I am most honored and perhaps also startled to read these comprehensive scholarly essays dedicated to the question of the appropriation of Gender Trouble in Asian studies. Sometimes “appropriation” is a problematic activity, such as the cultural appropriation of artworks and styles from minority communities, such as the indigenous, for the purposes of market circulation, profit, or the augmentation of human capital. But when texts such as Gender Trouble enter the global market of books, a different kind of appropriation becomes possible. The book is at once taken up and refused, indicating the limits of translation or marking a resistance to cultural imperialism.

Marx's early article “for a ruthless critique of everything existing” was written as a letter to arnold ruge, a young hegelian, in September 1843 and then printed in the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher in 1844. It is one of several letters that Marx wrote to Ruge during that period on the need to upend philosophical authority. Translated into English, the essay is often taken to be an exuberant and ironic prefiguration of the writings that came to be known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The essay's title is taken from Marx's letter, in which he remarks that we must undertake “die rücksichtlose Kritik alles Bestehenden”—the ruthless critique not of “everything existing,” exactly, but of everything established, even institutionalized as the establishment over time.

How quickly and how often those who heard about the sudden death of helen tartar asked, did i let her know how much her support meant to me? Did I express adequately my gratitude for all the work she did for me and for others in literature, philosophy, critical theory, visual culture, poetry, and religion, to name but a few of her fields? I do not think it was a reflex of self-punishment as much as the upsurge of another kind of remorse, the wishing to have said more. At the American Comparative Literature Association's memorial for Helen Tartar, person after person testified to the extraordinary support she offered—soliciting a manuscript; reading it actively and critically; sometimes productively quarreling with its ideas or formulations; finding the right readers; collaborating on the material form, including cover and font; and sending the work forth into the world of readers, “worlding” it, if you will. Some at that event spoke about the race against tenure and the acute anxiety it produces, and how crucial Helen was in expediting a review and presenting the work before the board for approval. Others talked about her frank and sensitive evaluations, which let us know what had to change before the manuscript became a book—always delivered with an affirmation of the project. But because Helen was a committed intellectual with her own philosophical, literary, and religious archive, she also contested conclusions and queried moves. I remember how, when she copyedited The Psychic Life of Power (in the days when she handled every aspect of production at Stanford), she quarreled with my reading of Freud and sent me to new sources to correct my view. To Haun Saussy, with whom she worked on several projects, she wrote, “When I read this argument, I felt I needed to take hold of it like a twisted sock and pull it inside-out.” She was our first reader, and we were incredibly lucky because she paid attention.

The phenomenon of “embedded reporting” seemed to emerge with the invasion of iraq in march 2003. it is defined as the situation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspective established by military and governmental authorities. They traveled only on certain trucks, looked only at certain scenes, and relayed home only images and narratives of certain kinds of action. Embedded reporting implies that this mandated perspective would not itself become the topic of reporters who were offered access to the war on the condition that their gaze remained restricted to the established parameters of designated action. I want to suggest that embedded reporting has taken place in less explicit ways as well: one example is the agreement of the media not to show pictures of the war dead, our own or their own, on the grounds that that would be anti-American. Journalists and newspapers were denounced for showing coffins of the American war dead shrouded in flags. Such images should not be seen because they might arouse certain kinds of sentiments; the mandating of what could be seen—a concern with regulating content—was supplemented by control over the perspective from which the action and destruction of war could be seen. Another implicit occurrence of embedded reporting is in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The camera angle, the frame, the posed subjects all suggest that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the perspective of the war, elaborating that perspective and even giving it further validity.

The Arlington Hospital Needlestick Injury (NSI) Prevention Program was created to protect healthcare workers from NSI and to assess the effectiveness of our interventions. Interventions included revising NSI policy and procedures. The average NSI rate dropped from 109 to 43 per year after the interventions, over a period of 4 years.

Bordo argues that the “theoretics of heterogeneity” taken too far prevents us from being able make generalizations or broadly conceptual statements about women. 1 argue that the political efficacy of feminism does not depend on the capacity to speak from the perspective of “women” and that the insistence on the heterogeneity of the category of women does not imply an opposition to abstraction but rather moves abstract thinking in a self-critical and democratizing direction.

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poetic-maternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume.