Robin Goodman | Florida State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Robin Goodman
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2024
Consuming Consumption, 2024
We are consumed by our consumption. Consumption is ubiquitous: buying t-shirts, reading novels, b... more We are consumed by our consumption. Consumption is ubiquitous: buying t-shirts, reading novels, burning coal, drinking sugar with our coffee, visiting exhibitions are all deeply political acts with uncertain political corollaries. What we are doing when we consume-how we can approach, understand, and categorize different kinds of consumption and different kinds of commoditiesremains deeply contested. The scales of these implications, as other recently published works have made clear, can be as vast as the history of imperialism or as narrow as the regional brand identity of a single beer. 1 Appraising these acts, developing both a praxis and a disciplinary mode that can be appropriately responsive to their historical and social freight, is the challenge explored by these four 2023 works: Robin Truth Goodman's Gender Commodity:
Literature and Social Justice, 2024
Left Theory and the Alt-Right, 2024
The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mand... more In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mandates an “intellectual viewpoint diversity” survey that asks students, faculty, and other employees at Florida’s public colleges and universities to report on their levels of comfort to express their ideological and political opinions; 2) it forbids instructors from “shielding” students from “access to, or observation of, ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive”; 3) it deputizes students as vigilantes to record instructor lectures without the instructor’s consent “as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding.” By narrating my involvement as a plaintiff in litigation against this bill, I discuss how the protections of intellectual inquiry are being struggled over in the context of state overreach and growing authoritarianism and how this threatens the roots of democratic culture.
Gender Commodity: Markeing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security, 2022
Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has a... more Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you.
Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, 2023
Interventions
This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 ... more This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – to discuss the intersections between feminism and neoliberalism. It argues neoliberalism promotes images of feminist-influenced independent women in order to advance its ideologies of resilience and public-sector critique as well as to make sense of its policies of privatization, technological expansion, and cuts in workforce supports. Images of women in such films also serve to create narrative and moral meanings that support forms of exploitation in reproductive economies. However, such films also demonstrate that neoliberalism’s citations of feminism cannot help but produce multiple feminist perspectives, some of which cannot be collapsed into – and even contradict – neoliberalism’s constructions.
Philosophy as World Literature, 2020
Goodman asserts that the virus reveals very old ideas about control and about power The increase ... more Goodman asserts that the virus reveals very old ideas about control and about power The increase in reported domestic violence against women is no surprise, nor is the closure of women's health clinics that administer abortion-services labeled "non-essential" health services It is also not surprising that government-bought food is disappearing and price-gauged in the process of being distributed to stricken communities in Colombia and Bangladesh by contractors with no-bid deals, or that stock prices are rising at the same time as unemployment The virus reveals that control has been exercised not just through algorithms, media saturation, and the Internet, but, familiarly, as well, through dispossession, accumulation, imperialism, and their technologies and systems, which include the media In an economy that demands deskilling, automation, increasing contracting, and privatization, such forms of control have made "disposable" or "exchangeable" worker...
Contemporary Political Theory, 2016
Gender Work, 2013
In prior chapters, I have pointed to elements of the current organization of capital that depend ... more In prior chapters, I have pointed to elements of the current organization of capital that depend on expanding paradigms of “women’s work.” By “women’s work,” I mean a type of labor that in the industrial age was considered domestic, affective, immaterial, or reproductive, and having to do with functions of “care” and socialization. Designated as a “separate sphere” outside of production, such sets of productive tasks were, traditionally in the twentieth century, represented as outside of public concern, not organized by the wage, not protected by the rights and privacy discourse of the liberal state (e.g., labor, security, safety, health, environmental, educative, etc.), formulated as “autonomous,” and not connected to a package of guaranteed protections and benefits. Instead, they added “free time” to the productive process—time for which capital did not need to make an exchange, that in capital’s terms was separate: pure excess or “surplus” that capital got for free. Currently, capital is demanding that all work fit such paradigms.1
The Values of Literary Studies
Introduction 1. Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy 2. The Philosopher's Stoned: Harry ... more Introduction 1. Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy 2. The Philosopher's Stoned: Harry Potter's Public 3. A Time for Flying Horses: Oil Education and the Future of Literature 4. The Triumphant but Tragic Wealth of the Poor: Buchi Emecheta Meets Hernando DeSoto's Informal Markets 5. Homework: School in Serowe 6. Conclusion
