Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Steven Gardiner
Public Eye, 2020
Today, we see explicitly Christian Zionist organizations and megachurch pastors working with high... more Today, we see explicitly Christian Zionist organizations and megachurch pastors working with high administration officials such as Mike Pompeo, to justify expanding support for a right-wing, authoritarian Israeli government as the fulfillment of prophecy.
My paper on the ways in which Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ (2004) uses the idea of... more My paper on the ways in which Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ (2004) uses the idea of heroic suffering to intervene in contemporary religious politics and promote a militarized form of Christianity is now available in the open access journal CULTURAL ANALYSIS.
Citation. Gardiner, Steven. 2013. Behold the Man: Heroic Masochism and Mel Gibson's Passion as Rite of Passage. Cultural Analysis 12: 18-43.
Note the 2013 publication date reflects a delay caused by a turn-over in the editorial collective at CA. This is a wonderful journal and there are two insightful responses to my article included. The link below is to a full version of the article available both in html and pdf formats. The journal itself is distributed in hardcopy to libraries.
This article explores the ways in which contemporary American social movements explicitly grounde... more This article explores the ways in which contemporary American social movements explicitly grounded in overt white supremacy are responding to and informing nativist politics aimed at excluding immigrants, always with a subtext of maintaining a white majority demographic profile. It also addresses the limits of simple forms of economic determinism which tend to posit fear of competition from immigrants as the most significant factor motivating anti-immigrant political mobilization. (Journal of Hate Studies, Vol. 4 [2005], Pp. 59 - 87.
Women, War and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism, eds. R. Chandler, L. Wang, and L. Fuller. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 2010
Grounded in ethnographic work with veterans, soldiers and family members in the American Midwest,... more Grounded in ethnographic work with veterans, soldiers and family members in the American Midwest, this chapter examines the ways in which information control on the part of the military and the limits of knowledge in the civilian world shape intimate understandings about the experience of military deployment and channel certain kinds of activism and engagement on the homefront.
At the heart of current doctrinal debates in the United States Army between counter-insurgents an... more At the heart of current doctrinal debates in the United States Army between counter-insurgents and warfighters is a fight over the gender identity of the institution itself. With women making up an increasing portion of the Army the default "maleness" of the institution has become problematic. This has been exacerbated by post-9/11 battlefields in which soldiers not traditionally trained for combat operations, including women, come into contact with the enemy. The Army's response has been twofold. First it has created a new institutional gender identity--the warrior--that is meant to provide women and soldiers traditionally not directly involved in combat with a covering masculinity. Second it has resisted and rejected non-combat operations as insufficiently warrior like. This has created conflict with counter-insurgents seeking to apply modes of power less oriented to destruction--so-called kinetics--and more towards domination and transformation. (Journal of War & Culture Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 [2012], Pp. 371 - 383.
This article explores the ways in which military veterans who are active in various veterans orga... more This article explores the ways in which military veterans who are active in various veterans organizations perform military masculinity and mediate between civilian and military worlds. Grounded in ethnographic work with veterans in the American Midwest, it considers veteran experience as it is changing in the post-draft and post-9/11 eras.
Working Papers by Steven Gardiner
Blog Posts by Steven Gardiner
Some years ago I published an article in the Journal of Hate Studies (Vol. 4, Pp. 59-87) titled “... more Some years ago I published an article in the Journal of Hate Studies (Vol. 4, Pp. 59-87) titled “White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics” (2005). In it I presented an argument focusing on the ways in which changing demographics in the United Sates are reshaping cultural and political self-understanding in the “white, middle-American” population and the ways in which various flavors of ideologically committed white nationalists are exploiting these changes. (opening paragraph of my new blog post). Key Words: White Nationalism, White Identity Politics, Demographics, Election, Trump
The United States has things to learn from Pakistan. Key Words: Pakistan, Execution, Trump, Polit... more The United States has things to learn from Pakistan. Key Words: Pakistan, Execution, Trump, Politics of Hate
This is a blog post on my Xenophilia page into which I fold a review of Jonathan Waverley's book ... more This is a blog post on my Xenophilia page into which I fold a review of Jonathan Waverley's book Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Dissertation by Steven Gardiner
Conference Papers, Encyclopedia Articles, Other by Steven Gardiner
The peculiarity of object and subject together in the world is apparent in the ways in which Kant... more The peculiarity of object and subject together in the world is apparent in the ways in which Kantian antinomies are bound together in the movement between noun and verb: to subject is to act upon, to change, to produce; to be subject (to) is to be acted upon, dominated, produced. Inversely, we can say that to object is to refuse, protest, resist; to be object is to have already been made, dominated, produced. In Zizek’s terms the most fundamental act of subjectivity is self-making, which is in the first place an act of objectification, wherein lies the paradox of the self.
