A complexa filosofia de Giorgio Agamben convoca-nos a compreender a crise dos atuais modelos político-governamentais e a hodierna lógica da segurança que, sob a doutrina do medo orquestrado, visa à eliminação dos não-integráveis, como igualmente nos convida a abarcar na defesa de uma nova ontologia política além da tradição da soberania e do direito. Do confronto entre as conceituações semânticas do termo vida e da relação desta com o poder soberano, inclusive numa sociedade biopolítica de normalização, emerge o protagonista da obra agambeniana, a vida nua. Uma vida que não é inauguração moderna, mas atividade originária do poder soberano, quer dizer, uma vida que pode ser detectada tanto na pólis e na civitas - na figura do homo sacer -, assim como no totalitarismo moderno e, rasteiramente, na democracia em que vivemos. Trata-se de uma vida absolutamente matável e exposta à morte que, fundada numa relação de exclusão inclusiva, isto é, de abandono, revela o verdadeiro vínculo social. O que une vida e lei, violência e norma, é o estado de exceção. A norma se aplica à exceção desaplicando-se: a força-de-lei exercida no estado de exceção não põe, nem conserva, o direito, mas o conserva suspendendo-o e o põe excetuando-se. Uma figura em que factum e ius tornam-se indiscerníveis e homines sacri são produzidos a esmo; um espaço onde distinções políticas tradicionais como direita e esquerda, público e privado, perdem sua clareza e inteligibilidade. Uma indiscernibilidade que pode ser materializada no campo, seja de refugiados, seja de concentração, seja o hoje vigente e ainda inominado, de modo que o campo reflete o próprio paradigma da atualidade. Esta é a era da exceção em permanência. O caminho para a desativação dessa relação é a profanação, figura em que se busca uma nova forma-de-vida que não seja inaugurada pela lembrança teológica da política soberana e do direito, mas que reflita uma comunidade que vem capaz de desativar a máquina biopolítica produtora da vida nua e torne inoperante o atual conceito de político-jurídico: uma nova comunidade que pense além da soberania, do bando soberano e do próprio direito. Trata-se de uma comunidade de singularidades, sem identidade, sem propriedades e destinos, mas que seja pura potencialidade, que seja em si como ela é, quer dizer, que não possua qualquer tarefa enquanto fim, mas tão somente meios sem fins. / The complex philosophy of Giorgio Agamben summons us to review the crisis of the existing political-juridical models and the on-going governmental security rationale, which, based on a pre-oriented administration of fear, aims at eliminating those somehow non-adapted, as well as to join a defence towards a new political ontology beyond the tradition of sovereignty and law. Through the confront of semantically distinct definitions of life and its relation with the sovereign power, including under a biopolitical normalizing society, emerges the protagonist of Agamben`s work, the bare life. A life that is not a modern phenomena but the original activity of the sovereign power, that is, a life exposed to death that can be found either in the pólis or the civitas - in the form of homo sacer or in the modern totalitarianism as well as the democracy that we live in. A life that is permanently subject to death and, founded on an inclusive exclusion relation, that is, a relation of abandonment, exposes the real social bound. The state of exception links life and law, violence and norm. The law is applied through its own withdrawal: the force-oflaw exercised in the state of exception does not posit nor conserve the law, but conserves it through its suspension and posits it through the exception. A place where factum and ius are brought into conjunction and homines sacri are freely produced, a space where traditional political categories such as right and left, public and private, loses clearness and intelligibility. A zone of indistinction materialized in the camp, either of refugees or concentration camps or those in full force and effect and yet unnamed. The camp is the contemporary political paradigm and this is the era in which the exception becomes the rule. The way out to deactivate such relation is to profane, a political task in search for a new form-of-life that abolishes any remembrance of theological sovereign politics and law and that reflects a coming community able to turn inoperative the biopolitical machine producer of bare life: a new community that thinks beyond sovereignty, the sovereign band and the law itself. A community composed of singularities, with no identity nor properties or destinies, but pure potentiality. A community free of means in search for an end, but solely a community of pure means without ends.

