingly considered dangerous. If the body is synecdochal for the social
system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated
permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment. Since anal and oral sex
among men clearly establishes certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the
hegemonic order, male homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of view,
constitute a site of danger and pollution, prior to and regardless of the cultural presence of
AIDS. Similarly, the “polluted” status of lesbians, regardless of their low-risk status with
respect to AIDS, brings into relief the dangers of their bodily exchanges. Significantly,
being “outside” the hegemonic order does not signify being “in” a state of filthy and
3
untidy nature. Paradoxically, homosexuality is almost always conceived within the
homophobic signifying economy as both uncivilized and unnatural.
Word count: 1599
1) ¿Cuáles son los interrogantes que plantea la autora con respecto a la construcción
identitaria del feminismo?
2) Desarrolle en palabras propias las críticas de la autora a las representaciones del
cuerpo en las categorizaciones teóricas.
3) Contextualice y explique la siguiente afirmación: “This is not the modus vivendi of
one kind of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, “history” in its essential
and repressive gesture.”
4) Desarrolle en palabras propias el concepto de “history as a relentless writing
instrument”.
5) ¿En qué consiste el concepto de “cultural unruliness and disorder” propuesto por
Mary Douglas? ¿Cuáles son sus limitaciones y su valor epistemológico según la
autora?
6) Explique en palabras propias la relación entre enfermedad , márgenes corporales y
contaminación en el contexto de los sistemas de significación de la homofobia.
4
Cátedra Salceek
Gender as a Structure of SocialPractice

Raewyn Connell
In this section I will set out, as briefly as possible, the analysis of gender that underpins
the argument of the book.
Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered. In gender processes, the everyday
conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily
structures and processes of human reproduction. This arena includes sexual arousal and
intercourse, childbirth and infant care, bodily sex difference and similarity. I call this a
'reproductive arena' not a 'biological base' to emphasize the point that we are talking
about a historical process involving the body, not a fixed set of biological determinants.
Gender is social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not
social practice reduced to the body. Indeed reductionism presents the exact reverse of
the real situation. Gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine
the social. It marks one of those points of transition where historical process supersedes
biological evolution as the form of change. Gender is a scandal, an outrage, from the
point of view of essentialism. Sociobiologists are constantly trying to abolish it, by
proving that human socialarrangements are a reflex of evolutionary imperatives.
Social practice is creative and inventive, but not inchoate. It responds to particular
situations and is generated within definite structures of social relations. Gender
relations, the relations among people and groups organized through the reproductive
arena, form one of the major structures of all documented societies. Practice that relates
to this structure, generated as people and groups grapple with their historical situations,
does not consist of isolated acts. Actions are configured in larger units, and when we
speak of masculinity and femininity we are naming configurations of gender practice.
Taking a dynamic view of the organization of practice, we arrive at an understanding of
masculinity and femininity as gender projects. These are processes of configuring
practice through time, which transform their starting-points in gender structures.
We find the gender configuring of practice however we slice the social world, whatever
unit of analysis we choose. The most familiar is the individual life course, the basis of the
commonsense notions of masculinity and femininity. The configuration of practice here
is what psychologists have traditionally called 'personality' or 'character'. Such a
focus is liable to exaggerate the coherence of practice that can be achieved at any one
site. It is thus not surprising that psychoanalysis, originally stressing contradiction,
drifted towards the concept of ' identity' .
Post-structuralist critics of psychology such as Wendy Hollway have emphasized that

gender identities are fractured and shifting, because multiple discourses intersect in any
individual life. This argument highlights another site, that of discourse, ideology or
culture. Here gender is organized in symbolic practices that may continue much longer
than the individual life (for instance: the construction of heroic masculinities in epics;
the construction of 'gender dysphorias' or 'perversions' in medical theory).
Chapter 1 noted how social science had come to recognize a third site of gender
configuration, institutions such as the state, the workplace and the school. Many find it
difficult to accept that institutions are substantively, not just metaphorically, gendered.
This is, nevertheless, a key point. The state, for instance, is a masculine institution. To
say this is not to imply that the personalities of top male office-holders somehow seep
through and stain the institution. It is to say something much stronger: that state
organizational practices are structured in relation to the reproductive arena. The
overwhelming majority of top office-holders are men because there is a gender
configuring of recruitment and promotion, a gender configuring of the internal division
of labour and systems of control, a gender configuring of policymaking, practical
routines, and ways of mobilizing pleasure and consent.
The gender structuring of practice need have nothing biologically to do with

