Hegemony is a concept of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci which refers to the way that the political and social domination of the bourgeois class in capitalist society is pervasively expressed not only in ideologies but in all realms of culture and social organization. Hegemony is used in discussion of a patriarchal society or a colonial society. In Third World term 'hegemony' has come generally to mean Soviet domination. Some of the phrases with the term hegemony are: The working-class hegemony, and Political hegemony. Ideological Hegemony is a system of thought control.
Hegemony historically meant leadership or predominance, especially by one member of a confederacy or union, originally of the States of ancient Greece. Hegemony is the dominance or undue influence exercised by a country, especially the former USSR, over its weaker neighbours. The global system today is a hegemonic system that is increasingly globalized, in which the basic concepts of realism provide little guidance or understanding in explaining state behavior. - Peter Van Ness.
The hegemony of hegemony
Jeremy Valentine, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.
A distinctive characteristic of Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony is its insistence
on the denial of an essence or ground of the subject. This element of their theory is
derived from their notion of antagonism, in which a relation with a ground is brought into
question by revealing its contingency.
The universalizing of modernity as the form of hegemony reduces the ontological
notion of antagonism to a dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction. Laclau's response to the exhaustion of political
modernity in the figure of complexity, from which antagonism is evacuated through the
hegemony of the category of myth.
Hegemony, not anarchy: why China and Japan are not balancing US unipolar power - Peter Van Ness. Abstract: The United States today dominates the globe and many regional geographical subsystems in an unprecedented way, maintaining a hegemonic order that is in no way similar to the ‘anarchy’ assumed in realist analyses. This paper describes the US hegemonic system, analyzes the roles of China and Japan within this system, and examines how the Bush administration's plans for missile defense might transform the system.
International Law in Times of Hegemony: Unequal Power and the Shaping of the International Legal Order - Nico Krisch. Abstract: Hegemony and international law are often regarded as irreconcilable: international law is widely assumed to depend on a balance of power and to be eschewed by hegemons in favour of political tools. This corresponds to an often idealized contrast between international law and international politics, one reflecting reason and justice, the other brute power.
Designing Women - Cultural Hegemony and the Exercise of Power among Women Who Have Undergone Elective Mammoplasty - PATRICIA GAGNE, DEANNA McGAUGHEY.
Draws on Foucault's concept of the exercise of power and Gramsci's concept of hegemony to examine how women used cosmetic surgery to exercise power over their bodies and lives.
The analysis is rooted in two feminist perspectives on cosmetic surgery. The first argues that women who elect to have their bodies surgically altered are victims of false consciousness whose bodies are disciplined by the hegemonic male gaze.
The second asserts that women who undergo elective cosmetic surgery exercise free choice in controlling their bodies and lives. They find that the women achieved greater power and control over their bodies and lives when they embodied hegemonic ideals of feminine beauty. Cosmetic surgery can be empowering for individual women while reinforcing the hegemonic ideals that oppress women as a group.