reibureibu's reviews
103 reviews

"For liberals, sexual violence on campus is of critical importance because (1) universities are sites of class reproduction, and all intersubjective encounters in such places must be rationalized, and (2) the PMC elite loves to play the virtuous hero in clear-cut moral dramas where economic exploitation is not an issue. Laura Kipnis should not have been surprised by the fact that a segment of PMC young people no longer sees sex as an activity where pleasure and agency are critical. For Emma Sulkowicz, everything that happens to her can be instrumentalized and turned into fodder for publicity and prosecution. The lack of boundaries between the personal and the political is the poisoned fruit of contemporary neoliberalism’s metabolization of the historical counterculture."

Interpretations of Carnival present it as a social institution that degrades or "uncrowns" the higher functions of thought, speech, and the soul by translating them into the grotesque body, which serves to renew society and the world, as a release for impulses that threaten the social order that ultimately reinforces social norms, as a social transformation, or as a tool for different groups to focus attention on conflicts and incongruities by embodying them in "senseless" acts.

Furthermore, some cultures use Carnival as a method of empowering themselves in spite of social conflicts. For example, when the Caribbean Carnival was established as a result of French settlers, even the slaves had their version of the masquerade, where they would reverse roles to mock those of higher social status. Along with empowering individuals for a period of time, despite their typical status, Carnival brings communities together. In a day where all are meant to perform a "mask" that differs from their typical identity, all members of a society are able to connect through their theatricality and satire.

Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, writes: "Any new year is a revival of time at its beginning, a repetition of the cosmogony. Ritual fights between two groups of extras, the presence of the dead, Saturnalia and orgies, are all elements which indicate that at the end of the year and in the expectation of the new year the mythical moments of the passage of chaos to the cosmogony are repeated". Eliade also writes: "Then the dead will come back, because all barriers between the dead and the living are broken (is the primordial chaos not revived?), and will come back since – at this paradoxical moment – time will be interrupted, so that the dead may be again contemporaries of the living." Eliade speculates that people have "a deep need to regenerate themselves periodically by abolishing the elapsed time and making topical the cosmogony". As regards masks (monsters, animals, demons), he assigns them an apotropaic meaning.