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A one-day hybrid symposium to be hosted by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton (UK). Date: Wednesday 5 April 2023. Location: University of Brighton, City Campus, M2, and online. Keynote speaker: Dr Leticia Sabsay (LSE). Deadline for abstracts: Friday 24 February 2023. Please see poster for full details.

This article explores how young prenatal women negotiate, articulate, and manage their experiences of chronic pelvic pain (CPP). I argue that chronic pelvic pain lies at the intersection of chronic illness, pain, feminization, sex, and legibility, and that pain of this character is deeply stigmatized. Investigating it offers a visceral view into the affective layers of chronic pain. This project draws on ethnographic interviews with CPP sufferers aged eighteen to thirty, pelvic health care providers, and sex and treatment tool production companies. The analysis is rooted in histories of frigidity, hysteria, and chronic illness that together affect how CPP is socially understood today. This article explicates the critical differences between prompted recurrent pain and constant bodily pain in terms of the subjectivity of associated experiences, the problematic insistence on vaginal penetration as evidence of cure, and the dilemmas of treating pain with doubly painful therapies.

Research papers, an essential vehicle for disseminating new knowledge and findings, have long been valued for their linguistic objectivity and impersonality. However, more recent approaches to research paper writing suggest that authors should also take an "argumentative position" (White, 2003) by projecting their stance and encouraging the readers to actively engage in the process of reading and evaluating the text (Hyland, 2005 Scollon, 1994). An important linguistic feature, frequently employed for both objective and subjective presentation of claims, is modality and within it modal verbs, which through their modal meanings express different communicative functions. In recognition of genre- and discipline-specific norms, the present paper will focus on quantitative and qualitative analysis of modal verbs and their meanings and functions in logistics research papers, whereby the ultimate goal is to show what practical implications the study's results may have for the teaching of English to students of logistics.

This article focuses on the processes of subjectivity change and subjectification among Brazilian Jews who become citizens of Israel. Global Zionist movements and the State of Israel interpellate their Brazilian and Jewish Diasporic identities, and the process of migration (aliyah) is rooted in diverse motivations, that are further challenged by the political situation in Israel/Palestine. The characteristics of the Jewish Diaspora and of citizenship accession in Israel allow for different ways of looking at contemporary migrations and circulations of people, as well as the way that national and cultural identifications are negotiated between subjects, social context, and the state. O artigo foca os processos de mudanças na subjetividade e de subjetificação de judeus brasileiros que acedem à cidadania israelita. Os movimentos sionistas globais e o Estado de Israel interpelam as identidades brasileira e diaspórica, e o processo migratório (aliyah) revela motivações diversas e é desafiado pela situação política em Israel/Palestina. As características da diáspora judaica e do acesso à cidadania em Israel possibilitam novas formas de olhar as circulações contemporâneas e o modo como as identificações nacionais e culturais são negociadas entre sujeitos e Estado.

Cohen (this issue) raises intriguing questions about the impact of gestational experience but asks his readers to suspend disbelief, as he posits links between this liminal, mysterious, and on some level “unknowable” of times and later phenomenological and relational experience. Using the novel Nutshell, by Ian McEwan, narrated by a fetus who is privy to the portentous events happening outside, as well as inside, his mother’s womb as a frame, I explore questions including how much we can know about fetal subjectivity, how to differentiate the impact of prenatal from postnatal experience, and how that translates to later developmental and clinical realms.

Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new technologies.

These conjoint papers discuss critically Nancy Chodorow’s understanding of mother–daughter separation as an important milestone in psychic development, as well as subsequent psychoanalytic work on female and maternal subjectivity through revisiting the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In Paper A, we are looking at the figure of Demeter. Our reading of Demeter in the myth questions the usual interpretations of this maternal figure particularly those from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing the conclusion that Demeter, according to the myth, is the silent container for her child, the mother with no voice or subjectivity, or desire, she is the one who is to be left behind. Through a clinical vignette, we illustrate how in one clinical context, a mother and daughter relationship was perceived and “interpreted”, leading to the mother being seen as the problem, and cause of her daughter’s difficulties. The BBC film, The Mother, received many negative comments and even condemnation for its portrayal of a mother and grandmother as still sexually active, and wishing to be the subject of another’s desire. We suggest that the film illustrated some of our most uncomfortable and complex questions about the mother and the maternal. We conclude by looking at the film and the questions and fears it raises about female sexuality, desire, and ageing when applied to the “older” woman–mother.

In Paper B, we focus on the figure of Persephone in the myth, as the daughter, but also, as “the silent object of desire” of male imagination. We question whether Persephone’s forceful abduction is a representation of the emergence of female sexuality, as it has often been argued within psychoanalysis (Chodorow, 2012), or in fact, a symbolic representation of female subordination and objectification. We discuss a clinical vignette illustrating how a mother who is unable to face up to her own and her daughter’s vulnerability, unlike Demeter, can result in a daughter who is unable to protect herself from violation, and who cannot find her way up from the underworld so to speak. We then discuss the film, The Handmaiden, where the question of mother–daughter separation is a central theme. We argue that a strong mother–daughter bond is in fact central to the ability of women to find a healthy place for sexual desire and a close relationship in adult life, and that the nature of the mother–daughter bond is such that both mother and daughter seek out each other’s love and care throughout the lifespan.

In exploring the problem of thinking in black and white we encounter the difficulty of maintaining our subjectivity as good racialized whites. This commentary follows the journey that Yvette Esprey takes us on to reclaim her thinking mind and reconstruct an authentic racialized self. In addition, this work expands on the concept of racism as a form of abjection in which the hated parts of self that are extruded paradoxically come to construct the self.

