Search

Ambivalence, the vacillation between conflicting feelings and thoughts, is a key characteristic of scientific knowledge production and emergent biomedical technology. Drawing from sociological theory on ambivalence, we have examined three areas of debate surrounding the early implementation of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for gay, bisexual, queer, and other men who have sex with men in Canada, including epistemology and praxis, clinical and epidemiological implications, and sexual politics. These debates are not focused on the science or efficacy of PrEP to prevent HIV, but rather represent contradictory feelings and opinions about the biopolitics of PrEP and health inequities. Emphasizing how scientists and health practitioners may feel conflicted about the biopolitics of novel biomedical technologies opens up opportunities to consider how a scientific field is or is not adequately advancing issues of equity. Scientists ignoring their ambivalence over the state of their research field may be deemed necessary to achieve a specific implementation goal, but this emotion management work can lead to alienation. We argue that recognizing the emotional dimensions of doing HIV research is not a distraction from “real” science, but can instead be a reflexive site to develop pertinent lines of inquiry better suited at addressing health inequities.

This chapter examines how Dickens evaluated the troubling form of slapstick laughter and sought to generate its effects in his work. It demonstrates how Dickens’s writing becomes an insulated space from where he can experiment with slapstick violence and move his reader both mentally and physically in a similar manner to pantomime’s harlequinade. It demonstrates how Dickens’s comedy draws on two key pantomime tropes—clown’s indestructibility and the authority figure brought low—to provoke a type of laughter in his ‘audience’ of readers that simultaneously suggests their immunity and invulnerability. Ultimately, this chapter contends that by cultivating this unstable laughter, his slapstick scenes and characters resist control, leaving the reader in an uncomfortable and ambivalent state.

Chapter 7 and this chapter critically examine backlash men’s movements, especially fathers’ rights groups and the politics of fatherhood. Both chapters are based on in-depth, qualitative analysis of interviews with members of (Real) Fathers 4 Justice. This chapter explores two of three masculinities identified: ‘bourgeois-rational’ and ‘new man/new father’ masculinity. These map on to specific constructions of fatherhood: ‘the good enough father’ and the ‘nurturing father’, respectively, which are also explored. ‘Progressive’ notions of crisis were associated with new man/new father masculinity, which advances a vision of kinder masculinity (without fundamentally unsettling gender binaries). Finally, the presence of feminist and postfeminist understandings of gender/fatherhood in fathers’ rights perspective is considered. The analysis demonstrates that men’s movements frequently shift discursive strategies and express ambivalence about feminism.

Chapter 7 seeks to offer a comprehensive operationalisation of supplementary school positioning by exploring the manifestation of positioning within micro-level classroom discourse. This part therefore marks a transition from the panoramic view of a diverse cohort of schools (featured in Chaps. 4– 6) to a more focused micro-level perspective. This chapter presents the first part of an in-depth case study of an African-Caribbean supplementary school (African-Caribbean school C), which explores the micro-level discursive encoding of school positioning within everyday school processes and classroom interactions. This chapter discusses the positioning of school C in relation to mainstream schooling, revealing the complex manifestation of the ‘transformation’ discourse in both the perpetuation and rejection of mainstream schooling practices.

This chapter emphasizes the enduring internationalism of postwar Italy that was, in part, the legacy of its anti-fascist struggle. The years after 1945 witnessed the culmination of decolonization movements in various parts of the world. Influential anti-colonial theories emerged in these years, developed by Third-World intellectuals attempting to chart a future course of action for nations fighting for their independence against colonial rule. The liberation movements in Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba demonstrated the ever-increasing fault-lines between orthodox, Eurocentric communism and what came to be known in those years as “Third-Worldism”. In this chapter, I examine the fertile connections Italian intellectuals made between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism in the postwar period, and explore the ways in which perceived analogies between these two positions and the influence of Third-Worldism led to a renewal of Italian radical culture, especially in the realms of literature and film. I delineate a group of diverse texts that are all, however, characterized by a “resistance aesthetics”, as I call it here. But this chapter also emphasizes the point that Italian attitudes to colonialism have varied significantly in the course of its national history, and draws attention to the ambivalence of the Italian left. While Italian leftists stood alongside supporters of the Algerian struggle for independence, they also made no comment on Italy’s own colonial history, which had seemingly been erased from public memory after the Second World War. Moreover, the PCI campaigned for trusteeship of Somalia in the post-war period, arguing that this was Italy’s due “as just moral compensation” for the anti-fascist forces’ contribution to the war effort.