reproduction. The link with the reproductive arena is social. This becomes clear when it
is challenged. An example is the recent struggle within the state over 'gays in the
military', i.e., the rules excluding soldiers and sailors because of the gender of their
sexual object-choice. In the United States, where this struggle was most severe, critics
made the case for change in terms of civil liberties and military efficiency, arguing in
effect that object-choice has little to do with the capacity to kill. The admirals and
generals defended the status quo on a variety of spurious grounds. The unadmitted
reason was the cultural importance of a particular definition of masculinity in
maintaining the fragile cohesion of modern armed forces.
It has been clear since the work of Juliet Mitchell and Gayle Rubin in the 1970s that
gender is an internally complex structure, where a number of different logics are
superimposed. This is a fact of great importance for the analysis of masculinities. Any
one masculinity, asa configuration of practice, is simultaneously positioned in a number
of structures of relationship, which may be following different historical trajectories.
Accordingly masculinity, like femininity, is always liable to internal contradiction and
historical disruption.
We need at least a three-fold model of the structure of gender, distinguishing relations

of (a) power, (b) production and (c) cathexis (emotional attachment). This is a provisional
model, but it gives some purchase on issues about masculinity.
(a) Power relations The main axis of power in the contemporary European/ American
gender order is the overall subordination of women and dominance of men - the structure
Women's Liberation named 'patriarchy' . This general structure exists despite many local
reversals (e.g., woman-headed households, female teachers with male students). It
persists despite resistance of many kinds, now articulated in feminism. These reversals
and resistances mean continuing difficulties for patriarchal power. They define a problem
of legitimacy which has great importance for the politics of masculinity.
(b) Production relations Gender divisions of labour are familiar in the form of the
allocation of tasks, sometimes reaching extraordinarily fine detail. (In the English village
studied by the sociologist Pauline Hunt, for instance, it was customary for women to wash
the inside of windows, men to wash the outside.) Equal attention should be paid to the
economic consequences of gender divisions of labour, the dividend accruing to men from
unequal shares of the products of social labour. This is most often discussed in terms of
unequal wage rates, but the gendered character of capital should also be noted. A
capitalist economy working through a gender division of labour is, necessarily, a gendered
accumulation process. So it is not a statistical accident, but a part of the social
construction of masculinity, that men and not women control the major corporations
and the great private fortunes. Implausible as it sounds, the accumulation of wealth has
become firmly linked to the reproductive arena, through the social relations of gender.
(c) Cathexis As I noted in Chapter 2, sexual desire is so often seen as natural that it is
commonly excluded from social theory. Yet when we consider desire in Freudian terms,
as emotional energy being attached to an object, its gendered character is clear. This is
true both for heterosexual and homosexual desire. (It is striking that in our culture the
non- gendered object choice, 'bisexual' desire, is ill-defined and unstable.) The practices
that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order. Accordingly we can
ask political questions about the relationships involved: whether they are consensual or
coercive, whether pleasure is equally given and received. In feminist analyses of sexuality
these have become sharp questions about the connection of heterosexuality with men's
position of social dominance.
Because gender is a way of structuring social practice in general, not a special type of
practice, it is unavoidably involved with other social structures. It is now common to say
that gender ' intersects' - better, interacts - with race and class. We might add that it
constantly interacts with nationality or position in the world order.
This fact also has strong implications for the analysis of masculinity. White men's
masculinities, for instance, are constructed not only in relation to white women but also
in relation to black men. White fears of black men 's violence have a long history in
colonial and post-colonial situations. Black fears of white men's terrorism, founded in
the history of colonialism, have a continuing basis in white men's control of police,
courts and prisons in metropolitan countries. African-American men are massively over-
represented in American prisons, as Aboriginal men are in Australian prisons.
Similarly, it is impossible to understand the shaping of workingclass masculinities

without giving full weight to their class as well as their gender politics. An ideal of
working-class manliness and self-respect was constructed in response to class
deprivation and paternalist strategies of management, at the same time and through the
same gestures as it was defined against working-class women. The strategy of the 'family
wage' , which long depressed women's wages in twentieth-century economies, grew out
of this interplay.
To understand gender, then, we must constantly go beyond gender. The same applies
in reverse. We cannot understand class, race or global inequality without constantly
moving towards gender. Gender relations are a major component of social structure as
a whole,and gender politics are among the main determinants of our collective fate.
Word count: 1547
1) Fundamente en palabras propias la afirmación »Gender is a scandal, an

