Difference and Hierarchy Revisited by Feminism

Drawing heavily on the work of classicist Page duBois, which eloquently explains the emergence, in ancient Greece, of hierarchy and of what is still understood today as the great chain of being (scala naturae: male, female, slave, barbarian, animal), this paper analyzes the age-old negative conotations of the concept of difference in western culture, considers the reinvention of difference as “positive” by Rosi Braidotti (after Deleuze & Guattari), and reassesses the efforts of several other feminist philosophers (e.g. Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Gayatry Spivak, Drucilla Cornell) to counter Lacan on the impossibility of “speaking women” beyond the dominant (male) philosophical discourse. Or, to paraphrase Marie Cardinal, their efforts to find “les mots pour le dire”.

Appropriating Bimby on the Internet: Perspectives on technology mediated meals by a virtual brand community

It was Christmas day when an intriguing news piece about a kitchen technology was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2013 (Kowsmann, 2013). Immediately after, the piece went viral in the Portuguese (social) media (TV, blogs, press). It reported an odd 'obsession' of Portuguese consumers with a pricey German-made kitchen appliance - the Bimby (Figure 7.1) - during a difficult period of 'painful budget slashing in return for an international bailout'. The news piece served to unveil the irony: how come ''Western Europe's poorest country' could afford such an expensive technology 'that outsells high-end iPads [...] and is more popular on Facebook than the country's best-known rock band?' The journalistic piece advanced explanations for this technology craze: 'But the Portuguese love gadgets and seem determined, despite hard times, to maintain their tradition of regularly getting together for dinner. In this explanatory attempt, Bimby is portrayed as an intermediary that opens up the possibility for thinking about meal practices in a particular way, in this case, linking nation and meals through ideas around commensality.