Kari - JSTOR Notes

Experience, Embodiment and Epistemologies Nancy C.M Hartsock

A discussion of the content of Gail Mason’s book ‘Spectacle of Violence’

-Individuals assess their own experience and vulnerability to violence by identifying and managing the situations and groups of people that pose a threat to their personal safety. -These practices represent a form of knowledgethat can shape the way identities are constituted. - Mason examines homophobic and gendered violence by studying violence toward lesbians which contains feature sof both. -Feminist analysis meets Foucalt. -She puts forward ideas about the cultural body, ways violence has the capacity to constitute but not determine subjectivities. - homophobic violence is both corporeal and epistemological. -Are the lines of opposition between feminist and poststructuralist analysis as rigidly oppositional as Mason suggests? - Some feminist theory has been influenced by post-structuralism. - A feminist standpoint can be translated into essentialist claims about women’s innate knowledge and become in that way a restatement of liberal ideas about preexisting and independent subjects. - The women’s standpoint is not a social given/ preconceptual material fact- women’s experiences provides us with access to these facts. - Experience is not a self-evident from of knowledge as this relies on a liberal humanist model of the subject. - This relies on the idea that we are preexisting, prediscursive subjects who have access to unmediated experience. - All experience is mediated. - The author understands subjectivity as an “ensemble” of social relations (through Antonio Gramsci). - not individuals reporting their experience but groups coming together to understand the social relations in which they are involved. - To create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of these relations and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations. - Subjects are historical -Subjects are constituted by both the interplay of individuals and larger-scale social forces. - Some subjects are also formed as subjected. -A feminist standpoint must be achieved but it represents a mediated rather than unmediated form of knowledge. - A standpoint is a project not an inheritance, positions are always shifting and not fixed. - The process of mediation is a kind of theoretical migration. -It seperates a standpoint from a survey of what individual women might report, and allows standpoints to become technical theoretical devices that can allow for the creation of better accounts of the world. -Oppressed or subjugated people can be complicit with their oppression. - Mason has a project of doing away with mind/body sex/gender nature/culture dualisms. -The body is the site of knowledge but never the source. - bodies carry social relations (with/without health insurance in U.S for example). - An emphasis on social construction does not necessarily require particip[ation in dichotomies. - We are both socially created and embodied in interactions with both the natural and social worlds. -Discursive and physical formation of bodies are intertwined. - Bodies tell stories that are mediated in a complex way by a variety of social relations. - Mason take sup intersectionality to examine where homophobic violence intersects with gender violence. -Intersectionality is anti-essentialist - Mason interprets intersectionality as a model where race, gender and sexuality “intersects in a grid-like structure” - She sees theories of ‘intersectionality” as assuming that there are autonomous structures of race, gender and sexuality, the author believes these are not autonomous structures in reality. -Mason proposes the concept of interaction rather than intersection. -Mason wants an account that stresses the ways rrace, gender, class and sexuality mutually constitute each other. - We need to find a language for talking like this. - Violence is a “technique” in which heterosexual mascu;linity can be performed. - In franz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ he makes an account of how the ‘native’ is constituted in both systemic and epistemic violence. – The native can only become a man by killing the colonizer, by constituting himself through violence. - is it time to reevaluate Fanon’s ideas? - Heterosexual, male violence is central in constituting lesbian subjectivity.

Affect and Cognition Joseph P. Forgas

- The interplay between affect and cognition is poorly understood. - Many philosophers have been concerned with the relationship between thinking and feeling, the rational and emotional aspects of human nature. - In the 18th c. philospophers divided psychology’s subject matter into three distinct faculties: cognition, affect and conation. - Affect remains the least understood. - In early introspectionist experiments all these faculties were inseperable complementary aspects of human experience. - In subsequent research these three faculties came to be seen as sovereign, unrelated domains that have been studied in isolation and without reference to each other, these leads to a neglect of affect. - Psychology since Plato has believed affect to be dangerous this may be why it was so neglected. - Because it subverts rational thinking. - Our inability to control affect has led some to see it as a revolutionary ‘fatal flaw’ - Affect is now understood to be useful, essential compnenet of of cogniyion and behavior. - Affective reactions (such as jelousy) constitute specific mental modules that evolved to deal with particular adaptive problems. - One model view emotiomns as subordinate cognitive programs that help us to active and select the subset of cognitive strategies best suited to deal with a particular adaptive problem. - Positive and negative affective states may selectively recruit assimilative and accommodative cognitive strategies respectively, recently shown as most likely to yield adaptive outcomes in social cognitive tasks. - Other emotions (such as love/ guilt) function as commitment devices, helping us to sustain long-term adaptive strategies against superficially short-term rewards. - Cognitive and affective processes share overlapping neural structures. - Neural structures involved with emotional processing alson participate in social information processing. - The structure of the brain allows for ‘unconscious affect’ affective influences on behavior without any conscious feelings. - Affect is information. - Parts of the brain do multiple, overlapping tasks. - It may be adaptive, evolutionary pressures to deal flexibly with significant social stimuli that resulted in the linking of structure and function in the social and emotional brain areas. - Different school of though have had oppositional ideas about where they situated affect within the mind/ brain. - Psychoanalysis placed it within the ID - Behaviourist analysis sees it as conditioned. - Cognitive information processing paradigm in the 1960s saw affect as messy and disruptive it focused on the cold and logical. - In the 1980s peoplen became more interested in affect.