This article explores the themes of mud, marsh, and dirt in three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen: ”Clumsy-Hans,” ”The Swineherd,” and ”The Marsh King’s Daughter” from the perspective of queer theory. Following Michel Foucault’s reinterpretation of the Victorian Age as one characterized not mainly by repression but rather by production, proliferation, and multiplication of sexuality, I view Andersen’s texts as complex and ambivalent negotiations of desire and sexuality, purity and danger. The idyllic and harmonious surfaces reveal complex fantasies of both a sexual and scatological nature if, as a reader, one is willing to get one’s hands and mind dirty. The famous tale of ”Clumsy Hans” is seen as a celebration of a noble Son of Nature who literally knows his shit and is willing and able to manipulate it to his advantage. ”The Swineherd” is a misogynous story about a ”dirty” princess and about a prince who realizes that he is above both the dirt and the woman. The complex tale of ”The Marsh King’s Daughter” is an exploration of both incestuous and reproductive sexualities (both associated with marsh and mud) suggesting a higher, celestial escape from both forms. In a Foucauldian reading, Andersen’s texts can be seen as typically Victorian, in so far that the significance of sexuality is highlighted, but, except for ”Clumsy Hans”, they are also endeavors to imagine different ways to transcend the materiality – and the implied dangers and ”impurity” – of sex.
The article revisits the question of the critical subject through a reading of Jacques Rancière and Fred Moten. It starts out by giving an account of a longer historical trajectory where the notions of critique and revolution have run into the ground. David Scott’s nuanced analysis of the shift from an anticolonial romantic revolutionary perspective to a tragic postcolonial stance is both affirmed and challenged. Affirmed in so far as Scott’s analysis is embedded in a broader historical context, challenged by the presentation of two attempts to think the notion of a critical subject after the disappearance of a previous notion of an antisystemic subject. The second half of the article is a discussion of Rancière’s notion of a political subjectivation that is not based on pre-existing identities but is a break with the logic of a functionalist society. Followed by a discussion of Moten’s concept of Blackness that follows the Afro-Pessimist reading of the radical dispossession of Blacks but turn it into a possibility for a different kind of community.
Through the queer theoretical concepts of heteronormativity and compulsive monogamy, this article examines the notion of attachment in Danish family reunification law. From 2000 until today Danish migration law has been dominated by the understanding that applicants must prove a strong and unique connection to Denmark. The article argues for reading the attachment requirement in its changing forms in the context of shifting moral panics regarding perceived ethnic minority marriage traditions, as well as the notion of the citizen’s exclusive national orientation. Examples from family reunification legislation indicate that this legislation has been less interested in determining whether the parties in the migrating family desire each other. Rather, they must demonstrate to desire Denmark. The article suggests that the notion of national allegiance draws on historical discourses that link marriage forms and nation-formation to each other. These historical tropes can be seen as co-constructing the idea of non-Western immigrants’ and descendants’ family forms as queer disruptions of a monogamous national attachment.
Anmeldelse af Judith Butler:Kroppe af betydning Klim, Aarhus, 2023. Oversat af Peter Borum
The nun is a figure who, due to her radical otherness, has been subjected to various and very contradictory cultural projections throughout history. She has been interpreted as an activist and a feminist ideal, but also as an oppressed or perverted female figure. In contemporary Western culture, she is everywhere. Through readings of the works Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff and Hildegard (2009) by Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen, the article explores how queer theory, and in particular Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of the temporal drag and Jack Halberstam’s concept of female masculinity, can help us understand and release the subversive potential of the nun in our contemporary moment. The article focuses on how queer reinterpretations of medieval nun figures offer new (re)interpretations of gender and kinship. The article argues that Groff’s and Marstrand-Jørgensen’s historical nun figures, by virtue of their role as temporal drags, revoke heteronormative gender dualism, primarily by depicting medieval nuns as women who embody what we have identified as both feminine and masculine gender characteristics throughout Western culture. The article further argues that the queerness of the nuns consists in their avoidance of procreation and motherhood, and thus in the reproduction of heteronormative marriage, and that their performance of child freedom potentially enables other forms of temporality and other ways of forming kinship.