This chapter revisits the ambivalent impact of the Bosnian conflict in affecting women’s lives and sense of security, as well opening up opportunities and spaces for women’s political action. Interweaving feminist literature with interview material, this chapter charts complex narratives of women’s experiences of/during the Bosnian War and unearths the different dynamics shaping women’s practices of citizenship in the transition to the so-called peace.

The dialogue between the urban and the rural in contemporary Irish drama remains persistent and relevant, ranging in scope from Michael Sheridan’s assertion that “the universal truths about people can oftentimes be more clearly expressed in the claustrophobia of the provincial setting”, to Declan Hughes’s statement that rural-based plays in contemporary Irish drama are “based on an Ireland that hasn’t existed for years”. Issues of national and cultural identity are intrinsic to this debate, and the questions asked by it challenge perceptions and prejudices on all sides.

This article analyses the historical narratives that the French memory laws about colonialism construct, and reflects on the laws’ implications for French national identity. The Taubira law dating from 2001 characterises slavery of the past as a crime against humanity. The subsequent law about the ‘positive’ aspects of colonialism, the law of February 2005, prescribed that school programs were to focus on the ‘positive aspects’ of colonialism. Thus seemingly opposing narratives about colonialism have been inscribed in French legislation. Although memory laws establish ‘state-sponsored history’, the French laws about colonialism are at the same time manifestations of contests of different narratives about slavery and colonialism in French society, and of disputes concerning memory in contemporary societies in general.

This chapter considers the possible role of psychoanalysis in developing a theory of how oppression may be internalised by children during interactions with clinicians, social workers and researchers. How can the clinical encounter become a space for reflection? Can oppressive dynamics within the clinical encounter be altered? Psychoanalysis has often been viewed with suspicion within disability studies: this chapter explores what it might mean to become an ‘ambivalent advocate’ of psychoanalysis as a disability activist.

‘Ambivalent Fatherhood: Non-Lethal Assaults and Disobedience Against Parents in the Patriarchal Context of Early Modern Munich’, by Satu Lidman, draws on the Munich magistrates’ court proceedings from around 1600 concerning non-lethal, minor assaults against fathers. Lidman explores what happened in cases of rebellion against fathers; such rebellions threatened to unsettle the paternal authority underpinning the early modern European ideology of domestic order. This chapter contrasts the ideal perceptions of the father, father figures and fatherhood within the framework of patriarchal ideology and masculinity, and particularly in situations of disobedience challenging the parent–child hierarchy.

This chapter explores the feeling of gender of women and men born in the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s in different social classes in Norway. It connects their perceptions of the men’s and women’s work in their childhood families, the feelings of gender that grew out of their idealisation and ambivalence towards their parents, and of their experiences of gendered bodies and gendered sexuality. Furthermore, it examines the ways in which these feelings of gender found their way into articulated reflections of gender, the choices made about their own families as young adults and, finally, how all these experiences are reflected in their thinking about gender equality as a dilemma between justice and equity. The experience of the hardships of their mothers made it a life project for the men in this generation to refine gender complementarity, something that matched the policies of the post-war years. The women tacitly complied, but without enthusiasm.

Although On the Sidewalks of New York was a short-lived cartoon series (New York Journal, 1897–1898, 1899–1900), this chapter approaches it as a significant cultural artifact that expresses Progressive Era ambivalence about the figure of the street child. Lara Saguisag argues that while the series insisted that the street child is both symptom and cause of urban ills, it also encouraged readers to sympathize with this troublesome child and delight in his antics. She also shows how On the Sidewalks simultaneously reinforced and destabilized contemporary notions of ethnicity, gender, and class difference.

In ordinary, perceptual reality, remembering means not only recollecting accurately but also the recognition and toleration of the other in relationships. In narcissistic reality, it means creating a delusional memory, in which recognition and toleration of the other are distorted or eliminated, as in the Nazi ‘final solution’. I will speak of ‘remembering true’ for the former and ‘remembering false’ for the latter, which occur simultaneously in knowing and not-knowing, as defences not sufficiently encompassed by repression. There is, therefore, an inherent ambivalence in remembering and in reparation as a form of remembering. I will consider three forms of not-remembering, which are relevant to post-war Germany: undoing, disavowal and splitting. Historical research can be advanced by introducing defences of this sort, which are especially relevant to Holocaust studies, including ambivalence in memorialization as reparation.

