Category: Academic

Intersectionality vs. Assemblages

Intersectionality is concerned with the subject and the multiplicity of subject identity in relation to the culture surroundings of the subject or the ability of the subject to have a multiple perspective due to the sum of the subject’s identity (and potentially past experiences). Assemblages, in Deluzian tradition, are a more solid experience that does not necessarily allow the individual identities to be considered apart from the others, but yet does maintain the collective sense of identity. Both the intersectional and assemblage approaches consider multiplicity a trait of social identity.

In social theory (or at least social psychological social theory) the primary objective of social interaction is meaning-making. Intersectionality and assemblages both work toward explaining meaning-making from an identity that is perceived to be constructed from multiple cultural contexts. The interesting thing about these two approaches over anything social theory has to offer is that they consider external factors of identity and meaning making not being something happening only within the subject, but also something that is happening in interaction with the subject. In essence, these approaches provide for a mechanism in which the subject shapes (to some small degree) their social environment. A specific social theory, such as affect control theory or identity theory, might specify internal mechanisms by which the social actor attempts to internalize meaning that is created around them. The problem with that approach is that it assumes a homogeneous societal environment, or subjects that are interested in conforming.

One of the most striking differences between intersectionality and assemblages seems to be in degree to which corporeality matters. The discourse of intersectionality has been artificially confined to observing the intersection of race and gender, specifically in observing the political identity of women of color. This limit is reflective of its original purpose as a tool for decentering identity and its function of revoking significance of labels. The assemblage de-privileges corporeality. In moving beyond corporeality it is possible to step away from an entirely subjective conceptualization of identity and begin considering aspects of agency.

A problem that I observe in the concept of intersectionality is that it is based on the idea of an intersection, identities combining for an additive power is demonstrated, usually additive power of discrimination or disenfranchisement. What about identities that emerge and function parallel to each other (exclusive identities that would not be active at the same time)? Basically intersectionality presents a model in which identities have to all have the same relationship to each other. As Puar points out, intersectionality is a model of static identity that does not account for change or evolution of identity, and perhaps doesn’t create a space in which additional identities can be added. Assemblages are not conceived as a specific type of relationship and do not give meaning to each identity separately, but instead gives meaning to the combined identity and to the relationships between the individual identities (which might be better termed as “traits” in an assemblage).

An analogy that comes to mind is from the discipline of chemistry. Intersectionality:Mixture::Assemblage:Solution. Essentially intersectionality is a combined experience in which individual components can still be drawn out, whereas an assemblage is a cohesive identity wherein the parts of identity are much harder to look at individually. The later would certainly annoy most sociologists as they enjoy being able to draw nice neat categories in which a single trait (or simple pairing of traits) can explain social phenomena. I can think of no better reason to use an assemblage over an intersectional concept of identity.

Why does it matter how we conceive of identity? If identity is conceived as intersectional, then only the various attributes (mostly corporeal) may compose the identity. The identity is thus rendered as static and can only exist as a finite set of combinations of various recognized identities. Also, there is further limitation on the intersectional variety from external power structures when confronted with these intersectional identities as they will often be reduced to hierarchical binaries. In the hegemonic perspective there does not exist a multitude of races, only white and non-white. While assemblages do not escape hegemonic restrictions or assumptions of identity, it is possible for an assemblage identity to be significantly obfuscated from hegemonic interpretation to be subversively unintelligible and be granted agency outside of that granted to any specific identity.

Puar, Jasbir K. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. Philosophia 2.1 (2012): 49-66.

February 17, 2014
Pop Feminism and the Expansion of White Heterofemininity

One of the readings for feminist theory this week is a critique of Sheryl Sandberg by bell hooks, Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In. I approach this reading as a very biased reader. I am quite fond of bell hooks as she has always been a sort of “anti-Butler” for me in terms of her style and I am already predisposed to a passionate hatred of mainstream ideologies.

