Starting in the 1970s, the “ex-gay movement,” a loose collection of conservative Christian counselors and therapists, experienced sizable growth in the United States. Importantly, women played a prominent role in the expansion of the ex-gay movement in the ensuing decades, both as counselors and as counselees. This article highlights the tension that arose between the patriarchal gender norms and the role women counselors played in the ex-gay movement. When read “along the grain,” ex-gay texts demonstrate the production of a gendered hierarchy that not only valued “female femininity” over “female masculinity” but also reified patriarchal authority in the US. Female pastoral counselors, such as Leanne Payne and Elizabeth Moberly, advocated for the conservative gendered vision of the religious right. But as women, these counselors—and their books—could not transcend the patriarchal order of the religiously conservative ex-gay movement.

This article examines the topic of postcolonial subject formation in the work of Moroccan historian and theorist Abdallah Laroui (1933–) by analyzing his evaluation of the notion of authenticity. I trace understandings of self-identity for Moroccans and other Arab populations that Laroui articulates in his work from the 1960s through the 2000s, and situate his interventions in relation both to relevant political developments and to contributions of other Arab intellectuals on this question, across this time period. Rather than interpret Laroui as a proponent of undifferentiated universalism in his reading of modern history, as many of his critics and commentators do, I demonstrate how he departs from such an approach by calling attention to the notion of particularism, which he defends as a counterpoint to authenticity. The article concludes with a discussion of Laroui's abandonment of a positive, alternative conception of cultural and political subjectivity by the late twentieth century, and considers what the implications of this shift in his thought are.

In Ray Cummings's loony 1922 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, a man known only as the Chemist discovers a beautiful woman in a subatomic world in the gold of his mother's wedding ring. Smitten, he figures out how to shrink himself to join her. Upon his return to our world, he finds that although seven days passed for him while “in the ring,” he has arrived back only forty hours after leaving. Over drinks, the Banker asks him to explain how the difference is possible. The Chemist replies, “To get a conception of this change you must analyze definitely what time is. We measure and mark it by years, months, and so forth, down to minutes and seconds, all based upon the movements of our earth around its sun. But that is the measurement of time, not time itself.” He then turns to the Big Business Man and asks, “How would you describe time?” “The Big Business Man smiled. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘is what keeps everything from happening at once.’”

This essay reviews the contribution of Stuart Elden to the scholarship relating to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In particular, the essay considers Elden’s impressive four-volume intellectual history of Foucault’s career: The Early Foucault (2021), The Archaeology of Foucault (2023), The Birth of Power (2017), and Foucault’s Last Decade (2016). While acknowledging the thoroughness of Elden’s research, the essay analyzes Elden’s reluctance to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Foucault’s thought and his failure to say anything about his significance as a thinker. The essay concludes by considering Elden’s work as a symptom of “Foucault scholasticism.”