The Ethics of Cultural Studies

by Zylinska, Joanna

• ISBN13: 9780826475244
• ISBN10: 0826475248
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Ethical questions feature prominently on today's cultural and political agendas. The Ethics of Cultural Studies presents an ethical manifesto for Cultural Studies, an exploration of its current ethical and political concerns, and of its future challenges. The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and draws on examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum and immigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic and digital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th, and media representations of violence and crime. The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention that sets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluable source of ideas for students of contemporary culture.

Author Biography

Joanna Zylinska is Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Preface	ix
A User's Guide to Culture, Ethics and Politics	1	(25)
Welcome to the culture club	1	(2)
Description v normativity	3	(2)
Performativity	5	(1)
Deconstruction	6	(3)
Identity	9	(1)
`Turn to Levinas'	9	(2)
Levinas's ethics	11	(3)
Ethics and responsibility	14	(1)
Power struggle	15	(1)
Decision	16	(3)
Articulation	19	(1)
Antagonism in the plural	20	(1)
Ethics before politics	21	(5)
Ethics and Cultural Studies	26	(15)
Idle students and tabloid princesses	26	(2)
Cultural studies and ethics	28	(3)
The cultural studies of difference	31	(4)
What is cultural studies?	35	(3)
Cultural studies as a promise	38	(3)
Ethics and `Moral Panics'	41	(22)
Guns, youths and hip-hop	41	(2)
Cultural studies and `moral panics'	43	(2)
Beware the folk devils!	45	(3)
Cultural studies' ethical blind spot	48	(1)
Policing the (racial) crisis	49	(2)
Cultural studies before the law	51	(3)
Hegemony and ethical strategy	54	(5)
Permanent vigilance	59	(2)
A postscript	61	(2)
Ethics, Violence and the Media	63	(20)
Introduction	63	(3)
The sublime	66	(2)
The secular sacred	68	(2)
Mastering the sublime	70	(2)
Whose trauma is it anyway?	72	(2)
Good and bad violence	74	(2)
An(other) ethics of the sublime	76	(3)
Responsibility and the gift of death	79	(4)
Ethics and the Body	83	(20)
The people you never see	83	(1)
The universal acts and the biopolitics of immigration	84	(1)
Performativity of the public sphere	85	(4)
On the state's threshold	89	(2)
The politics of blindness	91	(3)
An ethics of bodies that matter	94	(9)
Ethics and National Identity	103	(19)
The nation at war (with itself)	103	(1)
`They're all anti-Semitic there'	104	(3)
Unveiling the truth	107	(3)
Is there such a thing as collective responsibility?	110	(3)
National memory and national forgetting	113	(3)
Narcissism, alterity and national identity	116	(6)
Ethics and Technology	122	(16)
Prosthetics and ethics	122	(2)
Welcoming the alien	124	(2)
Ethical confusion and `good scandal'	126	(1)
`I is an other'	127	(4)
`The information is the prosthesis'	131	(4)
`A species for which we do not yet have a name'	135	(3)
Bioethics and cyberfeminism	138	(21)
(Yet more) questions of cultural identity	138	(1)
Softening the cyborg	139	(2)
Bioethics between corporal and corporate obligations	141	(2)
Do soft cyborgs have bodies?	143	(7)
Mice experiments	150	(5)
A modest proposal for feminist cyberbioethics	155	(4)
Bibliography	159	(12)
Index	171