While both civil society and state weakness remain highly prominent subjects in the academic as well as in the international policy discourse, research on these two issues has thus far remained largely unconnected. In order to bridge this gap, this study set out to investigate whether, and if so, how state weakness influences the ability of national civil societies to emerge and persist, exert political influence and contribute to democratization. The study’s comparative findings from Bangladesh and the Philippines clearly show that state weakness can, in fact, constitute an enabling condition for civil society to emerge and persist, confirming similar observations made by the sparse existing literature on civil society in weak states (e.g. Gotze 2004, pp. 201ff.; Lorch 2006, 2008; Ottaway 2004). However, both countries have also been characterized by the existence of an ambiguous civil society, whose contributions to the national democratization process have been extremely ambivalent. More specifically, while in both countries civil society actors have exercised significant political influence, they have not always used this influence in order to promote democracy but at times also for highly undemocratic purposes. The cases of Bangladesh and the Philippines thus contradict the normative assumption that a strong civil society necessarily strengthens democracy (e.g. Ashton 2013; Cohen and Arato 1992; EC 2012; Putnam 2000; UNDP 2012; USAID 2014). Instead, both cases confirm the arguments advanced by the more empirically analytical literature on civil society that a vibrant civil society is not always good for democracy and that real, existing civil societies usually display certain dark sides, which are generally reflective of the context in which they operate (e.g. Alexander 1998; Croissant 2000; Croissant et al. 2000; Lauth 2003; Monga 2009).

The interpretation of the kitchen as a political, contested and subversive place is integral to my fieldwork (Jackson 1989; Okely 2007). I observed and experienced how the participants treated the theme of the kitchen with ambivalence and expressed contradictory emotions of excitement, unease and hesitation. This combination of opposing emotions was a common reaction amongst my key participants, and it was something which baffled me at the onset of my research, where I noted: ‘Talking about the kitchen with older lesbians seems fine. They are all ready to share their experiences from childhood. However, there seems to be a lot of “hesitation” around visiting their kitchen.’

This chapter examines Alfred Schutz’s thought-provoking concept of ‘shock experiences’. Schutz distinguishes the 'worlds' of dream, play, theatre, humour, religion and science from the world of ‘everyday life’. He considers the transition from daily life to each of these worlds to be a shocking experience and in so doing he strangely exaggerates the shock whilst ignoring actual experiences of shock. The main point of the chapter is that Schutz’s multiple worlds can be illuminated by liminality theory. The liminal is tightly connected to the sacred, but to grasp this it is necessary to deconstruct the purified concept of the sacred proposed in the influential tradition of Robertson Smith, and to grasp the sacred experientially as an inherently ambiguous and ambivalent wavering between worlds: as a way of making sense of experiences of liminality. This volatile ‘double-worldedness’ in turn sheds new light on the nature of dream, play, theatre, painting, religion and so on as liminal worlds-between-worlds, and it draws attention to ritual and the arts as liminal affective technologies for fabulating and navigating liminal experience ‘betwixt and between’ worlds.

In this chapter, I consider the ambivalent horror of Rafael Serrano Alcazar, Pedro de Alarcon—author of the first piece of prose in Spanish literature to call itself a horror story (‘cuento de miedo’)—and the feminist Gothic of Emilia Pardo Bazan. Although often read as fantastic writers, their short stories abound with Gothic themes and tropes well-established by the late-nineteenth century. I also focus on the way in which some of the Gothic stories of this time, especially those written by Justo Sanjurjo Lopez de Gomara, developed a small strand of mad science fiction. These stories continue the development of the Gothic as an artistic mode that allowed writers to voice contemporary social concerns, like the role and effects of modern science and technology on human life.

