ABSTRACT
I noted in Chapter 1 of this book that it would be in the conclusion that I would draw together these essays into a coherent whole, borrowing from Wibben (2011: 8) the metaphor of a patchwork quilt to describe the intellectual endeavour I have undertaken here. In discourse analysis, of course, ‘quilting’ has a very specific meaning, with ‘quilting points’ (points de capiton) identified as ‘privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of the signifying chain’ (Lacan cited in Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 112). Here, I revisit the privileged signifiers to ‘quilt’ together the constituent elements of this book. In this context, the act of quilting is the discursive practice of articulation, the attempt to impose coherence in/on a given field of discursivity, ‘to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’ (ibid.). As discussed throughout, there are multiple and necessarily competing readings of the texts with which I engage here, so my attempts to draw out and evidence what I consider to be ‘privileged signifiers’ within and between the artefacts is by definition an attempt to ‘construct a centre’ for this work. In this chapter, therefore, I provide an overview of the ‘quilting points’ that render this book meaningful: gender and violence. In the first section below, I move to explore the potential significance of these analyses beyond their particular contexts. I discuss the meta-level substantive issues that I have discussed in the previous chapters – the politics of aesthetics and the exploration of ethics that informed the analyses I have conducted – with a view to creating what I refer to as an aesthetic ethicopolitical approach to analysis of events, issues and phenomena in global politics. Within this section, I turn to three core thematic priorities that I argue have been emphasised through attention to representations of gender and violence: the necessity of empathy; compassion; and critique. In the second section, I re-visit the issue of critique, discussing the ways in which this volume might contribute to a different sensibility toward (teaching/learning/research as production of) knowledge that could inform engagement with both popular culture and world politics.
