- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Timothy N Laurie
University of Technology Sydney, Communications, Faculty Member
- Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Music, Film Studies, Sociology, Political Economy, and 129 moreGilles Deleuze, Marxism, Theodor Adorno, Media Studies, Media Economics, Post-Colonialism, Creative Industries, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Aesthetics, Rhythm and Blues, Pierre Bourdieu, Heavy Metal, Youth Subcultures, Phenomenology, Social Sciences, Gender, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Communication, Gender and Cultural Studies, Ghassan Hage, Korean Masculinity, Kpop, Korean Popular Culture, Hallyu, Social Theory, Masculinity, Gender Studies, Popular Music, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Korean popular culture, Continental Philosophy, Critical Whiteness Studies, Popular Music Studies, Music Aesthetics, Creative Economy, Youth Culture, Michel Foucault, Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Social and Political Philosophy, Cities, Urbanism, Popular musicology, History of Popular Music, Judith Butler, Queer Studies, Ethnomusicology, Hong Kong Cinema, Cultural Theory, Frankfurt School (Philosophy), Baruch Spinoza, Feminist political philosophy, Feminist ethics (Philosophy), Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Children's Media, Psychoanalysis, Jean Piaget, Education, Raewyn Connell, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Anthropology, Urban Studies, Australian popular music, Hip-Hop/Rap, Hip-Hop Studies, Critical Race Theory, Rock Music, Countercultural Studies, Korean film, Science Fiction, Gothic metal, Science Fiction Studies, Black Metal Theory, Martin Heidegger, Habitus, Black Metal, Speculative Realism, Metal Studies, Horror Film, Heavy Metal Music, Performance Studies, Hollywood, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Art, Richard Rorty, Feminist Philosophy, Star Studies, Masculinity Studies, Masculinities, Studies On Men And Masculinity, Freud and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Constructions of masculinity, Masculinity and Gender Studies, Hegemonic Masculinity, Postcolonial Studies, Poststructuralist Feminist Theory, Jacques Lacan, Culture, Ethics, Poststructuralism, Cultural Sociology, Popular Culture, Affect (Cultural Theory), Whiteness Studies, Humanities, Critical Pedagogy, Critical and Cultural Theory, Higher Education, Learning and Teaching, Neoliberalism, Learning And Teaching In Higher Education, Neo-liberalism, Philosophy of Love, Jean Paul Sartre, Political Theory, Intersectionality, Identity politics, Gender Issues, Orientalism, Deleuze Studies, Lila Abu Lughod, History Of Psychoanalysis, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Feminism, and Iris Marion Youngedit
- Timothy Laurie is a Senior Lecturer and Higher Degree Research Coordinator in the School of Communication at the Univ... moreTimothy Laurie is a Senior Lecturer and Higher Degree Research Coordinator in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. His core research interests include cultural theory, gender and sexuality studies, studies in popular culture, and philosophy.
Timothy is currently working on three broad research projects.
First, he is engaged in research on Australian boys and contemporary cinema, as part of his role as a Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council grant "Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem" (2021-2024). This work considers the ways that figures of youth and masculinity are taken up and transformed to produce complex meanings around class, race, and nationhood in Australian public culture.
Second, Timothy has an ongoing research collaboration around feminist philosophy and queer theory with Associate Professor Hannah Stark (University of Tasmania). They have co-authored the book The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures (Palgrave, 2021), which interrogates ethical and political understandings of love in the wider context of feminist and queer arguments around coupledom, marriage equality, and family diversity.
Third, Timothy has an ongoing research project around doctoral education and supervision practices with Dr. Liam Grealy (University of Sydney/Menzies - School of Health Research). They have published research on trust, care, disciplinarity, and the use of educational metrics for journals such as Higher Education Research & Development and Pedagogy, Culture & Society, and for the edited collection Cultural Studies in the Classroom (Palgrave, 2019).
Timothy also engages in extensive editorial work in cultural studies. Timothy has been a Managing Editor for Q1 Cultural Studies journal Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies since 2017. He has also co-edited Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era (Routledge, 2021) with Tanja Dreher and Michael Griffiths, a collection that identifies the limitations and the consequences of free speech debates in contemporary political arenas, and explores possibilities for combating racism within and against dominant liberal political frameworks. Timothy has also co-edited Special Issues for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy.
In the cultural studies research community, Timothy is also the regional representative for Australia and New Zealand on the Board of the Association for Cultural Studies, and a director for Hunar Symposia, which focuses on art practices that respond to State violence, forced migration, and the ongoing effects of colonisation.edit
This critical commentary considers the significance of Connell's The Men and the Boys in the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies. In particular, the article asks: How can research on boys contribute to feminist research on... more
This critical commentary considers the significance of Connell's The Men and the Boys in the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies. In particular, the article asks: How can research on boys contribute to feminist research on childhood and youth, without either establishing a false equivalency with girls studies, or overstating the singularity of "the boy" across diverse cultural and historical contexts? Connell's four-tiered account of social relations-political, economic, emotional, and symbolic-provides an important corrective to reductionist approaches to both feminism and boyhood, and this article draws on The Men and the Boys to think through contrasting sites of identity formation around boys: online cultures of "incels" (involuntary celibates); transmasculinities and the biological diversity of the category "man"; and the social power excercised within an elite Australian boys school. The article concludes by identifying contemporary challenges emerging from the heuristic model offered in The Men and the Boys.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Feminist Sociology, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Sociology of Children and Childhood, and 9 moreYouth Studies, Masculinity Studies, Feminism, Studies On Men And Masculinity, Sociology of Childhood, Sociology of Gender, Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Childhood and Youth, and Boyhood studies
Building on recent literature on supervision practice that has turned away from previous efforts to construct typologies, and towards ‘dialogic’ models that emphasise iterative feedback processes between students and supervisors in situ ,... more
Building on recent literature on supervision practice that has turned away from previous efforts to construct typologies, and towards ‘dialogic’ models that emphasise iterative feedback processes between students and supervisors in situ , this article examines how the curiosity of the supervisor expressed in supervision meetings can both model a relationship to scholarship and collegiality and support the development of confidence and self-trust in the doctoral candidate. Drawing on a qualitative study of videorecorded
supervision meetings across multiple Australian universities, this article examines the entanglements of scholarly discourse, interpersonal conviviality, and curiosity within supervision relationships. To understand this, we adopt a ‘post-critical’ approach to doctoral training and borrow the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ to consider the role of trust, conviviality, and informal ‘know-how’ in the development of formalised expertise. Analysis of exchanges within supervision meetings encourages the consideration of care as a relational structure linked to practices of curiosity and the sharing of tacit knowledge. We argue that although institutional pressures may continue to reshape doctoral candidatures in the neoliberal university, supervision meetings offer important sites for developing doctoral candidates’ intellectual self-trust, including through the expression of curiosity by their supervisors.
