This essay seeks to examine how Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) set in the planet of Gethen in the fictional Hainish universe envisions a political utopia of sequentially hermaphroditic humans to offer a succinct critique of traditional gender roles and conventional sexual customs while celebrating the potential of collective responsibility. While maintaining that the recent scholarship on queer utopias in SF has largely geared toward posthumanist articulations, the present essay argues that Ursula K. Le Guin who laid the genre conventions of queer utopic narratives unabashedly places her short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” within the ideals of humanism by upholding community as a unifying entity, at the same time carefully avoiding the pitfalls of anthropocentrism. Drawing from queer theorists and social scientists, this essay, while exemplifying the implications of a futuristic gender-neutral society, albeit partially, examines Le Guin's celebration of community collectivism in “Coming of Age in Karhide” to argue that the integration with the values and expectations of the larger community occasions individual growth and identity formation of the teenage protagonist and thereby, attests to the author's humanistic temperament.
This paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political-material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s ecologies. How can we be ethical global citizens when we are already material global subjects? The paper considers how literature confronts this ethical-representational challenge, and asks whether literature might help us take responsibility over the material economic networks that structure our everyday lives. I examine two novels that make use of strikingly similar techniques for narrating their characters’ immersion in globalized economies: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Both novels strive to represent the incomprehensible global economy by calling attention to their inability to represent it. I argue that this technique—which I call the “supply chain sublime”—ultimately reflects the incapacity of current forms of collective political agency to manage our material lives.
Discourse &Society, Ahead of Print. Today in Russia, there is a growing number of anti-abortion policies even though the birth rate is not a key factor affecting the demographic situation in the country. In this article, I investigate how the anti-abortion discourse is constructed in the media. For this purpose, I analyse a dataset of 5 hour-long episodes of the tabloid talk show Pust’ Govoriat. More specifically, the aim of this article is twofold. I seek to demonstrate to what extent the discourse displayed in the show is shaped and shapes by the Russian government’s family policies and, consequently, public opinion. On the other side, I aim to understand how speakers verbally and non-verbally negotiate morality, norms, gender roles and identities to negotiate if abortion is acceptable or not. I advocate that the tabloid talk show, like many other state-funded media products in Russia, is utilised as a government’s tool for anti-abortion propaganda and depoliticisation of social problems.
Discourse &Society, Ahead of Print. This article examines antisemitism in Türkiye within the framework of the new media landscape. The objective of this study is twofold: firstly, to investigate antisemitic discourses on Twitter within the cultural and political context in contemporary Türkiye and, secondly, to scrutinize the role of Twitter in this context. The study centers on the tweets and replies of five Turkish-Jewish writers that were collected between 5 November 2021 and 30 January 2022, a period coinciding with the airing of the Netflix original series The Club, during which antisemitic discourses intensified. Finally, this study posits that despite a favorable portrayal of Jewish individuals in the series, the discourse surrounding the historical and political incidents targeting minorities, mainly Jews, that were depicted in the series gave rise to antisemitism. This was expressed on Twitter largely through rhetoric that reinforces the marginalization of the Jewish community in Türkiye.