The act of self-making, however, is contingent. In Marxian terms it depends upon the social world in which the subject-object dance is performed. A world permeated by violence infects the psycho-social environment with Batesonian double binds that are enervating both psychically and politically. This paper argues that artist practice of a particular type can act as an escape hatch, personal and political, from such debilitation. Taking the self-portraits, tableaus and companion essays of contemporary artist Aleksandra Stone as a point of departure, we bring Zizek’s idea of the philosophical parallax vision that can emerge from engagement with the paradox of subject and object into communion with anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s epistemological metaphor of “binocular vision.” The parallax that emerges from the theoretical attempt to bridge the radically separated must be theorized simultaneously with the reality that all perspective emerges from disparate points of view, that is, from difference.
The choice of Stone’s work as focus is highly motivated. A double refugee from the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and domestic violence, Stone’s auto-mimetic images inscribe a living attempt to re-image the self in its the wake. In her work lies the aesthetic movement beyond the abjection that haunts subjectivity. In such work lies the seed of a practice through which the violence-permeated world in which we live might be re-imagined, marking an intervention, as Adorno argued, in the subterranean well of ideology that remains forever impervious to argument.
This paper traces the work accomplished by Stone’s art in terms of subject, object and violence. Through creative work that encompasses reflection and theory, a loosening of the hold of the particular double-binding violence of subjugation becomes possible. In Stone’s work the self-object is repeatedly made visible in a process that resonates to contrary effect with the making and unmaking of the world, to use Elaine Scarry’s term, that follows from the violence embedded in domestic life—itself always embedded in a political economy that privileges and tracks the production of persons of particular types. Her art practice opens the possibility of a Kantian freedom to the object once the object is imaged and aestheticized. It opens the possibility, in Zizek’s terms, of a philosophical parallax.
Encyclopedia of War & American Society, 2005
Drafts and Works in Progress by Steven Gardiner
Conference Presentations by Steven Gardiner
Living veterans are a problem for the militarized state-and not for the state alone, but for all ... more Living veterans are a problem for the militarized state-and not for the state alone, but for all who live in the shadow of war, civilians and soldiers and former soldiers alike. The severity of the problem, of course, is nothing like evenly distributed. For some, the primary inconvenience is representational. In their inconvenient embodiments, veterans condense an embarrassing abundance of potential meanings, only some of which are suited to recruitment for patriotic or commercial purposes. For others—veterans, family members, over-extended bureaucracies—the " veteran problem " is rather more visceral, written in the language of pain, mistrust, unemployment, guilt and inadequate budgets.
In the American imaginary of war home and front have long been represented as radically separated... more In the American imaginary of war home and front have long been represented as radically separated and separately gendered domains of experience. While women have always been existentially present at the front, they have been consistently erased from representations of war, at least in part to defend the ideological masculinity of war as such and the simultaneous construction of a feminine home that every soldier--whatever her or his anatomy--is presumed to be defending and longing to return to. To defend the gendered division between front and home, soldier-sons (and increasingly daughters) have been inculcated in a culture of non-communication, purportedly to protect the feminized civilians "back home"--most iconically mothers--from the realities of combat. This paper looks at the ways in which the use of social media (blogs, microblogs, you tube, photo sharing), by women and men in uniform, is reshaping the construction of gendered war memories, creating relatively public--if often access-controlled--records of war experience and increasingly threatening the precarious cordon sanitaire between home and front. Like the ongoing tendency to admit female-bodied persons into the masculine gendered realm of combat, the increasing leakiness of the home-front barrier does not necessarily break down gender binaries, but rather produces changes in the collective memory of war, and the potential militarization of society, that remain to be explored.
Organizer: Steven Gardiner (@VetAnthropology) Directions: If you want to be considered for this p... more Organizer: Steven Gardiner (@VetAnthropology) Directions: If you want to be considered for this panel please send a 250-word (maximum) abstract to [email protected] by April 12, 2016. If your paper is selected for the panel, then you must also submit your abstract via the American Anthropological Association website by 15 April 2016—and to do that you have to be registered for the conference. Note: Even if you are not selected for this panel, you can still submit your abstract/paper proposal directly to the AAA and they may place you on a panel that isn't full. Panel Title: Embodied Veterans: Personal Appropriation, Biopower and Normative Fitness Abstract: Veteran bodies suffer multiple contestations: biomedical, demographic, gendered, sexed, legal-political, movement-political and symbolic to name a few. No longer soldiers and never again quite civilians, veterans have job and role-related claims on the nation-state (and vice-versa). To make a veteran claim, the individual vet may subordinate him-or herself to state bureaucracies that seek to discipline and define fitness and deservingness; these matters may also be tried in the marketplace and the courts of public opinion. In the context of the vast reach of American military power in the early twenty-first century, veteran bodies reflect the aftermath of military service and violence in ways obvious (amputation, scarring and
Op-Eds by Steven Gardiner
Political Research Associates, 2020
Understanding the ways in which far-right, White nationalist and misogynist violence intertwines ... more Understanding the ways in which far-right, White nationalist and misogynist violence intertwines with mainstream politics and policing.