Competitive and performance-based funding has been identified by international scholars as a powerful trigger of neoliberalization in public higher education (HE) worldwide. In the Czech Republic, competitive funding has been recently introduced as a surrogate for the failed large-scale neoliberal reforms in HE. This chapter analyzes antagonist responses to this strategy in the departments of philosophy at two well-established Czech public universities. The first department has adopted competitive funding within its collegial spirit of self-governance and employed its symbolic capital to contest creeping neoliberalization in the university while the second one has adjusted indiscriminately. Based on empirical research, this chapter explores how students and academics from both departments responded to neoliberal norms being introduced at university, national and international governance levels.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the arguments and evidence about the apparent ‘decline of the family’. The issues raised here have focused largely on changing family structures and have, at times, achieved a very high public profile not least in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise in lone parenthood seen as a particular challenge to the nuclear family. The particular focus on family structures, however, provides only a partial picture of the state of family life, and the chapter therefore moves on to more academic debates about the nature of relationships between family members in terms of solidarity, conflict and ambivalence. We then turn to existing data on inter-generational financial exchanges to illustrate one particular dimension of family relationships: functional exchange. This data is interesting in itself but has also been used to explore the relationship between the provision of welfare within families and that provided by more formal structures of the state. In particular, there has been concern that welfare states have ‘crowded out’ family support and thus undermined the role of the family. This apparent ‘crowding out’ has also been seen, along with the concerns about the ‘decline of the family’, as part of a more general process of de-familialisation. We discuss this in part by reviewing the arguments and evidence around actual levels of financial exchange within families. Finally, we turn to another relevant strand of this debate: the role of values and social norms in relation to family life.

This chapter begins with an overview of contemporary counterterrorism (CT) policies in Germany. The general focus in CT has been on domestic elements up to 2001; but Germany has shifted its attention from domestic level to global terrorism since the September 11, 2001 (the infamous 9/11 attacks). The primary reason for Germany’s eagerness to wage a war against Islamist fundamentalism is the belief that there were many Islamist extremists in situation in and across Germany and they were believed to be enjoying the liberal environment and extensive rights and freedoms, which facilitated al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. A discussion is made of the change in the direction of CT policies in Germany and the current outlook in the field of CT more generally. The chapter moves forward by presenting an analysis of Germany’s activism in its fight against global terrorism. Unlike the country’s Cold War and post–Cold War period stance, Germany adopted an ambitious position to address growing threats posed by terrorism beyond the domestic and regional levels. In the period since the 2000s, Germany has demonstrated unprecedented activism in the domain of CT. This activism involves at least five main strategies: (1) identifying and prosecuting terrorists; (2) dealing with social, economic, and cultural causes of terrorism; (3) assisting other countries facing a danger of collapse and failure; (4) reliance on the EU for multilateral legitimization; and (5) addressing radicalization and extremism processes in fight of terrorism. Addressing these strategies also requires taking into consideration the way Muslim communities in Germany are affected by growing CT measures. Germany is known for broad constitutional and legal rights recognized for both citizens and foreigners, and for its subscription to human rights mechanisms. However, unlike the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), Muslims in Germany have expressed feelings of alienation despite having been able to exercise their rights. Muslim communities who failed to integrate within German society and feel part of the German social and political life, despite recognition of their rights and freedoms, were further alienated by the shifted attention to Islamist extremism and concrete measures to deal with so-called Islamist terrorism. Germany’s response to global terrorism and to the root causes of terrorism in domestic level includes some cliche and predictable strategies that suggest a flawed CT strategy. It is observed that this strategy failed to consider the sensitivities of Muslim peoples in Germany. The situation has become quite delicate with a growing number of German people expressing the view that tolerance towards Muslims, via recognition of their rights under German laws, contributed to the increased activities of Muslim radicals; on the other hand, reliance on CT measures that could offend Muslims would not properly address the problem.

