Refine
Year of publication
- 2022 (3)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Liste (2)
- Reduktion (2)
- Form (1)
- Form (aesthetics) (1)
- Identity (1)
- Identity politics (1)
- Identität (1)
- Identitätspolitik (1)
- Komplexität (1)
- Liberalismus (1)
- Lists (1)
- Oppression (1)
- Queer theory (1)
- Queer-Theorie (1)
- Rhetorical criticism (1)
- Rhetorical simplicity (1)
- Rhetorik (1)
- Social complexity (1)
- Social transformation (1)
- Sozialer Wandel (1)
- Strukturelle Diskriminierung (1)
- Unterdrückung (1)
- hooks, bell (1)
- Ästhetik (1)
On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
Feminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought. Yet, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. This chapter focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion. Often miming reductive reference forms (the dictionary, the A-Z list), these texts and the questions they raise help to rethink the place of 'identity' across gender and sexuality studies.