Journal of Creative Communications, Ahead of Print. This study investigates how eight higher education (HE) faculties located in Japan perceive and implement Global Citizenship Education (GCE) as a critically oriented pedagogy in the online course ‘Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education’. The main instruments of the study were questionnaires and interviews. The data collected were scrutinised with the use of the grounded theory and constant comparative method. Four notions of GCE surfaced from the data. According to the HE faculty, a critically oriented GCE should: (a) develop students’ empathetic identification, (b) cultivate students’ critical agency, (c) foster students’ self-confidence and inclusive mindset and (d) encourage students’ community participation. Building on the findings, this article concludes by advancing a proposal for a critical pedagogical framework for GCE online teaching and learning in Japanese HE.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This research reveals how social media advances gender responsiveness in the context of China’s digital transformation by exploring ride-hailing services, a fast-growing though often under-regulated sector. Specifically, the rise of ride-hailing has been accompanied by incidents of sexual harassment and gender-based violence, leading to social media outrage. Building on Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, this study – perhaps the first to explore the gender dynamics of ride-hailing policymaking in China – centers on the notion of digital public sphere. This study investigates how citizens, corporations, and government agencies have markedly differed in their discourses on gender and safety. Results exhibit that as corporations and government agencies seek technological and legislative solutions to improve safety, Chinese citizen-based activism efforts have amplified gendered perspectives, addressing gender-responsive policymaking. These actors generate discourses that echo various strands of feminism and further cultivate the policy trajectory, including pressuring government agencies to enforce the social accountability of private corporations. This research addresses a pragmatic perspective to demonstrate how liberal, socialist, and cultural feminisms coexist and negotiate in China’s digital public sphere. It aims to enhance one’s understanding of online civic engagement and resulting policy change in contemporary China, enriching the public sphere theory with emerging technology under a contentious political context.
Discourse &Society, Ahead of Print. This study focuses on how animal metaphors are deployed by Chinese social media users to evaluate others and negotiate social positioning in online grassroots political discourse. Animal metaphors are important devices for expressing judgement of human behaviour. This is due, first, to perceived similarities and differences between humans and (other) animals and, second, due to the ‘Great Chain’ idea of human superiority and dominance over animals. Animal metaphors are commonly deployed in communication that is interpersonally volatile, such as on social media, regardless of what language this occurs in. Through an analysis of the interpersonal systems of appraisal and involvement, we found that contributors often adopt highly charged animal metaphors to negatively evaluate each other and to create and maintain a left-right political division.
The notion of “New Sincerity” has become central to the study of David Foster Wallace's prose over the years. The present article explores how the tonal arrangement that characterises the movement has lived on to influence contemporary art, examining Bo Burnham's popular comedy musicals as a notable example of this influence. Wallace and Burnham's common stance concerning cultural reception is argued to be indissociable from their socio-cultural setting, with the two authors articulating parallel responses to an ongoing, multifaceted process of massification of public opinion, as well as to the consequences to cultural poiesis therein entailed.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. This article analyzes the cultural politics of the vacillating imagination of “us” represented in Black Panther, released in 2018. This popular cultural text centralizes Blackness in that it refers to instances of Black oppression in the early 1990s. Amid the contradiction between the film's Black-centered content and the form of the Hollywood superhero genre, the imagination of “us” in the film expands and shrinks. Drawing on concepts developed by Fredric Jameson and Étienne Balibar, including imaginary resolution, utopian potential, ideological containment, and equaliberty, this article critically examines the ideologies in the text. When it comes to the expansion of “us,” the article explores the utopian potential in the representation of the radical villain. In terms of the shrinkage of “us,” it investigates the function of ideological containment in the Hollywood superhero movie by focusing on the representation of the hero, and the portrait of South Korea as a spectacular background.
Journal of Creative Communications, Ahead of Print. Global citizenship education (GCE) has been in vogue for the last decade. The term has been used mostly to espouse and rearticulate some of the democratic, responsible and activist aspirations linked to forms of transformative higher education (HE) in the world today. Southern African HE is no exception, particularly invoking some of the (post)critical and decolonial virtues within matrices of HE for change. In this article, it is described how reflections on a massive open online course brought to the fore several poignant moments in the pursuit of cultivating a (post)critical and decolonial notion of GCE. Such reflections focused on enacting an African philosophy of HE, particularly showing how, first, ukama (iterative action) can be used to engage humans in perspicuous and deliberative ways; second, ubuntu (critical and dissonant action) is drawn upon to show how agreement and dissent about educational and societal matters can be resolved; and third, the notion of umsibenzi (activism) is couched in moderate terms to emphasise the potentiality and impotentiality of action that could subvert societal dystopias on the African continent and elsewhere. In this way, the cultivation of an African philosophy of HE could broaden the notion of a (post)critical and decolonial understanding of GCE.
