In the 1980s, James Baldwin recognized that a major transformation had occurred in the socio-political functions of religion. His critique adapted accordingly, focusing on the ways in which religion—particularly white evangelical Christianity—had morphed into a movement deeply enmeshed with mass media, conservativepolitics, and late capitalism. Religion in the Reagan era was leveraged, sold, and consumed in ways never before seen, from charismatic televangelists, to Christian-themed amusement parks, to mega-churches. The new movement was often characterized as the “religious right” or the “Moral Majority” and was central to both Reagan’s political coalition as well as the broader culture wars. For Baldwin, this development had wide-ranging ramifications for society and the individual. This article draws on Baldwin’s final major essay, “To Crush the Serpent” (1987), to examine the author’s evolving thoughts on religion, salvation, and transgression in the context of the Reagan era.
of selfhood and right to participate in this world. Moreover, violence is absolutely integral to the markings of subjectivity, setting apart claims about identity, along with notions of civility and barbarism. Violence is always mediated through expressed dichotomies between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, between the right to punish and the intolerable transgression, between the force of normative law and the terror of the minority. In fact, there is an entire political ecology at work in the very diagnosis of something as political violence in itself
to resist or change social or political wrong through either ‘contained or transgressive tactics, excluding political violence’ (Global Activism, Ruth Reitan, 2007). 2 Re-assertion of state sovereignty was also linked to the fact that pre-1989 MSF often worked on the margins of conflicts/refugees, as opposed to directly inside, thus bringing our public critiques and
, S. ( 2016 ), The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking ’ ( Chicago : The University of Chicago Press ). Olsson , C. ( 2015 ), ‘ Interventionism as Practice: On “Ordinary Transgressions” and Their Routinization ’, Journal of Intervention and
stranger as an unknown but nonetheless identifiable (read: racialised) figure who posits danger and transgression in his very being (see also Fanon, 1975 ). This figuration can be readily transposed to the colonial and patriarchal bases of the aid sector, structured by hierarchical and highly sexualised notions of both race and gender. Under this logic, colonised and non-white men have long been positioned as libidinous and violent, threats to the safety and honour of white women, while
This book looks at sovereignty as a particular form of power and politics. It shows that the fate of bodies in the transition from life to death can provide a key to understanding fundamental ways in which sovereignty is claimed and performed. The contributions analyse (post-)conflict as well as non-conflict contexts, which too often are studied in isolation from one another. Focusing on contemporary issues rather than the equally important historical dimensions, they all grapple with the questions of who governs the dead bodies, how, why and with what effects. The book analyses how dead bodies are placed and dealt with in spaces between competing, overlapping and nested sovereign orders, under normal as well as exceptional conditions. It looks at contributions that draw on psychoanalysis, critical theory, the structuralist-functionalist anthropology of burial rituals and recent ideas of agency and materiality. The book first explains the efforts of states to contain and separate out dead bodies in particular sites. It explores the ways in which such efforts of containment are negotiated and contested in struggles between different entities that claim the dead bodies. The book then shows how entities that claim sovereignty produce effects of sovereignty by challenging and transgressing the laws regarding the legitimate use of violence and how dead bodies should be treated with dignity.
fundamental step’ in forming society, the transgression of which causes atavistic endogamy. 10 Joseph Shepher located the incest taboo as being rooted in biology as well as social rules and customs and argued that violations against it are genetically and socially damaging. 11 The Freudian understanding of the incest taboo positions it as a necessary part of psychosexual development for
Unnatural women and uncomfortable readers? Clotilde Escalle’s tales of transgression Described by critics variously as one of the ‘new barbarians’ of French writing,1 as one of the cruel ‘Barbarellas’ who seek only to depict the disarray of contemporary French society,2 and as one of the new breed of women writers who hold a violent and deep-seated grudge against the gaze of men,3 Clotilde Escalle is remarkable among new writers for the dispassionate way in which she presents violent sexual and familial dramas. Escalle was born in in Fez
theory (‘between bio- and necropolitics’), the structuralist-functionalist anthropology of burial rituals (‘rites of separation and the sacralisation of authority’) and recent ideas of agency and materiality (‘dead agency’). Despite their differences, the various approaches point towards an excess of meaning and affect relating to dead bodies and human remains, something that evokes the mystical, the sacred, the liminal and the transgressive, which, in the end, escapes explanation. The following nine chapters are organised in two parts. The first, ‘Containment and
’s reaction of shock and disbelief is emblematic of how the omnibus was viewed in the nineteenth-century French cultural imagination: as a place associated with improper female conduct and with different forms of sexual transgression. Many cultural documents present this vehicle as a space of dubious repute, where respectable girls like Claudine could become ‘contaminated’ by the inappropriate behaviour of other, less virtuous women passengers, or, worse, be taken for a woman of loose morals. In fact, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that many