Papers by Steven Gardiner
Uploads
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Steven Gardiner
Citation. Gardiner, Steven. 2013. Behold the Man: Heroic Masochism and Mel Gibson's Passion as Rite of Passage. Cultural Analysis 12: 18-43.
Note the 2013 publication date reflects a delay caused by a turn-over in the editorial collective at CA. This is a wonderful journal and there are two insightful responses to my article included. The link below is to a full version of the article available both in html and pdf formats. The journal itself is distributed in hardcopy to libraries.
Working Papers by Steven Gardiner
Blog Posts by Steven Gardiner
Dissertation by Steven Gardiner
Conference Papers, Encyclopedia Articles, Other by Steven Gardiner
The act of self-making, however, is contingent. In Marxian terms it depends upon the social world in which the subject-object dance is performed. A world permeated by violence infects the psycho-social environment with Batesonian double binds that are enervating both psychically and politically. This paper argues that artist practice of a particular type can act as an escape hatch, personal and political, from such debilitation. Taking the self-portraits, tableaus and companion essays of contemporary artist Aleksandra Stone as a point of departure, we bring Zizek’s idea of the philosophical parallax vision that can emerge from engagement with the paradox of subject and object into communion with anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s epistemological metaphor of “binocular vision.” The parallax that emerges from the theoretical attempt to bridge the radically separated must be theorized simultaneously with the reality that all perspective emerges from disparate points of view, that is, from difference.
The choice of Stone’s work as focus is highly motivated. A double refugee from the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and domestic violence, Stone’s auto-mimetic images inscribe a living attempt to re-image the self in its the wake. In her work lies the aesthetic movement beyond the abjection that haunts subjectivity. In such work lies the seed of a practice through which the violence-permeated world in which we live might be re-imagined, marking an intervention, as Adorno argued, in the subterranean well of ideology that remains forever impervious to argument.
This paper traces the work accomplished by Stone’s art in terms of subject, object and violence. Through creative work that encompasses reflection and theory, a loosening of the hold of the particular double-binding violence of subjugation becomes possible. In Stone’s work the self-object is repeatedly made visible in a process that resonates to contrary effect with the making and unmaking of the world, to use Elaine Scarry’s term, that follows from the violence embedded in domestic life—itself always embedded in a political economy that privileges and tracks the production of persons of particular types. Her art practice opens the possibility of a Kantian freedom to the object once the object is imaged and aestheticized. It opens the possibility, in Zizek’s terms, of a philosophical parallax.
Drafts and Works in Progress by Steven Gardiner
Conference Presentations by Steven Gardiner
Op-Eds by Steven Gardiner
Papers by Steven Gardiner
Citation. Gardiner, Steven. 2013. Behold the Man: Heroic Masochism and Mel Gibson's Passion as Rite of Passage. Cultural Analysis 12: 18-43.
Note the 2013 publication date reflects a delay caused by a turn-over in the editorial collective at CA. This is a wonderful journal and there are two insightful responses to my article included. The link below is to a full version of the article available both in html and pdf formats. The journal itself is distributed in hardcopy to libraries.
The act of self-making, however, is contingent. In Marxian terms it depends upon the social world in which the subject-object dance is performed. A world permeated by violence infects the psycho-social environment with Batesonian double binds that are enervating both psychically and politically. This paper argues that artist practice of a particular type can act as an escape hatch, personal and political, from such debilitation. Taking the self-portraits, tableaus and companion essays of contemporary artist Aleksandra Stone as a point of departure, we bring Zizek’s idea of the philosophical parallax vision that can emerge from engagement with the paradox of subject and object into communion with anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s epistemological metaphor of “binocular vision.” The parallax that emerges from the theoretical attempt to bridge the radically separated must be theorized simultaneously with the reality that all perspective emerges from disparate points of view, that is, from difference.
The choice of Stone’s work as focus is highly motivated. A double refugee from the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and domestic violence, Stone’s auto-mimetic images inscribe a living attempt to re-image the self in its the wake. In her work lies the aesthetic movement beyond the abjection that haunts subjectivity. In such work lies the seed of a practice through which the violence-permeated world in which we live might be re-imagined, marking an intervention, as Adorno argued, in the subterranean well of ideology that remains forever impervious to argument.
This paper traces the work accomplished by Stone’s art in terms of subject, object and violence. Through creative work that encompasses reflection and theory, a loosening of the hold of the particular double-binding violence of subjugation becomes possible. In Stone’s work the self-object is repeatedly made visible in a process that resonates to contrary effect with the making and unmaking of the world, to use Elaine Scarry’s term, that follows from the violence embedded in domestic life—itself always embedded in a political economy that privileges and tracks the production of persons of particular types. Her art practice opens the possibility of a Kantian freedom to the object once the object is imaged and aestheticized. It opens the possibility, in Zizek’s terms, of a philosophical parallax.