Amorous Ex/Incursions: Love in Writings of Badiou, Weil, Fromm, and Barthes

My dissertation explores the enabling contributions of love to the practice of ethico-political and cultural critique. Engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Roland Barthes, I examine love in terms of the following modalities: waiting, giving, and looking. I place the aforementioned thinkers in dialogue with selected literary and cinematic texts to explicate and interrogate the meaningful possibilities of their discourse on love. In my chapter on Alain Badiou, I discuss his ontology, which I draw upon heavily to set the theoretical parameters of my study. I also discuss the logic of love that he develops in his philosophy. Speaking to the problem of pre-Evental agency that critics of his work identify, I suggest that waiting as attention, as theorized by Simone Weil, might be the closest form of agency that a pre-Evental (amorous) being can experience. In my discussion of Erich Fromm, I reevaluate his “art of loving” within the constellation of late capitalism. Reading his work through a Lacanian lens, I explore the utility of his prescriptions by examining Chuck Palahniuk’s controversial novel Fight Club. In my chapter on Roland Barthes, I theorize the possibility of cinematic looking that does not depend on the antagonism inherent in the binaries masculine/ feminine and (Gazing) spectator/ (to-be-looked-at) image. Towards this objective, I propose the “amorous look,” a mode of viewing occasioned by cinematic punctual encounters, that I contend is beyond the domain of desire and perversion. I deploy the “amorous look” as I reflect on Aureus Solito’s film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Olivares (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares) and its representations of love and waiting.

Governmentality gone wild: How the separation of sex workers from 'communities' contributes to violence against sex workers

Sex workers are members of our communities, whether they are local or national communities. In law, mainstream media representations, and research sex workers are positioned as outside of or in opposition to communities. Even within marginalized communities sex workers are excluded when appeals to respectability politics are made. In this thesis I analyze three analytic sites from three areas of social life. The first chapter performs a textual analysis of The Bedford Decision (2013) and the resulting Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (2014) as an examination of law. The second chapter is an analysis of filmic discourse on community, sex workers, and violence in the mainstream film London Road (2015) as an examination of mainstream media. The third chapter draws upon empirical research, i.e. in-depth interviews with three current and former sex workers in Ottawa, Canada and analyzes the transcripts using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to center how sex workers’ understanding of their work, community, and the laws and policies that are supposed govern and protect them. In my preface and conclusion I discuss some of the ethical dilemmas I encountered while conducting this research. My findings suggest that sex workers are being positioned and understood as outside of communities in ways that contribute to violence against sex workers. The implications of this research suggest that people who speak in the name of communities—communities in the sense of local neighborhood communities, activist communities, and national communities—need to recognize that sex workers are part of their communities and be accountable to ensuring they are treated as members. Researchers who conduct research on sex work and sex workers need to be accountable to their participants and the impacts their research may have on laws and policies. Sex workers are an over-researched population yet their voices are largely misappropriated or silenced in popular research and policy debates.

The political economy of industrial policy in Peru and Ecuador: 1980-2010

This dissertation focuses on industrial policy in two developing countries: Peru and Ecuador. Informed by comparative historical analysis, it explains how the Import-Substitution Industrialization policies promoted during the 1970s by military administration unravelled in the following 30 years under the guidance of Washington Consensus policies. Positioning political economy in time, the research objectives were two-fold: understanding long-term policy reform patterns, including the variables that conditioned cyclical versus path-dependent dynamics of change and; secondly, investigating the direction and leverage of state institutions supporting the manufacturing sector at the dawn, peak and consolidation of neoliberal discourse in both countries. Three interconnected causal mechanisms explain the divergence of trajectories: institutional legacies, coordination among actors and economic distribution of power. Peru’s long tradition of a minimal state contrasts with the embedded character of Ecuador long tradition of legal protectionism dating back to the Liberal Revolution. Peru’s close policy coordination among stakeholders –state technocrats and business elites- differs from Ecuador’s “winners-take-all” approach for policy-making. Peru’s economic dynamism concentrated in Lima sharply departs from Ecuador’s competitive regional economic leaderships. This dissertation paid particular attention to methodology to understand the intersection between structure and agency in policy change. Tracing primary and secondary sources, as well as key pieces of legislation, became critical to understand key turning points and long-term patterns of change. Open-ended interviews (N=58) with two stakeholder groups (business elites and bureaucrats) compounded the effort to knit motives, discourses, and interests behind this long transition. In order to understand this amount of data, this research build an index of policy intervention as a methodological contribution to assess long patterns of policy change. These findings contribute to the current literature on State-market relations and varieties of capitalism, institutional change, and policy reform.