As hooks points out, one of the key problems of Sandberg’s work is her reliance on an old definition of feminism which is strongly tied to the gender binary and does not allow for other categories of difference or for the potential for intersectional concerns. With the following comment hooks is very clear in her belief regarding the work of feminism:

“No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within existing patriarchal structure.”

I agree with hooks’ statement almost completely. If feminism is only working to improve the status of one group inside of existing structures, then it really is not doing any work at all. Hegemony needs the structure of patriarchy to function, there have to be power relationships to support its white-supremacist and male-dominant interests. Even if it were possible for women to achieve full equality inside the system, it would remain a constant struggle to maintain that position. The only option is to break patriarchy. I do not agree with the tone taken by hooks as it can be read as an attack on a form of feminism that is not the same as her feminism. While I share her dissatisfaction in the approach taken by Sandberg, I do not believe that discrediting her so directly serves any purpose toward the improvement of feminism.

If I were evaluating Sandberg’s approach without the guidance of hooks I believe I would find nothing new or noteworthy about it and I may even suggest that Sandberg is taking a pro-capitalist and almost anti-feminist approach to feminism. Sandberg has produced a book of empowerment for women that gives them no real theoretical tools, only a gimmick of “lean in” to encourage the taking of leadership roles in corporate or pseudo-corporate systems. Corporate systems ARE patriarchy and they provide support for the oppression of women and other marginalized groups. Sandberg is profiting from her book, but can it really be helpful for many women or anyone else? Is Sandberg teaching women how to “play male”?

January 27, 2014
Unrealistic Epistemological Assumptions for Social Theory

One of the courses required in the Master of Arts in Sociology at UNC Charlotte is Social Theory. The course is always taught by the same faculty member, even when he is on sabbatical, so there are few options in this situation if a student is a “mismatch” for the epistemological requirements dictated by the instructor. Unfortunately, this particular instructor has stable notions about who “fits” into his class.

From the syllabus:

“I presume that students here: …. Adopt the scientific approach to developing knowledge; “

“This course may not fit well for someone who: …. Wishes to read postmodern thought or cultural studies. “

Given that this class is supposed to be involving theory formation and the evaluation of theory, I do not see the relevance of accepting the scientific method as the only method for developing “knowledge”, nor do I believe that “knowledge” is real. I accept that the scientific method is one possible way for discovering information, and it is certainly the most practiced method for establishing evidence for claims regarding the nature of reality. As for the second suggestion, that the course may not be a good fit for someone who wishes to read postmodern writing or cultural studies, what I prefer to read is likely not very relevant to the content of this class and I do not think that such a preference will deter me from developing an understanding of how to form, apply or evaluate social theory.

My social and theoretical background is from postmodernism, cultural/critical studies and queer theory. I am not the traditional sociology student who comes from a background of a single tradition, I am interdisciplinary and my beliefs about the acquisition of knowledge reflect that background. I will not accept that the scientific method is the only way and I will not avoid cultural studies just because this one instructor feels they have no benefit to social theory.

On a positive note, early readings for this class advocate for a diminished role of quantitative methods in sociology and an increased emphasis on a qualitative approach and the integration with theory. I am very interested in the course, which is good since it is required for graduation, but I find such qualifiers in the syllabus to be off-putting.

January 18, 2014
Resilience

In this first attempt at philosophical blogging I will address the recent societal phenomenon of “resilience” as presented by Mark Neocleous in “Resisting Resilience.” I find the article itself to be a rather unremarkable piece of writing, as it seems to make no attempt at an argument, only presents a number of absurd obsessions around the term “resilience”. The author relates the current uses of the term resilience to the past uses of phrases like “security”. The author also makes a few jabs at the usefulness of resilience as a social framework merely because it is embraced by a few military organizations.