While other texts focus on theory, Coming Full Circle emphasizes the how-to of the discipline, providing students with a clear roadmap for involvement in service fields. Written in a student-friendly, accessible style, the book combines academic instruction with participation through service. It encourages students to reflect on their service experiences, and to grow as responsive citizens. More than a textbook, Coming Full Circle is also an effective aid to self-awareness and personal development. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1038/thumbnail.jpg

Over the past 20 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals have made progress in attaining the same basic civil rights as heterosexual individuals. As in other civil rights movements, the college campus has played an important role. The LGBT community participates in academic and campus life, and numerous colleges are developing and supporting an inclusive, safe, and respectful culture. However, bias and prejudice continue to occur. While researchers have studied the repercussions of prejudice, discrimination, and low evaluation scores for LGBT faculty, little research has been done to explore professional identity and activism in LGBT faculty at traditional 4-year universities. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how the narratives of LGBT faculty at traditional 4-year universities inform the experience of professional identity and activism. Using social identity theory and the concept of activism as conceptual frameworks, 13 faculty from college campuses across the United States were interviewed. The data were analyzed using NVivo software and hand coding. Ten themes were identified: coming out, identity, gender fluidity, stigmatization, campus climate, blatant prejudice and discrimination, resources, advocacy, responsibility, and positive experiences. Participants described professional identity as being fused with their sexual and social identity and described activism as an obligation. The results of this study will be shared in the scholarly and professional communities to support civil rights, activism, and advocacy for the LBGT community on campuses. Future research is recommended regarding the struggles of coming/being out in the academic workplace, as well as activism for LGBT issues on college campuses.

The focus of this thesis is the lived experience of 80 Australian gay men in the second half of the twentieth century. The oldest man in the sample was born in 1922 and the youngest in 1980. Their understanding of what it was to be gay is historically contingent, for their lives spanned the greater part of the twentieth century: from when homosexuality was illegal through the less repressive but no less problematic eras of gay liberation and the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Qualitative in approach, the thesis was based on oral history interviews. Interviewees were asked set questions about their social, affective and sexual lives. The sample comprised an old cohort of 22 men, a middle cohort of 30 men, and a young cohort of 28 men. The majority of interviewees were of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic decent. The exceptions were Aboriginal men, and the children of migrants to Australia from South-east Asia and Southern Europe. Interviewees' personal narratives included their experiences of the repression of the Cold War period, the exuberance, and, for some, personal confusion of gay liberation and the disco culture of the 1970s, and the trauma of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Through their life stories, the men in this sample illustrated the significant shifts in sexual attitudes and culture that Australia experienced in the latter part of the twentieth century. Aspects of the lives examined included the men's experience of coming out and development of their sexual identity, their social and affective lives, and their involvement in the gay 'scene' and gay community.

