Tekhnē of Reconstruction: Breast Cancer, Norms, and Fleshy Rearrangements
Social Semiotics (2012, 22.1, 121-141)
This essay is an engagement with and a rejoinder to Audre Lorde’s framing of prosthetics and breast reconstruction in... more This essay is an engagement with and a rejoinder to Audre Lorde’s framing of prosthetics and breast reconstruction in her seminal The Cancer Journals. Given that, as Susan Merrill Squier (2004, 183) has argued, human life is increasingly defined and understood in terms of discourses and possibilities for the “instrumental deployment of resources for bodily renewal,” this essay explores how the body/materiality might be understood in relation to the tekhnē (the technologies, techniques, and craft) of reconstruction three decades after Lorde’s account.
19 views
Download (.pdf) The Dialectics of Vulnerability: Breast Cancer and the Body in Prognosis
Under Review (Body and Society)
This paper argues that breast cancer prognosis potentially produces a circular dialectic in which a) the subject is... more This paper argues that breast cancer prognosis potentially produces a circular dialectic in which a) the subject is compelled to perceive the body as vulnerable and separate (alien) to the self, and the treatments required make the body more vulnerable, more alien and b) this is held in tension with the fact that the very alienation and heightened vulnerability of the body in breast cancer treatment is productive; it collapses the boundaries through which the body and self are understood, often demands a conscious intimacy of/with the body, and points to critical enactments and understandings of embodied subjectivity. I use the concept of dialectics here in a broad sense then, to mark the interaction of apparently conflicting states. While vulnerability is generally thought of as a somato-ontology to be avoided, and as a constraining, negative mode of being, through a shift in perspective it also appears as an enabling state. I argue that vulnerability might be seen as a relational ontology between flesh and self that is both restrictive and generative, where the restriction itself can be generative. Understanding vulnerability in this way might engender the critical politicization of risk and function as the place from which a radically altered/re-conceived politics proceeds. Such a politics would be ethico-political work around the issue of cancer. It would, perhaps, function ultimately as an ethics of vulnerability, foregrounding critical responsibility towards oneself, one’s life, the life of others, and the life of the community.
Connecting the Dots: Threat assessment, depression and the troubled student
Harwood, Valerie (2011) Connecting the Dots: Threat Assessment, depression and the troubled student. 'Curriculum Inquiry' 41(5)
Keywords: Depression, Virginia Tech Massacre, Threat Assessment Teams, School Shooting
One of the numerous... more
Keywords: Depression, Virginia Tech Massacre, Threat Assessment Teams, School Shooting
One of the numerous responses to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 has been the call for higher education institutions in the United States to take an increased role in identifying troubled students. This has had widely felt effects, with educational institutions across the US developing mechanisms such as ‘Threat Assessment Teams’ to respond to the perceived heightened threat of campus violence. At the core of these responses is the notion of the troubled student that brings dangerousness and depression together. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to this, arguing that extreme violence has been extended from the provenance of the dangerous mad individual to a potential characteristic of the depressed individual. Interrogating this shift takes on special significance, since understanding depression and violence is deemed vital to “connect the dots” to detect the troubled student, thereby preventing campus violence in higher education institutions. To consider this shifting conceptualization, this paper draws closely on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between factual and rational truths and Michel Foucault’s analysis of melancholy. The Arendtian distinction between factual and rational truths facilitates analysis of the truths of the troubled student, as well as underscoring the importance that this recognition has for debate. Foucault’s investigation of melancholy together with his emphasis on the “structure of perception” is employed to tease out how truths of the troubled student are produced, and thereby demonstrate that they are rational truths. Drawing on these ideas, the paper offers a critical examination of how depression figures as potency and advances the argument that, in the take up of these emerging conceptualizations, there is a significant shift in how the troubled student is understood in higher education.
Mobile asylums: psychopathologisation as a personal, portable psychiatric prison
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol. 31, No. 4, October 2010, 437-451
Keywords: ADHD, child behavior diagnosis, racialization, racism, disadvantage, poverty
Psychopathologisation, broadly understood as processes that lead to the effects of being psychopathologised, can have considerable consequences for isolating students from education. This can be especially the case for children and young people affected by the racialisation of behaviour and/or socio-economic disadvantage. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between the psychiatrist and the asylum in his lectures ‘Psychiatric Power’, the argument is made that these effects can be tantamount to being institutionalised in a mobile asylum. Portrayal of the asylum in the American television series House MD is used to highlight how, if we rely on classic depictions of the asylum-psychiatrist couplet, we risk missing - or minimising, the mobile asylum that some young children experience when they are psychopathologised in schooling.