Browsing by Subject "Subjectivation"

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Open Access
Adapting, defending and transforming ourselves: conceptualizations of self practices in the social science literature
(Sage Publications Ltd., 2015) Karakayali, N.
Self practices – mental and bodily activities through which individuals try to give a shape to their existence – have been a topic of interest in the social science literature for over a century now. These studies bring into focus that such activities play important roles in our relationship to our social environment. But beyond this general insight we still do not have a framework for elucidating what kind of roles/uses have been attributed to self practices by social theorists historically. Through an analysis of the works of 5 major contributors to the literature (Durkheim, Mauss, Simmel, Giddens and Foucault), the article highlights three distinct conceptualizations, which draw attention to the adaptive, defensive and transformative uses of self practices. Adaptive uses allow individuals to adjust their conduct to collective norms; defensive uses serve the maintenance and protection of self-identity despite de-individualizing pressures; and transformative self practices target the development of alternative ways of living. It is further suggested that the framework developed in the article can provide important clues about the different ‘practical’ solutions offered by social theorists to the problems that modern individuals face in constituting themselves as autonomous subjects.
Open Access
Subjectivizing children: melancholy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter and Wendy
(2023-08) Doğan, Şule Nur
This thesis is concerned with the subjectivation of children in children’s literature and film, and the melancholy caused to child characters as they are forced down a path of growing up as conceived by adults. Engaged in a close reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Peter and Wendy (1911), as well as their select film adaptations Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Return to Never Land (2002), Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and finally Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), the thesis is also committed to a discourse analysis of the concepts of childhood and growing up. As the thesis is concerned with works occupying a timeframe of over a century, the shifts in Western children’s literature and film, as well as their introduction into the Disney machinery is also considered. Approaching this multitude of attitudes towards how child characters relate to adulthood and growing up, the thesis connects this issue in relation to the dynamic between the Western colonizer and the colonized subjects, as the former desubjectivizes the latter in a similar dynamic to the one between adults and children.