outrage, from the point of view of essentialism. Sociobiologists are constantly
trying to abolish it, by proving that human social arrangements are a reflex of
evolutionary imperatives.»
2) Sintetice los argumentos expuestos por la autora para postular los procesos de
género como «arena reproductiva» y enumere las distintas maneras en las que
el Estado se organiza en función de esta arena reproductiva.
3) Sintetice en palabras propias los tres sitios de configuración de género
desarrollados por la autora.
4) ¿Qué ejemplo proporciona la autora para ilustrar el vínculo social entre la
estructuración de género y la arena reproductiva?
5) Caracterice en palabras propias el modelo tridimensional de estructura de
género que propone la autora.
6) Desarrolle en palabras propias las variables de interseccionalidad del género
en tanto estructurante de la práctica social y su gravitación en el análisis de las
masculinidades.
Cátedra Salceek
Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order.

The Global Dynamics of Disinformation
Gabriele Cosentino
1.3 Forms and Functions of Post-truth
Harsin (2018) identifies three main forms of deceptive communication—rumor bombs,

fake news and lies—as examples of the current post-truth phenomenon. He compares
rumor bombs to “statements whose veracity is unknown or unprovable, and to
communication bombs as longtime forms of information warfare migrating from military
to politics” (2018, 8). Rumor bombs can be elaborate, contradictory and contain
ambiguous claims, so that they generate confusion and disagreement among public
opinion. Rumor bombs can break into the news-cycle after emerging from the subcultural
fringes of the Internet or they can be spread by professionalized disinformation campaigns
in the context of political campaigns or military conflicts.
An example of a rumor bomb that worked as a preamble to the current post-truth era—and
perhaps not incidentally jumpstarted the political career of Donald Trump—is the 2011
‘birther’ conspiracy theory against Obama, based on the rumor that he was not born in the
United States and thus didn’t meet the requirement to be president. While in the 2008
election cycle the rumor remained confined to the periphery of the political conversation,
after 2011 the birthers campaign started to be amplified by prominent bloggers and social
media, which elevated its visibility, until it was brought into the mainstream by Donald
Trump. As is often the case in post-truth politics, the debunking of the rumor didn’t
completely displace it from public conversation. Another example or a rumor bomb is the
Pizzagate conspiracy theory targeting Hillary Clinton in the period before the 2016
election. Unlike fake news, which is entirely false, rumors can turn out to be true or contain
a modicum of truth. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory, based on rumors alleging that Hillary
Clinton was part of a pedophiles’ ring active in Washington DC, contained references to the
case of convicted pedophile and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had had established
relations with Bill Clinton.
Fake news is the most popular sub-category of the broader post-truth phenomenon. Unlike
rumor bombs, fake news is patently false or fabricated statements. The term became
popular between 2015 and 2016, during the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US elections, as
a catch-all category identifying various forms of disinformation and misinformation. The
term later lost part of its original meaning as various politicians, including Trump, started
to use it to dismiss unfavorable coverage and criticism by the media or political opponents.
Some academics have cautioned against using the term in relation to post-truth because it
frames the problem as isolated incidents of falsehood (Bennett and Livingston 2018), while
others have criticized its opaqueness and the political connotations that it has acquired
(Benkler et al. 2018). Fake news has also been used to identify producers of false
information whose only intention is to leverage on the social media economy of attention
simply in order to generate profit. Such type of fake or junk news, despite their lack of
political intentions, can nonetheless engender political effects, by entering amplification
channels of politically motivated actors.
It is worth pointing out that the term fake news was originally associated with satire news
programs blending information and entertainment such as The Daily Show with John
Stewart and The Colbert Report (Baym and Jones 2012). John Stewart famously attacked
CNN in 2004, blaming legacy media for their failure to perform a necessary watchdog
function on the US government decisions in a sensitive moment such as the post- 9/11
period. The critique of mainstream news brought forth by satire news shows can thus be
seen as a precursor of the current trust crisis of journalism and of the traditional media
outlets. For two decades, satire news programs have revealed the shortcomings and the
codependency of traditional media vis-à-vis the political establishment, instilling in
people’s minds the suspicion that news was packaged as products to be sold, and that
journalistic objectivity was a fabricated myth.
The ‘postmodern’ and skeptical spectator of satire news shows is thus aware, at times
cynically, that mediated reality is a construct. An important aspect of the postmodern
sensibility lies in its fascination with the process of representation, which is often exposed
and deconstructed to reveal the ‘behind the scene,’ the marks of authorship and the
