Kathy E. Ferguson

Interpretation and Genealogy in Feminism

An important tension within current feminist theory is that between articulating womens voice and deconstructing gender. The creation of womens voice, or a feminist standpoint, or a gynocentric theory, entails diving into a world divided between male and female experience in order to critique the power of the former and valorize the alternative residing in the latter. It is a theoretical project that opposes the identities and coherencies contained in patriarchal theory in the name of a different set of identities and coherencies, a different and better way of thinking and living. The deconstruction of gender entails stepping back from the opposition of male and female in order to loosen the hold of gender on life and meaning. This theoretical project renders gender more fragile, more tenuous, less salient as both an explanatory and an evaluative category. The creation of a womens point of view is done in order to reject the male ordering of the

On Bringing More Theory, More Voices and More Politics to the Study of Organization

Studies of organization need to be more theoretically informed, politically diverse and democratically practiced. The field would be enhanced by more robust encounters with three broad areas of inquiry: (1) contemporary theories of language, politics and subjectivity, which focus organizational studies on the constitution of identities, the practices of discourse and the arrangements of power; (2) analyses of gender, race and class, which call attention to diversities and inequalities within and between identities, languages, politics; and (3) democratic practices, which raise questions about our constituencies, our sources of data and our conventions of teaching and research.

Bureaucracyand Public Life The Femininization of the Polity

The increasing bureaucratization of politics and work has significant implications for the possibilities of meaningful citizen participation in public life. The requirements of survival in bureaucracies, either as a bureaucrat or as a client, require one to develop sets of skills and traits that perpetuate dependency and undermine autonomous political action. These traits are traditionally associated with the feminine role, but are in fact a manifestation of subordination and thus likely to be found in any dependent population. This process ought to be of particular concern to those interested in feminism, because the expansion of bureaucratic hierarchies undermines the possibilities of liberation for both women and men.

The Sublime Object of Militarism

Slavoj Žižeks analysis of ideology helps us to see that, far from hosting the end of ideology, the contemporary world is ideologically saturated. Ideology has come into its own via the development of doubling strategies that simultaneously articulate and hide the workings of ideologies. This is not a simple process of socialization or “brainwashing,” but a complex double move that facilitates identification and disidentification at the same time. Contemporary militarism performs the first move by separating regular life from the war, establishing the war to be “over there,” big but distant, not here. It enacts the second move by saturating our daily lives with war-ness, in the form of securitizing practices such as surveillance cameras, wire tapping, electronic locking systems, sign-in sheets, guards with clipboards and often guns; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. Todays wars carry on alongside “normal” life without seeming to interrupt it, pretending to separate it completely while it in fact saturates our lives.

Gender and Genre in Emma Goldman

Several feminist commentaries on Emma Goldman have focused critical attention on tensions between her anarchist feminist demands for freedom in personal relations and her longing for a stable and fulfilling relationship with a man. This article turns those inquiries around, asking why feminist readings of Goldman have featured those questions. I suggest that Goldman’s implicit practices of rhetoric and genre, as much as her explicit ideology and gendered social relations, encourage critics to look for consistency between her political theory and her personal life. I look at Goldman’s habits of genre as shaped both by the chronological practices of film media versus theater and by the discursive practices of modernism versus those of romanticism and realism. My goal is to open up a field of questioning in which consistency between her ideological commitments and her love life takes a backseat to inquiry into how she made meaning in politics and in love.

Anarchist Printers and Presses Material Circuits of Politics

Printers and presses were central to the physical and social reproduction of the classical anarchist movement from the Paris Commune to the Second World War. Anarchists produced an environment rich in printed words by creating and circulating hundreds of journals, books, and pamphlets in dozens of languages. While some scholars and activists have examined the content of these publications, little attention has been paid to the printing process, the physical infrastructure and bodily practices producing and circulating this remarkable outpouring of radical public speech. This paper brings the resources of the new materialism into conversation with the networks of anarchist printers and presses. Printers and presses operated as nodal points, horizontal linkages among the objects, persons, desires, and ideas constituting anarchist assemblages. In their publishing practices, anarchists may have implicitly identified a constitutive condition of possibility for the flourishing of radical political communities in our time as well as theirs.

Discourses of Danger Locating Emma Goldman

Government, media, and medical accounts of Emma Goldman converged to create her public presence in the U.S. as a “dangerous individual.” The prevailing discourses constituted Goldman as violent, utilizing her alleged menace to distract attention from far more egregious violence against labor by state and corporate forces. Goldman responded by denying, confronting, and redirecting the alarmed gaze toward greater risks left underarticulated in hegemonic accounts. Goldmans bold confrontations with authorities constituted a kind of anarchist parrhesia, fearless speech, a relentless truth-telling practice that risked her own security in pursuit of her “beautiful ideal.” The labor of remembering Americas history of class violence hones our attention to the complex discursive processes by which some historical facts come to count in prevailing narratives, while others fade into obscurity.

Why Anarchists Need Stirner

Stirner is a hard thinker to categorize. He has been called a nihilist, one who advocates ‘heartless frivolity and criminal irresponsibility’ above the necessities of social revolution.1 Some readers debate, rather ponderously, whether or not he is a psychological egoist.2 Others find him to be a radical individualist who is ‘wrong in his fundamental presupposition’, about society,3 or a ‘radical nominalist’ who launches ‘a comprehensive attack on the world, generally’.4

A Symposium on the Political Thought of H. Mark Roelofs

and as practiced. A scholar keenly attuned to the ways that contradiction can be both productive and crippling, some of Roelofs’s most signal contributions come from his directly facing certain profound contradictions in American political thinking. This piece will focus on Roelofs’s attention to religion within his radical analysis of, and insight into, the promise and poverty of American politics. In his work, Roelofs situates religion as central to US politics. His innovative grasp on this matter enabled him to name a dominant political theoretical orientation as operative in US politics that is simultaneously split at its core. Given Roelofs’s standpoint, the religious tradition he sees as the center of (US) American political theory and practice, in fraught tension with what he names our foundational liberalism, is Protestantism. While Roelofs’s systematic explication of the ways that Protestantism struggles with liberalism at every level of US political life is one of his most prominent contributions to the study of American democratic thought, it is also where we find a crucial flaw in his thinking. It is common when one has an insight and is able to so carefully explicate it, that the very clarifying of the content of the insight then exposes new layers for analysis that the original work could not envision. I argue that this is the case with Roelofs’s political theory of religion in the US. A Political Theory of Religious Freedom Among the developments of the (US) American political experience widely and historically identified as pathbreaking has been the notion and practices of freedom of religion in the United States. Domestic scholars tend to note with approval US achievements of creating a union not consistently torn apart 420 Lori Marso et al.

The Ticking Tenure Clock: An Academic Novel . By French Blaire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 256p.

certain key philosophical dilemmas are not so much to be resolved as abandoned. If nothing else, these two books indicate our continuing failure to stop fretting about the twin perils of relativism and foundationalism. Fott condemns Dewey and Rorty alike for their inability to show how liberalism, absent some solid ground, can escape the snares of subjectivism, whereas Hoy lauds Dewey for his success in showing how liberalism can defend itself against rival traditions by rooting its claims in a rationally defensible conception of potentiality. It is my suspicion, contra both, that the specifically political promise of pragmatism will remain unfulfilled so long as its interpreters feel compelled to answer questions Dewey urged us simply to forget.