HT SF Imagining the Contemporary Exam Quotations

Connell on Gender Arrangements

These arrangements are so familiar that they can seem part of the order of nature.

Connell on 'Becoming'

Being a man or a woman…is a becoming.

Connell on Relations

…focus on relations.

Connell Definion of Gender

Gender is the structure of social relations that centers on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes.

Connell on The Consequences of Gender's Effect

Gender concerns the way human societies deal with human bodies and their continuity, and the many consequences of that dealing in our personal lives and our collective fate.

Connell on Feminisim in Europe

Moving feminist thought beyond Eurocentricism

Connell on Butler

Butler argued…gender is 'performative,' bringing identities into existence through repetitive actions, rather than being the expression of some pre-existing reality.

Sara Strauss on Fourth-Wave Feminism

Highlights key interests of fourth-wave feminism, first and foremost intersectionality, the fierce resistance to exploitation and sexual harassment, as well as intergenerational perspectives on experiences of inequality.

Amma and Dominique in Girl, Woman, Other

They would be a voice in theatre where there was silence.

Carole in Girl, Woman, Other

Carole amended herself to become not quite them, just a little more like them.

Penelope in Girl, Woman, Other

She loathed that feminism was on the descent, and the vociferous multi-culti brigade was on the ascent.

Morgan/Megan in Girl, Woman, Other

How could she put her gender-free identity into practice when they were living in a gender-binary world, and that with so many definitions…the very idea of gender might eventually lose any meaning.

Penelope on Hattie in Girl, Woman, Other

This metal-haired wild creature from the bush with the piercingly feral eyes/is her mother/this is she/this is her/Who cares about colour? Why on earth did Penelope ever think it mattered?

Carole's Rape in Girl, Woman, Other

Then/her/body/wasn't/her/own/no/more/it/belong/to/them…/it was hurtinghurtinghurthing/onandonandonandonandon into infinity.

Fisher on End

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.

Fisher Definition

'Capitalist Realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.

Fisher on Capitalism on Reality

…atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

Fisher on Pleasure

Depressive hedonic…the inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.

Fisher on Teachers' Position

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime.

Fisher on Academics

Bureaucratic tasks that academics have to perform, all of which have funding implications.

Fisher on Capitalism in Hiding

Capitalism's rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing.

Lyotard on Capitalism

Incredulity towards metanarratives.

McCarthy on The Project to the Public

…it would remain, in an everyday sense, to members of the general public, invisible.

McCarthy on Structures

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted these as the primary structures of the modern tribe.

Peyman on Universities

Forget universities…these are irrelevant; they've become businesses.

McCarthy on Turning Enviornmental Catastrophe into a Good

They, too, are improved…transformed into monumental versions of themselves.

McCarthy on the Project

Its very vagueness rendered it nefarious and sinister and dangerous…the Project garnered for itself enormous and far-reaching capabilities, while at the same time reducing its accountability - and vulnerability - to almost zero.

McCarthy on the Project's Deadly Nature

The Project was supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything - and infra- too: that's what made it so effective, and so deadly.

Derrida on Competence

Dissociation between the place of competence and the place of risk.

Derrida on Textuality of Nuclear Weaponry

It is fabulously textual…nuclear weaponry depends…upon structures of information and communication, of language.

Derrida on Literariness of Nuclear War

…fabulously textual also to the extent that…one can only talk and write about it.

Derrida on Reality

'Reality'…is constructed by the fable, on the basis of an event that has never happened.

Derrida on Doxa

There is no room for distinction between belief [doxa] and science [epistemē]…or even a truth in that sense. No truth, no apocalypse.

Derrida on Nuclear Politics

The whole of the official logic of nuclear politics is called "strategy of deterrence"… dissuasion, or deterrence, means "persuasion."

Derrida on Rhetoric

The rhetoric of dissuasion is a performative apparatus that aims to produce other performatives. The anticipation of nuclear war…installs humanity…in its rhetorical condition.

Derrida on Referrent

Literature and literary criticism cannot, finally, speak of anything else…they can only multiply their strategic maneuvers in order to assimilate this unassimilable wholly other.

Derrida on Name of War Worth

Nuclear war…can only be waged in the name of what is worth more than life. What gives life its worth is worth more than life.

Derrida on What Nuclear War is in the Name of

Waged in the name of something whose name…could no longer be borne, transmitted, inherited by anything living. Thus, this name in the name of which war would take place would be in the name of nothing: pure name, 'naked name.'

Dr. Strangelove on Deterrence

Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.

Derrida on Military Men

The military men are also scientists, and they find themselves inevitably in the position of participating in the final decision.

Dr. Strangelove on the Doomsday Machine

The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret.

Soviet Ambassador on the Doomsday Machine

Is not a thing of saying man will do, the Doomsday Machine is designed to trigger itself automatically.

Derrida on Meaning

The study of the functioning of language, of its play, presupposes that the substance of meaning and… of sound be placed in parentheses.

Jeffrey T. Nealon

Reading’s impossibility…allows reading to be set in motion.