The kitchen stories told by older lesbians evoked poignant aspects of their lives that cut across various social spheres. Perhaps it is because the kitchen holds a specific role, one which, as Dubisch (1986) states, says something about society in general. As I discussed in Chap. 5, the role of the kitchen is different and distinct from that of the bedroom, the bathroom and the living room. It is that place which is closest to the body in terms of nurturance, social relations, pedagogy, care and processes of feeding which occur across the life course. Such processes are often associated with the mother, and her image of the archetypal feeder. However, this was not always the case for some key participants. The mother—as present or absent—did emerge as a prominent theme within these kitchen stories. Hence, these associations and representations triggered various earlier memories from childhood, and especially mother-centred kitchen stories. The theme of the ‘mother-daughter relationship’ emerged as another common denominator in the stories told by these older lesbians and was also perceived as sensitive to the extent that some key participants kept their ambivalent mother–daughter relationship hidden, until I visited again in a more informal manner. Attached to the mother-memory-storytelling, there were also official discourses of gender, motherhood, religion, class and androcentrism. This chapter will focus on the kitchen as a place of, and for, memory and narration. In this chapter, there is further ground for enhancing my argument of the kitchen as a tool for analysis of self and culture (Chap. 5). I seek to do so by looking at the stories narrated by older lesbians and how aspects of self, gender, politics, history, class, kin relations, hegemonic institutions and ethnicity were entangled within the storyline.

This chapter describes the major perspectives identified in post-viewing surveys relating to The Desolation of Smaug, conducted between January and July 2014, and The Battle of the Five Armies, conducted between January and May 2015. The chapter notes the emergence of increasingly critical and indeed polarised perspectives on the cinematic value, quality and impact of Jackson’s second and third Hobbit films. These critiques often expressed a more fundamental concern about the detrimental impact of key creative decisions that were seen to reflect underlying commercial imperatives. The chapter thus documents the crystallisation and intensification of audience ambivalence toward the processes and imperatives governing the cinematic adaptation, serialisation and blockbusterisation of Tolkien’s original novel.

The scene of war has changed dramatically since Sigmund Freud wrote the two essays that would become ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death ’ (1915). Freud was writing in the early months of World War I . Despite his initial enthusiasm for the war, Freud stepped back critically to interrogate our investment in war and the relationship between that investment and our attitude towards death. In this chapter, Pellegrini returns to Freud’s 1915 reflections to ask how they may help us negotiate and reimagine our contemporary moment of endless war and develop a different attitude towards life and death. To do so, Pellegrini underscores psychoanalysis ’s ambivalent status as a signal science of secular modernity and as a practice whose ways of telling and reshaping time potentially resist the disciplinary force of being secular.

Newcastle-born Jimmy Nail became an overnight star in 1983 as a result of his striking performance as a Geordie bricklayer, Oz, in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. This chapter focuses in particular upon the television shows Spender and Crocodile Shoes which Nail produced at the height of his television fame in the early 1990s. It suggests how their nuanced articulations of regional identity and realism can be read through an auteurist recognition of Nail’s own ambivalence towards his former home and his career trajectory.

I argue that the creation of a delusional enemy is a defence against a primal catastrophe in an unstable core of the self or society. I build my case on two of Freud’s powerful concepts: the narcissism of small differences, according to which aggressiveness intensifies with closeness; and his Unbehagen in der Kultur—an unease or malaise intrinsic to culture, charged with immanent explosive violence. From this model of an elemental state, we can ground the basic processes in psychic development and maintenance, which build up structures of the individual and group or society as forms of management of a psychotic core. These processes and structures need repositories for projection. The Jews as a people provided such a repository for Nazi Germany.

Rousseau was profoundly opposed to the dominant tendencies of his times. We focus on two “Enlightenment establishments”—the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Both groups were leading forces behind the Enlightenment, and both were roundly condemned by Rousseau. He castigates the indulgent idleness characteristic of the aristocrat, and with comparable force, the misguided frenzy characteristic of the bourgeois. Surprisingly, however, in his own positive alternatives, he seems to readmit certain aspects of their ways of life. His first model—simple republican citizens—practice (seemingly bourgeois) economic diligence, yet in lacking ambition and vanity, they are able to find delight and leisure in their work itself. His second model is more aristocratic, yet it is far more involved in manual labour, and content with far simpler material attainments, than most of this rank. The second model was also influential in illustrating the natural and relational delights of times of pure repose.

This chapter highlights the ambiguity surrounding the meaning and significance of animal cruelty and the ambivalence that characterises our treatment of animals. The contradictions in how we regard animals seem greatest when we look at our varied relationships with companion animals, ranging from complete devotion to indifference. The chapter establishes how the ambiguous, conflicting nature of cruelty has shaped attempts to explain it, document its prevalence and determine appropriate ways of responding to it. Through focusing on animals typically considered pets, the authors sift through some of the distortions and projections that surround dominant interpretations of cruelty. Using a symbolic interactionist perspective, they question the belief that cruelty has an objective definition, independent of context. They also challenge the assumption that harming pets as well as other animals necessarily predicts future violent behaviour. Finally, drawing upon recent empirical research largely from the USA, the authors specify the conditions under which cruelty to pets may signal, in particular, extreme forms of violence and consequently argue that appropriate responses to cruelty requires understanding of the context in which it occurs.

