BiblioVault - Books about Late Capitalism

Ludic Feminism and After

Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism

Teresa L. Ebert

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Following the equal-rights struggles of the 1960s, feminism became involved in the theoretical problems posed by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, queer theory, postcolonialism, and Marxism. After years of debate about whether feminism can or should accommodate these other modes of contemporary thought, Ludic Feminism and After provides a way of making a leap forward. Teresa Ebert rethinks such notions as "pleasure," "essentialism," "performance," "labor," "class," "body," and "difference" through readings of influential texts by feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Rigoberta Mench, Donna Haraway, Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, and Teresa de Lauretis. She not only engages the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, but also moves beyond the academic arena to address the "backlash" phenomenon and the writings of "popular" critics like Camille Paglia. Ebert argues that the crisis of feminist theory in postmodernity is about the very meaning of politics and the possibility for effective social change. The future of feminism and feminist theory, believes Ebert, lies in reclaiming radical knowledge(s) that have been obscured by what she calls "ludic theory": the branch of postmodernism that sees politics primarily as a linguistic and textual practice, and focuses on subverting cultural representations of difference. She argues instead for the possibilities of a "resistance postmodernism" in feminism: theory grounded in the social struggle over the "material differences" of labor and access to economic means and resources. Ebert's provocative and powerful book challenges ludic feminism within the academy, and outlines transformative politics and feminist theory that can address material crises, such as the international trade in young women for prostitution, dowry murders in India, and the genocidal rape in Bosnia. The author seeks to go beyond dominant theories to open a radically new space for an active third wave feminism. Ludic Feminism and After is sure to be influential and controversial.

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The Neoliberal Deluge

Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans

Cedric Johnson

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Katrina was not just a hurricane. The death, destruction, and misery wreaked on New Orleans cannot be blamed on nature’s fury alone. This volume of essays locates the root causes of the 2005 disaster squarely in neoliberal restructuring and examines how pro-market reforms are reshaping life, politics, economy, and the built environment in New Orleans.

The authors—a diverse group writing from the disciplines of sociology, political science, education, public policy, and media theory—argue that human agency and public policy choices were more at fault for the devastation and mass suffering experienced along the Gulf Coast than were sheer forces of nature. The harrowing images of flattened homes, citizens stranded on rooftops, patients dying in makeshift hospitals, and dead bodies floating in floodwaters exposed the moral and political contradictions of neoliberalism—the ideological rejection of the planner state and the active promotion of a new order of market rule.

Many of these essays offer critical insights on the saga of postdisaster reconstruction. Challenging triumphal narratives of civic resiliency and universal recovery, the authors bring to the fore pitched battles over labor rights, gender and racial justice, gentrification, the development of city master plans, the demolition of public housing, policing, the privatization of public schools, and roiling tensions between tourism-based economic growth and neighborhood interests. The contributors also expand and deepen more conventional critiques of “disaster capitalism” to consider how the corporate mobilization of philanthropy and public good will are remaking New Orleans in profound and pernicious ways.

Contributors: Barbara L. Allen, Virginia Polytechnic U; John Arena, CUNY College of Staten Island; Adrienne Dixson, Ohio State U; Eric Ishiwata, Colorado State U; Avis Jones-Deweever, National Council of Negro Women; Chad Lavin, Virginia Polytechnic U; Paul Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Linda Robertson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Chris Russill, Carleton U; Kanchana Ruwanpura, U of Southampton; Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Wayne State U; Geoffrey Whitehall, Acadia U.

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Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson

Duke University Press, 1992

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

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Tissue Economies

Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism

Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell

Duke University Press, 2006

As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines—are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who receives it, and who profits—or does not—from the transaction. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell survey the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human tissue, explaining the complex questions raised and suggesting likely developments. Comparing contemporary tissue economies in the United Kingdom and United States, they explore and complicate the distinction that has dominated practice and policy for several decades: the distinction between tissue as a gift to be exchanged in a transaction separate from the commercial market and tissue as a commodity to be traded for profit.

Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.

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