The doctoral thesis Who Am I? Subjectivities in the Society of Accountability aims to demonstrate that accountability is one of the most powerful processes of subjectivation in our contemporary era. The background is constituted by ordinary daily practices, born from the propagation of digital media in the last twenty years. Accountability is defined as the peculiar anthropotechnic that derives from the extension of the subject in the form of the account. Account is defined as every extension of the subject in the digital world, so that these extensions are univocally attributable to a singular physical body of a singular human being. The concept of subjectivity is considered as outlined by Michel Foucault in the period 1977-1984. The dissertation also aims to demonstrate that the society of control, investigated by Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, finds its present fulfillment in the form of the society of accountability. Accountability is considered in three moments, connected by a circular movement instead of a causal sequence. The first moment describes how dispositives act on subjects. The scene of address is constituted by the request of performativity made by dispositives to the subject. This request takes place in the account, to be understood as the interface between dispositives and subjects. Secondly, the same process is taken in consideration from the point of view of the subject, who is invited to answer the question: Who am I? Thus the subject understands him/herself as a subjectivity without ground, because the hermeneutics of the self, derived from dispositives, finds the foreclosure of the referent as its foundation. In a third moment accountability is considered from the point of view of the statements (énoncés). The conversion of statements into information, and the statistical inferences operated on it (basically, the processes related to big data), are the focus of this moment. The outcome of this analysis is a second hermeneutics of the subject, characterised by the discourse of the master. Convergences and divergences between this (digital) hermeneutics, the Christian hermeneutics derived from the confession and the Cartesian moment are explored in order to outline the actual accountability as pastoral power and discourse of the master at the same time. In conclusion, accountability is considered as a possible ethics. If anomie and anonymity are excluded as far as they exclude the scene of address, and consequently the very possibility of existence of a bios, the valorisation of opacity is identified as the grounding of a possible ethical action based on freedom, an exercise of freedom to be understood as resilience to the complete panoptical visibility and the consequential proceduralisation of the scene of address.

Este trabalho apresenta o resultado de questionamentos sobre o atendimento clínico contextualizado em Instituição de Saúde. Tem por objetivo pesquisar as bases teóricas dos grupos terapêuticos, analisar e explicitar os fatores que fundamentam os grupos como campo de intervenções terapêuticas, por meio do estudo de grupos, especificamente dos grupos terapêuticos.A pesquisa é sustentada no referencial psicanalítico, cujo objeto de estudo é o Inconsciente e o eixo clínico está apoiado no conceito de transferência.O eixo teórico fundamental é a constituição da subjetividade e suas relações com a intersubjetividade, conceitos que são abrangidos em um estudo longitudinal no pensamento freudiano. Outro eixo, é o esclarecimento das fontes epistemológicas de grupos, especificamente as do campo da psicanálise, abordadas por meio de autores contemporâneos, visando à compreensão da noção de intersubjetividade e dos fenômenos grupais. O conteúdo teórico desenvolvido é ilustrado por dados obtidos de recortes do material clínico dos atendimentos de grupos terapêuticos realizados no Hospital do Servidor Público Estadual “Francisco Morato de Oliveira".Este estudo demonstra que as relações do sujeito psíquico com o outro semelhante podem propiciar alterações intrapsíquicas que contribuem para o tratamento do sofrimento humano. / This work presents the results of an inquiry on the clinic services in the context of a health institution. Its aim is to research the theoretical basis of the therapeutic groups, analyse and explicit the factors that establish the group as a field of therapeutic intervention through the study of these groups, specifically the therapeutic ones.The research is founded on the psychoanalytical referential whose object of study is the unconscious where the clinical axis is supported on the transfer concept.The fundamental theoretical axis is the constitution of the subjectivity and its relationship with intersubjectivity, concepts embodied in a longitudinal study of the Freudian thinking. Another axis is the clarifying of the epistemological sources of the groups, specifically those of the psycoanalytical science, focused through the contemporary authors, seeking the comprehension of the notion of intersubjectivity and group phenomena. The theoretical content developed is illustrated by data extracted from cut-outs of clinic materials collected in the day-to-day practice of the therapeutical teams of the State Public Hospital “Francisco Morato de Oliveira".This study demonstrates that the relationship of the psychic subject with the other may bring on intrapsychic changes that contribute to the treatment of the human suffering.

This thesis is an analysis of female prophecy as it is constituted, represented or performed in seventeenth-century texts. I consider both the way in which prophecy is socially constructed and the role of prophetic experience in the development of feminine subjectivity. I argue that interpreting prophecy within the context of psychopathology or feminism (to take two examples of critical practice) colludes in the early modern objectification of women's speech and somatic experience. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that prophecy needs to be understood as a media event and as a site of discursive proliferation. In this study, I examine texts which participate in the explication of a prophetic event and interrogate their intentions and functions. I suggest that an inclusive reading of prophecy allows the critic to recuperate women's agency. My study of prophecy combines the seventeenth-century notion of prophecy as a category for diverse linguistic and bodily manifestations with an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the prophetic text. In the course of this thesis I consider: 1. the work of various scholars who have attempted to explicate the relations between gender and radical religiosity; 2. how a comparison between hysteria and prophecy illuminates the primacy of psychopathology in the interpretation of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women's experience; 3. the interplay between scriptural models of prophecy and early modern biblical exegesis; 4. the role of texts in (in)validating female bodily experience and 5. how seventeenth century antisectarian texts attempt to police the female creative imagination.

Magister Artium - MA / There is a theoretical gap in scholarship pertaining to masculinity and disability in dance. Existing scholarship on masculinity, disability and dance respectively, seldom bring these three themes into conversation with each other, missing opportunities to examine the nuances of masculinity. Through an ethnographic study, I endeavoured to capture the narratives of three professional disabled male dancers from different contexts and backgrounds. The phenomenological approach was selected in order to enhance understanding of my participants’ experiences in an attempt to illuminate how these dancers negotiate and embody their masculinity in dance spaces. The nuances of masculinity, disability and dance are therefore interpreted through a phenomenological framework and seek to foreground the intricacies of negotiation and subjectivity. Through face-to-face in-depth interviews, watching performances and rehearsals as well as less formal conversations, this project aims to illuminate the lives of Marc Brew (Scotland), David Toole (England) and Zama Sonjica (South Africa) as disabled male dancers. I am particularly interested in disability’s ability to challenge normative ideas around dance, identity and masculinity. I argue the need to change limiting perceptions of hegemonic masculinity and the male dancer’s body to advance the artistic medium of dance and allow for constructive dialogue around issues of access and inclusivity. Furthermore, like Roebuck (2001), I am interested in the ways in which contemporary dance works "contributes to the development of a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which dance articulates masculine identity" (Roebuck, 2001: 1).

This thesis examines how the fiction of Joseph Conrad anticipates and enacts the elaborate model of subjectivity that is later formalised in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. While modernist criticism has often utilised the work of post‐structuralism in reading key texts of modernism, the complexity and profundity of the conceptual relationship between Conrad and Lacan has not yet been explored in depth. Conrad’s work captures the impact and influence of emerging transnational capital upon forms of the subject in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, his fiction is also sensitive to how nascent global capital structures forms of space that the subject is embedded within in their daily experience. I argue that it is the intricate and finely woven theories of Lacan that are necessary in identifying this area of the novelist’s work, as Lacan’s model contends with both the individual psychic structure of the subject, and, crucially, how the individual is located and constituted within the broader matrix of social reality. Using four of Conrad’s novels from his early period to the end of his major phase, the thesis traces the evolution of the various fundamental modalities of Lacan’s subject across Conrad’s fiction. I examine how Almayer’s Folly offers the key tenets of Lacan’s primary model of the subject of desire, while Lord Jim presents the transition of the subject of desire into Lacan’s later mode of the subject of drive. Subsequently, The Secret Agent is shown to critique the role of rationalism in the structuring of the subject’s consciousness, while, finally, I read Under Western Eyes as a tour de force of Lacan’s four discourses. The deep and fundamental relationship between the two figures’ work attests to their acuity in observing the development of the subject in the twentieth century, while the method of theoretical analysis also, on a wider disciplinary level, suggests and helps to confirm the continued validity of the mode of deep reading in literary interpretation.

Cette thèse traite de la question des travaux d'aiguille dans la littérature et la culture victorienne. Ils apparaissent de manière récurrente dans les romans britanniques du dix-neuvième siècle et cristallisent bon nombre de sentiments contradictoires qui sont au coeur de la formation du sujet féminin. En dépit de leur omniprésence dans la culture victorienne, les travaux d'aiguille, associés à l'assujettissement des femmes, ont longtemps été déconsidérés par la critique. Cette thèse se propose de porter un nouveau regard sur l'artisanat féminin. A travers l'étude de sources très variées - romans, poèmes, manuels de couture, extraits de presse et les objets eux-mêmes - nous nous attachons à explorer les paradigmes complexes articulés par cette praxis, ainsi que la manière dont les travaux d'aiguille ont participé à l'articulation d'un « je » féminin. Considérée par les Victoriens comme l'activité féminine par excellence, la couture était pratiquée par toutes les femmes de tous âges et de toutes les classes sociales : ainsi, elle était au coeur du vécu et de l'identité féminine. Néanmoins, les travaux d'aiguille s'articulent autour de contradictions: il s'agissait d'une pratique à la fois amateur et professionnelle; ils encourageaient et cristallisaient la domestication des femmes, tout en imitant les modes de production industriels; ils étaient critiqués par bon nombre de femmes qui aspiraient à une plus grande ambition intellectuelle, mais étaient investis par d'autres comme un extraordinaire moyen d'expression. Ainsi, au dix-neuvième siècle la couture n'était pas une activité solitaire, mais plutôt une pratique sociale et discursive qui était pleinement engagée dans les problématiques sociales, économiques et culturelles de son temps. / This thesis deals with the question of needlework in Victorian literature and culture. Needlework is a constant and recurrent motif in nineteenth-century novels, and crystallises the many complex and contradictory feelings of satisfaction or resentment, creativity or censorship, elation or utter dejection that are crucial to the formation of the nineteenth-century female subject. In spite of its ubiquity, however, it has long been ignored or dismissed by critics as trivial, unimportant or revealing of the limitations imposed on Victorian women's lives. This thesis seeks to complicate previous assumptions by taking needlework on its own terms and exploring the complex and sophisticated tenets that underlie it. Relying on a large range of sources - novels, poems, magazines, craft manuals and material objects - this work examines the ways in which sewing has participated in the articulation of female subjectivity. Because it was construed as the ultimate feminine occupation and was undertaken by virtually ail women, regardless of age or social class, it was central to their identities and experience. However, needlework was fraught with contradictions: it was both amateur and professional; it enshrined the domestication of women, but it was closely allied with industrial modes of production; it was resented by many intellectually ambitious women, but was invested by others as a formidably evocative means of self-expression. Rather than a reclusive activity, then, Victorian needlework was a highly sociable practice which was fully engaged in the social, economic and cultural issues of its time.

The gap between hope and happening refers to the experiences of four academic women who work at Milton University (MU), the pseudonym for a regional Australian university. This thesis is concerned with the ways in which discourses circulating within MU shape the performances and discursive positionings of the four women - Alice, Madonna, Veronica and Tamaly (all pseudonyms) - and how, in turn, these women negotiate these discourses. Data are drawn from the women’s narratives, university policy documents and selected institutional texts. A feminist poststructuralist lens interrogates both policies, reflecting different approaches towards gender equity at MU, and discursive practices, constructing the ‘good academic’ at MU. Instead of acts of resistance, what is revealed in this workplace is the continuing covert strategies of marginalization that reproduce women’s positioning on the margins of mainstream academia, indicating the presence of a kind of ‘phallocentnc smog’ emerging from a dominant masculine culture. This thesis finds a gap between the transformative potential of the four women at the micro-social (subjectivity) level and the lack of transformation at the macro-social (workplace) level. This suggests that the women’s abilities to resist and transform phallocentric discourses at the personal/private level are not sustainable at the public level because of the enduring power of normative institutional discourses or the ‘phallocentric smog’. This thesis signals the need for ongoing interrogation of the gap between the hope that feminists have (theory) and the happening for women (practice) in the quest for sustainable equity.

This study explores women’s experiences of sex with men. It is based on qualitative data collected from eighteen life history interviews. Such an approach provides means for examining women’s sexual experiences over time. The study finds that women give meaning to their sexual experiences through two main discursive representations: the passive, “proper” and sexually obliging girlfriend or wife, and the active and “sexually equal” woman. However, these representations do not capture the entirety of women’s sexual experiences. The life history analysis demonstrates that women are not simply inscribed by discourse. Rather, they are embodied beings actively engaged in pursuing sexual identities. Central to the process is a relationship between the practice of sex and self-reflexivity over time. Finally, the study demonstrates how the process of gaining sexual subjectivity is shaped by the material conditions of women’s lives. For instance, the praxeological circumstances of women’s class or race are powerful in recasting discourses of feminine sexuality, the meanings women ascribe to them, their access to broader sexual experiences, and the kinds of relationships they have with their male partners.

This thesis addresses both theories and practices of subjectivity in Anglo-American societies into the twenty-first century. The central argument is that one dominant subjectivity that has emerged in these societies centres on a deep-seated, almost irreconcilable tension. On the one hand, persons experience relatively heightened desires for unbounded lifestyles amidst relatively high levels of affluence and consumption. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the education, skills, and dispositions that persons assume in social worlds make desiring problematic. For example, high-level consumption or workplace flexibility are not necessarily seen as desirable things, yet appear to envelop contemporary lifestyles. Individuated desires form key aspects of an Anglo-American 'way-of-life', but a liberal individualism that emphasizes personal capacities and responsibilities, 'self-improvement' and 'well-being' has arisen, and this makes resolving ethical and existential dilemmas difficult. That is, many worldly dilemmas - concerns with material security, social justice, the environment, or nutrition, for example - seem irreconcilable to the liberal individualism that is 'lived' as subjectivity 'on the ground'. The thesis synthesizes social anthropology and social theory to ground its claims about the empirical world that sees subjectivity as 'being' human for particular social worlds. The approach is designed to look at situations that call upon self-orienting individuals, in order to explain how these represent the form of life that an 'immediate' self-projecting and orienting, self-asserting and 'creative' dominant subjectivity takes in Anglo-American societies. The argument develops a number of examples in the context of a theory-based approach in two registers: normative and ontological. Inquiry over an ontological register discusses the social formation of subjectivity in relation to the 'categories' of spatiality, temporality, embodiment, and institutionality, and the social constitution of subjectivity over coeval somatic, practical-ethological, and reflexive 'layers of affect'. Inquiry over a normative register discusses practical and discursive conditions, and relates the overall argument to a critique of normativity based in the claim that 'being' requires that norm-based and relational contexts can affectively 'legitimate' ongoing sociality. In summary, the thesis has two dimensions. It argues that this dominant subjectivity moves between sovereign desires for satisfactions and their atomized dissatisfactions, and turns on a sustained deferral of worldly dilemmas irreconcilable to the liberal individualism that is seen to both anchor and impel ongoing sociality. Secondly, it suggests that we need to rethink theories of subjectivity in order to understand better this new dominant form of life.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.