Gender without identities

Reivew of Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does
Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 280 pp., £78.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 0 81669 857 8 hb., 978 0 81669 858 5 pb. In queer theorist Annamarie Jagose’s book, Orgasmology (2012), she argues that orgasm has been an overlooked aspect of queer critique. Part of a […]

Unlikely hegemons

Reivew of Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Alresford: Zero Books, 2017). 136pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78535 543 1 Kill All Normies sets out to provide an anatomy of the internet spaces in which contemporary ‘culture wars’ are being fought out, and an account of […]

Philosophy and racial identity

Philosophy and racial identity Linda Martin Alcoll In the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, ‘Why are you making maps?’ Without hesitating, the white man responds ‘They will be very accurate.’ Map-making and race-making have a strong […]

On National Identity: A Response to Jonathan Rée

On National Identity A Response to Jonathan Ree Ross Poole Jonathan Ree’s ‘Internationality’l makes a number of significant contributions to the sparse philosophical literature on nationalism. The concept which gives the paper its title promises, I think, to be particularly useful. Just as we are now accustomed to think of individual subjects as constituted in […]

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration J. M. Bernstein- SeylaBenhabib’ s Critique, Norm, and Utopia* is, without doubt, the most philosophically acute and learned history of the critical theory of society yet to be written. Because the intentions of Benhabib’s work are systematic rather than historical, her history is equally a major contribution to critical […]

In Defence of Internal Relations

In Defence of Inlemai Relalions -Beriell OIlman 11 Most of the criticisms of Alienation have centered on my account of Marx’s philosophy of internal relations. I would like to take advantage of the appearance of a second edition to develop my defence of this philosophy beyond the brief remarks found in the appendix on this […]

Out of Africa: Philosophy, ‘race’ and agency

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of these ideas – particularly in exploring notions of identity, and the cultural and political options these appear to make available – have penetrated other areas of the humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that it is philosophyʼs […]

Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment

When one realizes the indeterminacy of racial categories, their fluid borders and cultural variety, it is often tempting to adopt a nominalism about race: that race is no more real than phlogiston or witchcraft. In this essay, I resist this conclusion primarily on phenomenological grounds. Race is real, certainly more real than phlogiston, though like […]

The space of flows and timeless time: Manuel Castells’s The Information Age

The space of flows and timeless time Manuel Castells’s The Information Age Simon bromley is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where ʻthe consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than beforeʼ, and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity […]

Wishful theory and sexual politics

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle […]