The aim of the present paper is to introduce Michel Foucault’s archaeology as a specific symptomatology. The thesis of symptomatology can be found in Nietzsche’s oeuvre where one can find a lot of papers analysing the relation between Nietzsche’s genealogy and Foucault’s conception of genealogy. However, Nietzsche appears also in the Les Mots et les Choses. This led us to interpreting the role of Nietzsche in Foucault’s archaeology and emphasizing the role of the language and the conception of symptom as a specific sign.
Artykuł ma na celu analizę wprowadzającą do sposobów reprezentacji mniejszości transpłciowej w nowych mediach. Poprzez analizę retoryczną wybranych treści związanych z dwoma głośnymi transpłciowymi youtuberami, zidentyfikowano pięć elementów składowych dyskursu na ich temat. Są to: redukcja problemu strukturalnego do osobistego, redukcja indywidualnej rzeczywistości do uczuć, tokenizacja, psychiatryzacja tożsamości transpłciowej i ingroup gatekeeping, czyli selekcja informacji w obrębie danej grupy. Wymienione aspekty dyskursu funkcjonują jako siły ograniczające i formujące medialną reprezentację tego, co w danym dyskursie uznawane jest za transpłciową tożsamość i transpłciowe doświadczenie. W związku z tym osoby transpłciowe nie są w stanie wyrazić własnego doświadczenia, ponieważ jest ono z góry wpisane w stereotyp poprzez strukturę debaty publicznej i wywiadów oraz poprzez określoną reprezentację medialną.
EN
The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.
The text provides a description as well as an analysis of mental disorders as socially constructed entities while focusing on the category of normality not only in its medical sense but also in social and cultural one. Our methodology has to be understood as rooted in social constructionism. We work with concepts created within social anthropology and semiotics but also existentialist psychotherapy or Mad Studies. When postulating mental disorder as a topic of social anthropology, we suggest that mental disorder is one of the key concepts behind the social and cultural understanding of normality: normality in regard to emotions, thinking, and behaviour is to a great extent defined negatively – that is, by what it isn't – with mental disorder being one of its major opposites. Normality in Western societies is significant mostly in the areas of mental health, sexuality, and gender whereas these areas may overlap; being different in terms of sexuality or gender may be – and often is – interpreted as a sign of a mental disorder. As for our findings, on a general level we suggest that the binary between the normal and unproblematic on the one hand and a disorder on the other hand is arbitrary. The border between the two categories has to do with social and cultural rules more than with actual medicine. More specifically, we describe a physician as a constructor who puts individual signs together and forms diagnoses which can change their structure, shift, or even break down completely. Researching mental disorders as a part of the socially constructed reality allows us to see the power dynamics and questionability of seemingly natural categories such as health and illness, or normality and abnormality.
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