Elizabeth Long

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Juliet Mitchells new book is important, exciting, and, I think, profoundly wrong. Its importance lies in her rejection of theories about womens oppression that assume as easy malleability of human social and cultural institutions. In so doing, she forces us to recognize what has become increasingly apparent in the years following the first joyous discovery of solidarity that marked the emergence of the recent womens movement: that the problem is ancient, complex and deeply rooted within ourselves and our social environment. Psychoanalysis and Feminism can perhaps be best understood as an attempt to explain the tenacity and intransigeance of the old.

The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender

Politics and knowledge interact in complex and sometimes hidden ways. A recent dramatic instance of this is the way in which the womens movement has compelled a re-examination of some of the most widely held assumptions of social science. In this context, Chodorows book, The Reproduction of Mothering, stands out as an impressive theoretical initiative. It gives us a new way of understanding womens mothering as fundamental to the sexual division of labor and gender inequality. By exposing the socially constructed nature of what has often been dismissed as a biologically based species universal, this book points toward its social transformation.