Beyond Fetish and Animism: Interpretations of the Autonomy of Commodities

The purpose of this paper was to re-visit data from a nine-week scrapbooking project, with Black and Latinx youth, in an urban after-school programme, using an affective lens. To examine the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, I (White, woman, researcher) returned to week three of the nine-week project, during which the youth and I explore health and fitness-related magazines. I explicate how affect, using feminist new materialism, drew me into three affective moments, which took place during and after the project had officially ended. In looking at these non-linear moments, I explain the ways in which the participants, materials and, perhaps, most importantly, myself became affected by a co-constitutive entanglement of human (youth, adult) and non-human (scrapbooks, images, texts) bodies. These moments generated affects that were uncomfortable, disruptive, and productive. I end the paper by urging researchers, educators, and practitioners to continue to engage in critical scholarship with youth, particularly in the United States. While this is a modest beginning, it is also a point to pause in discomfort and disruption which can, in turn, produce possibilities for youth and adults to destabilise traditional hierarchies in research and practice and learn from each other.

Steampunk is an aesthetic technological movement incorporating science fiction, art, engineering, and a vibrant 21st century Do-It-Yourself counterculture. This article explores the feminist potentials of ‘thinking with’ steampunk as a playful, affective and decidedly political response to the present technological condition. It starts out by navigating the field of affect theory with a Deleuzian reading of Baruch Spinoza on affect, to then engage in the affective renderings of the relations, rhythms, and power of a soma-technology central to steampunks as well as their Victorian predecessors: the corset. The purpose of the article is (at least) threefold: first, it sets out to complicate the notion of the corset as either oppressive or liberating by a move from signification to affect. Secondly, it aims to put a feminist spin on Spinoza, by offering what Moira Gatens (2000) calls a micropolitical feminism of the in-betweens of subjects (or bodies). The argument, thus, takes seriously the seeming lack of distinction in Spinoza between nature and artifice, which opens up possibilities of exploring the affective relations and the in-betweens of human and nonhuman bodies. Finally, and as a result of this interest in the affective relationality of human and nonhuman bodies, the article contributes to the discussion of ‘somatechnics’ ( Sullivan and Murray 2009 ) by proposing an intimate relationship between somatechnics and affect.

The play " Fen" by Caryl Churchill was written in 1983. Fen is the story of the rural women of the Fen region who are forced to work on farms that are managed in the feudal manner of England to make a living. Churchill shows how the capitalist system has ruled over the working class and the lower class of society throughout the ages, as it has involved these people and especially in this play, women. And this problem is visible at every moment in their female body and psyche. Now, the category of alienation, according to Karl Marx, depends on factors that are briefly: economic aspects, commodity fetishism, capital gains, and political aspect, we will examine the moral aspects and religion in this play and see which of the aspects mentioned in HJEga" will be indicated by alienation.

More-than-human relations have gained much attention in the study of home and homemaking in Western contexts. We contribute to and geographically expand this growing literature by focusing on informal homes established by climate migrants living in the urban fringes of Khulna city, Bangladesh. To explore these precarious dwellings we develop a more-than-human approach, focusing upon the agencies and relations of plants, animals and elements of nature in securing homes. We focus on the more-than-human imaginaries that bring together human and non-human bodies and contribute to the conditions and capacities of homemaking. We have identified three dominant imaginaries (aesthetic, spiritual and economic) through which homes are produced and maintained. These imaginaries inform the material dimensions of migrant home-ecologies in unconventional but important ways, influencing the production of internal and external spaces. We conclude that reimagining non-humans as co-constituting home provides unique insights into the diverse strategies and experiences of marginalized communities and their socio-ecological complexities in urban space. Thinking through cities and their uneven metabolic processes in this way can generate innovative approaches for engaging with marginalized people in the urban fringe.

Purpose: This paper sheds light on how the film satirizes capitalist society through the theory of commodity fetishism by Karl Marx, paying particular emphasis to visual motifs and character interactions that reaffirm these commodified relationships. It situates these challenges within the frames of Weimar-era feminist discourse. The paper also explores how the protagonist Ossi, subverts gender norms to capture contemporary debates on women’s roles. She evokes the tensions between individual agency and societal constraints. Through the film’s intense representation of wealth, class, and gender, this paper reveals Lubitsch’s critique of economic relationships and social mobility during a tumultuous historical period. Methodology: This study employs film analysis as its primary method, using textual and discourse analysis to examine the film. The analysis is supported by a theoretical framework drawn from relevant literature and scholarly discussions that align with the topic of commodity fetishism and female agency. This analysis uses Karl Marx's concept of commodity fetishism as a framework to examine the lasting impacts of the film within the context of the economic and social structures of the Weimar Republic. Textual analysis facilitates the identification of the visual motifs and cinematographic techniques used by Lubitsch in relation to his portrayals of relationships and social comment. Each of these interpretative points inspects how the visuals accentuate themes of commodification and capitalist critique. This contextualization establishes the film within the broader socio-political context of Germany in the years following World War 1, addressing the cultural and feminist discourses of the Weimar Republic. Findings: The analysis indicates that Ernst Lubitsch's film The Oyster Princess employs humor to critique the social, economic, and gender dynamics pervasive in post-World War I Germany during the Weimar Republic. The film illustrates absurd patterns of commodity fetishism through its depiction of how human interpersonal relationships undergo manipulation. The analysis shows the transformation of human connections into transactions dictated by wealth and social standing, thereby prompting reflection on their convergence in an era of rapid change. Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: This analysis of The Oyster Princess contributes to discussions on commodity fetishism by merging economic theory with visual and narrative elements. It shows how gendered perspectives deepen our understanding of commodification and agency and emphasize the interplay of class, power, and identity. The study promotes critical conversation on social inequalities, gender relations, and commodification. It emphasizes how these problems still impact modern society and how crucial it is to stop the commodification of human values to create a more just society.