The relationship between art and revolution inspires lively discussion—especially among those intent on promoting them both. Yet the relationship is far from straightforward. This chapter offers the first full-scale analysis of Rolland’s Theâtre de la Revolution alongside the socialist and communist theatre groups inspired by his challenge to the distinction between theatre and politics. Drawing on recent assessments of Rolland’s ambivalence towards the revolutionary people (especially as the volatile crowd), the chapter highlights his preoccupation with heroic individuals throughout the Theâtre de la Revolution. It also examines the quasi-liturgical socialist commemoration of the First World War in the Fetes du Peuple—directly inspired by Rolland’s writings—and draws on neglected police archives to shed light on Communist agit-prop in France. In this final case, not only does this chapter highlight the European connections and importance of French agit-prop, but it also probes its hybrid forms and the sometimes surprising social composition of its troupes and audiences.

Although the 9/11 attacks occurred on US soil, it has had a broad impact reaching countries as remote as South Africa. Because terrorism poses a global threat, counterterrorism efforts in South Africa relies on the nation’s ability to cautiously identify international alliances for the sake of shared intelligence and resources. Beyond tactical efforts of war, terrorist victim prevention requires a broad collaborative effort among various nations and institutions to exert continuous effort towards perfecting its security measures. In the case of South Africa, counterterrorism accompanies the complication of its historical accounts of repression in the form of apartheid, its classification of resistant groups as terrorist organizations, and the need for effective means to prevent reoccurrences of past corruption within their various law enforcement branches. The South African context of counterterrorism provides a blueprint for other countries to examine their labor migration policies and practices and the accompanying risk factors. The latter section of this chapter establishes the role that scholarly research and theory plays in providing explanations with regards to determining the conditions for terrorist recruitment and activity such that policy makers can attain maximum information.

The outcomes of social remittances and their spillover depend on the one hand on the content and modes of transfer, but on the other hand on characteristics of local inhabitants who are potential receivers of social remittances. Our research shows that local inhabitants see migration as a general social phenomenon and not as a new pattern, with examples brought by other people to be eventually followed and adopted. The impacts of migration are perceived in a biased way; on the one hand as modernising local towns (e.g. creation of new work places, better quality of life); on the other hand as adverse to local communities (e.g. breaking family life). In addition, the general attitudes to ideas and behaviours brought from abroad are rather ambivalent among local inhabitants. Migrants manifest what social remittances they acquired abroad with their own behaviours and activities. Less often, they disseminate them to the others. The range of local spillovers of social remittances depends on the social position of a migrant and on a range of his contacts with different categories of local inhabitants. At the same time, social remittances are often resisted by local inhabitants, which is connected much more to the general conservatism of local communities than to the content of these transfers.

While media and youth research reveal the intersectionality of young people’s sexual well-being, mental health, and social media practices, little attention has been paid to how this entanglement is addressed in education. Pedagogy that is not informed by a nuanced and interconnected understanding of young people’s everyday experiences of sexual well-being, mental health, and social media is likely to be ineffective and inadequate. I describe a workshop activity with young people experiencing mental ill health that uses bodies as a metaphor for social media, allowing participants to reveal and discuss their experiences, attitudes, and values through dressing up and illustrating “social media bodies.” I outline three themes that arose from the workshops: revealing and destabilising affordances, the spatial and temporal affordances of social media, and young people’s affective relationships through and with social media, and advocate for an intersectional approach to sexuality education, one that is necessarily complex and ambivalent.

The picturing of military recruitment before 1789 and the outbreak of the Revolution establishes the topic of signing up for the army as an important symbolic form of expression. How this trope has been incorporated into a range of two-dimensional visual images from prints of street cries to the high art of history painting, as also its presence in literary and text based performances, plays, satire and reportage, is considered. In this period, the military calling is generally viewed with a degree of ambivalence whilst certain key themes and conventions become codified into ways of showing the moment of transition from a civilian to a military status where men take up arms and leave sorrowful family and grieving womenfolk behind.