supervision meetings across multiple Australian universities, this article examines the entanglements of scholarly discourse, interpersonal conviviality, and curiosity within supervision relationships. To understand this, we adopt a ‘post-critical’ approach to doctoral training and borrow the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ to consider the role of trust, conviviality, and informal ‘know-how’ in the development of formalised expertise. Analysis of exchanges within supervision meetings encourages the consideration of care as a relational structure linked to practices of curiosity and the sharing of tacit knowledge. We argue that although institutional pressures may continue to reshape doctoral candidatures in the neoliberal university, supervision meetings offer important sites for developing doctoral candidates’ intellectual self-trust, including through the expression of curiosity by their supervisors.
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This article argues for a revised understanding of 'complicity' as a undertheorised position and relationship within the social organisation of gender. The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, developed by R.W. Connell and others, has been... more
This article argues for a revised understanding of 'complicity' as a undertheorised position and relationship within the social organisation of gender. The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, developed by R.W. Connell and others, has been influential for understanding masculinities as shared ideals embedded within gender power relations, but scholars have paid less attention to Connell’s attendant concept of ‘complicity’, which does not require a shared ideal to be honoured or emulated. To develop a critical account of complicity, this article draws on Iris Marion Young’s distinction between series and groups and considers ways that persons with diverse relationships to masculinities may nevertheless contribute to collective forms of domination. Young’s approach is placed in dialogue with studies of mateship and violence in contemporary Australian cinema, noting the ways that complicity and coercion can be masked through the language of mateship. As key examples, the article considers two Australian true crime films that explore the complicity of adolescent boys with the collective violences of men: David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010) and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011).
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We have become exhausted by debates around freedom of speech in liberal democracies. Exhausted not in the sense that these debates lack significance - indeed, they often become the locus of powerful symbolic struggles over national and... more
We have become exhausted by debates around freedom of speech in liberal democracies. Exhausted not in the sense that these debates lack significance - indeed, they often become the locus of powerful symbolic struggles over national and political identities - but rather in the sense that, as a legalistic orientation to speech as an act, free speech discourses have provided so little guidance in responding to the overwhelming rise in everyday hate speech and vilification as diffuse and decentered social practices.
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Chapter 2 from 'The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures'. Book blurb: The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond... more
Chapter 2 from 'The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures'.
Book blurb:
The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple.
Book blurb:
The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple.
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This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this... more
This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this article teases out the film’s depiction of both normative and antinormative practices as parallel forms of sexual citizenship. Examining the relationship between normative enactments of gender and sexuality and the regulation of the species boundary, we argue that The Lobster reveals three dichotomies at the core of heteronormative cultural mythologies: male and female, coupled and uncoupled, human and nonhuman. In examining the complex interplay between these categories throughout The Lobster, this article foregrounds the important intersections between critical approaches to normativity established within feminist and queer film studies, and emergent approaches to nonhumanand more-than-human ethics in the environmental humanities.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and 12 moreTransgender Studies, Queer Theory, Literary Criticism, Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Feminism, Theories of Gender and Transgender, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Transgender, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, and Paul B Preciado
This chapter seeks to link the development of teaching skills around Higher Degree Research supervision to broader institutional issues around working conditions and knowledge production. In particular, we identify key questions facing... more
This chapter seeks to link the development of teaching skills around Higher Degree Research supervision to broader institutional issues around working conditions and knowledge production. In particular, we identify key questions facing higher degree supervisors in the humanities and social sciences, citing Australian cultural studies research as an example. By drawing from the contemporary sociology of education, we examine different forms that supervision can take, the professional expectations placed upon supervisors, and the challenges associated with HDR supervision for cultural studies practitioners in Australia. In doing so, we link literature on research learning communities to sociological studies of class-based stratification and increased casualisation within the tertiary sector, noting the ways that intersecting issues around expertise, hierarchy and inter-dependency can shape supervisors’ teaching practices.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Education, Sociology of Education, Teacher Education, and 8 moreHigher Education, Critical Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Work and Labour, Learning And Teaching In Higher Education, Critical sociology and politics of education, Casualisation in Higher Education, and Affect Studies and Affective Labour
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In the most acute moments during fits of laughter, as the body convulses and the breath quickens, as each comical thought fumbles toward the next, and when the whole world shrinks around a single word, image, or gesture—in these moments... more
In the most acute moments during fits of laughter, as the body convulses and the breath quickens, as each comical thought fumbles toward the next, and when the whole world shrinks around a single word, image, or gesture—in these moments our laughter can come to feel absolutely our own. No social pressure can force this feeling into being. We can fake a chuckle and dissimulate amusement at poor jokes, but we cannot lie to ourselves about laughter. Like a slip of the tongue, laughter tears apart practiced routines of social comportment. Laughter delivers truths through the body. Truths about our deepest desires, fears, and fantasies are revealed through laugher, even if the method of delivery is unreliable and the truths remain littered with fabrications. Indeed, laughter challenges conventional distinctions between the true and the false: we do not, after all, need to believe something to find it comical. The sociology of humor seeks to offer a critical account of laughter. At a kinesthetic level, laughter seems to arrive without a history, culture, or politics, but this embodied feeling of spontaneity can be deceptive. Most societies contain methods for condoning and sanctioning different kinds of laughter. Often these methods are tacit—that is, enforced through inter-personal cues. For the same reason, humor can be an important resource for identity building and the maintenance of cultural continuity in displaced communities, as Elisabeth Betz and Toon van Meijl (2016) show in their study of diasporic communities from Tonga. Critical approaches to laughter are attentive to the social rules that divide the serious from the unserious, the sacred from the comic, and are consequently able to examine the formation of social identities in informal, unguarded, and convivial settings. But critique does not mean showing that people who laugh at ''the wrong things'' are bad people. Moral indictments of laughter tend to be ineffective, because humor taps into strongly felt perceptions and intuitions that connect bodily experience to thoughts and ideas. Sociologists do not need to silence laughter in order to understand the social conditions that make certain things— phrases, images, anecdotes, gestures—funny at some times and not others, for some people and not others, and in certain places and not others.
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This article argues that strong theories of neo-liberalism do not provide an adequate frame for understanding the ways that measurement practices come to be embedded in the life-worlds of those working in higher education. We argue that... more
This article argues that strong theories of neo-liberalism do not provide an adequate frame for understanding the ways that measurement practices come to be embedded in the life-worlds of those working in higher education. We argue that neo-liberal metrics need to be understood from the viewpoint of their social usage, alongside other practices of qualification and quantification. In particular, this article maps the specific variables attending measurement in higher degree research programmes, as the key sites that familiarize students with measurement practices around research and teaching. With regard to the incremental reframing of doctoral study as a utilitarian pursuit, we suggest a need to better identify the singular and immeasurable features of long-term research projects, and argue for a revitalized notion of failure. In this context, this article suggests that many critiques of neo-liberalism do not sufficiently advance alternative ways to think about the purposes and limitations of higher education.
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This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the... more
This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the epistemological question, “how do we acquire certainty about love?,” this article advances a pedagogical question: how might love enable us to learn? To answer this question we turn to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After examining the tensions between ontological and ideological conceptions of love, we explore Hardt and Negri’s work on love as part of the affective labour of the “multitude.” We then trace the development of Deleuze’s early work on love as an apprenticeship to signs to his later exploration (with Guattari) of love in relation to multiplicity. In doing so, this article seeks to renovate the concept of love itself, framing it in terms of difference rather than merging and unity, and locating it outside the confines of the heterosexual couple and nuclear family.
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Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and... more
Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and minorities, and the various historical and intellectual agendas that have shaped these social practices of classification. It begins by examining Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' as an anti-sociological reworking of minor and minority, then turns its attention toward the policy-driven sociological traditions of the Chicago School, and how this has informed the contemporary construction of 'minorities' reflected in Australian immigration debates. As a third key paradigm in the study of the 'minor' , the article revisits cultural studies' own embrace of the Popular as a site for political struggles over the meanings attached to 'major' and 'minor' social identities. Finally, we consider the range of transformative cultural practices addressed in this Minor Culture special issue, and reflect on the utility of the minor in holding together disparate political projects. There are a range of ways in which the minor might productively imagine or construct collective identities, in ways that do not anticipate, or even desire, majoritarian endings. It is argued that minoritised social categories do substantive political and cultural work, while acknowledging that numerical descriptions of minorities can hide as much as they reveal.
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This chapter argues that the gender politics of K-Pop videos are dependent upon their utopian narrative structures and performance conventions. Most Korean boy groups and girl groups present unrealistic social aspirations and ideal body... more
This chapter argues that the gender politics of K-Pop videos are dependent upon their utopian narrative structures and performance conventions. Most Korean boy groups and girl groups present unrealistic social aspirations and ideal body types, but the narrative logics of K-Pop’s idyllic worlds also cannot be measured against the standards of social realism. Rather, genre specific expectations around homosocial performance create internal tensions in the presentation of K-Pop masculinity and femininity, tensions carefully negotiated by f(x) and dramatically unpicked in N.O.M’s ‘A Guys’, which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. At the same time, the estrangement between K-Pop’s performance spaces and tangible social lives also provides opportunities for audiences – and most conspicuously, for fanfiction writers – to reimagine Idols in everyday settings. Although narrow conceptions of gender, sexuality, race and age circumscribe the social imaginaries of K-Pop groups in deleterious ways, this chapter argues that critical responses must be attentive to the specificity of genre in the production of musical and viewing pleasures.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Popular Music Studies, Popular Music, Popular Culture, and 11 moreQueer Theory, Gender and Sexuality, East Asian Studies, Masculinity, Music Aesthetics, Constructions of femininity, Representation of Women in Music Lyrics and Videos, Korean popular culture, Korean Wave, Hallyu, and K-Pop
"If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals." This essay argues that Deleuze and... more
"If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals." This essay argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'becoming-animal' offers a a supple framework for reading the nonhuman outside the templates provided by psychoanalysis and structuralism. At the same time, it argues that 'becoming-animal' entraps the reader at the very moment that it acquires any normative force, because the will to 'become-animal' presupposes a modality of narcissistic ego-formation. It makes these arguments by way of DreamWorks' 'Madagascar' animated film franchise, read through psychoanalytic, structuralist and queer lenses, and pays special attention to despotic lemur King Julien, an "anomalous" figure of cultural mobility.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Animation, and 21 morePopular Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Geopolitics, Queer Theory, Cultural Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Continental Philosophy, Children's Media, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Humanism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropocentrism, Animals and non-humans, Queer Cinema, Donna Haraway, Cartoons, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Film, Human-Nonhuman relations, and A Thousand Plateaus
This essay examines masculinity as a quasicausal object and naming practice that guides a range of discussions around gender, with a particular focus on the sociology of masculinity. It begins by examining R.W. Connell’s widely used... more
This essay examines masculinity as a quasicausal object and naming practice that guides a range of discussions around gender, with a particular focus on the sociology of masculinity. It begins by examining R.W. Connell’s widely
used concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” and scrutinises a series of specialised metaphors around hegemony – strategies, positions, goals – that present masculinity as an effect of competitive communion between men. Having identified key tensions in the explanatory model of hegemonic masculinity, the essay then turns towards the
analysis of sense and language outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze’s notions of “singularity” and “event” are reworked to support a pragmatic account of
how masculinity studies can engage tense relationships between observation, description and representation, an engagement that remains salient for developing the ethical scope of gender studies more broadly.
used concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” and scrutinises a series of specialised metaphors around hegemony – strategies, positions, goals – that present masculinity as an effect of competitive communion between men. Having identified key tensions in the explanatory model of hegemonic masculinity, the essay then turns towards the
analysis of sense and language outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze’s notions of “singularity” and “event” are reworked to support a pragmatic account of
how masculinity studies can engage tense relationships between observation, description and representation, an engagement that remains salient for developing the ethical scope of gender studies more broadly.
