A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites promote fear of crime and terrorism to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion. This ebook is participating in an experiment and is available Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence. Users are free to disseminate and reuse the ebook. The licence does not however permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
In recent years, lesbians and gay men have developed a new, aggressive style of politics. At the same time, innovative intellectual energies have made queer theory an explosive field of study. In "Fear of a Queer Planet", Michael Warner draws on emerging new queer politics, and shows how queer activists have come to challenge basic assumptions about the social and political world. Existing traditions of theory - Marxism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, legal theory, nationalism, and antinationalism - have too often presupposed a heterosexual society, as the essays in this volume demonstrate. "Fear of a Queer Planet" suggests a new agenda for social theory. It moves beyond the idea that lesbians and gay men share a minority identity and special interests and that their issues can be subordinated to more general social conflicts. Instead, Warner and the other contributors to this volume show that queer sexualities take many forms, are the subject of many kinds of conflict and struggles, and must be taken as a starting point in thinking about cultural politics. This collection explores the impact of ACT UP, Queer Nation, multiculturalism, the new religious right, outing, queerness, postmodernism, and other shifts in the politics of sexuality. The authors featured speak from different backgrounds of gender, race, nationality, and discipline. Together, they show how struggles over sexuality have profound implications for progressive politics, social theory, and cultural studies. Michael Warner has written extensively on censorship and the public sphere, the construction of American literary history, and the social and political implication of literary theories. He is author of "The Letter of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America" and co-editor of "The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology".
The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling resutl is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse.
Fear is a powerful emotion and a formidable spur to action, a source of worry and – when it is manipulated – a source of injustice. Manufacturing Phobias demonstrates how economic and political elites mobilize fears of terrorism, crime, migration, invasion, and infection to twist political and social policy and advance their own agendas. The contributors to the collection, experts in criminology, law, sociology, and politics, explain how and why social phobias are created by pundits, politicians, and the media, and how they target the most vulnerable in our society. Emphasizing how social phobias reflect the interests of those with political, economic, and cultural power, this work challenges the idea that society’s anxieties are merely expressions of individual psychology. Manufacturing Phobias will be a clarion call for anyone concerned about the disturbing consequences of our culture of fear.
In historiography, many interesting theoretical perspectives on biography have emerged in recent years, from forensics to structure and microhistory. Biographers themselves, though, often fear the study of the genre - needlessly, as these eighteen engaging new essays demonstrate.
Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidden plots, but are not sufficient without considering the role and ideological bias of the media. This timely book focuses on making sense of how and why some people respond to their fear of a threat by creating or believing conspiracy stories. It integrates insights from psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences to provide a complete overview and theory of how conspiracy beliefs manifest. Through this multi-disciplinary perspective, rigoros research develops and tests a practical, simple way to frame and understand conspiracy theories. The book supplies unprecedented amounts of new data from six empirical studies and unpicks the complexity of the process that leads to the empowerment of conspiracy beliefs.
An antidote to the culture of fear that dominates modern life From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself.
A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.
Dangerous Others, Insecure Societies examines the turn in post-industrial societies towards a fear of cultural, racial or religious externality, adopting a ground-breaking analysis which considers 'insecurity' a constituent part of 'otherness', rather than something separate or following from it. By addressing the link between insecurity and otherness, this book sheds light on the contemporary cultures of fear and risk that have made possible the aggressive measures that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US and which continue to dominate contemporary geopolitics. The result of particular socio-economic and political circumstances, a sense of fear in relation to the Other has emerged as a replacement for the social bond, as otherness and danger are increasingly associated with one another - a development that appears paradoxical in the modern, globalized world. Bringing together the latest research from scholars in the UK, Europe and Australia, Dangerous Others, Insecure Societies engages with diverse issues surrounding migration, authoritarianism and social exclusion to consider the implications of a culture of fear and exclusion for multicultural, globalized, networked societies. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, social anthropologists and political scientists concerned with questions of identity, citizenship, exclusion and belonging.