The problem with resilience that is alluded to in the article is it is a new form of mediocrity that generally encourages a stable constant state of being. I think that the quest for being resilient is a collective fear of change and a desire for a feeling of safety in that nothing will change, but if it ever does it will be possible to quickly get back to that previous state. Unpredictability is a component of life and change happens, so I don’t think that fetishizing the status quo is the best idea. Progress is made through taking risk and looking beyond the current state, not wasting time trying to plan every potential disaster and be constantly prepared to avoid or recover from those disasters.

One of the areas where I have practical knowledge outside of philosophy (sociology –> social philosophy –> philosophy) is in information systems. Resilience is part of everything from designing a large scale system to selecting a hard drive. In information technology a lot of the factors of resilience are accomplished through redundancy, mostly because its easy to do and relatively inexpensive compared to other ways of recovering from a disaster. A lot can go wrong with technology, starting with the end user (the most likely reason for any disaster) and moving to more external things like power outages, hurricanes or locusts. Resilience (or redundancy) is a major component of the field, with the overall goals of maintaining data integrity and a certain level of “uptime”. A long time ago redundancy and fault tolerance were buzzwords, roughly equivalent to resilience, but now they are traits that are assumed to be goals of every system and every developer. This works well for information technology, for machines that can’t adapt on their own (at least not yet). Humans and societies are not machines and can adapt without any sort of prior preparation. While some level of preparation is good, dedicating a lot of resources and time to the task of maintaining the current status seems wasteful and overall an inhibition to progress (where progress = moving toward personal or societal improvement).

January 13, 2014
Fall 2013 Paper Available

Normally at the conclusion of a semester I have multiple academic papers to release, but for this semester there is only one. This is as a result of only one of my courses having a major written component that would be appropriate for publication. This paper is now available for download.

Commodified Gender Performance and Influence in Pornography
Philosophical Methods & Analysis (PHIL 6120)

December 23, 2013
PDF for Academics

I have made numerous negative critiques of the things I see that are done badly in academia regarding the use of PDF scans. Perhaps its time that I document those critiques more seriously and provide a few suggestions on how to have a happy PDF experience.

First of all, avoid scanning if you can. If the resource is available as a web page or a pre-made PDF provided by the publisher, it will save you some time and effort scanning and provide a better experience for your students. Also, if you have a cooperative ILL librarian or other library staff that will scan for you, let them do it. They have experience with making professional quality scans.

Second, scan one page at a time. It is more time consuming for you, but if you scan one page at a time, your students are more likely to read it on an electronic device and not print it out. This makes environmental and economical sense. It may take you a little longer to scan, but it will save your students the time of printing the pages or help them struggle with the frustration of constantly panning on a PC or tablet. It may be tempting to scan more than one page at a time, but it just isn’t worth it, unless of course you intend to split them electronically later.

This brings me to my next point, in sort of an odd way. If you are scanning a page at a time, scan your document straight. This is a special annoyance for me as I have received documents scanned at a 35° angle. Its annoying, messy and unprofessional. Just don’t do it. If you can’t get your book or document straight with one page at a time, then put the whole thing on the platen and select the area that you need for each page.

Finally, crop it. Do not use the entire platen scan and then disseminate it out raw. Either before or after scanning, use the scanner software to select which region of the document you wish to save.

When you have finished scanning, check the pages and ensure that you have actually gotten all of the text you meant to get. Are there pages missing? Does the text fall off into the dark area at the inside edge, or perhaps fall off the edge of the scan?

Now, other than the lost words or lost pages issues, if you have failed to do everything noted above, there is a way to correct it. You must use Adobe Acrobat Pro (not reader, but the full professional Acrobat application). Most academic libraries have access to Adobe Acrobat, and some departments do, but it does cost the school for each license, therefore it is unlikely you will be able to have it on your personal office computer (unless you have other needs for it).

Using the tools pane in Acrobat you can do a lot.

The first and last thing to do is OCR. Select “Recognize Text, In this document” from the tools pane. Use this to not only provide machine-readable text from your document, but also to straighten your document. This tool will run through and detect text on each page, store it in the file’s background data and then align the page so that the text appears straight (on average). It is a good idea to do this at the beginning to straighten all of the pages for cropping, and then again at the end to ensure that the spacial mapping of the recognized text is correct.