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2024
Consuming Consumption, 2024
We are consumed by our consumption. Consumption is ubiquitous: buying t-shirts, reading novels, b... more We are consumed by our consumption. Consumption is ubiquitous: buying t-shirts, reading novels, burning coal, drinking sugar with our coffee, visiting exhibitions are all deeply political acts with uncertain political corollaries. What we are doing when we consume-how we can approach, understand, and categorize different kinds of consumption and different kinds of commoditiesremains deeply contested. The scales of these implications, as other recently published works have made clear, can be as vast as the history of imperialism or as narrow as the regional brand identity of a single beer. 1 Appraising these acts, developing both a praxis and a disciplinary mode that can be appropriately responsive to their historical and social freight, is the challenge explored by these four 2023 works: Robin Truth Goodman's Gender Commodity:
Literature and Social Justice, 2024
Left Theory and the Alt-Right, 2024
The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mand... more In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mandates an “intellectual viewpoint diversity” survey that asks students, faculty, and other employees at Florida’s public colleges and universities to report on their levels of comfort to express their ideological and political opinions; 2) it forbids instructors from “shielding” students from “access to, or observation of, ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive”; 3) it deputizes students as vigilantes to record instructor lectures without the instructor’s consent “as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding.” By narrating my involvement as a plaintiff in litigation against this bill, I discuss how the protections of intellectual inquiry are being struggled over in the context of state overreach and growing authoritarianism and how this threatens the roots of democratic culture.
Gender Commodity: Markeing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security, 2022
Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has a... more Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you.
Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, 2023
Interventions
This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 ... more This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – to discuss the intersections between feminism and neoliberalism. It argues neoliberalism promotes images of feminist-influenced independent women in order to advance its ideologies of resilience and public-sector critique as well as to make sense of its policies of privatization, technological expansion, and cuts in workforce supports. Images of women in such films also serve to create narrative and moral meanings that support forms of exploitation in reproductive economies. However, such films also demonstrate that neoliberalism’s citations of feminism cannot help but produce multiple feminist perspectives, some of which cannot be collapsed into – and even contradict – neoliberalism’s constructions.
Philosophy as World Literature, 2020
Goodman asserts that the virus reveals very old ideas about control and about power The increase ... more Goodman asserts that the virus reveals very old ideas about control and about power The increase in reported domestic violence against women is no surprise, nor is the closure of women's health clinics that administer abortion-services labeled "non-essential" health services It is also not surprising that government-bought food is disappearing and price-gauged in the process of being distributed to stricken communities in Colombia and Bangladesh by contractors with no-bid deals, or that stock prices are rising at the same time as unemployment The virus reveals that control has been exercised not just through algorithms, media saturation, and the Internet, but, familiarly, as well, through dispossession, accumulation, imperialism, and their technologies and systems, which include the media In an economy that demands deskilling, automation, increasing contracting, and privatization, such forms of control have made "disposable" or "exchangeable" worker...
Contemporary Political Theory, 2016
Gender Work, 2013
In prior chapters, I have pointed to elements of the current organization of capital that depend ... more In prior chapters, I have pointed to elements of the current organization of capital that depend on expanding paradigms of “women’s work.” By “women’s work,” I mean a type of labor that in the industrial age was considered domestic, affective, immaterial, or reproductive, and having to do with functions of “care” and socialization. Designated as a “separate sphere” outside of production, such sets of productive tasks were, traditionally in the twentieth century, represented as outside of public concern, not organized by the wage, not protected by the rights and privacy discourse of the liberal state (e.g., labor, security, safety, health, environmental, educative, etc.), formulated as “autonomous,” and not connected to a package of guaranteed protections and benefits. Instead, they added “free time” to the productive process—time for which capital did not need to make an exchange, that in capital’s terms was separate: pure excess or “surplus” that capital got for free. Currently, capital is demanding that all work fit such paradigms.1
The Values of Literary Studies
Introduction 1. Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy 2. The Philosopher's Stoned: Harry ... more Introduction 1. Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy 2. The Philosopher's Stoned: Harry Potter's Public 3. A Time for Flying Horses: Oil Education and the Future of Literature 4. The Triumphant but Tragic Wealth of the Poor: Buchi Emecheta Meets Hernando DeSoto's Informal Markets 5. Homework: School in Serowe 6. Conclusion
interveiw on New Books Network