blurring of the border between stage and backstage. The audience becomes knowledgeable
and skeptical of televisual representations, suspicious even, and thus transfers trust onto
new and alternative means of mediation and information that acknowledge this
postmodern sensibility. Legacy news media is thus challenged by satire news programs or
by on-line independent news outlets, while the political outsider is preferred to the
professional politician. Populist leader and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi—himself a television tycoon, thus well versed in the logic of spectacle and
entertainment— was one of the first to intercept this cultural disposition and tap on it to
build a new brand of postmodern politics (Cosentino and Doyle 2010). In a similar vein,
Trump, a former reality TV host and a savvy user of the media, has titillated popular
discontent posing as a political outsider claiming to take on the corruption and
inefficiencies of the political establishment.
As for the third sub-category, lying, Harsin sees it as inherently associated with the post-
truth condition, whose most visible feature is the noticeable increase of deceptive
communications and of discourses around lies and deception, as well as of the instruments
and services like factchecking or rumor-debunking web sites, which are part of the new
economy of ‘truth-markets’ (Harsin 2018). Lies and deceptions can also be seen as
structurally inherent to contemporary political communication and journalistic practices,
as the logic of entertainment has influenced politics and journalism to the point that tactics
of performance, seduction and visibility are emphasized and cultivated to the detriment of
truthfulness and honesty.
Hate speech, nationalistic tropes, nativist and racist slurs, uttered either in jest—for the
lulz—or to provoke intentionally, spread from the fringes of the Internet to occupy the
center of public conversations. Trolling as a new genre of political speech, promoted by the
virality and popularity incentives of social media, is becoming a salient trait of the new
mediated public discourse. From a fringe political practice to now a mainstream form of
political spectacle, trolling has become a staple of the political discussions enabled by
social media (Marwick and Lewis 2017; Hannan 2018). The alt-right online communities
and their media ecosystem, based on a plurality of platforms such as Breitbart News,
Infowars, 4chan and Reddit, have received significant academic and media attention
(Benkler et al. 2018; Marwick and Lewis 2017; Nagle 2017). In particular, the subcultural
symbols, codes and jargons emerging out of online forums such as 4chan and Reddit seem
to have had a profound impact in shaping the alt-right political sensibilities. Benkler et al.
call the meme wars or ‘memetic warfare’ of the alt-right as a new type of ‘core political
speech’ (2018, 12).
The alt-right community and its media have played a significant role in the advent of the
post-truth condition. As pointed out by Bennett and Livingston, the term alt-right has
expanded “to encompass a broader range of interconnected radical right causes and
conspiracy theories promoted through information sites that often mimic journalism in
order to distribute strategic disinformation” (Bennett and Livingston 2018, 125). Such
alternative communication spaces often circulate political narratives advocating for
‘stronger authority, nationalism and anti-immigration’ policies, which often engender the
‘disinformation–amplification–reverberation’ cycle that allows them to enter the
mainstream media and public discourse. While the focus of Bennet and Livingston is on
the American political context, many other nations are currently suffering a similar
problem. In their argument, the trust crisis in democratic institutions is linked to the
hollowing out of mass parties and declining electoral representation. Such breakdown of
essential processes of political representation and engagement makes “national
information systems vulnerable to strategic disinformation campaigns by a plurality of
actors” (Bennett and Livingston 2018, 127), both domestic and foreign.
A further dimension of post-truth is indeed the influence operations carried by State actors
based on disinformation and media manipulation aimed at destabilizing elections and
governments, or to influence the course of armed conflicts (Woolley and Howard 2018).
Such strategic forms of computational propaganda are aimed at inserting false and
polarizing information and narratives into the political conversations of other nations.
Covert influence tactics operate by leveraging the technological features and affordances of
social media, by taking advantage of the difficulty that lawmakers have in regulating and
policing such platforms, as well as by tapping on popular sentiments of discontent and
frustration to further exacerbate the political crisis of rival countries.
Word count: 1454


a) el concepto de fake news y los dos momentos en la evolución de su sentido y
connotaciones;
b) las posturas de la comunidad académica con respecto al uso del término;
c) la subcategoría derivada del fenómeno fake news.
2) ¿Cuál es el antecedente directo del fenómeno fake news? Explique el proceso en

palabras propias referenciando
a) sus características;
b) sus efectos sobre la opinión pública;
c) sus efectos sobre el proceso de representación;
d) sus efectos sobre la escena política, incluyendo los ejemplos ilustrativos
consignados por el autor.
3) Desarrolle en palabras propias los fundamentos por los cuales Harsin incluye a la
mentira dentro de la condición de la post verdad.

a) el termino alt- right;
b) sus espacios alternativos de comunicación;
c) su incidencia en los medios hegemónicos y el discurso público;
d) el discurso resultante y sus ciclos de difusión.
5) Sintetice la última dimensión de la post verdad que desarrolla el autor.

Cátedra Salceek
Defining Masculinity
Raewyn Connell
Chapter 1 traced the main currents of twentieth-century research and showed that they
had failed to produce a coherent science of masculinity. This does not reveal the failure of
the scientists so much as the impossibility of the task. 'Masculinity' is not a coherent object
about which a generalizing science can be produced. Yet we can have coherent knowledge
about the issues raised in these attempts. If we broaden the angle of vision, we can see
masculinity, not as an isolated object, but as an aspect of a larger structure. This demands
an account of the larger structure and how masculinities are located in it. The task of this
chapter is to set out a framework based on contemporary analyses of gender relations. This
framework will provide a way of distinguishing types of masculinity, and of understanding
the dynamics of change. First, however, there is some ground to clear. The definition of the
basic term in the discussion has never been wonderfully clear.
All societies have cultural accounts of gender, but not all have the concept ' masculinity'. In
its modern usage the term assumes that one's behaviour results from the type of person
one is. That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable
rather than violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, hardly able to kick a football,
uninterested in sexual conquest, and so forth. This conception presupposes a belief in
individual difference and personal agency. In that sense it is built on the conception of
individuality that developed in early-modern Europe with the growth of colonial empires
and capitalist economic relations (an issue I will explore further in Chapter 8).
But the concept is also inherently relational. 'Masculinity' does not exist except in contrast
with 'femininity'. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized
character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of
modern European/ American culture. Historical research suggests that this was true of
European culture itself before the eighteenth century. Women were certainly regarded as
different from men, but different in the sense of being incomplete or inferior examples of
the same character (for instance, having less of the faculty of reason) . Women and men
were not seen as bearers of qualitatively different characters; this conception accompanied
the bourgeois ideology of 'separate spheres' in the nineteenth century.
In both respects our concept of masculinity seems to be a fairly recent historical product, a
few hundred years old at most. In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing
gender' in a culturally specific way. This should be borne in mind with any claim to have
discovered transhistorical truths about manhood and the masculine. Definitions of
masculinity have mostly taken our cultural standpoint for granted, but have followed
different strategies to characterize the type of person who is masculine. Four main
strategies have been followed; they are easily distinguished in terms of their logic, though
often combined in practice.
Essentialist definitions usually pick a feature that defines the core of the masculine, and
hang an account of men's lives on that. Freud flirted with an essentialist definition when he
equated masculinity with activity in contrast to feminine passivity - though he came to see
that equation as oversimplified. Later authors' attempts to capture an essence of
masculinity have been colourfully varied: risk-taking, responsibility, irresponsibility,
aggression, Zeus energy... Perhaps the finest is the sociobiologist Lionel Tiger's idea that
true maleness, underlying male bonding and war, is elicited by 'hard and heavy
phenomena' . Many heavy-metal rock fans would agree. The weakness in the essentialist
approach is obvious: the choice of the essence is quite arbitrary. Nothing obliges different
essentialists to agree, and in fact they often do not. Claims about a universal basis of
masculinity tell us more about the ethos of the claimant than about anything else.
Positivist social science, whose ethos emphasizes finding the facts, yields a simple
definition of masculinity: what men actually are. This definition is the logical basis of
masculinity /femininity (M/F) scales in psychology, whose items are validated by showing
that they discriminate statistically between groups of men and women. It is also the basis
of those ethnographic discussions of masculinity which describe the pattern of men's lives
in a given culture and, whatever it is, call the pattern masculinity.
There are three difficulties here. First, as modern epistemology recognizes, there is no
description without a standpoint. The apparently neutral descriptions on which these
definitions rest are themselves underpinned by assumptions about gender. Obviously
enough, to start compiling an M/F scale one must have some idea of what to count or list
when making up the items.
Second, to list what men and women do requires that people be already sorted into the
categories 'men' and 'women'. This, as Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna showed in
their classic ethnomethodological study of gender research, is unavoidably a process of
social attribution using common-sense typologies of gender. Positivist procedure thus rests
on the very typifications that are supposedly under investigation in gender research.
Third, to define masculinity as what-men-empirically-are is to rule out the usage in which

