Anna Hickey-Moody

Deleuzian Encounters brings together sixteen accessible, thought-provoking essays that examine the practical and ethical implications of Deleuze's philosophy for different contemporary social issues. Topics explored include: the environment, terrorism, refugees, indigenous reconciliation, gender, suicide, intellectual disability, injecting drug use, classroom teaching and global activism. Each contribution provides practical examples of how to make use of Deleuze's thought in social research, and offers fresh insights into the creative and innovative potentials Deleuze's philosophy holds for social thought and action.

This chapter offers an interpretation of the integrated dance theatre of the Restless Dance Company as involving a process of turning away from the determinations of intellectually disabled bodies in medical discourses using the Deleuzian concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘affect’. It contends that bodies with intellectual disability are constructed through specific systems of knowledge and argues that performance spaces can offer radically new ways of being affected by people with disabilities. It also highlights the importance of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's works in providing models for understanding minor or politically marginalised knowledge systems.

This book uses Deleuze’s work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses masculinity in terms of what it does, how it operates and what its affects are. Taking a pragmatic approach, Hickey-Moody shapes chapters around key Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in masculinity studies and then presents case studies of popular subjects and offers overviews of disciplines that have applied Deleuze’s work to the study of men’s lives. This book shows how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to, and transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Examining the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the psychoanalytic boy, as exemplified by their writing on Little Hans, Hickey-Moody reconsiders the politics of their approach to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. In this context, the author examines contemporary lived performances of young masculinity, drawing on her own fieldwork. The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a nearly unprecedented fashion. Accordingly, the book also explores the gendered nature of disability, and canvases some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space, before introducing case studies of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and the popular Hollywood film Me Before You. The book provocatively concludes by challenging scholars to take up Deleuze’s thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination mediated through environmental exploitation.