In this article, I analyze and discuss the potentials of what I call negative intimacies in Tomas Lagermand Lundme’s debut novel Forhud (1998) through the lens of antisocial queer theory. Through Berlant’s concept of intimacy as inherently threatened by an internal failure, I identify three types of negative intimacies in the novel: 1) Incestuous intimacy, in which the narrator denies the incest taboo and the Oedipus complex as foundation of heteronormative sociality through a perversion of the father figure. 2) Masochistic intimacy, in which the symbolic function of the father as authority is negated through contractual submission. And, lastly, 3) impersonal intimacy, which I argue is the overall mode of intimacy that the novel explores both in its content and as a gesture toward its reader. Impersonal intimacy offers an ethical alternative to heteronormative identity- and relation-based intimacy. In the impersonal intimacy I find what Tim Dean has called an ”ethics of alterity,” that is, a radical openness to otherness. In Forhud only strangers can be lovers, which is precisely the queer potential of the novel. I argue that these queer intimacies do not lend themselves to any kind of positive representation of queerness, but rather a negative critique of heteronormative sexuality. Though Forhud does not express any optimistic hope for queerness, it nevertheless stresses the pleasure of being intimate with the stranger.
This article analyzes Lars Saabye Christensen’s novel Maskeblomstfamilien (2003) with a particular focus on uncovering how the novel portrays and addresses the shame and stigma associated with deviating from established gender norms. Drawing on Judith Butler’s works Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, the article investigates the social regulation that the novel’s protagonist undergoes in 1960s Norway within the framework of the heterosexual matrix. While Butler’s theoretical texts do not provide extensive descriptions of how the regulation of the heterosexual matrix operates in practice and how it feels to be subjected to it, an analysis of Maskeblomstfamilien offers a more comprehensive understanding of how these regulations function in relation to the allocation of shame, acts of violence and hatred, institutional violence, and social exposure. Concurrently, the novel highlights the protagonist’s resistance to these regulations through strategies such as hyperbolic misquotation.
The article provides a critical commentary on the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V, from 2013. It traces the historical reasons behind the fact that sexual preferences are included as mental disorders in the psychiatric manual, even if many of them are empirically neither generally associated with impairment or harmful to anyone else. This holds true for fetishism, masochism and consensual sadism among others, and the article pays special attention “sadism” and “masochism, which as “clinical” terms are constituted from the names of literary authors. Second it close reads the descriptions in DSM-V to show that there are several reasons why these descriptions become pathologizing and stigmatizing despite explicit intentions to be the opposite. These include erosions of the distinction between paraphilia and paraphilic disorder – a distinction on which the very possibility of diagnosis is established. Furthermore, the handbook does not make the non-consensual, the impairing or the harmful, the over-riding principle but instead the sexual preference in and of itself. The article shows how deeply affected the conceptions of the real-world preferences are by the events and characters in the fiction of these authors, and how hierarchical disparity and power exchange are typically more central to the preferences than pain with which they have been so closely linked.
With a deconstructive method and theoretical starting point in Raewyn Connell’s theory of masculinity as well as various queer theoretical perspectives, this article examines the gender-critical potential of Cecilie Eken’s science-fiction trilogy for children The Karana Galaxy (2018-2019). The thematic interpretation points to an unraveling of conventional gender perceptions in which diversity triumphs over conformity. But does the text indeed break with heteronormative assumptions, or are the descriptions of gender and sexuality (or the lack thereof) more like a modified version of gender binarism? The analysis shows that The Karana Galaxy both transcends and respects the logics of the heterosexual matrix. At the surface level of the text, the genders in the galaxy are defined by compulsory heterosexuality. At the same time, the text’s depiction of female masculinity breaks with these logics. Thus, the text can be interpreted as a homoerotic love relationship between a man and a masculine woman. However, the text’s bid to portray alternative forms of gender identities seems to contradict such a reading. Overall, the article therefore concludes that although the conventional understanding of masculinity and femininity is modified in The Karana Galaxy, the text’s constructions of gender and sexuality are still shaped by binary logics.
Anmeldelse af: Judith Butler:Who’s afraid of gender? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024
This paper studies a discussion about posthumanism between the two influential feminist philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway in the journal, Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 7-8 in 2006. In the journal Braidotti describes Haraway’s thinking as “high posthumanism”, while Haraway, interviewed in the journal, on the other hand is very critical of the term. She prefers thinking with other terms such as cyborgs, companion species or the Chthulucene. With the starting point in this historical discussion, the paper traces it into Braidotti’s recent book Posthuman Feminism (2021) and Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). A central concern in the discussion is the critical subject: How can the critical subject be understood and operate in a posthumanist framework? Can there be critical potentials in more-than-human positions and perspectives? How to think critical subjectivity as relational with other species and the material world? Based on these questions, the paper investigates posthuman feminism through more-than-human perspectives on the critical subject.
