Ruth Barcan

Academic Life and Labour in the New University : Hope and Other Choices

Contents: Introduction: private feelings, public contexts The big shifts: massification, marketization and their consequences The wellbeing of academics in the palimpsestic university Pluralism and its discontents: teaching critical theory and the politics of hope The idleness of academics: hopeful reflections on the usefulness of cultural studies Feeling like a fraud: or, the upside of knowing you can never be good enough Conclusion Bibliography Appendix Index.

Subtle transformations: Imagining the body in alternative health practices

This article is an examination of an ancient but widespread model of the body known as the subtle body. Subtle body is a term used to describe a model of embodied subjectivity in which matter and consciousness are not understood as ontologically distinct but as varieties of ‘energy’ resonating at different densities. The subtle body model figures the self as multiple, extensive and radically intersubjective. We argue that this model has much to offer cultural studies but that in order for it to be considered, cultural studies will have to overcome its traditional scepticism, if not outright hostility, to spiritual/religious thought. The article grounds its argument in a study of some alternative health practices, arguing that they represent a popular body practice hitherto neglected by cultural studies.

'The Moral Bath of Bodily Unconsciousness': Female nudism, bodily exposure and the gaze

In the predominantly clothed societies of modernity, nakedness is an exceptional state, especially in public space, where it is, by and large, forbidden to adults—except in strictly circumscribed conditions or as a theatrical, subversive or criminal possibility. As a state often associated with childhood, it carries with it a whole metaphorical baggage around ‘innocence’, ‘nature’, and ‘freedom’ that can, in some circumstances, translate into a bodily experience of release. As Freud recognized, nakedness is one of the many freedoms relinquished as part of adulthood. Public nudity therefore has the potential to be not only abject, deviant, criminal, or transgressive, but also exhilarating. It follows, then, that any social practice which takes as its foundation this fundamentally paradoxical state—the naked body in a clothed society—will require much ideological work to sustain and regulate. In his discussion of the typical dream of feeling embarrassed at being naked in public, Freud conjures up a quite vivid picture of the freedoms of childhood nakedness:

The idleness of academics: reflections on the usefulness of cultural studies

The rather depressing starting point for this paper is the all-too-common denunciation of academics, especially humanities academics, as not doing useful work. Rather than engaging in a characteristic critique of the discourse of utility or the deconstruction of its terms—vital as both these projects are—I want to allow the terms of the question, at least for a while. Uselessness is a serious accusation—dangerous, commonsensical, powerful—and a particularly potent and fraught one in the Australian political scene, given both traditional Australian anti-intellectualism and the current attacks on higher education. All the more reason, then, why we should occasionally see what our own investment in the discourse might be, how we might fare within its parameters, and whether we can sometimes put it to work in our favour. This paper, then, proceeds less from a rejection of the discourse of utility than from an ambivalence towards it. But I want to start, briefly, with the spectre of uselessness, in the form of an evasion, an accusation and an insult.

The Haunting: Cultural Studies, Religion, and Alternative Therapies

Dr Ruth Barcan is a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg Publishers, 2004) and of numerous articles on feminist cultural studies approaches to the body. She is currently writing a book on alternative therapies for Berg, provisionally entitled The Body and Alternative Therapies: Cultural Practice and the Boundaries of the Senses. Jay Johnston currently works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Angels of Desire: Subtle Subjects, Aesthetics and Ethics (forthcoming, Gnostica: Equinox). Previous publications include J. Johnston and R. Barcan, “Subtle Transformations: Imagining the Body in Alternative Health Practices.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.1 (2006): 25-44.

Paying Dearly for Privilege: Conceptions, Experiences and Temporalities of Vocation in Academic Life.

Abstract This paper explores the forms of lived time that characterise a vocational relationship to academic work. Drawing on interviews and surveys with over 30 academics who have left the profession early or have given up looking for ongoing academic work, it paints a portrait of vocationalism as a double-edged sword. The research found that despite widespread disaffection and disillusionment, academics overwhelmingly consider their profession to be a ‘vocation’. A vocational relation to work implicates temporality and embodiment in particular ways. Vocation is, as David T. Hansen argues, not merely an attitude, idea or feeling of commitment, but a mode of being enacted through practice. It relies on big temporalities (legacies from the past; visions of a collective future) and on particular configurations of lived time (or what Sarah Sharma calls ‘temporal architectures’). It typically produces a sense of purpose, meaning and satisfaction, while also being open to exploitation by managers.

New Age artworks: portrait of a puzzle

The impetus for this project came from a passing comment in Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s landmark book New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (1998). In the pr...

Aromatherapy and the Mixed Blessing of Feminization

ABSTRACT Aromatherapy is a complementary and alternative medicine practice with several distinct lineages and with some uncertainty about the most appropriate way to professionalize. The historical feminization of smell and perfumes means that aromatherapy is culturally marked as a “feminized” practice. This feminization is a mixed blessing in relation to aromatherapys attempts to advance itself as a discipline. While for many practitioners and clients the traditionally feminized associations of smell, such as its connections to emotions, memory, and the unconscious, serve as a source of value, for others, feminized languages and practices stand in the way of aromatherapys advancement as a scientifically validated discipline.

Book Review: A Brief History of Nakedness Reaktion Books, London, 2010, £19.95 pbk (ISBN-13: 9781861896476), 288 pp.Carr-GommPhilipA Brief History of NakednessReaktion Books, London, 2010, £19.95 pbk (ISBN-13: 9781861896476), 288 pp.

Brown-Saracino shows that those she terms ‘social preservationists’ (‘previously unnamed and little explored’ – p. 101) challenge, and in some cases undermine, their own market ‘take’ by promoting affordable housing, choosing negative-growth strategies, sub-letting below market, buying local and seeking to maintain the older, built fabrics and economies of their new neighbourhoods. We might, no doubt, utilize a drawbridge analogy here; now I am here, my claim is made, and I don’t want any of you coming along to spoil my place or its authenticity. But this is neither a simplistic nor a benign reading of the changes unfolding in these communities. The author both starts and concludes this volume by highlighting the social pain of displacement and the numerous ways in which new residents (though distinct from the archetypal gentrification hate figure – the supplanting and destroying ‘urban pioneer’) often create problems for lowerincome groups. These include the way that the new cultural and physical capital of gentrifiers tends to draw further waves of tourism and displacement, the way that readings of authenticity often bring its destruction, and the tendency that gentrifier constructions of ‘old-timers’ as endangered, or marginal, comes to reinforce a subjectivity further at odds with the changes occurring in such locales. I see a number of important challenges coming from this book. The most obvious of these is in challenging the tendency for the antagonisms of the gentrification debate to deepen. Often this has occurred through attempts to shout down those voices indicating the sometimes positive contributions and socially authentic dispositions of gentrifiers, as the author herself suggests. Second, we still need to see a kind of bi-modal analytical frame within those urban studies that try to capture the local social costs, valid personal experiences and complex systemic forces that shape and force a range of both problematic and socially beneficial outcomes. Gentrification is comprised of all these forces and so, in this sense, this particular contribution is distinctly but understandably one-sided. In my view the real value of this book is that it helps us to confront the tendency to ascribe the culturally alien to those household decisions made in a search of a real home, rather than in an attempt to supplant or dislocate. That gentrification offers benign and destructive examples of local change is no doubt possible at the same time (and over time) and we need to be able to accommodate this complexity in our insights into these practices. As Brown-Saracino puts it, gentrification as culture is both produced by and productive of capital, often producing the continued unseating of the urban poor and yet also, as her contacts show, time and again, the deep desire to co-habit, share and better these places.