...Rostom Mesli This essay extracts the concept of “benign sexual variation” from the work of feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin. The concept has been largely ignored by queer theorists and has often been misunderstood as liberal by feminists. In this essay, I seek to illuminate the concept's radical...

... Borders  892 Martin, Randy, Money after Decolonization  377 McKinley, Dale T., Labor-Community Alliances in South Africa: Reclaiming (Some of) the Past, Inventing the Future?  457 Mesli, Rostom, Gayle Rubin’s Concept of “Benign Sexual Variation”: A Critical Concept for a Radical...

.... Ferguson (1896), (b) argue that the affirmative action/reversediscrimination issue is a late twentieth-century variation of the historic clash of vested rights and the public interest, (c) present some of the arguments for and against affirmative action, (d) explore the evolving legal doctrine...

... scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers (p. 84). Although natural selection is a little like a benign goddess who acts solely...

... no responsibility) became dimly apparent between the lines. Other variations occur from author to author, but enough homogeneity obtains in the genre to give some validity to the following receipt to make a domestic novel. First, take a young and not-too-pretty child about ten years old. Boys are possible...

... as the powerful conservatism of heredity persists, scarcely admitting of change save through selection of variations, it is to be doubted whether education has the efficiency claimed for it. Time, struggle, and sacrifice have always hitherto been required to create a great race. If these are to be exacted...

... representative selection of concrete in­ stances may be cited.11 These suggest an arabesque individualism, a lack of system, and wide variations by place, personalities, and periods. There is a strong suggestion of political fragmentation, of provincial and local autonomy, and of fitful and impulsive com­...

... rituals are the public equivalent of the rituals of our psyche, set in childhood and repeated for the rest of our lives, repeated in every sublimated variation our tireless psyche is capable of. In this way, too, we are at odds with our changing, collective culture. As persons we compulsively repeat...

.... It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, in­ deed so brotherly, made me realize that I d been...

... with many voices. To many men it means many things. Whatever the regional and individual variations among Progressives, they were optimists who held fast to the idea of progress. The evils and imperfections that had come with the powerful economic tides of a changing America could be removed through...

... narra­ tives differ from the comic formula only in degree, not in kind. Her most significant variation is in the proportions of the plot: she tends to protract the first stage of the action, the comic agon, and to push it to bloody ex­ tremes. Whereas most comic writers build the confusion to a peak...

... in Hebrew and some Greek in Josephus, or some variation. Rising from three o clock to six o clock, he disciplined his mind in Hebrew and Greek. Rarely does he mention a title, but he read from Anacreon, Cassius Longinus, Herodian, Homer (Odyssey), Josephus, Pindar, Plutarch, and Thucydides. During the day...

... or rhetorical model, which LaCapra believes is finally subjective rela­ tivism, a narcissism too permissive in licensing free variations on the past. For his part, White defends his semiological historiogra­ phy on the grounds that it can show us directly the process of meaning-production, an admirable...

... and reality at the outset, the novel never allows its readers to be certain of what really happens. If, for example, Magda actually does later shoot her father dead, we do not know which horrifying variation on his final hours is the real one, or even whether such distinctions matter. Magda remains...

...-century United States as a large, unwieldy nation-state in a reactive and defensive mode to the post-9/11 declaration that the defensive response can occur anywhere (and can take almost any form) because its monopoly of legitimate violence literally encompasses the globe. War as a Variation...

..., the degree of original analysis and insight it brings to this school of thought can hardly be overestimated. Mapping the variations internal to Deleuze s materialism should enable us to situate it, at least implicitly, in the terms set by contemporary ma­ terialist thinking in the Anglo-American tradition...

... state is a variable, and since variation in the shape of states is politically consequential, academic practices which treat the territorial compass of a state as fixed make it difficult to pose crucial research questions by making certain things true by definition. 6 In short, once the state has been...

... of the functionaries, mixed with the The Obstacle: The Human Being 295 execution of grim responsibilities; the beautiful assistants decorat­ ing the gloomy functioning of the establishment; the benign merging of the private and the official spheres for those who are the masters of this environment, along...

.... In the view of poets from Herder and Goethe to Wordsworth and Coleridge, genuine author­ ship is originary in the sense that it results not in a variation, an imitation, or an adaptation, and certainly not in a mere reproduction, but in an utterly new, unique in a word, original work which, accordingly...

... identity throughout, and, if so, how? For example, would the uncanny experience of the ‘‘famil- iar’’ in your writing in fact involve a certain theatricalization, in that we find there (to borrow your own words): ‘‘not the communication of something new in the sense of content, but the variation...