Author Archives
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Gender Order
The gender order is a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a… Read More ›
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Psycholinguistics: An Essay
A BRIEF HISTORY Interest in the mind and language both date back for millennia, with a documented history of language study going back 2,500 years and spread across many cultures (including India, China, Mesopotamia, and Greece). Documented interest in the… Read More ›
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Assemblage and Asseblage Theory
“Assemblage” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to counter all claims to presence or center in favor of the many material ways that objects come together over time. As they explain in A Thousand Plateaus (1987),… Read More ›
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Third Wave Feminism
Third wave feminism has numerous definitions, but perhaps is best described in the most general terms as the feminism of a younger generation of women who acknowledge the legacy of second wave feminism, but also identify what they see as… Read More ›
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Second Wave Feminism
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
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First Wave Feminism
The historical development of feminism (especially in Britain and the USA) is commonly divided into several key periods, some characterised by a relative absence of feminist thought and mobilisation, and others by the sustained growth both of feminist criticism and… Read More ›
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Identity Politics/ the Politics of Identity
The utopian vision of ‘sisterhood’ – the collecting together of all women under the same political banner – was in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in feminism and the emergent Women’s Liberation Movement. It was inevitably going to come… Read More ›
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Post-Feminism: An Essay
It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context… Read More ›
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Lesbian Continuum: A Brief Note
The ‘lesbian continuum’ was a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich in her pathfinding essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980, reprinted in Rich 1986). Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ here extends the definition of lesbian beyond that of sexual identity… Read More ›
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The Other, The Big Other, and Othering
Critical theorists are particularly committed to opposing binary oppositions where one side is seen as privileged over or defining itself against an Other (often capitalized), for example, male/female, Occident/Orient, center/margin. Through such binary oppositions, Homi Bhabha explains, “The Other loses… Read More ›
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Postcolonial Magical Realism
The majority of magical realist writing can be described as postcolonial. That is to say much of it is set in a postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. As… Read More ›
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Introduction to Comics Studies
Although both film and comics in their currently recognized forms emerged in the nineteenth century, film acquired much earlier critical academic recognition, even though as early as the 1830s the comic strip began to distinguish itself from already established fields… Read More ›
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Introduction to Whiteness Studies
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
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Hegemony
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated… Read More ›
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Glocalization
First popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, and later developed by Zygmunt Bauman, the term ‘glocal’ and the process noun ‘glocalization’ are formed by blending the words ‘global’ and ‘local’. Both terms… Read More ›
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Fanonism
A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Fanon’s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism… Read More ›
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Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. Although, as Diamond and Orenstein note, ecofeminism is really ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 13), it first came to prominence… Read More ›
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Decolonization
Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is… Read More ›
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Paul Gilroy and His Theory of Black Atlantic
The term Black Atlantic was employed first by the Black British critic Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 1993). In that study, he addressed the cultural and historical linkages, which unified the peoples of African descent on both sides of the ocean that… Read More ›
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Binarism in Post-colonial Theory
From ‘binary’, meaning a combination of two things, a pair, ‘two’, duality (OED), this is a widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular sets of meanings in post-colonial theory. The concern with… Read More ›
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