While the term “art theory” may well have been employed from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment as a means of validating certain philosophical practices of art, art historians in the second half of this century have become particularly uncomfortable with… Read More ›
Discourse theorists take discourse, rather than language, as their domain in part because of difficulties with the latter term. The standard definition of “language” in linguistics (a set of units and the rules for combining them to make well-formed sentences)… Read More ›
Sociolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to society, is a relative newcomer to the linguistic fold. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, largely as a result of William Labov’s work in America, and Peter Trudgill’s in Britain, that… Read More ›
The study of value, called axiology, has three main branches: ethics, concerning the morally good; political theory, concerning the social good; and aesthetics, concerning the beautiful, or taste. One might perhaps add another branch, pragmatics, which concerns the utilitarian good… Read More ›
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a model intellectual for the twentieth century. He was a multitalented thinker who not only created several philosophical systems but also wrote major novels and plays, essays on literary theory and art criticism, and some methodologically… Read More ›
Critical Theory is, by and large, concerned with the critique of modernity, modernization, and the modern state. The first generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm – came together in the early… Read More ›
The concept of the ‘imagined community’ is most obviously associated with the work of Benedict Anderson on the ‘nation’. For Anderson, the nation is an ‘imagined community’ and national identity a construction assembled through symbols and rituals in relation to… Read More ›
Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998) works as a starting point for the discussion of masculinity studies since this text considers the fundamentals of what constitutes masculinity and how the paradigm of female masculinity fits in. Halberstam begins with the assertion of… Read More ›
Until recently, the body has been either ignored or made marginal in philosophical, political and cultural theory. Thus, in philosophy, human agency and the identity of the person were traditionally seen to lie in the mind. The mind (or soul)… Read More ›
Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the most renowned member of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Born in 1929 in Dusseldorf, Habermas wrote his Ph.D dissertation (published in 1954) on the conflict between the Absolute and… Read More ›
In a society dominated by production, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) argues, the difference between use-value and exchange-value has some pertinence. Certainly, for a time, Marx was able to provide a relatively plausible explanation of the growth of capitalism using just these… Read More ›
A theory of the operation of the world economic, social and political system, formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974a; 1974b). The chief assertion of this theory is that the capitalist system has been the world economic system since the sixteenth century… Read More ›
During the 1990s, a group of Australian feminists (e.g., Grosz 1994; Grosz and Probyn 1995; Gatens 1996; Kirby 1997) developed a branch of sexual difference theory known as ‘corporeal feminism.’ Drawing on Irigaray, this group has argued that feminist researchers… Read More ›
The concept of a stereotype was introduced into social science in 1922, when Walter Lippman used it to describe the ‘typical picture’ that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social group (Macrae et al. 1996). A stereotype can… Read More ›
Masculinity is the set of social practices and cultural representations associated with being a man. The plural ‘masculinities’ is also used in recognition that ways of being a man and cultural representations of/about men vary, both historically and culturally, between… Read More ›
Men’s movements emerged at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the groupings gathered together under this umbrella title were as heterogeneous as early radical feminist groups. In a sense they all seemed to be a reaction to… Read More ›
The word ‘heterosexism’ derives directly from the feminist creation of the term ‘sexism’ during the late 1960s. The first usage of the term heterosexism is given as 1979 by the Oxford English Dictionary and it is defined as ‘prejudice and… Read More ›
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 ›
German-born sociologist, who held academic posts in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ghana and the Netherlands, Norbert Elias‘s (1897-1990) approach to sociological inquiry is characterised by the use of highly detailed historical study, so that even theoretical questions are addressed in… Read More ›
Anthony Giddens (1938- ) is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least… Read More ›