In her book The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar introduces the concept “debility,” distinguished from disability. The former is a process of slow wearing out, while the latter centralizes the event of becoming disabled and the entitlement afterward. In the disability framework, disability is exceptional, a condition caused by an accident that may affect anyone…
Author: chiayulien
COVID-19 and Governmentality in Taiwan
Chia Yu Lien // By April 16, COVID-19 had infected 2,101,164 people and killed 140,773 globally. Located 81 miles from China, as predicted by John Hopkins University, Taiwan should be one of the hardest-hit countries from COVID-19. So far, however, among its population of 23 million, only 385 people have been infected, and only 6…
Desire II: Desire and its Object
Chia Yu Lien // For philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, desire produces perpetually new objects. Unlike Freud and Freudian scholars, who consider desire as lacking and trace the desired object back to the mother–child relationship, Deleuze and Guattari argue: “the real object can be produced only by an external causality and external mechanisms; nonetheless…
Desire I: Desire and the Formulation of the Bourgeois Subject
Chia Yu Lien// In this and the following posts, I would like to talk about the concept of desire—more specifically, the desire of the bourgeois subject, or in Lauren Berlant’s words, “capitalist subject” (2007, 779). I am not talking about desire as a primary physiological drive, such as the desire to breathe or to eat,…
Neoliberalizing aging: a successful aging paradigm?
Chia Yu Lien // In the past century, aging and old age have become widely recognized as one of the most important medical and social problems. This recognition has been accelerated by multiple factors, including demographic change and the institution of retirement. In addition to all these factors, in the last three decades aging as…