Der Sammelband umfasst die Beiträge des 10. Arbeitstreffens slavistischer Nachwuchswissenschaftler im Rahmen des Jungen Forums Slavistischer Literaturwissenschaft (JFSL), das vom 26. bis zum 28. März 2010 an der Universität Trier stattfand. Präsentiert wird ein Überblick über aktuelle Forschungsrichtungen und -themen der deutschsprachigen Slavistik, der trotz der weiter bestehenden Dominanz der Russistik eine zunehmende Tendenz zu Studien über verschiedene slavische Literaturen zeigt. Die Beiträge lassen sich in drei große Bereiche differenzieren: Der erste Teil ,Texturen' beinhaltet literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, die sich mit den textimannenten Effekten literarischer Werke auseinandersetzen. Der Text als Gewebe wird auf seine Fadendichte und -verkreuzung wie Entstehung und Tradierung bestimmter Motive und Topoi, Decodierung intertextueller Referenzen oder Allegorisierungs- und Symbolisierungprozesse hin analysiert. Der zweite Teil vereinigt unter dem Begriff ,Identitäten' Arbeiten aus dem Bereich der kulturwissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft, die mit Geschlechter-, Raum-, Erinnerungs- und postkolonialen Konzepten den Fragen der literarischen Identitätsgenese nachgehen. Untersucht werden ästhetische Umsetzungen von Machtdispositiven, Hierarchiebildungen und Ausschlussmechanismen. Die Beiträge des dritten Teils ,Theorien' reflektieren entweder die Literaturforschung und ihre Ästhetiktheorien oder unternehmen einen Theorieimport aus verschiedenen Disziplinen wie Philosophie, strukturalistische Psychoanalyse, Neuro-, Geschichts- oder Translationswissenschaften, die sich für die Analyse literarischer Texte als fruchtbar erweisen und damit das Literaturverständnis erweitern. / This collection covers the articles compiled in the 10th workshop of Slavonic Study PhD-Students and postgraduates within the framework of the ‘Young Forum of Slavonic Literary Studies’ (JFSL) which took place at Trier University between March 26 and March 28 2010. Participants presented an overview of the current fields of research in German language Slavonic studies, which, despite a prevalence of Russian Studies, shows a growing trend towards multi-Slavonic literature studies. The articles can be divided into three different categories: The first category, textures, comprises literary studies which expose anticipated text effects of literary works. Text is analyzed in the context of its fabric density, for instance, development of particular motives and topics, and the decoding of intertextual references or allegories and symbology. The second category, identities, aggregates works from culturally-oriented Literary studies, which follow questions of the literary genesis of identity concerning gender, space, memory and post-colonialism. Here, the aesthetic shifts of power disposition, demonstrative hierarchy and the mechanisms of exclusion are evaluated. The third category, theories, reflects literary research and its theories of the aesthetic or importation of theory from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, structural psychoanalysis, neuroscience, history and translation studies, which show themselves as fertile literary texts for analysis and as such may extend our understandings of literature.

This dissertation concerns Sveriges Kommunistiska Parti (SKP) [the Swedish Communist Party] – in 1967 renamed Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna (VPK) [the Left Party – the Communists] and in 1990 renamed Vänsterpartiet (V) [the Left Party] – and the Party's process of coming to terms with history and its communist legacy. The aim of the study is to describe and analyse the SKP/VPK/V's process of coming to terms with history for the period 1956-2006, and to set out and problematise the driving forces and constraining mechanisms of this process. The theoretical framework of the study consists of Gunnar Sjöblom’s theory about party strategies of political parties in multi-party systems and Michael Freeden’s conceptual approach to ideology analysis.      During the period of study the SKP/VPK/V has, like no other political party in Sweden, been ascribed historical guilt regarding its own party history but also regarding the effects of world communism. The Party has thus found itself in a situation where it has had history as an adversary. The process of coming to terms with history has mainly revolved around three issues: independence (1956-1977), international ties (1977-1989) and a broadening beyond the communist tradition (1986-2006). The internal debate within the Party has linked these issues to calls for change aimed at ridding the party of what is considered undesirable elements of the Communist legacy. By analysing the arguments pursued in favour of these calls, it is possible to pick out a number of the driving forces behind the Party's process of coming to terms with history, namely an ambition to obtain vote maximisation, programme realisation and maximisation of parliamentary influence. The urge to distance the Party from certain aspects of its communist past has thus been related to fundamental goals that political parties in multi-party systems seek to obtain.      The results of the dissertation show that it is possible to pick out five main constraining mechanisms in the Party's process of coming to terms with history. 1) The safeguarding of Party cohesion. 2) The safeguarding of the distinctive character of the Party.  3) The need to resist external pressure. 4) The desire to avoid unfair apportioning of blame. 5) The safeguarding of the right to define the substance of one's own ideology. The existence of these constraining mechanisms help to explain why the process of coming to terms with history lingered on for several decades, and also why it seems to have been a process of such complexity for the Swedish Communist and Post-Communist Party.

Les deux dernières décennies ont été marquées par des changements sociaux et législatifs en ce qui a trait aux droits des personnes de minorités sexuelles. Des jeunes endossent maintenant une identité gaie, lesbienne ou bisexuelle (GLB) et ils la divulguent à leurs parents (coming out) de plus en plus tôt, souvent à l'adolescence. Ils sont alors confrontés aux réactions parentales et à l'impact des ces réactions sur leur adaptation. Cette thèse se penche sur l'expérience respective de jeunes GLB et de leurs parents relativement au coming out des jeunes à la famille d'origine. Elle examine, d'une part, les conditions familiales associées au coming out des jeunes GLB. D'autre part, elle examine la nature et la valence des réactions parentales post coming out et leurs associations avec le développement identitaire, l'adaptation psychologique ainsi que la présence de facteurs de risque pour la santé chez les jeunes GLB. Le premier article vise à 1) examiner les liens entre la qualité des relations parents-enfant durant l'enfance et le dévoilement de l'orientation sexuelle des jeunes GLB à la famille; 2) comparer les jeunes qui ont fait leur coming out à ceux qui ne l'ont pas fait quant à leur adaptation identitaire et psychologique, ainsi qu'aux facteurs de risques pour la santé et 3) examiner la contribution unique des relations parent-enfant passées et actuelles à l'adaptation identitaire et psychologique, ainsi qu'aux facteurs de risques pour la santé des jeunes. L'échantillon est composé de 111 jeunes GLB qui ont fait leur coming out à leurs parents et de 53 jeunes qui ne l'ont pas fait. Comparativement aux jeunes qui n'ont pas fait leur coming out, les jeunes qui l'ont fait rapportent avoir eu des attirances pour une personne du même sexe à un plus jeune âge, de même que davantage d'acceptation des parents et moins de rejet du père dans l'enfance. Les jeunes qui ont fait leur coming out rapportent des niveaux plus faibles de difficultés d'adaptation identitaire et psychologique ainsi qu'une prévalence moins élevée de facteurs de risque pour la santé. Ces résultats suggèrent qu'un environnement familial sécurisant durant l'enfance crée un contexte facilitant le coming out à l'adolescence. Par ailleurs, parmi les jeunes qui ont fait leur coming out, le rejet du père dans l'enfance ainsi que l'acceptation et le rejet parental actuel prédisent les difficultés d'adaptation identitaire et psychologique, tandis que le rejet familial actuel prédit la présence de facteurs de risque pour la santé chez les jeunes GLB. Cet article a été accepté pour publication dans le Journal of GLBT Family Studies. Le deuxième article de cette thèse vise à examiner la nature et la valence des réactions parentales au coming out el leurs associations avec le bien-être des jeunes GLB. Il répond à certaines limites soulevées dans le premier article et dans les recherches antérieures. D'une part, il collige des données indépendantes provenant de jeunes GLB et de leurs parents. L'échantillon est composé de 53 dyades parent-enfant. D'autre part, il utilise un devis de recherche à la fois qualitatif et quantitatif. L'analyse qualitative d'entrevues de parents permet d'abord d'explorer la nature des réactions parentales, au-delà de la dichotomie positive / négative. Les dix types de réactions parentales qui ont émergé de l'analyse qualitative sont à la base du système de codification des réactions parentales au coming out. Les résultats de l'analyse factorielle montrent que les réactions parentales peuvent être classifiées sous trois facteurs : le soutien apporté à l'enfant, la détresse exprimée par le parent et les doutes du parent quant à la stabilité de l'orientation sexuelle de l'enfant. Les réactions parentales ne diffèrent pas en fonction du sexe du jeune ou celui du parent. L'analyse quantitative des liens entre les facteurs des réactions parentales et l'adaptation des jeunes montre que de faibles niveaux de soutien et des niveaux élevés de difficultés exprimées par la mère sont liées à des difficultés identitaires et de la détresse psychologique chez les jeunes GLB. Quant au père, de faibles niveaux de soutien, des niveaux élevés de difficultés ainsi que des doutes quant à l'orientation sexuelle de l'enfant sont liés aux idéations suicidaires et à l'utilisation de drogues par les jeunes GLB. Ces résultats suggèrent des pistes d'intervention pour les cliniciens travaillant au près des jeunes GLB et de leurs parents. Les interventions devraient être conduites auprès des deux parents puisque leurs réactions sont liées à différentes composantes de l'adaptation de leur enfant. Cet article a été soumis pour publication au périodique Sex Roles. Suivant la présentation des deux articles de cette thèse, une discussion générale résume et intègre les principaux résultats, souligne notre contribution unique, note les limites de l'étude, puis propose des pistes de recherche future. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : coming out, orientation sexuelle, famille, parent, gai, lesbienne, bisexuel, relations familiales, adaptation, identité sexuelle

Lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender young people face a landscape of prejudice and intolerance when first coming to terms with their identities. In these moments of confusion, they often turn to their parents for support, yet parents often lack the information and resources necessary to support their LGBT child. The outcomes project interviews LGBT people about their "coming out" experience, and presents their video interviews a multi-platform website. The interviews appear alongside written accounts that highlight common themes encountered in research. The website also links to well-sourced resources for parents coming to terms with a child's disclosure. By telling these stories in a context that encourages an empathetic response, The outcomes project aims to give parents the information and understanding they need to support their LGBT child. / text

The literary utopia is often accused of being an outmoded genre, a graveyard for failed social movements. However, utopian literature is a surprisingly resilient genre, evolving from the static, descriptive anatomies of the Renaissance utopias to the novelized utopian romances of the late nineteenth century and the self-reflexive critical utopias of the 1970s. The literary utopia adapts to the needs of the moment: what form(s) best represent the fears and desires of our current historical period? In this dissertation I perform a close reading of three exemplary texts: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). While I address topics specific to each text, my main focus is on the texts’ depictions of utopia and their spatialized narrative forms. In Stand on Zanzibar Brunner locates the utopian impulse in three registers—the political/bureaucratic, the technical/scientific, and the human(e)—and explores how their interplay constitutes the utopian space. In Always Coming Home Le Guin renovates the classical literary utopia, problematizing its uncritical advocacy of the “Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist-West” but preserving much of the older utopia’s form. In Cloud Atlas the networked narrative structure reflects and enables the heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, and processual utopian communities depicted in the novel. In these science fictional works the spatialized techniques of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and collage —commonly associated with a loss of historical depth and difference—are used to create utopian spaces founded on contingency and human choice. I contend that science fiction is a historical genre, one that is invested in representing societies as contingent historical totalities. Science fiction’s generic tendencies modify the context that a spatialized narrative form functions in, and in changing the context changes its effects. By utilizing a spatialized narrative form to embody a contingent practice, Brunner, Le Guin, and Mitchell cast the future—and the present—as historical, as something that can be acted upon and changed: they have provided us with strategies for envisioning better futures and, potentially, for mobilizing our visions of the future for positive change in the present.

Most girls in Gopher Slough, Florida, worry about whether GSHS will win the next football game (they won't), when their boyfriends will take them muddin', and how many times they can sneak cigarettes behind the bleachers before they get thrown into in-school suspension. Libby Hoyer is not most girls. Instead, Libby is worried about her slipping grades, especially in Geometry, where she can barely keep her head up long enough to take the weekly quizzes. She's concerned about losing her friendship with her best (only) friend, Bobbi Jo, who's distracted with her own Aber-zombie boyfriend, and she's unsure of how to define her new relationship with Neil, a mysterious boy from her class who is not as carefree as he pretends to be. Libby is also troubled by the fact that she can't seem to remember her distant father, even though he only left five years ago. Everyone else, it seems, is worried about Libby's sporadic eating habits. If she continues to refuse to eat or to purge anything she's forced to eat, she might disappear. But Libby isn't afraid of disappearing. She's afraid of being seen.