English/Humanities

Ideas about gender-about what men and women are and do-are deeply enfolded in the images and narratives that comprise the discourse of antisemitism. Because representations of Jews are inevitably gendered, it would be impossible to understand fundamental aspects of the mechanisms of antisemitism in modernity without considering its intersections with gender and sexuality. In cultural and political discourse, notions of gender and race function together as important signifiers of otherness and outsiderness, especially in the context of evolving ideas about the modern citizen. Both the external discourse about Jews and the internal discourse among Jews rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on gendered tropes-recurring patterns of images about sexual difference, identity, and practice. These gendered Jewish figures include effeminate, weak, and passive men; aggressively greedy and rapacious men; domineering and suffocating women; and materialistic, frigid, and manipulative women. In the popular imagination, gender difference and Jewish difference become intertwined, the one fueling, challenging, or justifying the other. Although they initially followed separate trajectories, the theoretical and critical conversations about gender and about antisemitism bear on one another in important ways. By now, the significance of gender as a crucial component of cultural analysis has been well established. Introduced first by feminist studies and enriched by gender and queer studies, using gender as a category of analysis entails examining the actual and imagined experiences

The depiction of Jewish ritual on American television stands out from ordinary TV fare. Not surprisingly, since its early popularization the culture of television in America has been vaguely Christian. Vaguely, because television programs depict a fairly secularized culture, with religion often left unstated and unobtrusive; Christian, because the dominant culture in America is Christian, and thus need not be specified. Religious markers, when they appear in the course of regular television series, are Christian, and their use implies the presumption of an audience that grasps the set of meanings associated with themfor example, the Christmas tree and carols linked with peace, love, and coming together. Jewish ritual, when it appears, puts into relief the Christianness of TV-land. Jewish difference makes apparent the unstated but presumed Christianity, and at the same time, it highlights the general absence of the Other. Infrequent enough to warrant attention, these televised moments of Judaism and Jewishness raise complex questions about the nature of the American multiculture, and the negotiation of ethnic, national, and religious identities, through the prism of Jewish exclusion and belonging. The last two decades of the twentieth century brought greater diversity to the screen and an increased number of identifiably Jewish characters as regulars on television series.1 While situation-comedies play on popular stereotypes (such as the Jewish princess, the Jewish mother, the effeminate Jewish man), television dramas examine a set of issues relating to Jewish identity through the portrayal of the enactment of Jewish ritual. As presented on American television, these rituals mix the familiar with the alien, the ordinary with the exotic. Rare but never entirely absent, the function of televised Jewish ritualparticularly life cycle ritualhas shifted over time. Life cycle ritualmarking such events as birth, puberty, marriage, and deathcouples the emotional charge universally inherent to those events with particular cultural signifiers that are also emotionally charged. Part of the impact of ♦ SAJL 49 Volume 29 (2010) ♦

the link between his different topics, despite the title, not always clear, the book is written with passion and a radical indignation at the unjust way in which many (especially in the Church) have caused great and continuing 'psychic damage' by failing to come to terms with complex sexual issues. The book takes a courageous and prophetic stance on many of the most difficult issues of the day.

Ideas about gender-about what men and women are and do-are deeply enfolded in the images and narratives that comprise the discourse of antisemitism. Because representations of Jews are inevitably gendered, it would be impossible to understand fundamental aspects of the mechanisms of antisemitism in modernity without considering its intersections with gender and sexuality. In cultural and political discourse, notions of gender and race function together as important signifiers of otherness and outsiderness, especially in the context of evolving ideas about the modern citizen. Both the external discourse about Jews and the internal discourse among Jews rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on gendered tropes-recurring patterns of images about sexual difference, identity, and practice. These gendered Jewish figures include effeminate, weak, and passive men; aggressively greedy and rapacious men; domineering and suffocating women; and materialistic, frigid, and manipulative women. In the popular imagination, gender difference and Jewish difference become intertwined, the one fueling, challenging, or justifying the other. Although they initially followed separate trajectories, the theoretical and critical conversations about gender and about antisemitism bear on one another in important ways. By now, the significance of gender as a crucial component of cultural analysis has been well established. Introduced first by feminist studies and enriched by gender and queer studies, using gender as a category of analysis entails examining the actual and imagined experiences

T his essay contributes to the decentring of vision that has been the project of much recent scholarship. Accepting Derrida's argument in Of Grammatology that the sound of the voice is not a sounding of presence, this essay nonetheless argues that sound itself remains active as the invisible ground that figures "sounds." Sound is thus presented here as a "field-mosaic" in Marshall McLuhan's sense, indicating a relational ontology wherein this relationality is taken as pre-existent to the terms related. Sound in the following essay thus represents an attempt to grasp the "fieldness" of this ontology precisely by refusing to give sonic instantiations ("sounds") primary status, instead thinking them in the technological terms of McLuhan's tetrad. However, if sound is thus understood (in the technological sense) as an extension of the human, and the "fieldness" of sound prevents us from registering the term "human" as prior to its relational status, then sound as it is here mobilized suggests an understanding of human subjectivity as itself decentred, such that subjectivity is now understood as a This essay uses the sound-art practice Skewed Remote Musical Performance as a probe for considering the implications of sonic ontology. Understanding sound as radically relational, the essay argues that subjectivity is a technological extension that, in the acoustic reality of our virtual age, has rendered the human always already posthuman.

One night, I dreamt my head was 1,000 feet wide. The expansion was executed between the outside edge of each of my eyes and the inside edge of each corresponding ear; the distance between my eyes remained the same, but that between my ears increased greatly.

In the context of the highly contested discourse of posthumanism, this essay examines Mark Hansen's attempt to give a robust account of technology in its extra-linguistic dimension by evincing an '''originary'' coupling of the human and the technical' that grounds experience as such (Hansen, 2006a: 9). Specifically, I argue that Hansen's perspective is haunted by the representational logic that it moves against. In this, I do not repudiate Hansen's argument as such, but rather reject one of its central underlying implications: that the extra-discursive materiality of technology might be accessed, linguistically, without attaching a meaning to it that is foreign to this materiality. To this end, the essay begins with an examination of technesis as it is initially developed by Hansen, demonstrating the necessity from which it sprang, the contribution that Hansen's reading makes, and its ultimate limitations. From here, the essay articulates Hansen's argument for an affective topology of the senses, corroborating the increased importance of digital technologies in this perspective through a brief comparison of Roberto Lazzarini's 'skulls' (as read by Hansen) and my own piece 'Sound'. Finally, this comparison pivots the essay towards a critical analysis of Hansen's account of primary tactility that demonstrates its dependence on the (representational) logic of language. In closing, then, I argue that what is accomplished by Hansen's putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a re-staging of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that reinvigorates the posthumanist elements of that discourse.

This essay examines the problem of medial specificity in music and sound art, giving particular attention to Seth Kim-Cohen's call for a non-cochlear sound art based on the notion of " expansion " that has been decisive in visual arts discourses. I argue that Kim-Cohen's non-cochlear intervention in In the Blink of an Ear might be productively pressured towards the concept of a " sonic effect " that acknowledges the material-discursive particularity of sound without recourse to the phenomenological claims of authenticity that Kim-Cohen correctly abhors. In service of this argument, the essay extensively discusses a sound and media artwork – Exurbia, created by myself and William Brent – that leverages the metaphorics of sound against existing understandings of specific forms of network communication. I argue that the conceptual and material dimensions of the project stridulate in a hum of recursive vectors for considering the constitution and consequences of networked aural interaction. Exurbia can thus be parsed in terms of medial specificity precisely because its digital aural materials are themselves discursive.