• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.543-555
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• 2010

In his early poems, Wallace Stevens shows us different gestures, compared with his later poems, when he acquires reality by faculty of imagination. The former is made of ontological violence while the latter is revealed by bareness of less sensuality. However, they are the identical gestures, though from different angles, to accomplish things as they are rather than the ideas of things. In "Sunday Morning," ontological violence occurs in such epistemological couples as thought and thing, mind and world, and imagination and reality. Especially, in order to recuperate his poetic reality, Stevens undermines the traditional hierarchy between heavenly divinity and earthly divinity. In the poem, Christianity faces a critical challenge and then it is disempowered by the earthly divinity. Additionally, by disadvantaging religion, he wants to raise his poetic issue of the faculty of imagination to acquire reality. Stevens' concept of imagination is less subjective and more transcendental than Kantian one. After the ontological violence, Christian divinity and mythic gods leave ontological boundary for earthly divinity in an ambiguous way. In other words, between "Sunday" and "sunny day," the ontological conflicts haunt us throughout the poem as if the violence would happen between imagination and reality. For Stevens, both Christian divinity and mythic gods are mere obstacles to real divinity; both play a mere role of imagination before reality is revealed. Whatever reality is, imagination is always ready to draw an ontological line of reality in an ambiguous way, regardless of how long it lasts. In general, most ontological violence requires such physical remnants of conflicts as borderline, deaths, and pains which still prevail in the poem. Those ontological remnants remain to be found on earth. The sky is an abstract borderline between heaven and earth because in a sense, it belongs to both earthly landscape and heavenly sphere. Without any ontological borderline or threshold, there is no recognition of the divinity because the vitality of divinity is inflamed in continuous transgression of the other. After the final ontological conflict between heaven and earth, there remains only ambiguous borderline near the earth beside the friendlier sky.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.15
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• pp.111-135
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• 2013

This study explores gender images represented in the works of women artists from the Middle East, where male chauvinism is recognized to be more predominant than elsewhere. The artists included in this study such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Lida Abdul and Sigalit Landau are Post-Feminist generation of artists who were born in the Middle East but spent significant amount of time in the West. In addition, they were trained as artists under the influences of the Western Feminist Art. This particular group of female artists pays much attention to the ontological question of their identities rather than male/female inequality, and each artist represents men and women in the ways that can hardly be found in the works by women artists in the West. These artists not only connect gender identities to the socio-political geography of the Middle East but also deconstruct Western stereotypes of men and women from Arab world. The paper focuses on the way these women artists incorporate male/female vs. culture/nature dichotomies into their works to subvert the premises on which Western Feminism has been based and not only to cast light on women's freedom and their ontological conflicts but also to emphasize social suppression inflicted upon men. In such process, these artists resist stereotypical images of Middle Eastern men and women widely circulated in the mainstream media of the West.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.97-119
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• 2011

This paper, as an initiative to fertilize analyses on women's technoscientific practices, reviews theoretical discussions and empirical studies in-between feminism and STS, mainly owing its thinking technologies to Karen Barad's Agential Realism. The first part of this paper shows that women's technoscientific practices as research sites are not only fertile grounds between STS and feminism but also conflict areas between constructivist theories and feminist politics. The second part proposes Agential Realism as an way of thinking to deal with 'conflicts' between STS and feminism in analytical levels. Agential Realism provides useful conceptual tools for 'techno-scientific ways of thinking' through the reconceptualization of agency, the displacement of agency by accountability, and the configuration of STS analysis as 'apparatus.' The third part finds three examples of 'techno-scientific ways of thinking' on women's technscientific practices from previous feminist STS works, which suggests how to analyze not only women's technoscientific practices but also diverse practices of science, technology, and medicine as follows: follow 'the invisible', account for 'ontological choreography', and 'care' for what is analyzed.