This chapter explores a radical spiritual indeterminacy present throughout the work of Rose Macaulay and the way in which this is manifested through the recurring tropes of androgyny, amphibious life and ruins. These literary devices enable Macaulay to present a bifurcated vision of faith and identity that is troubling to many of her Christian critics who wish to present Macaulay as a spiritual seeker who eventually found a secure home within the Church. Although modernist scholars have been celebrating her ambivalent and polyvalent writing, they have been less willing to acknowledge its religious elements. Through a reading of Macaulay’s later work, I display the spiritual significance of her literary and personal decision to dwell amongst the ruins of faith.

Looking at Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, I seek to challenge the view according to which the play resorts to violent images in order to stigmatise traditional, non-modern performative practices (Pilkington) and thus endorses the Abbey’s modernising agenda. Using Žižek’s concept of “systemic violence,” I suggest instead that the attitude shown in this play to modernity is ambivalent, and that while images of archaic forms of violence abound in the text of the play, what is exposed theatrically in the culminating scene of Christy’s Passion, when he is tortured and nearly hanged by an angry mob acting as the long arm of the law, is the normally invisible violence of the institutions of the modern state.

People have expressed ambivalence about education and schools for a long time. On the one hand, it is believed that a good education should produce better people, better in every aspect of human life: intellectual, moral, physical, social, vocational, aesthetic, spiritual and civic. On the other hand, we know that schools have often induced fear, boredom, subjugation and feelings of inadequacy among those being educated. Fifty years ago, Ivan Illich (1971) suggested that, if we want to enjoy the true promise of education, we must find alternative ways to educate; we should “deschool” our society.

The previous chapter on elite positions showed that European integration has become integrated into the existing conflict structures, although in a complex way. Radical left parties, for example, face the difficult question of whether they should oppose Europe for economic motives or support it for cultural reasons. Similarly, mainstream parties from the Christian-democratic and Conservative party family hold Eurosceptic potential for cultural reasons, but this conflicts with their economically motivated pro-common market view. Moreover, it is a delicate task for established political actors to adapt or reverse traditional, long-held European integration positions. In these circumstances, when European integration orientations do not fit neatly into a political actor’s ideological profile, if they threaten internal cohesion or may scare potential voters away, a useful strategy is to try to shift public attention away from this political issue. This is what we would expect from most ideologically moderate parties, as their attitudes to Europe are quite ambivalent. By contrast, if politicians think they will benefit from increased politicization because they hold a European position that is attractive to their voters and is at the same time consistent with their general programmatic profile, they will try to move Europe further up on the political agenda. In any case, politicians deliberately either emphasize or downplay European integration relative to other political issues in order to win public support and achieve electoral gains.

In the previous chapter, we saw that Avatar coded movement past the frontier of the screen plane and into the locus as something immersive and positive. Outward protrusion, on the other hand, was constructed as something threatening and antithetical to the illusion of authenticity that was offered by the film’s explicitly depth-focused aesthetic. I want to argue that Gravity is much more ambivalent and supple in the meaning it constructs with the screen plane and the stereoscopic spaces on either side of it. 3D here represents the distances of extraterrestrial space in a narrative where movement through space conveys a protagonist’s shifting emotional state in what I will argue is legible as an existential narrative of survival, acceptance and self-actualisation. The film’s relationship between protagonist and mise-en-scene, where the impetus lies in the former conquering the latter, aligns it closely with survival thrillers such as Alive (Frank Marshall, Kennedy/Marshall, USA, 1993), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, Universal, USA, 1996), The Edge (Lee Tamahori, Art Linson Productions, USA, 1997) and The Grey (Joe Carnahan, Scott Free, USA, 2011). In these films, we follow characters that are forced to fend for themselves as they contend with unexpected situations in extreme environments that put their life at risk. Along with Sanctum (Alister Grierson, Relativity Media, Australia, 2011), Everest (Baltasar Kormakur, Working Title, UK/USA/Iceland, 2015) and The Martian (Ridley Scott, Scott Free, USA, 2015), this is the one of several survival thrillers to be exhibited stereoscopically. In each case, stereography reinforces and nuances the representation of the protagonists’ relationship to their surroundings, a relationship upon which their survival depends. In these films, how protagonists behave in relation to physical obstacles reveals the nature of their character. In Gravity, I want to explore how characters’ attitudes towards their situation, and therefore their own lived experience, changes over the course of film. I will show how these existential adjustments are worked through by characters’ shifting occupation of differently parallaxed spaces and in the ways that they renegotiate their relationship to the screen plane.