The other task that needs to be done, if it wasn’t done in scanning is to crop the pages. Use Pages> Crop. This option will allow you to select a region of the page to keep and discard the rest. Turn on the crop tool, select the region, then press enter to finish the process.

If you scanned double pages, you will need to break them up. Start with the even pages (the pages on the right). Select the even side of the first page in the document, press enter, apply the crop to all pages in the document (even and odd), then save the document (usually DocumentName_even.pdf). Once saved, “undo” the crop (edit, undo). Now, select the odd (left) side of the page and again apply the crop to all pages. You may now rejoin the even pages to the document by selecting Pages> Insert from file. Select the _even.pdf file, and add the pages AFTER the LAST page in the document. Finally, move the pages into the correct order. You can turn on the thumbnail panel and drag them manually, or you can set up an automated task (see end of post for code) to do this. To do it by automation, you will first need to set up a task by selecting “action wizard” and then “create a new action”. From the action creation wizard, select “more tools”, then execute javascript. Select “options” to insert the code. You will only need to do this once, then you can just reuse the existing action. It should be noted that the code only works for documents with an even number of pages. If your document has an odd number of pages, go to the Pages tool, Insert pages, more insert options. Add a blank page AFTER the LAST page in the document.

After you have finished working on your document, go to File> Properties and give your document a title, author information and perhaps a few keywords. This metadata will make your file easier to locate and index. Once that’s done, save the file.

Code for putting a document back together:

(if the code below causes an error, use the version at https://cmkularski.net/special/Interleave.txt instead)

function InterleavePages() {

var n = this.numPages;

var nOdd = Math.floor(n / 2);

var nEven = n – nOdd;

var x;

var y;

var i;

for(i = 0; i < nEven; i++) {

                         // movePage x, toAfterPage y

                         // note page numbers are 0-indexed

    x = nOdd + (i);      //

    y = i * 2     ;      //

    this.movePage(x,y);

   }

}

InterleavePages();

September 8, 2013
Fitting In, Moving Forward
This has been a somewhat turbulent and interesting week so far, and its only a little over half over.

First of all: at this point I am enrolled in no courses that are directly taught by the sociology department. I’m really not sure what to think about this. The course I was originally in wasn’t taught by sociology faculty, but was merely cross-listed with our department. The course originated in Religious Studies (Social Theory in Religious Studies was the course). I really have no strong academic interest in religion, except as a secondary factor of social status and the maintenance of hegemonic control over society. My coursework toward my degree this semester is a Survey Methods course taught by Educational Research, which I think will be extremely helpful in the construction of my thesis study, and Philosophical Methods which I am using as an elective. I don’t know if Philosophical Methods will help me a lot with things, but I feel like it might help me center myself academically by returning to the roots of where my academic curiosity began.

Second: I took an interesting dive this semester. I am enrolled in 6 hours in my secondary program (MS IT).

I started my week by going to the religious studies class. I decided after going into it that it really isn’t for me, it isn’t covering anything that will help toward my thesis or my greater academic understanding. I just am not academically curious about religion. The final stake in the heart of me taking that course was a single seat opening up in ITIS 6112, Software System Integration. I had considered the course before and the only thing stopping me from taking it was the religious studies course in the same time slot and my previous commitment to a cohort-mate to take the class with him. With the cohort-mate deciding that he would rather be in social stratification and the opening of the other class, I just had to take it.

On Tuesday I went to my first meeting of Philosophical Methods and Analysis. I was greeted by other members of the class who already knew me and the instructor who I had only met once also greeted me by name. I was very much at ease. The discussion for the class centered around the question “what is philosophy?”. Part of that discussion addressed the idea that philosophy is the origin of all other disciplines and that philosophy still functions as a medium between the disciplines. This is the sort of thought that reassures me that I am not as confused about what I want to do with my research (or life) as I thought, I just take a philosophical approach.

