Browsing by Author "Fallon, Jordan Keats"
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- Culinary ManFallon, Jordan Keats (Virginia Tech, 2023-03-27)This dissertation offers an exploration of the field of normative subjectivity circulated within western fine dining traditions. I use the notion of "normative subjectivity" which derives from the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's emphasis on the use of disciplinary repetition to mold, circumscribe, and modulate the conduct of subjects informs my own argument that fine dining spaces feature a normative regime of subjectivity centered on the hegemonic governance of a figure which I call "Culinary Man." This phrase follows from Sylvia Wynter's account of "the overrepresentation of Man," which describes the colonial field of subjectivity which revolves around a normatively white, male, and European figure of authority. Drawing from these sources, this dissertation seeks to give a theoretical analysis of the governing relationship between the chef (who embodies Culinary Man) and the fine dining brigade (the organizational unit of labor within commercial kitchens). As I argue, Culinary Man deploys a heterogeneous set of disciplinary discourses and practices which have the effect of consolidating monopolies on epistemic authority and governance. Each position within the brigade's hierarchy is subject to distinct, though related, disciplinary practices. Thus, several chapters seek to identify the specific practices pertinent to each brigade subject, while also illuminating how they fit together as a coherent hegemonic project. Additionally, a genealogy, in the style of Sylvia Wynter, is carried out to illuminate points of variance as well as continuity within the figure of Culinary Man. While the bulk of the dissertation seeks to carry out a discursive analysis of Culinary Man's disciplinary regime, there are also moves toward alternative projects which do not replicate the brigade form. The concluding chapters seek to identify where extant modes of resistance or alternative forms of culinary organization may hold the potential to move beyond the hegemonic overrepresentation of Culinary Man.
- Overrepresented Man: Genre, Violence, and HegemonyFallon, Jordan Keats (Virginia Tech, 2019-07-09)This thesis explores the intersections between practices of epistemic production and distribution and material violence. Following the work of Sylvia Wynter, a framework of "genre" is engaged to provide an account of intersectional social identities, disproportionately distributed hegemonic violence (including both state and non-state actants), and the traditions and technologies of anti-colonial theoretical modeling, material praxis, and political work engendered by the rich, interdisciplinary body of Black Feminist thought. To address the continued practices of social, political, and material violence which sustain the Wynterian onto-epistemological "Overrepresentation of Man," an emergent archipelagic politics of heterogenous coalition-building presents a viable path of becoming for liberatory political projects.
- Undoing the DemosFallon, Jordan Keats (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)This review charts the substantive theoretical import, diagnostic utility, as well as the conceptual and stylistic limits of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos. Brown adamantly charts the destructive effects of contemporary neoliberalism, construed largely as an insidious form of rationality rather than simply an economic system, and the hollowing out of democratic political life which has ensued from its ascension. The account of neoliberalism supplied by Undoing the Demos presents an indispensable tool with which to forge modalities of both analysis and resistance yet also contains important limitations which circumscribe some of the book’s utility and gesture toward the need for critical supplement.