Dickenson shows that in the first decade of the twentieth century Australian women were attracted to advertising work by the promise of personal growth, good pay and the opportunity to travel. Reports arrived from overseas of women succeeding in the industry but support for women in advertising came with heavy caveats around the potential impact of advertising work on women’s ‘femininity’. Despite this ambivalence, Australian women responded to the siren call of the industry from its earliest days. Most then remained in support roles but, as this chapter shows, some went on to build strong and rewarding careers.

If a common (perhaps defining) feature of those regimes we call “mass dictatorships” is the practice of violence directed both inwards and outwards, then a shaping precondition for that violence is the construction of internal and external enemies. The forms and degree of violence visited on those enemies are directly related to the fact that they are constructed as outsiders to society or the polity and accordingly outside the law; the “mass” envisaged by self-conscious “mass dictatorships” is never everybody, but commonly a mythic “us” that always implies a “them” and calls for “them” to be identified and eliminated. The other chapters in this section of the handbook discuss the ways in which internal terror and coercion are ambivalent in their functions and need to be modulated in such a way as not to endanger the legitimacy of systems that ultimately rely on a level of popular consent. Ensuring that it is “them” and not “us” who are (or appear to be) the objects of state violence is one way to maintain the balance.

Peterson argues that America’s attitude toward European integration often reflects a mixture of ambivalence and ineffectuality. The USA has at times viewed the emergence of what is now the European Union (EU) with suspicion and even hostility, although it has mostly supported European integration. His chapter develops two arguments. First, transatlantic relations in the twenty-first century are primarily—by no means exclusively—conducted through the US-EU channel. On issues from counterterrorism to financial regulation to cybersecurity, the USA mainly engages Europe via Brussels. Second, the progress of European integration over time has had the effect of focusing USA attention on the EU itself. By accident or design, by extolling or opposing it, the USA has been an important regulator of European integration.

Fitzpatrick considers the two central themes of tradition and crisis in relation to the contemporary, post-financial crisis, era. He explores why the financial crisis in 2008 did not result in significant change in the regulation and political economy of the UK, despite the unprecedented nature of crash and subsequent state intervention. Fitzpatrick contends that part of the explanation is the moral and political ambivalence of UK regulation; or rather that the values and principles underpinning it are naturalised and considered as a common sense rather than prescriptive and value-laden. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the future trajectory of the regulatory agenda and a critical flaw at the heart of the risk-based, better regulation agenda, which suggest that we may be at the start rather than the end of an era of regulatory crisis.

Academic analysis of the response to the Lib-Lab Pact has focused almost exclusively on the Liberal Party.1 There has been no in-depth analysis of the Labour Party’s response to the Pact.2 Of those studies which have commented on Labour’s response, the broad conclusion has been that while there was hostility within the left wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) about the concept of cross-party co-operation, more generally the Party was ambivalent about the Agreement.3

Disgust and queerness are tangled together in law. Sometimes used synonymously, these terms have come to point to the visceral recoil or turning away from practices and identities that contaminate the reproductive, matrimonial, monogamous imaginary that sustains the social order of heteronormative intimacy. Criminal law in particular has a long history of gesturing with disgust in order to contain offensive or injurious conduct. Sex that is deemed ‘queer’ can attract disparate disgust gestures. From sex in public to buggery in the bedroom, activities that violate a majoritarian (hetero)sexual order have been the subject of considerable penal sanction. My interest is not in rehearsing these arguments. While much has been written about the problematic use of disgust in criminal law, this chapter maps a queerer path: to consider the way disgust can trouble our attachments to the sentimental and open us up to new possibilities of intimacy. Specifically, I am interested in pursuing the mobilisation of disgust by and against queer subjects by examining the decriminalisation and criminalisation of particular queer sex acts. This analysis highlights the ambivalence of disgust used in pursuits to protect queer minorities and helps queer the ideas of legal progress that are advanced as a consequence of this pursuit.