differences

Title differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies
Location Providence
Publisher Duke University Press
Periodicity Thrice a year
ISSN 0098-8767
URL Duke differences
Published Since 1989-
Indexed Holdings 2000-
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Periodical's Overview

"differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies first appeared in 1989 at the moment of a critical encounter—a head-on collision, one might say—of theories of difference (primarily Continental) and the politics of diversity (primarily American). In the ensuing years, the journal has established a critical forum where the problematic of differences is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social. differences highlights theoretical debates across the disciplines that address the ways concepts and categories of difference—notably but not exclusively gender—operate within culture."

Selected Subject Headings

  • Allostasis
  • Bisexuality - psychological aspects
  • Birdsongs
  • Details
  • Dracula, Count (fictitious character)
  • Eclecticism
  • Empathy - social aspects
  • Feral children
  • Friendship - philosophy
  • Gifts
  • Honor killings - Turkey
  • Human beings - forecasting
  • Humanism
  • Negritud (literary movement)
  • Optimism
  • Other (philosophy)
  • Philosophy - data processing
  • Swarm intelligence - social aspects
  • Tolearation
  • Turing machines

Notes

The following subject headings could also have been selected:

  • Difference (philosophy)
  • Femininity (philosophy)
  • Feminism and literature
  • Feminist criticism
  • Feminist art criticism
  • Feminist literary criticism
  • Feminist theory
  • Psychoanalysis and feminism
  • Queer theory
  • Transgenderism

Or we could have listed some of the philosophers and thinkers that circumscribe differences’ thought nodes, even if to contest or rethink them; this list should start with Jacques Derrida, but it would also encompass Jacques Lacan, Theodor W. Adorno, Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit, Paul de Man, Félix Guattari, and many others, even the Marquis de Sade; we should also add Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Melanie Klein, Barbara Johnson, Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, and the vast number of theoreticians, literary critics and writers that fill the journal’s pages; all of them belonging to an eukaryotic species constituted by oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

But ccindex opted to present this serious endeavor of a thinking journal by giving another indication of the array of subject matters that are covered in their pages, all filtered through their editorial statement, and articulated nodes of thought. Yes, deconstruction, différence, feminism, continental philosophy, gender, sexual varieties and constructions are the lenses that shape how they think, read and see the world, but these are nothing else than tools used to extract meaning from it; differences’ world is one firmly grounded in Academia--a U.S. and Western-based one--but nonetheless engaged with those aspects of our reality that can allow their thoughts to be expounded: a speech act, a news item, a literary text, a philosopher’s oeuvre, or a social event, all starting points from which to elaborate discursive filigrees. And that’s the value of this sober journal, to present new ways of perceiving reality, no matter if these can feel sometimes more of an exercise between peers than an act driven by some sense of urgency. In contrast with other similarly academic journals like Public culture, differences’ simmers thought, its pace and austerity a much-needed oasis in an ever-accelerated thoughtless social reality.

The question remains if the inhabitants of this intellectual world are at ease in it, or if the world they have created is an inviting one for other(s); but that’s the beauty of difference, to create worlds, even if sparsely populated. We like to every so often dwell and diffuse differences’ arid and otherly beautiful landscapes.

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