...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...

...Matthew Abraham This essay argues that the reception of Noam Chomsky's political scholarship by progressive academics demonstrates that the state of theory in the humanities has reached a point of crisis; that is, Chomsky's unpopularity in certain academic circles indicates that conceptions of...

... different historical understandings of the concept of freedom of conscience: an early modern preoccupation with religious plurality as threatening public order, and a postwar understanding of religious freedom as the protection of secularized Christian values against the totalitarian propensities of modern...

...Paul Boghossian 2002 by Duke University Press 2002 Paul Boghossian Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-)Epistemology: A Reply to Barbara Herrnstein...

... obscures are the various ways in which discourses of antiracism and the postracial converge around a singular failure to interrogate the political and theoretical conditions of possibility for the early twentieth-century concept of racism. Conceptually racism as an object of critique was founded on the...

...Robert Mitchell This essay employs the concept of population to articulate the logic of a dominant style of contemporary thought, practice, and affect. This style, which underwrites cultural productions as diverse as reality TV, para-scholarly endeavors such as Wikipedia, and biomedical initiatives...

...Frank Donoghue This essay questions the historical yoking together of the concepts of academic freedom and tenure, arguing that both concepts have been poorly and inconsistently defined since the AAUP's inaugural document, the “Declaration of Principles on Academic Tenure,” was published in 1915...

...Patrick Greaney This essay examines how key Situationist concepts—the spectacle and détournement —are gendered. The first half of the essay presents these concepts along with a discussion of Asger Jorn's and Isidore Isou's gendered theories of creation and a reading of the figure of Jack the...

...Alvaro Reyes; Mara Kaufman This essay examines the relationship between “autonomy” as practiced by the indigenous Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico, and the Western juridical concept of sovereignty. By delineating the historical trajectory of the concept of sovereignty and its colonial...

...Jason Read What is the “anthropos,” humanity of the Anthropocene? In many ways this would seem to be beside the point; the point is not how humanity is defined, but charting its massive effects on the planet. However, conceptions of the Anthropocene end up answering the question of humanity, albeit...

...Larissa Behrendt The concept of “home” is multifaceted and complex. This is especially so for Aboriginal people who are forcibly removed from their land, retain deep spiritual and cultural attachments to their traditional homes, but have been forced to create new communities. This essay looks at...

... metaphysics. Claiming to think the problem through to its logical conclusion, the sociology of knowledge went so far as to reconcile the concept of ideology with precisely the speculative thought that historical materialism was originally conceived to displace. In effect, Mannheim's notion of history as the...

... points of light into the patches of darkness that lie outside its foundational center. Modernity in this guise was projected as an instrument of progress. The guiding concepts often associated with it—instrumental rationality, the development of capitalism—emerged in the debate between theological and...

... been accustomed to think about using the concept of “agency.” Theory now has moved slightly beyond this concept; yet a penumbra of anxiety about agency colors the reception of contemporary theory. A more direct questioning, not of the state of theories of agency exactly, but of the role of their ghosts...

... is within these movements that new horizons of visibility—new concepts—have been produced, forcing us to rethink the relation between philosophy and social movements and, alternatively, to propose a philosophy of social movements. In other words, this essay concludes by foregrounding the following...

... decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi —a parallel coexistence of difference—to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that...

...Carolyn J. Dean Michel Foucault’s shift to “biopower” away from his earlier conception of power as a form of constraint from which there is no clear path to liberation is the subject of the essays in this issue. In the context of this shift, these essays address from fresh perspectives Foucault’s...

...Neferti X. M. Tadiar Examining the recent post-Marxist conception of labor in the contemporary context of financialization and global crisis, this essay contests prevailing ideas about the contemporary eradication of the distinction between production and reproduction, between labor and life...

... current phase of capital accumulation in Latin America, focusing on critical concepts such as neoextractivism and bad development. It presents a particular reading of environmental conflict, linked to processes of dispossession, enclosure of the common, and the deepening of extractivism by Latin American...

... political scientists tend to develop. This chapter uses hip-hop lyricism to measure how the concept of theft appears in the political philosophy of Malcolm X against the way this strategy for resource redistribution is discussed in the films The Departed and Scarface as a way to enrich political theory. If...