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This themed edition of Angelaki encourages relocations to and within the neighbourhood of masculinity studies. Rather than looking primarily for new thoughts about masculinity we have also been looking to masculinities as sites in which... more
This themed edition of Angelaki encourages relocations to and within the neighbourhood of masculinity studies. Rather than looking primarily for new thoughts about masculinity we have also been looking to masculinities as sites in which thought is created. We have considered what it might mean to over-populate this neighbourhood, forcing open its borders into new territories.
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Writing about popular culture always involves inclusions and exclusions. In popular music studies, these inclusions and exclusions are often made tacitly through the use of genre taxonomies, ranging from the broad (pop, rock, jazz) to... more
Writing about popular culture always involves inclusions and exclusions. In popular music studies, these inclusions and exclusions are often made tacitly through the use
of genre taxonomies, ranging from the broad (pop, rock, jazz) to the highly specific (the Gothenburg sound, Hi-NRG, Krautrock). Since the early 1980s, genre has graduated from being a subset of popular music studies to being an almost ubiquitous framework for constituting and evaluating musical research objects. One rarely has to make a general case for genre, so long as one can tell persuasive stories about what genres mean in cultural context: metal as transgressive, hip hop as community building, punk as counter hegemonic, and so on. Jennifer Lena’s Banding Together, Graham St John’s Global Tribe and Michelle Phillipov’s Death Metal and Music Criticism each employ genre as a principle of selection and hence raise questions about the strengths and limitations of genre criticism as a heuristic method in popular music studies.
of genre taxonomies, ranging from the broad (pop, rock, jazz) to the highly specific (the Gothenburg sound, Hi-NRG, Krautrock). Since the early 1980s, genre has graduated from being a subset of popular music studies to being an almost ubiquitous framework for constituting and evaluating musical research objects. One rarely has to make a general case for genre, so long as one can tell persuasive stories about what genres mean in cultural context: metal as transgressive, hip hop as community building, punk as counter hegemonic, and so on. Jennifer Lena’s Banding Together, Graham St John’s Global Tribe and Michelle Phillipov’s Death Metal and Music Criticism each employ genre as a principle of selection and hence raise questions about the strengths and limitations of genre criticism as a heuristic method in popular music studies.
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This article brings together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian social... more
This article brings together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian social encounters. While scholarship on masculinity has frequently focused on hegemonic modes of behaviour or normative gender relations, less attention has been paid to the “ethics of people I know” as informal political resources, ones that shapes not only conversations about how one should act (“people I know don’t do that”), but also about the diversity of situations that friends, acquaintances or strangers could plausibly have encountered (“that hasn’t happened to anyone I know”). The article rethinks mundane social securities drawing on Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sara Ahmed to consider anecdotal case studies around gender recognition and political practice, and in doing so also develops the notion of interpellation in relation to everyday ethical problems. The article suggests that inquiry into diverse modes of quotidian complicities – or what de Beauvoir calls the “snares” of a deeply human liberty – can be useful for describing the mixtures of sympathy, empathy, and disavowal in the performance of pro-feminist and queer-friendly masculinities or masculinist identities. It also suggests that the adoption of an “anti-normative” politics is insufficient for negotiating the problems of description and recognition involved in the articulation of gendered social experiences. In doing so, the article approaches questions around political identification commonly considered in queer theory from the viewpoint of descriptive practices themselves, and thus reorients problems of recognition and interpellation towards the expression of ethical statements, rather than focusing solely on the objects of such statements.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Ethics, Masculinity Studies, Phenomenology, and 10 morePolitics, Continental Philosophy, Louis Althusser, Martin Heidegger, Masculinity, Simone de Beauvoir, Studies On Men And Masculinity, Constructions of femininity, Qualitative Research Methods, and Queer Phenomenology
This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors’ claims about power and... more
This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors’ claims about power and politics. While noting the benefits of politically analysing social customs and traditions, Laurie highlights the complicities between Deleuze and Guattari's theories and the assumptions embedded in their anthropological sources. He further argues that the cultural and historical speculations in Anti-Oedipus cannot be divorced from the authors' privilege of philosophy as a uniquely European creative space. Seeking an alternative perspective on cultural translation, the paper turns to Walter Mignolo’s study of the 'book' in Spanish-Amerindian colonial encounters. Foregrounding the critical value of philology for ‘de-colonising’ theory, Mignolo argues that Eurocentric cultural comparisons serve to legitimate particular ways of knowing within contested fields of representation. However, in both Deleuze and Guattari and Mignolo, the paper questions the gender dynamics of writing practices implicitly articulated in meta-narratives about the State and/or colonialism. Laurie suggests that these authors frequently remain oblivious to the role of women in the historical contexts examined, and that understanding political dynamics within cultural groups requires questioning the privilege of writing itself, both in and outside the academy. While sympathetic to the role of political philosophy in negotiating complex historical issues, this paper also advocates a rethinking of the subordinate place attributed to anthropological and historical research practices in the theoretical exegeses of Deleuze, Guattari and Mignolo.
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This article examines the cultural politics of “crossover” at Motown Records, focusing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes’ covers albums in the mid-1960s, the article links notions... more
This article examines the cultural politics of “crossover” at Motown Records, focusing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes’ covers albums in the mid-1960s, the article links notions of musical originality to commercial logics of publishing, gendered divisions of labour, and racialised channels of record distribution. It also traces the rise of the celebrity songwriter-producer in soul, including artists like Isaac Hayes, Norman Whitfield, and Stevie Wonder, who fit a new mould of artistic authenticity that clashed with the carefully manicured performances of 1960s “girl pop.” The professional mobility afforded to men in both rock and r&b should prompt media scholars to consider the temporal dimensions of artist trajectories in the music industry, and taking the constraints on girl group singers seriously allows for reflection on (gendered) music industry knowledge about which audiences matter and for how long.