we call some women 'masculine ' and some men 'feminine', or some actions or attitudes '
masculine' or 'feminine' regardless of who displays them. This is not a trivial use of the
terms. It is crucial, for instance, to psychoanalytic thinking about contradictions within
personality. Indeed, this usage is fundamental to gender analysis. If we spoke only of
differences between men as a bloc and women as a bloc, we would not need the terms
'masculine ' and 'feminine' at all. We could just speak of 'men's' and 'women's' , or 'male'
and 'female ' . The terms 'masculine ' and 'feminine' point beyond categorical sex difference
to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in matters
of gender.
Normative definitions recognize these differences and offer a standard: masculinity is

what men ought to be. This definition is often found in media studies, in discussions of
exemplars such as John Wayne or of genres such as the thriller. Strict sex role theory treats
masculinity precisely as a social norm for the behaviour of men. In practice, male sex role
texts often blend normative with essentialist definitions. Normative definitions allow that
different men approach the standards to different degrees. But this soon produces
paradoxes, some of which were recognized in the early Men's Liberation writings. Few men
actually match the 'blueprint' or display the toughness and independence acted by Wayne,
Bogart or Eastwood. (This point is picked up by film itself, in spoofs such as Blazing
Saddles and Play it Again, Sam.) What is 'normative' about a norm hardly anyone meets?
Are we to say the majority of men are unmasculine? How do we assay the toughness
needed to resist the norm of toughness, or the heroism needed to come out as gay? A more
subtle difficulty is that a purely normative definition gives no grip on masculinity at the
level of personality. Joseph Pleck correctly identified the unwarranted assumption that
role and identity correspond. This assumption is, I think, why sex role theorists often drift
towards essentialism.
Semiotic approaches abandon the level of personality and define masculinity through a
system of symbolic difference in which masculine and feminine places are contrasted.
Masculinity is, in effect, defined as not-femininity. This follows the formulae of structural
linguistics, where elements of speech are defined by their differences from each other. The
approach has been widely used in feminist and poststructuralist cultural analyses of
gender and in Lacanian psychoanalysis and studies of symbolism. It yields more than an
abstract contrast of masculinity and femininity, of the kind found in M/F scales. In the
semiotic opposition of masculinity and femininity, masculinity is the unmarked term, the
place of symbolic authority. The phallus is master-signifier, and femininity is symbolically
defined by lack.
This definition of masculinity has been very effective in cultural analysis. It escapes the
arbitrariness of essentialism and the paradoxes of positivist and normative definitions. It
is, however, limited in its scope - unless one assumes, as some postmodern theorists do,
that discourse is all we can talk about in social analysis. To grapple with the full range of
issues about masculinity we need ways of talking about relationships of other kinds too:
about gendered places in production and consumption, places in institution and in natural
environments, places in social and military struggles.
What can be generalized is the principle of connection. The idea that one symbol can only
be understood within a connected system of symbols applies equally well in other spheres.
No masculinity arises except in a system of gender relations. Rather than attempting to
define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioural average, a norm) ,
we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women
conduct gendered lives. 'Masculinity' , to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is
simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women
engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience,
personality and culture.
Word count: 1533

1) Especifique los dos presupuestos históricos/ ideológicos que dan sustento al uso
moderno del termino masculinidad.
2) En palabras propias, sintetice

a) las cuatro estrategias de caracterización de la masculinidad;
b) las críticas formuladas por la autora a cada una de ellas.
3) En palabras propias, explique

a) en qué consiste el principio de conexión;
b) de qué manera contribuye a pensar las definiciones de masculinidad.
4) Redacte una breve fundamentación de las siguientes afirmaciones sobre la base de

lo trabajado en el texto:
a) 'Masculinity' is not a coherent object about which a generalizing science can be
produced.
b) In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing gender' in a culturally specific
way.
An Agonistic Model
Chantal Mouffe
It is in the context of the ever-present possibility of antagonism that I have elaborated what
I call an ‘agonistic’ model of democracy. My original intention was to provide a ‘metaphoric
redescription’ of liberal democratic institutions – a redescription that could grasp what
was at stake in pluralist democratic politics. I have argued that in order to understand the
nature of democratic politics and the challenge that it faces, we needed an alternative to
the two main approaches in democratic political theory.
One of those approaches, the aggregative model, sees political actors as being moved by the
pursuit of their interests. The other model, the deliberative one, stresses the role of reason
and moral considerations. What both of these models leave aside is the centrality of
collective identities and the crucial role played by affects in their constitution.
My claim is that it is impossible to understand democratic politics without acknowledging