Wednesday was another one of those very unusual days. I started my third ever graduate-level class taught by CCI faculty. While most classes in sociology are taught close to the same way, CCI contains a mix of teaching methods by instructors with diverse backgrounds. I was somewhat anxious when reading the class roster because I was concerned about being a minority in the class. My previous CCI classes had been in flat classrooms not in lecture hall style arrangements or in a tiered lab setting like this one. Going to the class wasn’t bad at all and I actually felt like I fit in pretty well, as the class was fairly diverse. The subject matter of the class wasn’t unfamiliar either, it felt quite comforting to be back in IT for such an applied technical learning sort of way. Oddly, several sociological issues were raised during the class, such as unequal access to Internet connectivity and the role of privilege in how applications are designed.

Thursday evening my emotions and thoughts swung around the other way. I went to Survey Research Methods and found myself drawn back in to the possibilities for social research (even if this class is focused on the educational outcomes aspects of society). I can’t say that I am highly moved by the course, but I do believe it will be fun and might help get me back on track in my pursuit of sociology as well.

This week has been a battle between two parts of my intellectual curiosity trying to unify and become one. I do think that I will find a way to make it work, especially since my current course schedule has me doing equal work in both of my degree areas.

One thing I am realizing is that I do need to put my gender and sexuality academic interests aside when it comes to my degrees, but I need to do what I can to become professionally engaged with that side of sociology. The scope of sociology as a discipline is pretty wide, but each department takes its own corner of that larger discipline. Mine is pretty limited, but that won’t stop me from being engaged in both my own department and the wider discipline. The biggest thing I need to do is return to writing. I don’t write nearly enough for my own personal reflection or to articulate little thoughts that enter my mind that are of academic, ethical or philosophical importance.

So, next week I will begin my modified schedule which will have me directly alternating between social science/humanities and information technology courses each day:
- Monday: Software Systems Design and Implementation
- Tuesday: Philosophical Methods
- Wednesday: Network Based Application Development
- Thursday: Survey Research Methods
August 21, 2013
Informal Summer Goals

I have placed a few informal summer goals for myself in GITI to guide me toward being prepared to write and defend my thesis on time.

May 19, 2013
Entering “Thesis Summer”
At this point in my graduate school career I should have narrowed down a thesis topic and be prepared to engage in a detailed literature review of that topic over the next several months. Unfortunately I have yet to isolate my thoughts that closely and feel like I am not ready to begin my literature review or engage in the types of preliminary research that is typically considered prudent during this time of my academic career. Of the 6 people in my cohort, all have isolated their topics to at least one particular category of interest and seem to have a strong direction in which they seem to want to go, except me.

I have a wide range of interests in Sociology, but I’m finding it difficult to narrow any of them down to a specific topic I wish to engage in a long-term, in-depth way.

Currently my scopes are:
- Sociology of the Internet
- Deviance (Social Construction of Deviance)
- Sociology of Sexuality (and the intersection of sexuality and gender)
- Sociology of Culture (Sub-cultures)
- Social Complexity (Complex Systems approach to Social Science, which is more of a method than an area of study)
I have very broad interests in sociology (as well as other fields such as philosophy and information technology), so for me to narrow them down will be a huge struggle, but somehow I have to manage to get through it if I want to graduate next spring. I suppose the key to doing this will be to start a brief review of the literature of each of my major areas of interest and determining if there is any concentration area where I feel like I can dive in and make a difference.
May 14, 2013

Spring 2013 Papers

The Spring 2013 semester has now ended. My academic papers for this semester have now been released.

Thesis Proposal: The Effects of Stigma on Self-Disclosure in the BDSM Community Issues in Social Research (SOCY 6652)	Gay Sadomasochism as Hyper-Masculine Performance Theoretical Approaches to Gender (WGST 6602)
Complexity of Social Deviance Complex Adaptive Systems (ITIS 6500)

May 10, 2013