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This paper will consider three major conceptions of desire and how they relate to the human condition. For many desire is conceived either as lack, a 'desire-for', or as some affirmative force that enables us to 'reach beyond ourselves'.This is desire reduced to a dualism in order to negate one pole in favour of the other. Georges Bataille offers a third way, where the two form a complex dialectic such that desire is both lack and affirmation. His theory demonstrates how desire reveals the sacred as a transcendental immanence rather than psychic ideal and where the profane follows rather than precedes the sacred. His desire is one that conceptualizes us as humans that occasionally catch glimpses of the sacred but these glimpses are insufficient to have and to hold it. For Bataille we cannot become God, we cannot have the sacred because we are human, all too human.

In a brief biography of the former president of the DRC, Laurent Desire Kabila, discussion of his formal & informal education provides insight to the formation of his political beliefs, including the development of his interpretation of "radicalized nationalism." After fleeing from a failed coup attempt, Kabila became a rebel bush leader. The influence of communism on his political beliefs is addressed in the discussion of his relations with the international political community, including those opposed to Mobutu. The discussion concludes with Kabila's ascension to the presidency & his assassination. L. Collins

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can 'let go' and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras' work questions this process of 'letting go' and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras' work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential.

This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, Jerker, or The Helping Hand (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of Jerker on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when "Silence = Death," Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.

Abstract
Susan Wolf defines a meaningful life as one that is somewhat successfully engaged in promoting positive value. I grant this claim; however, I disagree with Wolf's theory about why we desire meaningfulness, so understood. She suggests that the human desire for meaningfulness is derived from an awareness of ourselves as equally insignificant in the universe and a resulting anti-solipsistic concern for promoting goodness outside the boundaries of our own lives. I accept that this may succeed in explaining why people want to engage in projects that happen to be meaningful. Nevertheless, I argue that Wolf fails to explain why people have a desire for meaningfulness itself. In other words, she has told us one reason we may be motivated to promote positive value, but not why we personally want to be the people who promote it—why we think it is a good thing that meaningful acts be done, but not why we want them to be our meaningful acts. In detailing my response, I follow Wolf in relating our desire for meaningfulness to a kind of love-based motivation. However, I argue that it has more in common with a selfish form of love than the altruistic kind of love proposed by Wolf. Finally, I suggest an alternative explanation which I believe can more fully account for our desire for meaningfulness: the prospect of disappearing from the universe without a trace makes us anxious, so we pursue meaningful achievements in an attempt to make our own physical deaths less final.

Aliens — Refugees — Refugee status — Criteria for determination of — Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951 and Protocol, 1967 — Test of well-founded fear of persecution in country of nationality — Political persecution — Whether necessary for refugee to hold political opinion — Whether well-founded fear resulting from an imputed political opinion sufficient — United States Immigration and Nationality Act 1952 — Refugee Act 1980 — The law of the United States

This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences (biography) into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field.

Cover -- Dedication -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- SECTION I The Capitalist Paradox: Expanding and Contracting Pleasures -- Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology -- "Charity Girls" and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880-1920 -- Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II -- Capitalism and Gay Identity -- SECTION II Sexual Revolutions -- Family, Sexual Morality, and Popular Movements in Turn-of-the-Century America -- Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925 -- The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany -- SECTION Ill The Institution of Heterosexuality -- Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence -- Russian Working Women: Sexuality in Bonding Patterns and the Politics of Daily Life -- they're always curious -- The Afro-American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of Sexual Identity Rennie Simson -- I Just Came Out Pregnant -- Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different -- Issues and Answers -- Garden Paths, Descents -- SECTION IV Domination, Submission, and the Unconscious -- Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination -- Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor -- Movie -- Street Dream #1 -- Is the Gaze Male? -- "The Mind That Burns in Each Body": Women, Rape, and Racial Violence -- Hearts of Darkness -- SECTION V On Sexual Openness -- Gender Systems, Ideology, and Sex Research -- The Teacher -- What We're Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism -- In the Morning -- Bestiary -- A Story of a Girl and Her Dog -- SECTION VI Current Controversies -- Male Vice and Female Virtue: Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain -- The New Feminism of Yin and Yang.

AbstractThis article examines transgender practices in Southwest China through the analytic lens of assemblage. Through ethnographically contextualizing transgender sex workers' daily navigation of the rapidly shifting urban space in Kunming, this article reconceptualizes transgender as constitutive to the dynamic urban assemblage instead of carving out a space and time external to it. It argues that the critical lens of assemblage in the analysis of transgender practice reveals the constitutive queerness of the norm, troubling the political and analytic tenet of antinormativity in queer studies.