Rosi Braidotti
Biography
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Rosi.Braidotti/personal/ [Jun 2005]Is Metal to Flesh like Masculine to Feminine?
The challenge that the hybrid, the anomalous, the monstrous others throw in our direction is a dissociation from the sensibility we have inherited form the nineteenth century, one which pathologized and criminalized differences. Conservative cultural critics even today tend to view anomalies or deviant differences as dangerous signs of decadence, that is to say both morally inadequate and epistemologically bankrupt. This is for me one of the clear signs of that deficit of imaginary energy, or downright symbolic misery, which is one of the defining features of postmodernity. I have argued that to overcome such a crisis new conceptual creativity is necessary. In this chapter I would like to argue that we approach the anomalous and monstrously different others not as a sign of pejoration, but as the unfolding of virtual possibilities that point to positive developments and alternatives. Re-formulated in Deleuze's language expresses simultaneously two contradictory tendencies, yearnings or political passions. As a reactive or negative reaction, it expresses the fear and the anxieties of the Majority, embodied in the dominant subject-position of the male, white, heterosexual, urbanised property-owning speaker of a standard language, at a historical time when His certainties are crumbling. As an active, or affirmative and empowering act, it expresses the political passions of all the subjects, Majority-based or minority-inscribed, who have opted for transformative politics and processes of becoming. Contrary to most Orthodox deleuzians, I think the simultaneity of these patterns of becoming, which are dissymetrical in their starting positions, also engender equally dissymetrical expressions. The political economy of fear and terror, therefore, does not affect the Majority and his minorities in the same manner. --http://www.chairetmetal.com/cm06/braidotti-complet.htm [2003]
Nomadic Subjects Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Gender and Culture) - Rosi Braidotti
Rosi Braidotti was born in Italy, raised in Austraia, and educated in Paris and is professor of women's studies at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Nomadic Subjects argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory. Braidotti's personal, surprising, and lively prose insists on an integration of feminism in mainstream discourse. The essays explore problems that are central to current feminist debates including Western epistemology's relation to the "woman question," feminism and biomedical ethics, European feminism, and how American feminists might relate to European movements.
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