Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

This chapter offers an account of the key events shaping modern forensic psychiatry since the 1950s, including legal reforms, political initiatives and key reports which have influenced practice. These are summarised in a narrative beginning with the 1959 Mental Health Act and concluding with the most recent Wessely proposals for reform. The critical clinical events including the cases of Graham Young, Peter Sutcliffe, Christopher Clunis and Michael Stone, the Carstairs escapes and the Butler, Reed, Blom-Cooper, Fallon and Tilt reports are discussed. The chapter includes a commentary on the development of medium-secure services and the refocussing of high-secure care since 2000.

Hutcheson and Butler were contemporaries whose best-known works appeared within a year of one another. Although they had similar intellectual temperaments and styles, their philosophical approaches differed in important ways that reverberated through thinkers that followed. Both were sharply analytical, and both shared a keen insight into moral psychology. Moreover, both laid great stress on the psychology of moral judgment. Hutcheson called this, following Shaftesbury, “moral sense,” and Butler referred to it alternately as the “principle of reflection” or “conscience.” For both, moral judgment involves the human capacity to (more or less successfully) reflect upon and respond affectively to motives, characters, and actions in dispassionate impartial way. However, the role of moral reflection for these two philosophers is profoundly different. For Hutcheson, it is an observer’s moral sense that enables a person to make moral evaluations of motivation and actions, but these evaluations are not self-reflexive – the agent is not evaluating their own, or even others’, moral sense. For Butler, on the other hand, conscience is a moral faculty by which agents crucially make judgments of themselves, judgments they employ to shape their own actions. Conscience is action-guiding for Butler in a way that moral sense is not for Hutcheson.

This chapter offers readings of Kazuo Ishiguro’s screenplays, paying particular attention to two films commissioned by Channel 4, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984) and The Gourmet (1986), and to his collaboration with Merchant Ivory, The White Countess (2005). In these rarely discussed works, Ishiguro interrogates the form of film itself by drawing attention to ‘unfilmable’ aspects of experience such as memory and imagination, which also feature prominently in his novels and short stories. While often overlooked in critical examinations of his work, these films provide insights into Ishiguro’s creative process and the evolution of his recurrent themes more generally. Like his most renowned novels, the subjects of these screenplays are service, sacrifice, and self-deception.

The second chapter examines heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América, 2666 and, in particular, Peres’ O Evangelho Segundo Hitler can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, in writing about Nazism, they encounter other challenges to explore such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works, there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds – the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first is explored with reference to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universals’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

In the time period from Berkeley to David Hume the architect and spectator metaphors were in competition with the legislative metaphor. Shaftesbury emphasized the architect metaphor where one assumes that God, the divine architect, has so designed human beings that we know what is right without relying upon the legislative paradigm. Human beings are endowed with a moral sense by the divine architect. Francis Hutcheson tried to synthesize the legislator and architect metaphors while adding that of the spectator. The perspective of the impartial spectator helps us determine what is right, avoiding personal bias or acting out of self-interest. Hume’s skepticism about the existence of divinely implanted moral sense led him to explain our sense of justice through a secular version of the spectator metaphor. Hume was very aware of the basic dilemma that adhering to the rules of justice in particular cases did not always produce the most good but that it was nonetheless important that people obey the rules of justice even in those cases. Hume sought to demonstrate what motivates people to act on rules that would be approved from the legislative perspective without recourse to divine intervention.

If digital technology requires us to completely rethink the fundamental axes of our human existence: time, space and causality, we have to ask the following questions: How are we to conceive of these three axes today when studying and teaching languages as a human activity? How can learning another language help us better understand the symbolic complexity of the human condition? And how can it enable us to engage with symbolic power and respond to symbolic violence? I discuss six scholars that have responded to these questions in recent decades: Judith Butler and her reflections on the time-bound political promise of the performative; Michel de Certeau and his thoughts on the space of strategies and tactics in everyday life; Mikhail Bakhtin on the time/space chronotope and the carnivalesque; Pierre Bourdieu and his Pascalian meditations on causality and the habitus; Alastair Pennycook and Bruno Latour on post-humanist thinking.