Making Trouble
“Making Trouble” is also the name of my blog on this site, but the links below are to writings over the years that have tried to make trouble for many traditional concepts and intellectual approaches that I have found to be obstacles to better understanding.
These include concepts about mind, self, individual, cognition, identity, gender, sexuality/sexual orientation, and literacy. Among these my most radical critiques apply to accepted notions about mind and cognition, which I replace with more useful perspectives from semiotics, and widespread views about gender and sexuality, which I see as being misleading oversimplifications of very complex matters. I also try to penetrate many of the leading ideologies of our times, including those that legitimate the economic and legal oppression of children and adolescents by older adults.
In my blog more specific applications of these critiques appear. Here you will find the theoretical arguments behind them. My first essay actually called “Making Trouble” was published, along with some of these other troublesome ideas, in my book Textual Politics (1995), which is a good source for the relevant references and citations.
The Social Semiotics of the Material Subject [individuality and sexuality]
Science, Masculinism, and the Gender System
Notes on Masculinity and Academic Discourse [more on the gender system]
Identity, Development, and Desire
Cognition, Context, and Learning: A Social Semiotic Perspective
Technical Discourse & Technocratic Ideology