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On the release of the screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), ex-Motown songwriter William ‘Smokey’ Robinson fielded speculations about corruption at America's most successful black-owned business. In the broader context of racial... more
On the release of the screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), ex-Motown songwriter William ‘Smokey’ Robinson fielded speculations about corruption at America's most successful black-owned business. In the broader context of racial inequalities in media ownership and distribution, this article asks how spectacles of hard-won individual success, juxtaposed sharply against sexually and financially corrupt ‘music moguls’, continue to shape popular mythologies of the US music industry. In particular, the article focuses on the ways that sexual combat, corrupt masculinities and the politics of respectability inform Dreamgirls’ dramatization of the shift from pre-integration to post-Civil Rights America. Finally, the notion of post-racial discourse is used to make sense of the competing historical interpretations at work in the film and its critical reception, especially with regard to the use of past entertainment icons to make sense of Beyoncé Knowles’ and Jennifer Hudson's own success stories. Throughout, the article argues that myths of meritocracy cannot be separated from the racialized and gendered cultures of production that continue to shape the contemporary repackaging of popular histories and musical genres.
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Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to... more
Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the ‘majoritarian’ taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the ‘normative’ family and its alternatives.
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Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976, her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and... more
Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976, her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. Across the Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, Butler‘s engagement with the gendered dimensions of ethical and social obligation has intersected in striking ways with ongoing discussions in feminist and postcolonial critical theory, while being criticized for its recuperation of normative family values and its naturalization of gendered social behaviours. In this paper, I will explore her complex ethical responses to developments in genetics and sociobiology in the 1970s, with a focus on the ethics of filiation and altruism in Butler‘s works, and drawing upon celebratory and critical readings of Butler from the feminist perspectives of Donna Haraway, Nancy Jesser and Michelle Osherow. Butler‘s speculations about the possibilities of futures based on very different ―humans will then be compared with those of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophies of biology and human agency, especially those developed with Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, reflect similar anxieties around the normative definitions of human behavior implicit in both sociobiology and psychoanalysis. While it is difficult to place philosophical texts in conversation with literary works, especially when both authors and their imagined audiences are separated by linguistic, cultural and geographical divides, this analysis teases out some of the overlapping challenges faced in mapping out utopian (or revolutionary) thought beyond the limits of the human.
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To borrow a phrase from a program that foreshadows much of Hamilton Carroll’s argument, Affirmative Reaction
reads like a captain’s log of what stressed out, fed up, self-sacrificing white men are up to on America’s screens...
reads like a captain’s log of what stressed out, fed up, self-sacrificing white men are up to on America’s screens...
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Global Cinema examines the key themes, production techniques, and cultural contexts that shape contemporary world cinemas. Students become familiar with different national and regional cinematic traditions, develop critical vocabularies... more
Global Cinema examines the key themes, production techniques, and cultural contexts that shape contemporary world cinemas. Students become familiar with different national and regional cinematic traditions, develop critical vocabularies for understanding and interpreting cinematic storytelling devices, and consider the role that cinema plays in addressing social inequalities and injustices. The subject also invites students to explore diverse forms of film-making, which may include high-budget national cinemas, films by Indigenous communities and film-makers, independent and experimental film-making, multilingual and diasporic cinemas, cinema as political activism, and documentary cinema (among others). Throughout, students are given opportunities to focus on specific elements within film-making processes, including narrative, genre, and characterisation; cinematography, editing, lighting, sound, and production design; and the industrial contexts of production, distribution, and reception.
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This subject brings together a range of disciplines within communications to examine cultural difference, social identity, frameworks for promoting diversity, and contemporary community formation. In particular, case studies from... more
This subject brings together a range of disciplines within communications to examine cultural difference, social identity, frameworks for promoting diversity, and contemporary community formation. In particular, case studies from contemporary Australian society are used to explore themes of racialisation, multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, and class-based inequalities, with a particular focus on Indigenous Australian and settler colonial identities. Case studies are drawn from a variety of cultural sites that engage with diversity and difference, from popular culture (such as film and television) to institutional diversity policies and social activism. This includes an opportunity to examine Sydney-based initiatives that seek to address marginalisation, promote activism, encourage community participation or extract commercial value from diversity. Through developing original ideas and projects for engaging with diversity and difference, students are invited to reflect upon their own identities from a cultural perspective. The subject also familiarises students with relevant theories and concepts, critical media studies, critical race and feminist theory, cultural geography, critical diversity studies and organisational studies. In developing frameworks for understanding inequalities, the subject equips students to evaluate the ethical dimensions of contemporary professional practices in diverse working environments.
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Subject Outline for Core subject in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney (Autumn 2019).
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Indigenous Studies, Media Studies, and 13 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Disability Studies, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Race Theory, Gender, Feminism, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Intersectionality, Anti-Racism, and Queer
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This subject focuses on key developments in global cinema with an emphasis on films that challenge students to think critically and creatively about the world in which they live.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Communication, Multiculturalism, Indigenous Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and 12 moreFilm Studies, Film Music And Sound, National Cinemas, Film Genre, Horror Film, Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, Chinese Cinema, Documentary Film, Film and Media Studies, Cinema Studies, and Films
This subject brings together a range of disciplines within communications to examine cultural difference, social identity, frameworks for promoting diversity, and contemporary community formation. In particular, case studies from... more
This subject brings together a range of disciplines within communications to examine cultural difference, social identity, frameworks for promoting diversity, and contemporary community formation. In particular, case studies from contemporary Australian society are used to explore themes of racialisation, multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, and class-based inequalities, with a particular focus on Indigenous Australian and settler colonial identities. Case studies are drawn from a variety of cultural sites that engage with diversity and difference, from popular culture (such as film and television) to institutional diversity policies and social activism. This includes an opportunity to examine Sydney-based initiatives that seek to address marginalisation, promote activism, encourage community participation or extract commercial value from diversity. Through developing original ideas and projects for engaging with diversity and difference, students are invited to reflect upon their own identities from a cultural perspective. The subject also familiarises students with relevant theories and concepts, critical media studies, critical race and feminist theory, cultural geography, critical diversity studies and organisational studies. In developing frameworks for understanding inequalities, the subject equips students to evaluate the ethical dimensions of contemporary professional practices in diverse working environments.
