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Alienating Hamlet

Precarious Work in Jenny Andreasson's Teatern

Per Sivefors

Abstract

The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel Teatern (2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet at the Swedish national stage fails to have its planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital – embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play – and economic. The resulting precarious work situation is reflected in the protagonist's yearning for stability, in her recurring assertions of class privileges vis-à-vis her co-workers and in her increasing sense of alienation from both them and her own work. While not strictly paraphrasing Shakespeare's play, the protagonist invokes parallels to both Hamlet and Ophelia, and Teatern, instead of locating these parallels in an ‘existential’ reading of Shakespeare's play, anchors the theme of alienation in the economic and social strictures of the theatre institution.

Open access

Becoming Through Detachment

Displacement, Unframing, and Disidentification in the Brazilian June Journeys

Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça and Ângela Cristina Salgueiro Marques

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing literature around the idea of a politics of becoming by emphasizing its deconstructive dimension. It advances the notion of “detachment,” which articulates different angles of such deconstructive dimension. Detachment can draw from three different concepts: displacement (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), unframing (Judith Butler), and disidentification (Jacques Rancière). After highlighting the key points of each of these concepts and the way they contribute to an encompassing notion of detachment, the article moves to a brief illustration of how these concepts are relevant to make sense of contemporary protests, focusing specifically on the Brazilian June Journeys of 2013.

Open access

Becoming Visible

Corporeal Politics, Spaces of Appearance, and the Miss America Protest

Moya Lloyd

Abstract

Jacques Rancière's discussion of disidentification provides an important account of how existing inegalitarian structures and hierarchically ordered identities may be challenged. However, Rancière treats disidentification as a discursive phenomenon, centered on naming. As an explanation of how the invisible might become visible, it is problematic to overlook the body, since appearance requires our bodies to be seen, to become visible. Drawing on discussions of the subject-in-process and the idea of identity as both enfleshed and performatively constituted, this article seeks to enrich Rancière's discussion of disidentification by focusing attention on its embodied dimensions. It does so by exploring, through an analysis of the Miss America protest of 1968, the role of corporeality both in constituting spaces of appearance and in articulating democratic demands for visibility.

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Biometrics, Dualities, and Fluid Identities

Decentralized Response to the Modern Normalization of Biopower

Melody Ling

Abstract

Categorized by what Michel Foucault called the “biopolitics” of life, the modern human body is reborn into a defamiliarized incarnate social entity that embodies an ecology of different kinds of augmentations. How do the mechanisms of biopolitics create normalized bodies and identities, and what are the real stakes of this new biopolitical power? This article investigates a genealogy toward the contemporary definition of identity and how biopolitics induces and creates a modern milieu of dualities. It then proposes a concept of “fluid identities” as a disruptive, provocative, and whimsical design intervention. It recognizes fluidity to be a presumed agentic human condition and a widely acceptable social factor; it recognizes identities to be “fragmented yet authentic” and “incomplete but sufficient.”

Open access

Book Review

Erika Monahan

Nick Fielding (Oxford: Signal Books, Ltd., 2020), xv +320pp. £16.99 Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-909930-865.

Open access

Book Symposium

The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age

Taina Meriluoto, Anastasia Kavada, Andrea Cornwall, Oliver Escobar, and Hans Asenbaum

Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy.

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A Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence

Loïc Wacquant

Abstract

Ethnoracial violence is a dynamic and multilayered phenomenon whose definition is at stake not only in academe but also in reality itself. It comes in two varieties, expressive and instrumental, when it serves to buttress the other four elementary forms of racial domination, namely, categorization, discrimination, segregation, and seclusion. I point out that the phenomenon is relatively rare and burdened with heavy moral baggage. I introduce distinctions based on directionality (vertical, horizontal), scale of the actors involved (individual, group, or state), degree of spectacularization, and type of ethnic classification system (categorical, gradational). The imperial domain offers an especially fruitful terrain for the comparative investigation and theoretical elaboration of the dynamics of racialization, violence, and the state. Students of human brutality in history should join hands with comparative scholars of race to throw new light on their explosive intersection.

Open access

Christopher Krupa: A feast of flowers review essays

Gavin Smith, Steve Striffler, Paul Eiss, Victor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar, and Christopher Krupa

A feast of flowers is simultaneously grounded in the reality of place and the practice of face-to-face social relations while at the same time being thoroughly shaped by detailed attention to actual global geopolitical economy—not just vague references to globalization, but a thorough engagement with, in this case, finance capital and the way debt has driven Northern ambitions and generated a specific kind of social world in the Ecuador of the Global South.

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A Danish Fool at Elsinore?

Some Thoughts on Hamlet's Lost Clown

Peter K. Andersson

Abstract

This article discusses the clowning element of a German version of Hamlet believed to date back to the time of Shakespeare. Der bestrafte Brudermord is noted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy which incorporates a lot more low comedy than any extant version of Hamlet and provides opportunity for contemplating the reason why Hamlet has no explicit clown character. The article focuses especially on a character appearing very briefly in the German play, a rustic buffoon called Jens, and his affinity with the rustics and comic servants of other Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan plays. It is particularly asserted that this role shows signs of the involvement of the clown Will Kemp at some stage of the writing of Hamlet, or of touring continental Europe with an adaptation of it that puts the clowning element at the forefront.

Free access

Democratic Self-transformations

Identity, Performance, and the Politics of Becoming

Hans Asenbaum and Taina Meriluoto

Our selves are characterized by inner multiplicity (Elster 1986). Our raced, classed, gendered, and sexed identities are intersectional (Crenshaw 1991; Wojciechowska 2019). Depending on the context and our state of mind, we are parents, employees, dancers, slackers, victims, perpetrators, players, hosts, explorers, altruists, or egoists. We are all these things at once and consecutively. We change and grow. Our identities are never permanent but always in motion, being transformed through our performative engagements (Lloyd 2005). We are constantly becoming.