Tag Archives: subjectivity

Love, I argue, is a demand around which moral experience—and thus moral subjectivity—takes shape. Love entails the struggle to ethically remake oneself, and the response to its unavoidable demand has consequences for both oneself and others. I examine the moral experience of love as it was lived by two former participants in a Russian Orthodox Church–run heroin rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg. My discussion thus contributes conceptually and ethnographically to the growing literature on the anthropology of moralities.

Psychologists working in Russia’s cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer “psychological education” to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work—as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, and its political ambiguity. I conclude that studies of governmentality that attend to both subjectivation as an ethical practice and social history can effectively render capitalist complicity and ordinary ethics in the same frame.

The United States has declared a war on fat. I examine this campaign as a biopolitical field of science and governance that has emerged to manage the “obesity epidemic” by remaking overweight and obese subjects into thin, fit, proper Americans. Drawing on research in Southern California, I examine the impact of the campaign on the bodies, selves, and lives of the heavyset young people who are its main targets. At least in this corner of the country, I argue, the war on fat, far from alleviating the problem of fatness, is creating a new fat problem by expanding the number of weight-obsessed, self-identified “abnormal” “fat subjects,” who may not be technically obese but whose desperate efforts to lower their weight endanger their health and bring intense socioemotional suffering. These developments have implications for larger issues of social suffering and social justice.

Intervening at the nexus of queer anthropology, black resistance, and Latin American and Caribbean culture and politics, I examine sites, modalities, and limits of “erotic subjectivity” during Cuba’s Special Period in Time of Peace (Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz)—the economic crisis of the 1990s. I trace how nonheteronormative black Cubans have been reinventing ways to participate, officially and unofficially, in a number of fraught, uneven exchanges on the ground. I aim to outline a genealogy of the political possibilities for nonheteronormative black Cubans.

After the Batu Hijau mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, began operating in 2000, mine managers identified area farmers as a top security risk because they were threatening to shut down the mine unless they were given jobs there. Among various efforts to get local residents “back on the land,” the mine began sponsoring participatory integrated pest management trainings that were supposed to turn residents into productive and self-reliant subjects. Instead, these trainings evoked subjects who claimed—through their resistance to certain aspects of the trainings—that they were dependent on and entitled to conventional forms of development aid from the mine.