Browsing by Subject "Subjectivity"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Assembling the Orthodox Soul: Practices of Religious Self-Formation among Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy
    (2013-07) Winchester, Daniel Alan
    This dissertation is the result of a multi-sited ethnographic study of contemporary conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region of Minnesota. Theoretically, this case study of Orthodox conversions is utilized as a way to better approach and account for the phenomenon of religious self-formation, here defined as the process by which social actors, with the aid and encouragement of others, incorporate aspects of a religious tradition into their own subjective experiences and self-interpretations. Through talking, interacting, and practicing with Orthodox Christian converts, this study provides answers to how individuals come to inhabit and experience a religious system as a personal reality, making a particular construal of the religious world a formative part of how they experience themselves as persons. While the empirical details are necessarily confined to the ethnographic case at hand, central to this dissertation is a wider claim that coming to grips with the question of how religious cultural systems enter into the lived experiences of individuals requires a better understanding of the constitutive effects of religious practices on those who perform them. Moreover, through detailed analyses of three significant religious practices and their phenomenological effects on the converts who participated in them, I demonstrate how these constitutive relationships between particular religious practices and subjectivities unfolded over time and in context, extending cross-disciplinary literatures on religious narrative, embodiment, and materiality.
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    Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom in Israel-Palestine
    (2020-02) Gortler, Shai
    What do 20th century attempts of Israelis, Palestinians, and Humanitarians to affect subject formation in Israeli prisons reveal about the relation between domination and freedom? Literatures of carceral subject formation regard prisons as sites where subjectivity is either irrelevant (Wallace 2015, Guenther 2013), liberatory (Nashif 2008, Bargu 2014, Dilts 2014), or manipulated (Daka 2011). The resulting analyses of these approaches regard Israeli incarceration of Palestinians as a site of “neutral and objective” humanitarian work by the Red Cross, purely liberatory political action by Palestinian prisoners, or an all-catching Israeli top-down apparatus that is able to harness every attempt of Palestinian political action to its own benefit. To offer a competing approach, my dissertation builds on newly exposed archival materials from Israeli, Palestinian, and Red Cross archives on Israeli prisons between the arrest of the first self-proclaimed Palestinian political prisoner in 1965 and 2019. With and against contemporary political and social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Iris Young, and Walid Daka the dissertation traces how the Israeli Prison Service attempted to use the prisoners’ actions—such as their leadership structures, hunger strikes, demands for improved material conditions, and inner-relations—to amplify Israeli interests. It further traces how the Red Cross’s “neutral” humanitarian work participated in the constitution of the prisoners as individualized consumers and limited the prisoners’ ability to act collectively. Last, it traces how the prisoners were nevertheless able to change their reality by cultivating alternative kinships, textures of collectivity, and senses of selves. The result is a differentiation between practices where the Palestinian prisoners were only able to act according to definitions set by others and those rare moments when they were able to participate in defining the structure of their participation.
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    Deslocamento e Subjetividade em João Gilberto Noll, Silviano Santiago e Bernardo Carvalho.
    (2010-08) Brasileiro, Marcus Vinícius Câmara
    The present dissertation, in the field of contemporary Brazilian Literature, analyzes how three Brazilian writers, João Gilberto Noll (1946-), Bernardo Carvalho (1960-) and Silviano Santiago (1936-), question essentialized and authoritarian positions of national identity through the development of characters traveling to the space of the Other. This questioning is transfigured throughout the metaphor of travel, reflecting a movement that happens in global space, but also in the language that constitutes identities. The work of these Brazilian writers problematizes the dichotomies of self-other, north-south, real-fictional, while attempting to rescue the Modernist consideration of the place of language and discourse as a privileged site to analyze matters related to identity-formation. The dissertation is structured around three movements that correspond to the aesthetic projects of these authors. In João Gilberto Noll's "Berkeley in Bellagio" (2002) and "Lorde" (2004), the metaphor of travel functions as the representation of a traveler moving toward an understanding of his own self. In Bernardo Carvalho's "Nove Noites" (2002) and "Mongólia" (2003), travel functions as a way to contest the truth-value of the essentialized mode of representation of the other carried out by ethnographic discourses, such as travel guides. Finally, in Silviano Santiago's "Stella Manhattan" (1985) and "Viagem ao México" (1995) travel becomes a mechanism that reveals modes of resistance, assimilation, and transformation of the Other, while engaging in a postcolonial debate, within the Latin American context, regarding Western Modernity in the time of global capitalism.
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    The prosthetic life: theatrical performance, survivor testimony and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1963.
    (2009-10) Peschel, Lisa A.
    During all periods in postwar Czechoslovakia when the World War II Jewish ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) could be discussed in the public sphere, Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivors created and circulated narratives about the cultural life of the ghetto and their own experience of agency and pleasure while engaged in theatrical performances. Focusing on two periods, the immediate postwar years (1945-47) and an early point in the political thaw leading to the Prague Spring (1963), I examine testimony that survivors addressed to their fellow Czechs in the public sphere as a rhetorical performance in its own right. The constative and the performative aspects of testimony have shifted over time; in each period, survivors needed or wanted their testimony to achieve different effects, and they provided different information about theatrical performance in the ghetto. The survivors clearly adjusted their narratives in response to period-specific pressures as they tried to reinforce both their subjectivity and their subject position in postwar Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the testimony of both periods shares a consistent core of themes, suggesting that theatrical performance in the ghetto functioned as a social practice that increased the prisoners' resilience and ability to cope with the traumatic events occurring in the ghetto on a day-to-day basis. Their postwar testimony reveals a related function: they resisted objectification within the sometimes hostile environment of postwar Czechoslovakia by establishing and conveying the meaning they ascribed to their own experience, thus remaining speaking subjects.
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    Violent subjects: a rhetorical cartography of bodies, spaces, and technologies in the global war on terror
    (2013-04) Hayes, Heather Ashley
    Looking to the bodies of suicide attackers, to the circulating technologies of the United States drone program, and to the space of Egypt's Tahrir Square in January of 2011, this project expands the ways rhetorical studies has conceptualized the relationship between violence and discourse. It also generates political and cultural insights about the possibilities for newly formed subjectivities and their relationship to violence within the global war on terror and beyond. The monograph argues that these insights point to a refiguration of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of bodies, spaces/places, and technologies and attends to the ways different subjectivities arise and circulate within larger maps of contemporary global power. More specifically, the project produces three areas of insight. First, for rhetorical studies, it suggests a refiguring of the rhetorical situation to be understood as material. As such, it suggests that the rhetorical situation is composed of bodies, technologies, and spaces/places. This new transsituated circuit would replace the understanding of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of exigencies, audiences, and constraints as previously argued in the context of rhetorical studies scholarship. Second, for interdisciplinary modes of investigation, the project further develops rhetorical cartography as a method of inquiry, drawing foundationally from both rhetorical studies and from critical cartography and geography. This method allows for mapping of modes of materiality within rhetorical situations and cultural moments. Finally, the project suggests political and cultural insights for understanding the conjuncture of the global war on terror. Here, the project posits that through rhetorical cartography, we can better understand the multitude of ways that subject positions are generated, changed, and reconstituted for people to occupy within the global war on terror.