On national dress and the problem of authenticity in Ulysses

This article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.     

The Disappearing Body

Although Chile was the first country in Latin America to report cases of anorexia nervosa in 1982, the issue had already gained notoriety during the 1970s, the decade when North American policies and the United States capitalist economy began to infiltrate Chilean society. The category of eating disorders, which may be manifested in a variety of diseases (such as anorexia, bulimia, and compulsory overeating), has only recently become the focus of Chilean literature and, in turn, literary criticism, which has primarily focused on the metaphorical interpretations of these illnesses. One novel that treats the multifaceted manifestations of eating disorders, not merely the metaphorical representations, is Marcela Serrano's Antigua vida mía (1995). The societal demands of unhealthy body images have been the concern of feminist criticism such as Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993). In Marcela Serrano's novel the treatment of eating disorders reflects the evolving expectations on women in contemporary Chilean culture. Through the application of Bordo's analysis of the cultural pressures and significances of body expectations, this article delves into the various manifestations of unhealthy eating practices in Serrano's Antigua vida mía and reveals the self-destructive and self-isolating consequences of an often-occulted illness while also recognizing that by treating body image and illness, the author engages in a cultural discourse regarding the expectations and repercussions of cultural demands.     

AGAINST POWER? DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN ACQUISITIVE RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION

Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. This article argues for an analytical distinction between such strategies of capturing power on behalf of those without it, and strategies for reducing power differentials directly or annihilating the capacity to accumulate power. We adopt the analytical term subversion to describe these latter efforts to reduce the intensity of, and undermine the capacity to reproduce or deepen, power relationships. Rather than focusing on redistribution or inversion of asymmetrical power relations to benefit the disempowered, subversive strategies work toward decreasing the possibility of accumulating power or, in the extreme case, completely evacuating existing unequal power relations. Thinking about political engagement in terms of limiting the possibility of asymmetrical power relationships (regardless of who holds that power) helps to illuminate a distinction between reactive politics against injustice and proactive politics that pursue alternative, increasingly just conceptual norms. We draw on threads in critical, political, and urban geographies to articulate a particularly geographic concept of “fleeing‐in‐place” as subversive resistance to hegemony, the undermining of the possibility of asymmetrical socio‐spatial power relations within existing contemporary political economies. We propose strategies for research that better highlight the differences between resistance and subversion.