Suchergebnisse

I explore Baier, Held, Okin, Code, Noddings, and Eisler on trust and distrust. This reveals a need for reflection on the analysis, ethics, and dynamics of trust and distrust—especially the distinction between trusting and taking for granted, the feasibility of choosing greater trust, and the possibility of moving from situations of warranted distrust to trust. It is impossible to overcome the need for trust through surveillance, recourse to contracts, or legal institutions.

Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of self-interpretation that introduce more active dimensions into understandings of subject formation and agency. Furthermore, an unqualified notion of indeterminacy does not unpick the imbrication of relations of time and power that overdetermine agency. Ultimately, structural accounts of subject formation need to be integrated more closely with hermeneutic perspectives of the self in order to understand better the complexities of agency in a post-traditional society.

Place and space / Linda McDowell -- Time / Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson -- Class / Rosemary Hennessy -- 'Race' / Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Meg Coulson -- Sexuality / Rey Chow -- Subjects / Chris Weedon -- Language / Sara Mills -- Literature / Mary Eagleton -- The visual / Griselda Pollock -- Feminist philosophies / Rosi Braidotti -- Cyberculture / Jenny Wolmark -- Feminist futures / Sara Ahmed