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2015, Screen and Cultural Studies, the University of Melbourne
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This paper draws on feminist approaches to serial television formats in the context of contemporary HBO dramas, with a special focus on the relationship between sexual violence and racial imaginaries in Game of Thrones (2011-present). The... more
This paper draws on feminist approaches to serial television formats in the context of contemporary HBO dramas, with a special focus on the relationship between sexual violence and racial imaginaries in Game of Thrones (2011-present). The paper firstly asks, to what extent can the gender politics of a “scene” be evaluated alongside, or against, the telos of multiple characters across several seasons? This issue become particularly acute in programs that, like Game of Thrones, profit from spectacular (and heavily criticised) depictions of sexual assault, while also sustaining careful long-term investments in nuanced female characters. Having outlined this tension, the paper argues that sexual reproduction is the biopolitical paradigm through which the serial drama is organised. Sex is the principle by which families are mixed and communities are (un)mixed. But insofar as the sexual capacities of white women’s bodies become the key sites of political tension, Game of Thrones also remains a story about an imagined racial community, its future longevity, and its territorial entitlements. Therefore the investments required of the viewer do not simply concern sympathetic or unsympathetic characters. Across several seasons, Game of Thrones becomes a program about the kinds of bodies that could viably mix in a future social order, those bodies that remain absolute incommensurate, and those that can only mix through acts of sexual violence.
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This paper considers feminist approaches to contrasting modalities of communication in online forums and fansites. I begin by engaging with Eve Sedgwick's schematic distinction between paranoid and reparative readings, and link each... more
This paper considers feminist approaches to contrasting modalities of communication in online forums and fansites. I begin by engaging with Eve Sedgwick's schematic distinction between paranoid and reparative readings, and link each modality to a different figure of the “troll”. While paranoia and repair each provide space for novel feminist reading practices around musical and visual cultures, the troll is defined either by a refusal to read, or by its production of noise that prevents others from continuing to read. Taking as my case studies the controversy surrounding Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, the paper argues that the politics of reading online may involve not only ideological combat over what people do read, but also a struggle over what people can legitimately claim not to have read.
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In Hardt and Negri’s collaborative writings the concept of ‘love’ has come to function as an important pivot between the indictment of poverty and oppression, and the activation of social bonds to produce new political groupings and... more
In Hardt and Negri’s collaborative writings the concept of ‘love’ has come to function as an important pivot between the indictment of poverty and oppression, and the activation of social bonds to produce new political groupings and energies. However, ‘love’ is invoked in two entirely contrasting ways: firstly, as an encounter from the outside, that disturbs and unsettles the subject; and secondly, as an attachment and investment in familiar forms of social belonging. This paper explores tensions in Hardt and Negri’s accounts of love, and argues that the concept needs to be supplemented with a notion of learning. To develop a more ‘pedagogical’ understanding of love, we draw on Deleuze’s writing on Proust, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative writings. By comparing approaches to love in Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri, we argue that a key difference around these scholars is not as much in their respective critiques of Marxism (although this remains important), but in the ways that love and desire are taken up in ‘post-Marxist’ ethical frames.
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Cultural relativism has been rightly dismissed by many Marxists as essentialising, de-historicising, or even colonialist by historical association, but many still struggle to find common ground between class-based appeals to social... more
Cultural relativism has been rightly dismissed by many Marxists as essentialising, de-historicising, or even colonialist by historical association, but many still struggle to find common ground between class-based appeals to social justice and less legible forms of moral protest shaped by singular ‘cultural’ factors. Debates about the authenticity, viability, or solidarity of collective working-class praxis have only exacerbated ambiguities in historical materialist accounts of political will and the social reproduction of moral conduct. This paper addresses these concerns using the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structural anthropologist who pursued a fragile mix of cultural relativism, Marxist political economy, and Kantian humanism. It argues that although the language of cultural difference has become a burden within liberal pluralist discourses, the critique of moral universalism and human rationality that a revised ‘cultural relativism’ enables remains invaluable for thinking through the ethical horizons of Marxist critique. In making this argument, the paper also suggests that Lévi-Strauss’ cultural account of the ‘categorical imperative’ is still useful for navigating political problems in which outcomes are patently unpredictable, or where a clearly delimited field of causes and consequences is unavailable for materialist analysis. In such cases, the notion of ‘culture’ is best understood not as a fixed attribute or compilation of customs, but as an open-ended normative enterprise that acknowledges its empirical limitations and irrational foundations. A culturalism of this kind can mediate between the rational imperative towards scientific abstraction required by historical materialism, and the urgencies of moral objection and intervention demanded by political praxis.
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Pop stars are too often mourned as historical objects. At worst, they become museum pieces repolished for burial, with eulogies focusing on hyperbolic turning points (“the first person to...”) and twilight accolades. For the Baby Boomer... more
Pop stars are too often mourned as historical objects. At worst, they become museum pieces repolished for burial, with eulogies focusing on hyperbolic turning points (“the first person to...”) and twilight accolades. For the Baby Boomer superstars who crowd the rock museum, generous biographers will overlook the Not-Quite-Disco Album, the Half-Tempo National Anthem At Major Sporting Event, and the Lawsuit To Protect Rebellious Teen Anthem From Copyright Infringement....
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Should prospective brides and grooms have their hormone levels tested or their genitals medically examined? The biological argument for "traditional" marriage doesn't stack up, writes Timothy Laurie.
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This film has us talking about sexual and emotional boundaries, about how they can be dangerously messy as well as willfully ignored. That such conversations are being openly pursued over popcorn is a cause for cautious optimism.