‘passions’ as the driving force in the political field. The agonistic model of democracy aims
to tackle all the issues that cannot be properly addressed by the other two models because
of their rationalist, individualistic frameworks.
Let me briefly recall the argument I elaborated in The Democratic Paradox. I asserted that
when we acknowledge the dimension of ‘the political’, we begin to realize that one of the
main challenges for pluralist liberal democratic politics consists in trying to defuse the
potential antagonism that exists in human relations. In my view, the fundamental question
is not how to arrive at a consensus reached without exclusion, because this would require
the construction of an ‘us’ that would not have a corresponding ‘them’. This is impossible
because, as I have just noted, the very condition for the constitution of an ‘us’ is the
demarcation of a ‘them’.
The crucial issue then is how to establish this us/them distinction, which is constitutive of
politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism. Conflict in liberal
democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist
democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal
democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but
as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those
ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict
does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an
‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).
For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of
the ‘adversary’, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the
democratic principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing about their
interpretation. Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation
of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of
their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between
adversaries is what constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant
democracy.
A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If

this is missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be
replaced by a confrontation between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of
identifications. Too much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion towards
confrontations, leads to apathy and to a disaffection with political participation. This is
why a liberal democratic society requires a debate about possible alternatives. It must
provide political forms of identifications around clearly differentiated democratic
positions.
While consensus is no doubt necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent. Consensus is

needed on the institutions that are constitutive of liberal democracy and on the ethico-
political values that should inform political association. But there will always be
disagreement concerning the meaning of those values and the way they should be
implemented. This consensus will therefore always be a ‘conflictual consensus’.
In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political
principles are not only legitimate but also necessary. They allow for different forms of
citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics. When the agonistic
dynamics of pluralism are hindered because of a lack of democratic forms of
identifications, then passions cannot be given a democratic outlet. The ground is therefore
laid for various forms of politics articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist,
religious or ethnic type, and for the multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable
moral values, with all the manifestations of violence that such confrontations entail.
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress once again that this notion of ‘the
adversary’ needs to be distinguished sharply from the understanding of that term found in
liberal discourse. According to the understanding of ‘adversary’ proposed here, and
contrary to the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated, but ‘sublimated’.
In fact, what liberals call an ‘adversary’ is merely a ‘competitor’. Liberal theorists envisage
the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the
positions of power, their objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place,
without putting into question the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the
relations of power. It is simply a competition among elites.
In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what
is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be
reconciled rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. It is a real confrontation, but one
that is played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted
by the adversaries.
I contend that it is only when we acknowledge ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension
that can we pose the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace liberal
theorists, is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how
to reach a ‘rational’, i.e. fully inclusive, consensus without any exclusion. Despite what
many liberals want to believe, the specificity of democratic politics is not the overcoming of
the we/they opposition, but the different way in which it is established. The prime task of
democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in
order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’
those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective
forms of identification around democratic objectives.
I am aware that the current zeitgeist is not favourable to such an understanding of ‘the
political’, as the tendency to envisage this domain in ethical terms is much more popular.
Several authors coming from different theoretical horizons could provide examples of this
‘ethical turn’, but I have chosen to say a few words about Alain Badiou. Badiou
distinguishes between the political and politics, but his distinction differs from my own. He
uses the term ‘le politique’ (the political) to refer to traditional political philosophy, and the
term ‘la politique’ (politics) to designate his own position. In his view, a political
philosophy which advocates the plurality of opinions and excludes the notion of truth is
bound to end up promoting the politics of parliamentarism. Against the characterization of
the political as a plurality of opinions, Badiou asserts the singularity of politics produced
by subjects who are defined by their singular relation to a truth event and not by their
mutual exchange of opinions.
Politics, he claims, is the order of truth and the event, and he is adamant that, to allow for
the event to occur, it is necessary to leave aside all the facts and to be faithful to something
which is not a given act of reality. Indeed, an event is an evanescent interruption of the
real. The decision of a subject to remain faithful to an event is what produces a truth. This
is how he puts it: ‘I shall call “truth” (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to an event: that
which this fidelity produces in the situation.’
According to the approach that I am advocating, the domain of politics is not and cannot
be the domain of the unconditional because it requires making decisions in an undecidable
terrain. This is why the type of order which is established through a given hegemonic
configuration of power is always a political, contestable one; it should never be justified as
dictated by a higher order and presented as the only legitimate one.
As I argued earlier, to institute an order, frontiers need to be drawn and the moment of
closure must be faced. But this frontier is the result of a political decision; it is constituted
on the basis of a particular we/they, and for that very reason it should be recognized as
something contingent and open to contestation. What characterizes democratic politics is
the confrontation between conflicting hegemonic projects, a confrontation with no
possibility of final reconciliation. To conceive such a confrontation in political, not ethical,
terms requires asking a series of strategic questions about the type of ‘we’ that a given
politics aims at creating and the chain of equivalences that is called for.
This cannot take place without defining an adversary, a ‘they’ that will serve as a
‘constitutive outside’ for the ‘we’. This is what can be called the ‘moment of the political’,
the recognition of constitutive character of social division and the ineradicability of
antagonism. This is why theorists who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this
dimension cannot provide an effective guide for envisaging the nature of radical politics.
Word count: 1597