Departing from the Italian critic, art historian, and feminist Carla Lonzi’s essay ”La critica è potere” (Critique is power) from 1970, this article discusses a crisis immanent to the concepts of art and history that dominated the late 1960s Italy. In line with Lonzi’s argumentation, this crisis resulted in what the communist Massimo Cacciari described as ”negative thinking” in 1969, and what Lonzi in her essay describes as a ”critique of the crisis”. Beyond a universal consciousness and its presupposed identities, as they were reproduced within the party form and at academic institutions during this period, artists, workers, and intellectuals turned away from formal organization, and to informal, collective practices. The separatist, decentralized and anti-authoritarian network Rivolta Femminile, founded by Lonzi in 1970, show how the subjects of crisis and critique emerge from a patriarchal and colonial regime of sexual repression.
How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today’s era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at “deconstructing” Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted.
The article takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov. His passive presence at the battle of Borodino, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is contrasted with today’s climate activism, exemplified by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm. In his book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Malm argues that global warming forces scientists and scholars to become activists, and activists to turn to violence. This analysis, the article argues, is based on a simplistic notion of action (”one acts or one does not”) and a strong conviction of being right. If this certitude is problematic, it is also typical of our time. Where, then, does this tendency to simplify the complicated, and replace all uncertainty with sureness, come from? One answer is that activism requires determination, which in its turn presupposes access to the truth. Another explanation lies in the binary operations of the digital media we all rely upon. At the most basic level, these operations exclude all approximation, all nuances, all doubt: the options are one or zero. Against this background, it becomes crucial to defend a research practice that refrains from simplifications. In Sloterdijk, the article finds an argument for interrupting the affective impulses that reach us constantly. From Popper, it fetches an understanding of research as an event. Via Marx’s well-known formulation that philosophers must change the world, not just interpret it, the text then moves to Adorno’s defense of theoretical thinking. The question is, however, whether critical theory has any edge left. Has it not just become a part of the academic apparatus it once reacted against? The article finds an answer in Lyotard, and his idea of a theoretical apathy. This idea reminds a lot of the starting point of the article: Pierre Bezukhov’s comic but clear-sighted passivity on the battlefield.
In 2011, during the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy Wall Street arranged a public reading of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, 1853. The widely discussed choice of this story points to OWS’s own politics: the movement said ”no”, but without forming any more specific demands for reform. This article, taking its theoretical lead from Judith Butler, Marcello Tarì and Michel Foucault, discusses if the self can be re-modelled. Bartleby and his refusal – “I would prefer not to” – is related to one other prominent no-sayer in literature: Stiller. Refusal is also the theme of Max Frisch’s novel Stiller, 1954, in which the protagonist simply refuses to acknowledge the identity that everyone, authorities as well as his wife, forces upon him. That way, he also refuses the society in which he lives, and its political subject in the form of the citizen. Stiller thereby illustrates Foucault’s theses that we must refuse who we are. Bartleby and Stiller can both be understood as examples of the obstinacy that Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt have emphasized as the basic form of resistance.
Inden for bare et par år er der udkommet adskillige bøger af eller om Georg Brandes på andre sprog end dansk: William Banks’ Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples: Collected Essays and Speeches (2020), Søren Blak Hjortshøjs Son of Spinoza: Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism (2021) og Per Dahl & Gert Posselts Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche (1888) und Aristokratischer Radicalismus (1889/1890) (2021). Hertil kommer den flersproglige online-udgave af Hovedstrømninger (2019) redigeret under ansvar af Lasse Horne Kjældgaard og Jens Bjerring-Hansen. Rækken af udgivelser synes at fortsætte i 2022-23 med flere engelsksprogede antologier på vej.
The films The Square (2013) by Jehane Noujaim and In the Last Days of the City (2016) by Tamer El Said both relate to the 2011 uprising in Cairo and its aftermath, albeit in very different ways. The article analyses how the films in each their way mobilise and articulate – rather than represent – political protest and a subject of this protest. The analysis is guided by the hypothesis that parts of critical Egyptian contemporary art, experimental film in particular, have increasingly moved away from the immediate endeavours of the uprising to establish a collective subject and toward a reparation of more unstable, politically seeking subjectivities with a view to destabilise the current authoritarian regime in Egypt. With reference to the political changes in Egypt in the period from 2011 to 2016 the article explores the enunciational conditions for protest in the span between a collectively manifest subject and fragmented, searching subjectivities. In dialog with Elizabeth Kassab’s notion of political humanism, Jacques Rancière’s understanding of political subjectivity, and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of destitution the authors analyse the visual articulation of protest – also where it is not readable as statement and iconography but, on the contrary, precisely insisting in its absence – and try to connect these analyses to reflections on the changing temporality and spatiality of uprising.