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Brief summary: This essay considers the utopianism of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze alongside Afrofuturism, a milieu including both artistic and academic work exploring futurity, technological innovation and speculative... more
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This essay considers the utopianism of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze alongside Afrofuturism, a milieu including both artistic and academic work exploring futurity, technological innovation and speculative imaginaries in the Afrodiaspora. Reflecting on the relationship between theoretical work and political practice, it considers two fictional authors associated with Afrofuturism: Ralph Ellison, who displays an ambivalence towards both creative individualism and utopian imaginaries, and Octavia E. Butler, whose short story “Speech Sounds” re-asserts the importance of communication, conversation and human relationships despite, or precisely because of, societal breakdown and alienation.
This essay considers the utopianism of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze alongside Afrofuturism, a milieu including both artistic and academic work exploring futurity, technological innovation and speculative imaginaries in the Afrodiaspora. Reflecting on the relationship between theoretical work and political practice, it considers two fictional authors associated with Afrofuturism: Ralph Ellison, who displays an ambivalence towards both creative individualism and utopian imaginaries, and Octavia E. Butler, whose short story “Speech Sounds” re-asserts the importance of communication, conversation and human relationships despite, or precisely because of, societal breakdown and alienation.
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Sometime in the week before reading this article, you will have heard or read about an act of deadly violence. At the beginning of 2016, it might have been a bombing in a metropolitan centre in Paris, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan,... more
Sometime in the week before reading this article, you will have heard or read about an act of deadly violence. At the beginning of 2016, it might have been a bombing in a metropolitan centre in Paris, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria or Jakarta. In the same story, politicians may have expressed outrage and stupefaction. These events become “senseless acts of terrorism”, “horrendous beyond imagining”, “mindless slaughters”, or “sickening atrocities”. Bewilderment confirms that we would never commit such acts of violence. More precisely, our collective moral compass is thought to be the obstacle between our current daily activities – walking the dog, shaving, shopping for apples – and those who pursue mass killings.
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This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophy in contexts where the label of "continental" may seem increasingly tenuous, if not entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding... more
This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophy in contexts where the label of "continental" may seem increasingly tenuous, if not entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding "critical thought" as enabling us "to reflexively move outside of ourselves such that we can start seeing ourselves in ways we could not have possibly seen ourselves, our culture or our society before." Such thought may involve an interrogation of our own conditions of knowledge production, by giving us "access to forces that are outside of us but that are acting on us causally." Our argument in this article is that critical approaches within continental philosophy need to examine a multiplicity of ways that disciplines can be defined and delimited, and to understand the ways that gender, geography, and coloniality (among other forces) shape the intellectual and social worlds of continental philosophy. In doing so, we wan...
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This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophy in contexts where the label of "continental" may seem increasingly tenuous, if not entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding... more
This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophy in contexts where the label of "continental" may seem increasingly tenuous, if not entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding "critical thought" as enabling us "to reflexively move outside of ourselves such that we can start seeing ourselves in ways we could not have possibly seen ourselves, our culture or our society before." Such thought may involve an interrogation of our own conditions of knowledge production, by giving us "access to forces that are outside of us but that are acting on us causally." Our argument in this article is that critical approaches within continental philosophy need to examine a multiplicity of ways that disciplines can be defined and delimited, and to understand the ways that gender, geography, and coloniality (among other forces) shape the intellectual and social worlds of continental philosophy. In doing so, we wan...
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Paper presented at Trans/Forming Feminisms: Media, Technology, Identity, November 23-25, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
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Paper presented at Trans/Forming Feminisms: Media, Technology, Identity, November 23-25, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
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This critical commentary considers the significance of Connell’s The Men and the Boys in the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies. In particular, the article asks: How can research on boys contribute to feminist research on... more
This critical commentary considers the significance of Connell’s The Men and the Boys in the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies. In particular, the article asks: How can research on boys contribute to feminist research on childhood and youth, without either establishing a false equivalency with girls studies, or overstating the singularity of “the boy” across diverse cultural and historical contexts? Connell’s four-tiered account of social relations—political, economic, emotional, and symbolic—provides an important corrective to reductionist approaches to both feminism and boyhood, and this article draws on The Men and the Boys to think through contrasting sites of identity formation around boys: online cultures of “incels” (involuntary celibates); transmasculinities and the biological diversity of the category “man”; and the social power excercised within an elite Australian boys school. The article concludes by identifying contemporary challenges emerging from the...
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Abstract This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the... more
Abstract This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the epistemological question, “how do we acquire certainty about love?,” this article advances a pedagogical question: how might love enable us to learn? To answer this question we turn to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After examining the tensions between ontological and ideological conceptions of love, we explore Hardt and Negri’s work on love as part of the affective labour of the “multitude.” We then trace the development of Deleuze’s early work on love as an apprenticeship to signs to his later exploration (with Guattari) of love in relation to multiplicity. In doing so, this article seeks to renovate the concept of love itself, framing it in terms of difference rather than merging and unity, and locating it outside the confines of the heterosexual couple and nuclear family.
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ABSTRACT This article interrogates “masculinity” as a named object of study for the social sciences, and sociology in particular, by drawing on the analysis of sense and language in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969).... more
ABSTRACT This article interrogates “masculinity” as a named object of study for the social sciences, and sociology in particular, by drawing on the analysis of sense and language in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969). While rejecting essentialist definitions of masculine attributes, sociologists have long insisted that masculinity can be defined as a strategic articulation in the pursuit of social goals. Developing Deleuze's notion of the “singularity” within signifying series, this article argues that sociological emphases on goal-oriented practices have elided important problems around the individuation of social relations, as well as neglecting the subsequent textual work of naming such relations as masculine. To develop this argument, the article begins with R.W. Connell's concept of “hegemonic masculinity” as one example of empirical investigation that proceeds by way of specialised metaphors – strategies, positions, goals – that make masculinity appear self-evident as an innate communication between men. In scrutinising the efficacy of such metaphors, the article questions the paradigm of homosociality as a methodological a priori in social scientific research. Finally, the article asks how masculinity studies might engage a more critical relationship to observation and description, a question that remains urgent for developing the ethical vision of gender studies more broadly.
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A review of Jennifer C. Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton University Press, 2012), Michelle Phillipov, Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits(Lexington Books, 2012) and... more
A review of Jennifer C. Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton University Press, 2012), Michelle Phillipov, Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits(Lexington Books, 2012) and Graham St John, Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox Publishing, 2012).