Marxism is not a magical key that unlocks Shakespeare. It is an approach to economic realities, ideas, language, and art in all its forms that draws on the concepts and principles we have been discussing (such as ideology, dialectics, exchange, alienation, commodity fetish- ism, and reaction) and can connect Shakespeare’s historical, cultural, and intellectual context with the imaginative works he produced. It is not simply a matter of ‘following the money’, for much of what we have seen has drawn on philosophical, historical, and psychological works, and the readings overfed here are intended to suggest the wide range of things a Marxist approach can attend to.

This paper argues for an approach within the medical humanities that draws on the theoretical legacy of cultural materialism as a framework for reading cultural practices and their relationship to...

The Shape of Desire

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.

Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories of law, space, and power, this paper explores how the public health surveillance of dengue fever is utilised by the state in an ongoing ‘war against the mosquito’ in Singapore. Here, the state deploys biopower as a form of spatio-legal ‘lawscaping’ – consisting of and implicating a host of actors, institutions, and objects – in order to seek and eradicate sources of stagnant water (and the mosquitoes that breed in them) in spaces across the city. The paper demonstrates how, in combating dengue fever this way, the public health surveillance and regulation of dengue fever in Singapore informs four distinct yet interconnected forms of spatio-legal materiality and normativity: a) the inspection of space; b) the invisibilisation of death; c) the implementation of self-regulatory objects; and d) the illegality of uncleanliness. Therefore, in tracing the public health surveillance of dengue fever as it relates to the biopolitical regulation of stagnant water, this paper is also able to evince how the state uses spatio-legal means to govern a range of sites as well as a host of human and non-human bodies, and in doing so reveal how state biopower can be exerted across different species. At the same time, these acts of biopolitical lawscaping serve to flatten different typologies of urban space – be they public, private, or even transient (or under construction). In its desire to eradicate mosquito breeding grounds, the state reduces urban space to that which is clean and unclean – even if unwittingly.

This article analyzes Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (Dominican Republic, 2015) from the perspective of queer ecologies. This approach seeks to dismantle normative conceptions of sexuality and nature through discourses and practices that articulate the relationships between human and non-human bodies from a fundamentally non-evolutionary, non-reproductive and multi-species perspective. La mucama de Omicunlé offers a unique opportunity to explore this approach by presenting an eco-political conspiracy plot -involving transgender characters, Afro-Caribbean rituals, magical animals, and time travel- to save the Caribbean Sea from a maritime disaster in the Dominican Republic. All this is framed in the context of the Caribbean, where the historical exploitation of nature intersects with the potentiality of this insular space to question the logics of disaster capitalism and imagine dissident and alternative ways of experiencing the body, sexuality, and the defense of the environment.

The current study applies the concept of the assemblage, an aggregation of discursive and nondiscursive bodies, objects, and ideas, to young adults and casual sex. By de-centering human subjectivity, we are able to focus on some of the ways in which dating apps and sexual desires, in addition to human and nonhuman bodies, can be propelled and/or impeded in anticipation of sexual encounters. To answer our research questions, we rely on online survey data from young adults living in the United States ( N = 99). Making use of the theoretical contributions of Deleuze and Guattari, our findings highlight the ways dating apps and social media contribute to organizing, arranging and rearranging the casual sex assemblage.

ABSTRACTVarious neuropsychiatric disorders are a common feature today, not least in educational contexts where Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common diagnosis. The dominant perspective regarding ADHD is biomedical. This perspective has been questioned and challenged in various ways. The aim of this article is to think ADHD through quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.] theory of agential realism. According to Barad, what we perceive as singular entities do not exist in advance. Barad pays attention to the world’s entanglements, and what we perceive as singular objects and subjects are effects of specific and various material-discursive practices acting as agential cuts. The theory of agential realism assigns performativity to matter, which highlights that ADHD is something that continuously comes into being together with human and non-human bodies. The material dimension has not previously been emphasised as a causal factor in studies on ADHD. In this article, the focus is on the agency of the book. As a conclusion, the importance of taking responsibility for every material-discursive practice with which we are always entangled is emphasised.

This essay offers a “landbody” method to examine how Xicanx (Chicanx Indigenous) performances express decolonial relationships between human and non-human bodies. I will employ a close textual reading method to analyze Chicana artist Laura Aguilar’s a self-portrait, Grounded #106, a photograph featuring the artist’s gender nonconforming body posed among a rocky outcrop. The arrangement of the photo—with the author’s broad back to the camera, her round form almost indistinguishable from the large boulders that surround her—blur distinctions between human and non-human embodiment. I utilize a “landbody” reading to consider how Aguilar’s text stages the ongoing presence of queer Indigenous bodies that are deeply rooted to the land in ways that disrupt settler processes of Native disappearance. The paper thus develops a methodology to guide our reading practices to analyze how texts and performances express relationships between land and bodies that navigate settler processes of dispossession.

Thesaurus definitions map out resonance in terms such as "richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion" and "oscillation induced in a physical system when it is affected by another system that is itself oscillating at the right frequency". More than a technical term, resonance refers to instances of being affected: to connectivity and contact between objects, ideas, and people as they move one another. As a dynamic relation of varying intensities and speeds where the affective and the emotional stick and cohere, resonance gives shape to online connections and disconnections, proximities and distances between both human and non-human bodies. This contribution explores the affordances of the notion of resonance in analyzing the networked circulation of data and the affective intensities that it entails. More specifically, it deploys resonance in unpacking the notions of virality and memes in ways that both detach them from biological premises and make it possible to account for their power to affect the people engaging with them.