Political Perversion

Political Perversion
Author: Joshua Gunn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020
Genre: Communication
ISBN: 022671344X

"When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, the perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, groundbreaking book Political Perversion, rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this "mean-spirited turn" in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion enhanced primarily by the speed of communication technologies. Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn shows how technology has changed our ways of relating (and not relating) to others and has engendered infantile and sadistic forms of provocation and enjoyment. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis"--

Perverse Politics?

Perverse Politics?
Author: Ann Shola Orloff
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-04-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786350734

The papers collected here offer anti-imperialist feminist alternatives to second wave feminism's often reductive understandings of freedom; emancipation; oppression; empowerment and democracy.

The Perversity of Politics

The Perversity of Politics
Author: Edward H. Buehrig
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1003835945

First published 1986, The Perversity of Politics talks about the perverse nature of political behaviour. Highly paradoxical, the seeking of advantage is of dual character, consisting not only in the spoils of conquest but in the rewards of co-operation. These two facets of politics pose the perennial question of why co-operation’s inviting prospects have never yet immunized politics- domestic and international- against the perils and sacrifices of conflict. The book finds an answer in the notion of the power overtone. Quest for security, more than immediate gratification, involves maneuver by individuals and groups for future freedom of action. The perversity of politics is heightened by sources of conflict that defy ultimate solution. Of ancient vintage is the uneasy relationship of attraction and repulsion between religion and state, each side uncertain as to where advantage lies. Nor is perversity dispelled by the social sciences, themselves caught in the dogmatics of nature versus nature, typified in the fundamentally different approaches to governance by James Madison and Karl Marx. Citing the American experience in particular the final chapter contends that democratic government is best designed to abate the power overtone and to mitigate conflict. This is a must read for students of political studies and political sociology.

Perverse Subsidies

Perverse Subsidies
Author: Norman Myers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Much of the global economy depends on large scale government intervention in the form of subsidies, many of which are perverse in that they damage economies and environments. This study offers a view of subsidies world-wide with focus on the extent, causes and consequences of perverse subsidies.

Prisoners of Politics

Prisoners of Politics
Author: Rachel Elise Barkow
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-03-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674919238

A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged

Space, Time and Perversion

Space, Time and Perversion
Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317325451

Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.

Safe Space

Safe Space
Author: Christina B. Hanhardt
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2013-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822378868

Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Pedagogies of Crossing

Pedagogies of Crossing
Author: M. Jacqui Alexander
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2006-01-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822386984

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity. In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Pragmatism, Politics, and Perversity

Pragmatism, Politics, and Perversity
Author: Joseph L. Esposito
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2012
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739173634

The political project of pragmatism has focused primarily on its defense of democracy as the best political system to maintain and improve human well-being over lifetimes and generations. Pragmatism Politics and Perversity: Democracy and the American Party Battle describes this project of Peirce, Dewey, Hook, and Rorty, and combines it with Charles Beard's study of the party battle as the most determinative influence upon American democracy. The book updates and confirms Beard's hypothesis that the history of the party battle is a chronicle of perverse schemes and self-inflicted wounds - the most salient to date being the American Civil War - because it reflects a ceaselessly disruptive contest over the creation of two largely incompatible political states: nation state and market state. The book supports its thesis with detailed historical accounts of the formation of the Constitution and early federal judiciary, the sedition trials and political schemes of the 1790s, the frustration of market state Whigs to attract white working-class voters by exploiting their religious identities, the reckless machinations of Whig Republicans in precipitating a national crisis over a contrived threat of oligarchy and white slavery, and the ideological oscillations of the Supreme Court from market state to nation state jurisprudence and back again. To reduce perversity in political rhetoric and free up pragmatic democratic practices, the book proposes a robust neo-Madisonian view of free speech, where political actors and their surrogates are not only free to speak and write, but are also obligated to explain, retract, and revise what they have said and written.

The Perverse Politics of Polarization

The Perverse Politics of Polarization
Author: S. Nageeb Ali
Publisher:
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

Many policies, such as trade and immigration, bear important consequences for both the size and distribution of surplus. Oftentimes, people are asked to vote on these policies despite not being all that well-informed about the consequences. This paper studies the extent to which an electorate can aggregate information when voters anticipate that some may benefit from a policy reform at a cost borne by others. We show that information aggregation may fail: with high probability, the outcome chosen when voters are privately informed departs from the outcome when all information is public. We identify a form of "negative correlation" -- where voters treat good news for others as bad news for themselves -- that is necessary and sufficient for this informational failure. Commitments to post-policy redistribution can mitigate this inefficiency, and lead voters to select better policies. We characterize features of economic environments that may foster or preclude negative correlation. Our results offer an understanding of how information can amplify electoral status quo bias, or generate popular support for ill-advised reforms that are ex post regretted and subsequently reversed.