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Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976, her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and... more
Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976, her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. Across the Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, Butler‘s engagement with the gendered dimensions of ethical and social obligation has intersected in striking ways with ongoing discussions in feminist and postcolonial critical theory, while being criticized for its recuperation of normative family values and its naturalization of gendered social behaviours. In this paper, I will explore her complex ethical responses to developments in genetics and sociobiology in the 1970s, with a focus on the ethics of filiation and altruism in Butler‘s works, and drawing upon celebratory and critical readings of Butler from the feminist perspectives of Donna Haraway, Nancy Jesser and Michelle Osherow. Butler‘s speculations about the possibilities of futures ba...
Research Interests: Sociology and Alienation
DESCRIPTION This chapter argues that the gender politics of K-Pop videos are dependent upon their utopian narrative structures and performance conventions. Most Korean boy groups and girl groups present unrealistic social aspirations and... more
DESCRIPTION This chapter argues that the gender politics of K-Pop videos are dependent upon their utopian narrative structures and performance conventions. Most Korean boy groups and girl groups present unrealistic social aspirations and ideal body types, but the narrative logics of K-Pop’s idyllic worlds also cannot be measured against the standards of social realism. Rather, genre specific expectations around homosocial performance create internal tensions in the presentation of K-Pop masculinity and femininity, tensions carefully negotiated by f(x) and dramatically unpicked in N.O.M’s ‘A Guys’, which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. At the same time, the estrangement between K-Pop’s performance spaces and tangible social lives also provides opportunities for audiences – and most conspicuously, for fanfiction writers – to reimagine Idols in everyday settings. Although narrow conceptions of gender, sexuality, race and age circumscribe the social imaginaries of K-Pop ...
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This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors’ claims about power and... more
This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors’ claims about power and politics. While noting the benefits of politically analysing social customs and traditions, Laurie highlights the complicities between Deleuze and Guattari's theories and the assumptions embedded in their anthropological sources. He further argues that the cultural and historical speculations in Anti-Oedipus cannot be divorced from the authors' privilege of philosophy as a uniquely European creative space. Seeking an alternative perspective on cultural translation, the paper turns to Walter Mignolo’s study of the 'book' in Spanish-Amerindian colonial encounters. Foregrounding the critical value of philology for ‘de-colonising’ theory, Mignolo argues that Eurocentric cultural comparisons serve to legitimate particular ways of knowing wit...
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ABSTRACT On the release of the screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), ex-Motown songwriter William ‘Smokey’ Robinson fielded speculations about corruption at America's most successful black-owned business. In the broader... more
ABSTRACT On the release of the screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), ex-Motown songwriter William ‘Smokey’ Robinson fielded speculations about corruption at America's most successful black-owned business. In the broader context of racial inequalities in media ownership and distribution, this article asks how spectacles of hard-won individual success, juxtaposed sharply against sexually and financially corrupt ‘music moguls’, continue to shape popular mythologies of the US music industry. In particular, the article focuses on the ways that sexual combat, corrupt masculinities and the politics of respectability inform Dreamgirls’ dramatization of the shift from pre-integration to post-Civil Rights America. Finally, the notion of post-racial discourse is used to make sense of the competing historical interpretations at work in the film and its critical reception, especially with regard to the use of past entertainment icons to make sense of Beyoncé Knowles’ and Jennifer Hudson's own success stories. Throughout, the article argues that myths of meritocracy cannot be separated from the racialized and gendered cultures of production that continue to shape the contemporary repackaging of popular histories and musical genres.
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Purpose – This paper aims to bring together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian... more
Purpose – This paper aims to bring together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian social encounters. While scholarship on masculinity has frequently focused on hegemonic modes of behaviour or normative gender relations, less attention has been paid to the “ethics of people I know” as informal political resources, ones that shapes not only conversations about how one should act (“people I know don’t do that”), but also about the diversity of situations that friends, acquaintances or strangers could plausibly have encountered (“that hasn’t happened to anyone I know”). Design/methodology/approach – The paper rethinks mundane social securities drawing on Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sara Ahmed to consider anecdotal case studies around gender recognition and political practice, and in doing so also develops the notion of i...
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ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural politics of “crossover” at Motown Records, focussing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes' covers albums in the mid-1960s, the... more
ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural politics of “crossover” at Motown Records, focussing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes' covers albums in the mid-1960s, the article links notions of musical originality to commercial logics of publishing, gendered divisions of labour, and racialised channels of record distribution. It also traces the rise of the celebrity songwriter-producer in soul, including artists like Isaac Hayes, Norman Whitfield, and Stevie Wonder, who fit a new mould of artistic authenticity that clashed with the carefully manicured performances of 1960s “girl pop.” The professional mobility afforded to men in both rock and r&b should prompt media scholars to consider the temporal dimensions of artist trajectories in the music industry, and taking the constraints on girl group singers seriously allows for reflection on (gendered) music industry knowledge about which audiences matter and for how long.
Research Interests: Sociology, Gender Studies, Politics, Ideology, Music Industry, and 5 moreFeminist Media Studies, Soul, Girl, Wonder, and Musical
Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to... more
Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the ‘majoritarian’ taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the ‘normative’ family and its alternatives.
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Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and... more
Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and minorities, and the various historical and intellectual agendas that have shaped these social practices of classification. It begins by examining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ as an anti-sociological reworking of minor and minority, then turns its attention toward the policy-driven sociological traditions of the Chicago School, and how this has informed the contemporary construction of ‘minorities’ reflected in Australian immigration debates. As a third key paradigm in the study of the ‘minor’, the article revisits cultural studies’ own embrace of the Popular as a site for political struggles over the meanings attached to ‘major’ and ‘minor’ social identities. Finally, we consider the range of transformative cultural practices addressed in this Minor Culture special issue, and re ect on the utility of the minor in holding together disparate political projects. There are a range of ways in which the minor might productively imagine or construct collective identities, in ways that do not anticipate, or even desire, majoritarian endings. It is argued that minoritised social categories do substantive political and cultural work, while acknowledging that numerical descriptions of minorities can hide as much as they reveal.