...Kenneth Berger This essay reassesses the concept of spectacle and argues for aesthetic refusal as a key strategy for contesting spectacle’s expanding hold on everyday existence. Against the view that spectacle renders the individual passive, the essay asserts instead that spectacle develops...

... by the materiality of human uniqueness together with its necessary relationality and vulnerability. Sceptical of postmodern, poststructuralist, and deconstructive theories that share a refusal of ontology and an avoidance of metaphysical closure, Cavarero points out that such a refusal tends to think ontology...

...Anjali Arondekar Sexuality endures as an object of historical recovery through a poetics of melancholia, an irresolvable longing for loss that refuses all forms of consolation. My meditations call upon a historiography of sexuality in South Asia that pushes against the binding energies...

... related to sexual difference, namely, the case of transgenerational guilt and that of the child who emerges into heterosexuality despite being raised by two parents of the same sex. Acknowledging Mitchell’s suggestion that sexual difference is marked by recalcitrance, but refusing the way in which she...

... as a political strategy of refusal and illegibility. Waddedar’s iteration of sati relies on its peculiar status in nineteenth-century colonial law, where it was classified as “voluntary culpable homicide by consent.” This legislation inaugurated a new juridical index of female desire that shaped the political...

... of sex as crime, the confessional risks and rewards of “testimony,” the sadomasochism of Catharine MacKinnon’s influential work, and the political necessity of refusing visibility and speech as the ascribed priorities for black feminist sexual freedom. The final thematic foregrounds the university...

... and a first lady who steadfastly refuses to step into the maternal modeling of the role. “Mother,” in this way, names the evangelical revival, the staggering rollback of women’s reproductive rights and healthcare access, both nationally and globally, as well as the federal assaults on trans people from...

... caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than...

... change the material conditions or the power relations between professional academics and the marginal subjects they study. The refusal of social scientific methods undermines queer scholars’ claims to interdisciplinarity. While queer studies has understood itself alternately as interdisciplinary...

... or to engage viscerally with the past. He thereby opens up new registers for taking in and taking account of the historical, registers that refuse to concede pleasure in the name of trauma, which has been treated as the more properly political affect by most criticism. Abelove, Henry. “Some Speculations...

... and detailed, and the observed and the read fragment interfere with each other in a virtuosic demonstration of criticism that is both involved and detached. In this process, his writing refuses any illusion of the possibility of theoretical coherence as a purpose of his text. Rather, Bersani’s writing produces...

... by conjuring ghosts of settler dispossession of indigenous people, even as an elderly Jewish justice was made to refuse submissive white femininity in the likeness of rapper Biggie Smalls. Circulated as competing minstrel brands, both performances consolidate the anti-Black and settler colonial grounds...

...Figure 1 The figure of Lucia enveloped and burdened by the refuse found in the boathouse during her confrontation scene with Nagel. The Reckless Moment , Max Ophuls, 1949. ...

... with Claude Lanzmann .” Caruth, ed. 200 –20. Malarek, Victor. “More Massacre Details to be Released by Police, but an Inquiry Ruled Out.” Globe and Mail 12 Dec. 1989 : A14 . ———. “Police Refusal to Answer Questions Leaves Lots of Loose Ends in Killings.” Globe and Mail 13 Dec. 1989 : A18...

... coercive violence ( Quashie 84 ). “Queering the smear,” then, is a refusal of the normative conditions of being, the terms of order, for the practice of stealing away and exposing the violences of normativity while cultivating practices that allow Black queer being to live, that make Black queer boyhood...

... mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand, in the same breath he recognized the danger of reality, takes over the fear of that danger as a pathological symp- 42 Lesbian Fetishism? tom and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear. . . . The instinct...

... the Hegelian and Freudian projects in their many guises and elaborations, philosophers (or psychoanalysts) such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous sought, with differing methods and ends, to locate, unveil, and “correct” the refusal...

... as one of its grounds, its founding methodological claims, a refusal of sexual difference in the theoretical constitution of "sex" as a proper object of study. The terms of the analogy suggest as much once we consider that the theoretical distinction between feminist and lesbian/gay studies effects...

... (and black women in particular) has been institutionally positioned as feminism’s “ ‘progress narrative,’ acting as a sign of how much the discipline has overcome its past exclusions and how deeply the discipline has [since] refused so-called white feminism” (4). This corrective burden is equally operative...