The ethics of cultural studies / Joanna Zylinska.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zylinska, Joanna, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture--Study and teaching--Moral and ethical aspects.

Culture.

Social ethics.

Culture--Study and teaching.

Physical Description:

xiii, 176 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Continuum, [2005]

Summary:

The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and draws on examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum and immigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic and digital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th and media representations of violence and crime.

The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention that sets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluable source of ideas for students of contemporary culture.

Contents:

1 A User's Guide to Culture, Ethics and Politics 1

Welcome to the culture club 1

Description v normativity 3

Performativity 5

Deconstruction 6

Identity 9

'Turn to Levinas' 9

Levinas's ethics 11

Ethics and responsibility 14

Power struggle 15

Decision 16

Articulation 19

Antagonism in the plural 20

Ethics before politics 21

2 Ethics and Cultural Studies 26

Idle students and tabloid princesses 26

Cultural studies and ethics 28

The cultural studies of difference 31

What is cultural studies? 35

Cultural studies as a promise 38

3 Ethics and 'Moral Panics' 41

Guns, youths and hip-hop 41

Cultural studies and 'moral panics' 43

Beware the folk devils! 45

Cultural studies' ethical blind spot 48

Policing the (racial) crisis 49

Cultural studies before the law 51

Hegemony and ethical strategy 54

Permanent vigilance 59

A postscript 61

4 Ethics, Violence and the Media 63

The sublime 66

The secular sacred 68

Mastering the sublime 70

Whose trauma is it anyway? 72

Good and bad violence 74

An(other) ethics of the sublime 76

Responsibility and the gift of death 79

5 Ethics and the Body 83

The people you never see 83

The universal acts and the biopolitics of immigration 84

Performativity of the public sphere 85

On the state's threshold 89

The politics of blindness 91

An ethics of bodies that matter 94

6 Ethics and National Identity 103

The nation at war (with itself) 103

'They're all anti-Semitic there' 104

Unveiling the truth 107

Is there such a thing as collective responsibility? 110

National memory and national forgetting 113

Narcissism, alterity and national identity 116

7 Ethics and Technology 122

Prosthetics and ethics 122

Welcoming the alien 124

Ethical confusion and 'good scandal' 126

'I is an other' 127

'The information is the prosthesis' 131

'A species for which we do not yet have a name' 135

8 Bioethics and cyberfeminism 138

(Yet more) questions of cultural identity 138

Softening the cyborg 139

Bioethics between corporal and corporate obligations 141

Do soft cyborgs have bodies? 143

Mice experiments 150

A modest proposal for feminist cyberbioethics 155.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [159]-169) and index.

ISBN:

082647523X

0826475248

OCLC:

56421933