This second of two papers focuses on the shame which emerged in the first 14 years of analysis of a woman who was bulimic, self-harmed, and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. To explore this intense and pervasive shame I draw on Jung's and Laplanche's emphasis on experiences of unresolvable, non-pathological ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ at the heart of the psyche. Images, metaphors, elements of clinical experience, and working hypotheses from a number of analytic traditions are used to flesh out this exploration. These include Kilborne's use of Pirandello's image of shame as like a ‘hole in the paper sky’ which, I suggest, points to a crack in subjectivity, and reveals our belief in the efficacy of the self to be illusory. Hultberg's observations on shame as having an existential mode (function) are also explored, as is the nature of analytic truth. Using these ideas I describe my patient's process of finding some small but freeing space in relation to her shame and self-hatred. Through enduring and learning from her shame in analysis she realized that it was part of a desperate unconscious attempt to draw close to her troubled father and so to ‘love him better’.

Through the examination of a select body of classical-style poems that are inscribed on or written about photographs of the self in the modern era, this article delves into the intertwined issues of the self, affect, and autobiographical writing. It first explores the ethical implications of “poems on photographs of the self” (ziti xiaozhao 自題小照) and the issue of temporality involved in the confrontation with a self-image and subsequent writing about the image. Second, it focuses on the issue of the self as other, as well as fractures and the instability of modern subjectivity as amplified in visual self-encounters. In so doing, the article attempts to offer a new understanding of the self/image and text/image dynamic, with insight into the cultural and affective articulations of the self in the context of a new visual culture in modern China.

In writing this discussion I have chosen a narrative structure to resonate with that of the paper, an unconventional episodic style in which I try to enter the work through the parts of the paper that speak to me. The lines in bold are direct quotes, followed by my associations and thoughts. In witnessing this beautiful unfolding of subjectivity, we are also witness to the complex way in which the processes of negation are enacted. I explore the transformation that occurs and the challenges this type of work places on the relational analyst.

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. They address topics as diverse as ritual expression in Cuba and madness in a Moroccan city, the HIV epidemic in South Africa and roadkill in suburban America. Essays alternate with methodological reflections on fundamental problems of writerly heritage, craft, and responsibility in anthropology. Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself. These talented writers show how inventive, appealing, and intellectually adventurous prose can allow us to enter more profoundly into the lives and worlds of others, breaking with conventional notions of representation and subjectivity. They argue that such experimentation is essential to anthropology’s role in the contemporary world, and one of our most powerful means of engaging it. Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramon Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart

This paper is part of a larger project examining several memoirs of participants in the American LGBT movement in order to identify the specific insights that published autobiographical sources provide. My earlier publications on this topic examine four autobiographical narratives of militancy in the gay movement of the 1960s-70s (Arnie Kantrowitz’s Under the Rainbow; Martin Duberman’s Cures and Midlife Queer; Karla Jay’s Tales of the Lavender Menace; Amy Hoffman’s An Army of Ex-lovers). My research so far has concentrated on the initial stage of the contemporary LGBT movement; the project will subsequently include memoirs of the 1980s—when AIDS considerably changed the dynamics of gay identity politics, the relationship between gender and sexual identities, gay men’s conceptions of their own life-times, and the politicization of sexuality—as well as memoirs of participants in gay counterculture or queer avant-garde.Rather than simply treating the memoirs as subjective insights into the movement’s past, or instead objectivizing them to understand how militancy is conditioned by social and historical circumstances, I study autobiographical memoir-writing as a way of deploying a militant identity: in addition to memoirs being an act of militancy in the sense that they will motivate readers to join the movement, authors also provide personal interpretations of their militant identity by retrospectively reconstructing their past experience. This is done through narrative treatment of time (period covered, and lapse between narrated events and narration) and the projection of a narrative voice, which results in various autobiographical modes (confessional; historiographical; testimonial; testamentary). Narrativeness is thus pivotal to how memoir-writing reflects the very agency that animates mobilizations, so that literary and rhetorical scholarship offers useful methodological tools.A multidisciplinary approach is therefore key to avoiding two contradictory dangers: “biographical illusion,” as expounded by Bourdieu—whereby the actor’s voice is fetishized—and what may be termed “structuralist illusion”—which all but ignores the actor’s voice. Indeed, while autobiographical narratives are not faithful images of the social reality, neither should they be treated as sheer mirrors of the social conditions that constrain their production. Following McAdam, social movement sociologists like Polletta and Jasper have been attentive to emotions, biography, and narrativeness, which endow social movements with moral justification and subjective inspiration. Yet, sociological literature on life-storytelling (e.g. Fosl; Plummer; Roseneil et al.; Schaffer and Smith) has mainly been concerned with what facts narrators include in their plots—and hence to negotiations between the individual and collective dimensions of movement participation—, thus highlighting emplotment and skirting narration itself. Instead, examining the narrative processes deployed in memoirs written for publication requires attention to literariness and helps understand how they reflect on social reality and, consequently, the specular relationship between the narratives themselves and LGBT militancy, collective identity constructions, and subaltern subcultures.Aside from general theoretical issues, this exploratory paper presents prospects for future research by discussing the likely differences between memoirs of the 1960s-70s and 1980s-90s, and between the narration of movement participation and cultural involvement, that will deserve attention.

This paper presents a book manuscript in which I examine the fluctuating place of sexuality in LGBT mobilization in the US. The book, forthcoming at Amsterdam University Press (2019), contends that, while politically successful, the US LGBT movement has a record of neglecting a key aspect of LGBT militancy—sexuality—and analyses grassroots efforts at re-politicizing sexuality and re-sexualizing LGBT politics. As LGBT movements in Western Europe and North America are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBT people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBT movements in other countries. My book manuscript focuses on the transformations of the United States’ LGBT movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have not led to an increase in militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors’ mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, forms of militancy that perpetuate the role of sexuality in LGBT militancy.