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1

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order.

1.3 Forms and Functions of Post-truth

1) Caracterice en palabras propias:

2) ¿Cuál es el antecedente directo del fenómeno fake news? Explique el proceso en

4) Caracterice en palabras propias:

5) Sintetice la última dimensión de la post verdad que desarrolla el autor.

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Third, to define masculinity as what-men-empirically-are is to rule out the usage in which we

Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el

2) En palabras propias, sintetice

3) En palabras propias, explique

4) Redacte una breve fundamentación de las siguientes afirmaciones sobre la base

Gender as a Structure of SocialPractice

1) Fundamente en palabras propias la afirmación “Gender is a scandal, an outrage, from the

5) Caracterice en palabras propias el modelo tridimensional de estructura de género que

6) Desarrolle en palabras propias las variables de interseccionalidad del género en tanto

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Gender Trouble. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions

Although Douglas clearly subscribes to a structuralist distinction between an inherently unruly

Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el

4) Desarrolle en palabras propias el concepto de “history as a relentless writing instrument”.

6) Explique en palabras propias la relación entre enfermedad , márgenes corporales y

The Society of Positivity

No buzzword dominates contemporary public discourse so much as “transparency.” Above all, it

Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is

Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el

1) ¿Qué características tiene el proceso dentro del cual se enmarca la transparencia?

2) Fundamente en palabras propias la aseveración: «The society of transparency is an

3) Explique en palabras propias las formas en que la aceleración incide sobre la

4) ¿Qué relación se plantea entre lenguaje y violencia?

5) ¿Qué críticas formula el autor a la ideología de la posprivacidad?

6) ¿A qué se refiere el autor con el concepto de «pathos of distance» y cuál es su

7) Explique en palabras propias la relación que traza el autor entre la positividad, el

9) ¿Qué caracterizaciones formula el autor en su definición de la democracia líquida?

10) ¿Cómo vincula el autor la transparencia con la pos política?

11) ¿De qué manera incide la positividad en la comunicación?

My claim is that it is impossible to understand democratic politics without acknowledging

A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If this is

In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political

Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el

2) Caracterice la categoría que la autora propone como condición principal de la

4) Desarrolle las dos conceptualizaciones contrapuestas de «adversario» y explique la

5) Fundamente la siguiente afirmación: «According to the approach that I am advocating,

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

The Democratic Paradox

Responda las siguientes consignas utilizando únicamente la información suministrada en el

3) Caracterice el concepto de «consenso de centro» según lo desarrolla la autora y explique

4) Desarrolle los corrimientos y transformaciones generados por el consenso de

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

The Society of Positivity

No buzzword dominates contemporary public discourse so much as “transparency.” Above all,

Transparent language is a formal, indeed, a purely machinic, operational language that

Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is

Word count: 1573

Realizar las siguientes actividades:

1) ¿Qué características tiene el proceso dentro del cual se enmarca la transparencia?

EXAMEN DE INGLÉS GLOBAL

Gender Trouble. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions