Identity K MAGS

contributors
Anish Dayal
Jaden Lessnick
Ryan Powell
Zack Schnall
Andres Gannon

notes
A lot of the links/impacts under the identity politics header are also
independent Ks that you can read on case, but I didnt want to double up and
put cards in multiple places, so if you wanna read something short against a
K aff, thats the place to look.

***Negative***

1NCs

1NC Identity politics

Beginning discussion with identity is essentialist even if they
acknowledge identitys fluidity, identity as a starting point
lapses into essentialism. They also over-determine autonomy
which ignores group conditions that arent predicated upon
individualism

Mowbray, 10 - PhD, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University and Co-Director,

Sydney Centre for International Law (Jacqueline, Autonomy, Identity and Selfknowledge: A New Solution to the Liberal-Communitarian Problem?
January 2014 Sydney Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No.
14/02)//jml
The problem of identity In bridging the gap between liberal and communitarian positions with the concept

the recent literature assigns a critical role to identity, of

which self-knowledge is to be gained. My concern with this approach is that taking
identity as a starting point for discussion results in a tendency to
essentialise identity. In other words, the relevant literature tends to
assume that identity is an object of some sort, with a fixed content,
which we are capable of discussing and discovering. In fact, however, work
in many fields has shown identity to be fluid, dynamic, negotiated
and contested. Psychologists and psychoanalysts from Freud onwards have deconstructed our
of self- knowledge,

notion of the self to demonstrate the way in which our identity is shaped by our life experiences.
Sociolinguists have shown that we construct our identity, at least in part, through language.12
Anthropologists have shown that ethnic identity is not fixed or primordial, but is constructed as a result of
social interactions with other groups. 13 As Judith Butler concludes in her book, Gender Trouble, identity is

Identity is not, therefore,

something pre-existing or given, which we can then discover, but something
which is constructed and subject to change. Of course, the recent literature which
a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience.14

I am discussing does not deny this. In fact, to some extent, it specifically acknowledges the uncertainties
associated with identity. Hague, for example, in arguing that autonomy should be the process by which we
develop our identity, treats the multiple and changing15 nature of identity as the basis for an argument

while the
literature acknowledges the complexities associated with the
concept of identity, in taking identity as the starting point for
discussion, it inevitably tends to lapse back into an essentialist
treatment of the concept. Arguably, this tendency to essentialism was
inherent also in the earlier communitarian view, given the central role played by
the concept of identity within communitarian thought. However , the early communitarian
literature was less prone to critique on this basis, as that literature
focused on what we might term objective aspects of identity
unchosen aspects of identity, such as gender and ethnic origin. In seeking to
overcome the gap between autonomy and identity by including more
individual, chosen aspects of identity within the concept, the
recent literature leaves itself more open to questions about the
objective existence of the identity with which it is concerned. In other
words, by constructing identity as the concrete, tangible creation of
individual choice, the literature invites questions about whether
that individuals need to take control of that identity themselves. Nonetheless,

identity in this sense really exists. This highlights another aspect of

identity which is, I think, inadequately accounted for in the recent
literature, namely that identity has not only individual but also group
elements. And group identity is not constructed solely by
autonomous individuals, but by social dynamics over which
individuals may have little control. The recent literature of course acknowledges the
importance of collective identities. However, in seeking to bridge the gap between
autonomy and identity, it focuses largely on the fact that individuals
can choose between the various collective identities available to
them. The implicit or explicit argument here is that, as put so elegantly by Sen: The same person can
be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a
liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance-runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist,
a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis
fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in
outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English). ... Given our inescapably plural
identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any

this account again risks simplifying the concept of

identity, in that it tends to position the individual as ultimately in
control of his or her identity. In fact, as noted above, identity is highly
contingent, and this is particularly the case when we are concerned
with group identities, which emerge and evolve as a result of social
interactions with other groups, and within the group itself. 17
particular context.16 But

Making the debate about identity politics diverts attention

from structural inequalities makes oppression inevitable
because it uses a flawed starting-point
Smith 13 intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist (Andrea, The
Problem with Privilege, August 2013,
http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-problem-with-privilege2013.html) //AD

This kind of politics then challenges the notions of safe space often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States. The concept of

once we have confessed our

gender/race/settler/class privileges, we can then create a safe space
where others will not be negatively impacted by these privileges. Of
course because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white
supremacy, settler colonialism or capitalism, these confessed
privileges never actually disappear in safe spaces. Consequently,
when a person is found guilty of his/her privilege in these spaces,
s/he is accused of making the space unsafe. This rhetorical
strategy presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make
the space unsafe as if everyone isnt implicated in
heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and
capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make
the entire world unsafe, to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of unsafe
safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege. That is,

is also levied against people of color who express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space unsafe because
of their raised voices. The problem with safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible. By contrast, instead of thinking of
safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests that

safe space is not

an escape from the real, but a place to practice the real we want to
bring into being. Making power models follow this suggestion in that they do not
purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create
the world they would like to live in now . To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color
Against Violence, organized, we questioned the assumption that women of color space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to
articulate that women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not assume alliances with each other,
but we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than presume that we were acting nonoppressively, we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of white supremacy/settler
colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where we would educate
ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include: disability, anti-Black

in this space, while

we did not ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we
developed action plans for how we would collectively try to
transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the
dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead,
we presumed we are all implicated in these structures of oppression
and that we would need to work together to undo them.
Consequently, in my experience, this kind of space facilitated our
ability to integrate personal and social transformation because no
one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be
targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who would need to
publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles
of loving rather than punitive accountability. Conclusion The politics of privilege have made the
important contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute who we are as persons. However, as the rituals of
confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building
social movements for global transformation to individual selfimprovement. Furthermore, they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist
notion of a subject that can constitute itself over and against others
through self-reflexivity. While trying to keep the key insight made in activist/academic circles that personal and social
transformation are interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on
privilege and more the structures that create privilege . These new
models do not hold the answer, because the genealogy of the
politics of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/ intellectual
projects of liberation must be constantly changing. Our imaginations
are limited by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all ideas
we have will not be perfect. The ideas we develop today also do not have to be based on the complete
disavowal of what we did yesterday because what we did yesterday teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we think
not only beyond privilege, but beyond the sense of self that claims
privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot
imagine now for the future.
racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many others. However,

Their form of politics fractures any meaningful change the

atomization of social movements has created a form of mesearch rather than research which makes the affs impacts
inevitable

Chandler, 9 - Professor of International Relations at the University of

Westminster (David, Questioning Global Political Activism, What is Radical
Politics Today Edited by Jonathan Pugh, 81-82)//jml

politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still

gives us a sense of social connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to
many of our lives. It is just that the nature and practices of this politics are different. We are less
likely to engage in the formal politics of representation - of elections and
governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is
much less division between the private sphere and the public one and
much less division between national, territorial, concerns and global ones. This type of politics
is on the one hand global but, on the other, highly individualised: it
is very much the politics of our everyday lives the sense of meaning we get
However,

from thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish
out for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the
ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to

when we do politics nowadays it

is less the old politics, of self-interest, political parties, and
concern for governmental power, than the new politics of global
ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global
Greenpeace and Christian Aid. I want to suggest that

approach to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social
political engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1)
global post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its concerns are free-floating and in
many ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are

the practice
of global politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not
subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties and are
more likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an
issue, as an end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or
ethicality in the face of an increasingly confusing, problematic and
alienating world our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in Marxs words, of the
private and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3)

heart in a heartless world or the soul of a soulless condition. The practice of doing politics as a form of

this is
politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change
at the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I
want to argue that global ethical politics reflects and institutionalises our
sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in
irrational and unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate
religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the opium of the people -

my points by briefly looking at the practices of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political
activism, government policy making and academia. Radical activism People often argue that there is
nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march,
anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005,

these new
forms of protest are highly individualised and personal ones - there
is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that
involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree;

theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal
statements of awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. This is illustrated by the

It is as if people are more

concerned with the creation of a sense of community through
differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or
collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really
concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with
overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences
would be quite important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence
celebration of differences at marches, protests and social forums.

It would seem important to debate reasons, causes

and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give those political differences an
organisational expression if there was a serious project of social
change. Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism
of guns and other weapons?

today is a form of social disengagement expressed in the anti-war marchers slogan of Not in My Name,
or the assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as

it seems that political activism is a practice

which isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal
commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging
with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brainwashed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of the practice of this type of global politics
engaging in political debate. In fact,

are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their
idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing awareness of themselves and by giving
political meaning to every personal action. Global ethics appear to be in demand because they offer us a
sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time giving us the freedom to construct the
meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of responsibilities for

While
the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack
of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its
rejection of any form of social movement or organisation . Strange as it
acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box.

may seem, the only people who are keener on global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since
the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended
to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian
intervention, healing the scar of Africa, the war on terror and the war against climate insecurity. Tony
Blair argued in the Guardian last week that foreign policy is no longer foreign policy (Timothy Garten Ash,
Like it or Loath it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for, 26 April 2007), this is certainly
true. Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policymaking, no longer seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth
Office where people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and
provides more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in
good causes. This shift was clear in the UKs attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s an
approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of
Britains caring and sharing identity. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of
demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people
on the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the valuebased interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blairs recent Foreign Affairs article, A Battle for Global
Values, 86:1 (2007), pp.7990). Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top
of the political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global
sphere the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international
institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme
to the ambitious assertion of global causes saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just
ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone
can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more
responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into
concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the civilised world,
NATO or the EU are on the line in wars of choice from the war on terror to the war on global warming lack
traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of Realpolitik than the

Governments feel the consequences of

their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals;
it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or cohere
political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection to the represented
narcissistic search for meaning or identity.

masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the Emperor with no clothes (In the
Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this lack of shared social
goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald Rumsfeld stated about
the war on terror, there are no metrics to help assess whether the war is being won or lost. These wars
and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and interests of others, are
demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible practices and policies.
Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics the ethics of conviction to the ethics of

responsibility in his lecture on Politics as a Vocation. The desire to act on the international scene without
a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from the Balkans to Iraq and to the
moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership requirements. Today more and
more people are doing politics in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International
Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the
attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom
in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests
and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a
product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realisms ontological
focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in.
Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not
be as concerned with what is as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community.
Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the
practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which
have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problemsolving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of

Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful

thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing
that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and
biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world
affairs. This becomes me-search rather than research. We have moved a
thinking about the world.

long way from Hedley Bulls (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to

The inward-looking
and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned
with our reflectivity the awareness of our own ethics and values
than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR
put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.

students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and
Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of
power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their
choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and
engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical

Politics has become a religious

activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less
and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of
ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in
radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a
one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a
one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because
when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in
the external consequences of our political acts. What matters is the conviction
understanding of engagement in global politics.

or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide
idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of
globalisation theory the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a
complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our

The more we engage in the new politics where there is an

unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global
issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world , and
actions.

the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and
organisation.

Using the ballot as a referendum on identity cedes agency to

the sovereign, which recreates the violence against social
movements that they kritik

Campbell, 98 - Professor of International Politics at the University of

Newcastle (David, Performing Politics and the Limits of Language 1998)//jml
Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses
assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it
constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts
upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based
upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign
power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative
understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as
injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor

This idealization of the speech act as a

sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the
idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and
forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state
has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then
reemerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to
protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign
power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded
in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when
understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible)
even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political
problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to
this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law
requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we
accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific
conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own
the offending words, and punish the speaker:

admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state
is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical
account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the
state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests
that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively
produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the
speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential

The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus

linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it
seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its
power in relation to that subject at the very moment its
phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the
resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social
movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)
demarcation" (77).

Reject their focus of identity in place of analytical categories

identity-based politics forego the possibility for institutional
change

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

*we do not endorse ableist language

aspects of what
I term "Paradigmatic Intersectionality". Only when brought together do all
five aspects of intersectionality effectively address the dilemmas posed by the
Oppression Olympics. ** Figure 3 about here ** Intersectionality takes
seriously race, gender, sexual orientation and class as analytical
categories rather than just as identities/" Why? If we focus solely on race
as an identity, we are limited to identity-based policy solutions that
get bogged down in debates about the legitimacy and humanity of
the individuals themselves, which ignores the role of institutions in
shaping politics. The previous section on Individual-Institutional Interactions, however, taught us
that we can't simply focus on the structure in response. Intersectionality's approach to
politics can illuminate new ways to think about longstanding
debates such as affirmative action and multiracial identity. Focusing
on gender, race, class and sexual orientation as identities ushers in
the reification of lived experience^" which often leads to paralyzing
claims of "uniqueness," "incommensurability," and the dreaded
Oppression Olympics. Using sexual orientation, gender, class and
race as analytical categories accepts the lived experience of people
without making it a condition of group formation, epistemology, or
agenda setting, further opening opportunities for deep political
solidarity. This expansion beyond the limits of identity politics in no way
dismisses identity as irrelevant or downright pernicious, as some advocates of
colorblindness would do. Instead the work opens up space for the first benefit
of intersectionality: creating diverse coalitions that are non-identity
based but may still generate identity-based benefits. Intersectional
approaches neither eschew identity nor remain mired in it. Multiple
planes of interaction (the organizational, intersubjective, experiential and representational)liv
and Categorical Multiplicity open up avenues of agency without ignoring the
role of Individual-Institutional Interactions. Take , for example, the news
media's longstanding overdependence on single black mothers as
prototypes of welfare recipients.lv Intersectional analyses can certainly
describe this problem, but it can also offer innovative solutions. A 20th
century identity politics-laden solution might be civil rights driven: getting
more Black faces in our newsroom to counter this overdependence. Not only is
Analyzing American Politics From an Intersectional Perspective Figure 3 shows all five

that a very indirect solution to this particular problem, one strategy to achieve
it, affirmative action, has been eviscerated by the Supreme Court in
recent years, thanks in part to Movement Backlash. A 20th century approach to this
problem would pour most resources into defending and attempting to resuscitate the rollbacks of
affirmative action programs at the state and federal levels. A noble effort, perhaps, but is it the most

A 21st century
intersectional analysis instead comprehensively attends to Time
Dynamics and Individual-Institution Interactions in order to identify
an unlikely and previously unidentified site of action for welfare
activists: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose
decisions about consolidation of media ownership can dramatically
affect the diversity of images portrayed of women on welfare. lvi Here
they might encounter new and largely counterintuitive allies in an
effort to more accurately represent their stories and change the size
of their microphone relative to the very large ones carried by
political elites. This kind of simultaneous attentiveness to Time Dynamics and Individualappropriate allocation of resources for this particular challenge?

Institutional Interactions follows in the footsteps of many scholars, including Iris Marion Young in her
thinking of categories as serial collectives. Unfortunately Young followed 20th century practice by
discussing only one category, gender, in depth. Intersectionality integrates all of the analytical categories
as interlocking categories of difference. lvii Returning to the example of the Rutgers University Scarlet

Black female athletes endure a tremendous amount of

surveillance and pressurelviii to conform to a "Black Lady" public
imagelix that is simultaneously liberating (from the "nappy-headed hos" stereotype)
and constraining (preventing complete autonomy of personal expression, including its
Knights,

heterosexism). Significantly such athletes experience that pressure from coaches who are themselves

Time Dynamics improves Young's original formulation

by acknowledging the accrual of power over time by multiple centers
of power, and Diversity Within recognizes the multiple centers of
power as sites of struggle for the power of self-definition. Whether
through U.S. census categories, discriminatory policies like
segregation, detention and internment, or incentive-driven policies like
affirmative action, government and its agents play a significant role
in the access we have to freedom of identification and equality of
opportunity in the United States. One final example of the
relationship among the five prongs of intersectionality can
illuminate the need for all five aspects in American political
discourse. Millennial-generation driven identity movements like the
Multiracial Movement have sought complete freedom of selfidentification in all aspects of their lives. From the perspective of
Categorical Multiplicity and Time Dynamics it is important to recognize the
politically charged practice of "passing" and its legacy as part of the
resistance to the idea of a multiracial identity and its goals.
often Black women.

1NC Modules

1NC Wounded Attachments

Narratives of suffering reinscribe oppression - exclude anyone
who does not fit the model
Brown 96 - Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is CoDirector of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. (Wendy, The University of Chicago Law School, Roundtable,
1996) //AD

If, taken together, the two passages from Foucault we have been considering call feminists to account in our compulsion to put everything about
women into discourse, they do not yet exhaust the phenomenon of being
ensnared 'in the folds of our own discourses.' For if the problem I have been
discussing is easy enough to see--indeed, largely familiar to those who track
techniques of co-optation--at the level of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it
is altogether more disquieting when it takes the form of regulatory discourse
in our own sub- and counter-cultures of resistance . . . when confessing injury
becomes that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and
prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than injured. In an
age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally
significant--gender, race, sexuality, and so forth--confessional discourse, with
its truth-bearing status in a post-epistemological universe, not only regulates
the confessor in the name of freeing her as Foucault described that logic, but
extends beyond the confess- ing individual to constitute a regulatory truth
about the identity group. Confessed truths are assembled and deployed as
"knowledge" about the group. This phenomenon would seem to undergird a
range of recurring troubles in feminism, from the "real woman" rejoinder to
post-structuralist deconstructions of her, to totalizing descriptions of women's
experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor
stories. Thus, for example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited,
violated and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the truth about
sex work; as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the truth about women
and math; as eating disor- ders have become the truth about women and
food; as sexual abuse and viola- tion occupy the knowledge terrain of women
and sexuality. In other words, even as feminism aims to affirm diversity
among women and women's ex- periences, confession as the site of
production of truth and its convergence with feminist suspicion and
deauthorization of truth from other sources tends to reinstate a unified
discourse in which the story of greatest suffering becomes the true story of
woman. (I think this constitutes part of the rhetorical power of MacKinnon's
work; analytically, the epistemological superiority of confes- sion substitutes
for the older, largely discredited charge of false consciousness). Thus, the
adult who does not suffer from her or his childhood sexual experi- ence, the
lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily
or "correctly" identify with her marking as such--these figures are excluded as

bonafide members of the categories which also claim them. Their status
within these discourses is that of being "in denial," "passing" or being a "race
traitor." This is the norm-making process in feminist traditions of "breaking
silence" which, ironically, silence and exclude the very women these
traditions mean to empower. (Is it surprising, when we think in this vein, that
there is so little feminist writing on heterosexual pleasure?)But if these
practices tacitly silence those whose experiences do not parallel those whose
suffering is most marked (or whom the discourse produces as suffering
markedly), they also condemn those whose sufferings they record to a
permanent identification with that suffering. Here, we experience a temporal
ensnaring in 'the folds of our own discourses' insofar as we identify ourselves
in speech in a manner that condemns us to live in a present dominated by
the past. But what if speech and silence aren't really opposites? Indeed, what
if to speak incessantly of one's suffering is to silence the possibilities of
overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it?
What if this incessant speech not only overwhelms the experiences of others,
but alternative (unutterable? traumatized? fragmentary? inassimilable?)
zones of one's own experience? Conversely, what if a certain modality of
silence about one's suffering--and I am suggesting that we must consider
modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and discourse--is to
articulate a variety of possibilities not otherwise available to the sufferer?

Identity politics recreates the politics of resentment

Bhambra and Margree 10 U WarwickANDVictoria Margree

School of Humanities, U Brighton (Gurminder K, Victoria, Identity politics and
the Need for a Tomorrow, academia,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomo
rrow_) //AD

2 The Reification of Identity We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politicsthat can be best described as the problem of

the reification of politicised identities. Brown (1995) positions herself within thedebate about identity
politics by seeking to elaborate on the wounded character of politicised
identitys desire (ibid: 55); thatis, the problem of wounded attachments whereby
a claim to identity becomes over-invested in its own historical suffering
and perpetuates its injury through its refusal to give up its identity claim.
Browns argument is that where politicised identity is founded upon an experience of
exclusion, for example, exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the
continuance of that identity. In such cases, group activity operates to maintain
and reproduce the identity created by injury (exclusion) rather than and indeed, often in
opposition to resolving the injurious social relations that generated
claims around that identity in the first place. If things have to have a history in order to have
af uture, then the problem becomes that of how history is con-structed in order to make the future. To the extent that, for
Brown, identity is associated primarily with (historical) injury, the future for that
identity is then already determined by the injury as both bound to the

history that produced it

and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history (ibid 1995: 73). Browns suggestion that as it is not possible to undo the past, the focus back- wards entraps the identity in reactionary practices, is, we believe,too stark

Politicised identity, Brown maintains, emerges and obtains its

unifying coherence through the politicisation of exclusion from an
ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion (ibid: 65). Its continuing
existence requires both a belief in the legitimacy of the universal ideal (for example,
ideals of opportunity, and re- ward in proportion to effort) and enduring exclusion from those ideals. Brown
draws upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identi-ties, produced in reaction to
conditions of disempowerment andinequality, then become invested in their
own impotence through practices of, for example, reproach, complaint, and revenge.
These are reactions in the Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or
can be seen as negative forms of action. Rather than acting to remove
the cause(s) of suffering, that suf-fering is instead ameliorated (to some
extent) through the estab-lishment of suffering as the measure of
social virtue (ibid 1995:70), and is compensated for by the vengeful
pleasures of recrimi-nation. Such practices, she argues, stand in sharp distinction to in fact,
provide obstacles to practices that would seek to dispel the conditions
of exclusion. Brown casts the dilemma discussed above in terms of a choicebetween past and future, and adapting Nietzsche,
and we will pursue this later in the article.

exhorts theadoption of a (collective) will that would become the redeemer of history (ibid: 72) through its focus on the possibilities of creating different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thingthat the will cannot exert its power over is the past, the it was.Confronted with
its impotence with respect to the events of thepast, the will is threatened with becoming simply an angry spec-tator mired in bitter
recognition of its own helplessness. The onehope for the will is that it may, instead, achieve a kind of mastery over that past such that,
although what has happened cannotbe altered, the past can be denied the power of continuing to de-termine the present and future. It is
only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a future in the face of human frailties and injustices that spares us
from a rancorous decline into despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment that is, by suffering caused by past events can only break
outof the cycle of slave morality by remaking the present againstthe terms of the past, a remaking that requires a forgetting of that past.
An act of liberation, of self-affirmation, this forgettingof the past requires an overcoming of the past that offers iden-tity in relationship to
suffering, in favour of a future in whichidentity is to be defined differently. In arguing thus, Browns work becomes aligned with a posi-tion that
sees the way forward for emancipatory politics as re-siding in a movement away from a politics of memory (Kilby 2002: 203) that is
committed to articulating past injustices andsuffering. While we agree that investment in identities prem-ised upon suffering can function as
an obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering, we believe that Browns argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby

we share a concern about any turn to the future that is figured as a

complete abandonment of the past. This is because for those who have suffered
oppression and exclusion, the injunction to give up articulating a pain that is still felt
may seem cruel and impossible to meet. We would argue instead that the turn to the future
that theorists such as Brown and Grosz callfor, to revitalise feminism and other emancipatory politics, need not be
conceived of as a brute rejection of the past. Indeed, Brown herself recognises the problems
(2002),

involved here, stating that [since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves suchintegral elements of the pain inscribed in most
subjugated identities[then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructedNietzschean form, seems inappropriate if not cruel (1995:
74). She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in painmay be no more than the demand to exorcise that pain throughrecognition:
all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognised intoself-overcoming, incited
into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing itself (1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of
remembering painful historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of remembering pain is to enable its release . The
challenge then, according to her,is to create a political culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own

this may be a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche

sake. Indeed, if Brown feels that

(1995: 74), then Freud may be a more suit-able companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freuds writ-ings have suggested the (only

remember-ing is often a condition of forgetting. The hysterical

patient, who is doomed to repeat in symptoms and compulsive actions a past
she cannot adequately recall, is helped to remember that trau-matic past in
order then to move beyond it: she must remember inorder to forget and to
forget in order to be able to live in the present. 7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for
apparent) paradox that

thedilemma articulated by both Brown (1995) and Kilby (2002),insisting as it does that forgetting (at least, loosening the holdof the past, in
order to enable the future) cannot be achieved without first remembering the traumatic past. Indeed, this wouldseem to be similar to the
message of Beloved , whose central motif of haunting (is the adult woman, Beloved, Sethes murderedchild returned in spectral form?)
dramatises the tendency of theunanalysed traumatic past to keep on returning, constraining, asit does so, the present to be like the past, and

in order
to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attach-ments that are hurtful, we must
first bring them into the realm of political action (2004: 33). We would add that the
thereby, disallow-ing the possibility of a future different from that past. As Sarah Ahmed argues in her response to Brown,

task of analys-ing the traumatic past, and thus opening up the possibility of
political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals on their own, but
that this, instead, requires a community of participants dedicated to the serious epistemic
work of rememberingand interpreting the objective social conditions that made up thatpast and continue in the present. The pain
of historical injury is not simply an individual psychological issue, but stems
from objective social conditions which perpetuate, for the most part, forms of
injustice and inequality into the present. In sum, Brown presents too stark a choice between past andfuture.
In the example of Beloved with which we began thisarticle, Paul Ds acceptance of Sethes experiences of slavery asdistinct from his own,
enable them both to arrive at new under-standings of their experience. Such understanding is a way of partially undoing the (effects of) the
past and coming to terms with the locatedness of ones being in the world (Mohanty 1995). As this example shows, opening up a future, and
attending to theongoing effects of a traumatic past, are only incorrectly under-stood as alternatives. A second set of problems with Browns
critique of identity poli-tics emerge from what we regard as her tendency to individualise social problems as problems that are the possession

the problems associated with identity

politics can be overcome through a shift in the character of political
expression and politi-cal claims common to much politicised identity (1995: 75). She defines this shift as one in which
identity would be expressed in terms of desire rather than of ontology by
supplanting the lan-guage of I am with the language of I want
this for us (1995:75). Such a reconfiguration, she argues, would create an opportu-nity to rehabilitate the memory of desire
within identificatory processesprior to [their] wounding (1995: 75). It would fur-ther refocus attention
on the future possibilities present in the identity as opposed to the
identity being foreclosed through its attention to past-based
grievances.
and theresponsibility of the wounded group. Brown suggests that

1NC Tuck and Yang

Beginning with a politics of pain centered research is
dangerous the academy displaces marginal populations by
including their narratives of pain but not their subjectivity

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
educational research and much of social
science research has been concerned with documenting damage, or
empirically substantiating the oppression and pain of Native communities, urban
communities, and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered
researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in
which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that
reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and
sovereign adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change1 as both
colonial and flawed, because it relies upon Western notions of power
as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires disenfranchised
communities to posi- tion themselves as both singularly defective
and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that won reparations rarely
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that

become reality, and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.
Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has exhibited in

Academes
demon- strated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of
pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive
implacability. Imagining itself to be a voice, and in some
disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis
in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and
related fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to
reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an
eliciting pain stories from com- munities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight.

intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in
recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have cho- sen to pursue other lines of inquiry

novice researchers emerge from

doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects
because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to
do social science. The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of
than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines,

such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is
about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the

No need to hear your voice when I can talk

about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear
your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way.
academy to those on the margins as thus:

Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author,

Hookss
words resonate with our observation of how much of social science
research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed
authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343)

voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through

pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researchers voice is
constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the
margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story
of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible
differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to

the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also

say, Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that
space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an
unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of a politics of
tell their stories. Yet

recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman,

rec- ognizing the

personhood of slaves enhanced the power of the Southern slaveowning class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White,
1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997) discusses how

well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In
response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, making personhood coterminous with injury (Hartman,
1997, p. 93), while simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as a legal

Recognition
humanizes the slave, but is predicated upon her or his abjection.
You are in pain, therefore you are. [T]he recognition of humanity
require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits
of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the
slaves person (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes
person only when seen as criminal or a violated body in need of limited forms of protection (p. 55).

slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartmans analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret Garner or Nat Turner can
only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated
violence of the state to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, Is it possible that such recognition effectively
forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of

many social science

disciplines emerged from the need to provide justifications for social
hierarchies undergirded by White supremacy and manifest destiny
subjugation and pained existence? (p. 55). As numerous scholars have denoted,

(see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has explored how the contoured logic of
settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces the roots of

The origins of many

social science disciplines in maintaining logics of domination , while
sometimes addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or
inauspi- cious beginningsmuch like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous peoples that
psychology to the need to sci- entifically prove the supremacy of the White mind.

afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an unfortunate byproduct of the birthing of a new and

amnesia is required in settler colonial societies, argues

Lorenzo Veracini, because settler colonialism is characterized by a
persistent drive to supersede the conditions of its operation, (2011, p. 3);
that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without ori- gin (and without end),
and inevitable. Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of
great nation. Such

their operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins of

We are struck by the pervasive silence on

questions regarding the contempo- rary rationale(s) for social
science research. Though a variety of ethical and procedural protocols require researchers to compose
the disciplines that we attend to now.

statements regarding the objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt reflection upon the

The rationale
for conducting social science research that collects pain narratives
seems to be self-evident for many scholars, but when looked at more
closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and some- what flimsy .
underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often go unexplored or unacknowledged.

Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted.
Why do researchers collect pain narratives? Why does the academy want them?

Desire is a particular and contextual refusal of settler

colonialism this space of refusal creates new ways to
approach epistemology

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
refusal is
particular, meaning refusal is always grounded in historical analysis
and present conditions. Any discussion of Simpsons article would need to attend to the
At this juncture, we dont intend to offer a general framework for refusal, because all

significance of real and representational sovereignty in her analysis and theorizing of refusal. The
particularities of Kahnawake sovereignty throb at the center of each of the three dimensions of refusal

We caution readers against expropriating Indigenous notions of

metaphorizing sovereignty in a way that
permits one to forget that struggles to have sovereignty recognized
are very real and very lived. Yet from Simpsons example, we are able to see
ways in which a researcher might make transparent the coloniality of
academic knowledge in order to find its ethical limits, expand the
limits of sovereign knowledge, and expand decolonial representational territories. This is in addition to questions her work helpfully raises about who the
described above.

sovereignty into other con- texts, or

researcher is, who the researched are, and how the historical/ representational context for research

One way to think about refusal is how desire can be a

framework, mode, and space for refusal. As a framework, desire is a
counterlogic to the logics of settler colonialism. Rooted in
possibilities gone but not foreclosed, the not yet, and at times, the
not anymore (Tuck, 2010, p. 417), desire refuses the master narrative that
colonization was inevitable and has a monopoly on the future. By
refusing the teleos of colonial future, desire expands possible
futures. As a mode of refusal, desire is a no and a yes. Another way to think about refusal is to
matters.

consider using strategies of social sci- ence research to further expose the complicity of social science

There is much need to employ

social science to turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge,
as opposed to uni- versal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without
horizon. This form of refusal might include bringing attention to the
mechanisms of knowledge legitimation, like the Good Labkeeping Seal of Approval
disciplines and research in the project of settler colonialism.

(discussed under Axiom III); contesting appropriation, like the collection of pain narratives; and publicly
renouncing the diminishing of Indigenous or local narratives with blood narratives in the name of science,
such as in the Havasupai case discussed under Axiom II.

1NC Novel DA
The affirmatives strategy writes the novel of the radical hero,
only to find the novel is unwritten by the time the next debate
starts politicized identity is ultimately a placebo that fails to
achieve their demands

Davis 1 Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois,

leading author in the field of disability studies (Lennard, Identity Politics,
Disability, and Culture, 2001,
isc.temple.edu/neighbor/ds/read/identitypolitics.pdf)
identity of the novel, if we can see the novel as having an identity, revolves around
a simple plot. The situation had been normal, it became abnormal,
and by the end of the novel, the normality, or some variant on it, was restored. We can
put this simplistic paradigm into the language that Wendy Brown (1995) uses and say that the identity of
the novel is therefore a "wounded identity." Like Philoctetes, the novel must
have a wound. And like that of Philoctetes, the wound is necessary because
without it, the novel would not be able to perform its function . Yet, also
like that of the mythical character, the wound must be healed or cured. I return to the notion of
identity because I want to tie the novel, disability, and identity politics together around the issue of cure. The novel
as a form relies on cure as a narrative technique . Protagonists must "change," we are told,
In this sense, the

for their character to be believable. Interestingly, this aspect of believability flies in the face of probability since most
"real" people do not change easily, if at all. When characters change, they undergo a kind of moral or perceptual
transformation that cures them of their problem. So, Emma is cured of her self-centeredness or Darcy is cured of his pride.
Likewise, the plot is cured of its abnormal initiating events. The narrative, at its end, is no longer disabled by its lack of

The process of narrative, then, serves to wound

identitywhether individual, bourgeois, national, gendered,
racialized, or cultural. Readers read so that they can experience this wound
vicariously, so they can imagine the dissolution of the norms under
which they are expected to labor. As a temporarily wounded person, the reader can
see the way that society oppresses various categories of being. At the
conformity to imagined social norms.

same time, the reader can rejoice in the inevitable return to the comfort of bourgeois norms, despite the onus that these

Yet the
desire for a cure is also the desire for a quick fix. The alterity
presented by disability is shocking to the liberal, ableist sensibility, and
so narratives involving disability always yearn toward the cure, the
neutralizing of the disability. This desire to neutralize is ironic because in a
dialectic sense, the fantasy of normality needs the abjection of disability to
maintain a homeostatic system of binaries. However, since this desire is premised on the
norms place on its beneficiaries as well as those excluded from the benefits of bourgeois identity. 14

denigration of disability, it will of course be invisible to the normate15 readers who prefer the kindly notion of cure to the

the quick fix presented by issues

concerning race, class, and gender is equally characteristic of the
bourgeois imagination. The conflict between classes can be nicely reconciled in novels, so that in North
more dramatic notion of eradication. Likewise,

and South, a kind of utopian factory emerges that bypasses labor unions and is achieved by rerouting surplus value
through the benevolence of a female captain of industry in the form of Margaret Hale, or, in Hard Times, the working class
struggle is seen as a "muddle" only soluble by Christian charity toward the poor who "will always be with you." All of

these cures are placebos for the basic problem presented to

capitalism and its ideological productions in the form of modern
subjectivity, which dons the form of the normal, average, citizen protagonist
that bell curvegenerated fantastic being who reconciles the promise of equal rights with the reality of unequal

the quick fix, the cure, has to be repeated

endlessly, like a patent medicine, because it cures nothing. Novels have to tell
the story over and over again, as do films and television, because the patient
never stays cured, and the disabled, cured individually, refuse to stop
reappearing as a group. Indeed, modern subjectivity is a wounded
identity that cannot cure itself without recourse to cure narratives,
which means that it cannot cure itself at all since the disability of
modern subjectivity is inherent in the environment, not in the
subject. The problem with the notion of wounded identities, as Brown (1995)
postulates, is that the ontology of their coming into being is best characterized by Nietzsche's
notion of resentment as an "effect of domination [that] reiterates impotence, a substitute
for action, for power, for selfaffirmation that reinscribes incapacity, powerlessness, and
rejection" (Brown 1995:69). Thus, identity is dependent for its motivation and
existence on remembering and reinvoking the pain caused by
oppression. Politicized identity "installs its pain . . . in the very foundation
of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity . . . by entrenching, restating, dramatizing,
and inscribing its pain in politics" (Brown 1995:74). Like the novel, identity is rooted in its
wounds, and plot is a form of pain control. Thus, its solution must be to
heal the wound and end the pain. However, like the novel that offers
a cure to the oppressions of modernity, the cure offered to wounded
identity spells the end of identity because identity is created by the
initializing wound, just as the cure offered in novels spells closure
for that novel. The answer to novels is more novels, not a cure
offered to the actual ills of society. Likewise, the proliferation of
politicized identities is symptomatic of the problem, and the addition
of more identities will no more solve the problem of oppression than
the proliferation of novels will solve the same problem. I want to add that we
have needed the idea of identity to help combat racism, sexism, ageism, and so on.
However, the limits of this kind of politics are now becoming increasingly
evident. The solution is not to do without identity or to denigrate the identities involved. Rather, a
reconsideration of oppression based around other parameters that
can, at this point, create solidarity while maintaining difference is
essential. I have tried to make the case briefly that disability, as an identity, can legitimately be seen as the
distribution of wealth. However,

foundational model on which to argue the origin and theory of the novel. As a foundational origin, I can then say that all
other identitiesclass, race, gender, sexual preferenceshould be subsumed under the hegemonic identity category of
disability. In other words, I contend that the novel belongs to a history of ableist domination (while it has also tried to
resist that domination). If I do that, I place myself in a line of critics who have argued for the centrality of their identity as
foundational for the creation of modern subjectivity. By doing so, I can now make two observations. First, I clearly have not

by adding my identity to the roster and

even by claiming the greater adequacy of my identity (which can be seen as
including and therefore superceding other identities), I have only rearranged the chessboard
without creating a strategy for winning the battle . Neither will
scholarship, like this chapter, propel disability into the forefront of identity
politics for the simple reason that the other identity groups will not
cede their place of priority. The reason for this reluctance is also relatively simpleto acknowledge
solved the problem of identity politics. Second,

truly that the existence of another identity dilutes the general category of identity, as well as to create a priority of
identities, places some identities further down the line as significant. As an amplification of this point, disability will have
difficulty being seen as having a primary place in identity politics because most academics are deeply implicated in
ableism without, of course, realizing it. Disability is still routinely ignored, marginalized, or patronized by the very people
most active in identity politics.

The answer is not to keep creating newer and newer

categories of identity or to claim that cultural institutions are

uniquely created by the oppression of one or other identity . The advantage
that disability studies gives us in this regard is that it is an identity that interrogates and can help
transform the very idea of identity. Disability, by the unstable nature
of its category, asks us to redefine the very nature of identity and of
"belonging" to an identity group. Only when identity is stripped of its
exclusive nature and becomes part of the larger reformation of
oppression can we all safely feel that we have truly regained our
identity.

Identity politics bad

Impacts

Anti-solidarity
Identity-based politics cannot produce change regresses into
anti-solidarity through purism and apathy refusing
complexity is reductionist

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

While intersectionality theory

started in identity politics, it has not remained there. lxii Identity
politics cannot transform the United States on its own; institutional
change beyond identity politics is critical to 21st century politics.
Attention to the five prongs of the intersectional approach - Categorical
Benefits of the expanded form of intersectionality:

Multiplicity, Categorical Intersection, Time Dynamics, Diversity Within and Individual-Institutional

directly challenges the Oppression Olympics. Specifically, it

offers us three hallmark contributions to our politics in the 21st
century, each of which will be explored in the case studies to come. A unitary approach (e.g.
focusing on race OR gender) cannot handle the complex processes of selfintegration that must take plce [sic] in order to avoid harmful, antisolidarity actions like self-deception,lxiii which undergirds the Willful
Blindness, Defiant Ignorance, and Compassion Deficit Disorder elements of the Oppression
Olympics. As I've noted throughout the chapter, intersectionality forces a direct
confrontation with Willful Blindness and Defiant Ignorance through
attention to Time Dynamics and Diversity Within to engage the role
that privilege plays in all Americans' lives. There are no longer any
pure victims in our political context. In the absence of any pure
victims we must examine new ways for us to stand in solidarity with
each other as individuals who are simultaneously marginalized and
privileged. Chapter two will take up this directly, by examining the individual-level preparation
Interaction -

necessary to pursue deep political solidarity. Second, I've also mentioned in passing throughout the

the intersectional approach provides the chance for new

kinds of counterintuitive coalitions. Turning the discussion away
from zero-sum questions using Categorical Multiplicity and Categorical Intersection
eludes the threat of Leapfrog Paranoia. Along with such a turn, confronting
Willful Blindness and Defiant Ignorance will facilitate the eradication
of Compassion Deficit Disorder, as apathy gets confronted as the
exercise of privilege that it is in these contexts. Similarly, new domains
for attention to the roles of gender, race, sexual orientation and
class are revealed by the attention to Diversity Within and
Individual-Institutional Interactions. The political agendas of
marginalized groups and their allies are transformed based on a
different approach to the process by which the agenda gets set and
ultimately new kinds of egalitarian coalition building within as well
chapter that

as between groups to achieve such an agenda. We'll examine these more

egalitarian coalition-building opportunities with regard to a specific political issue in chapter three. Last but

an emphasis on complexity that

is often challenging for mainstream portrayals of American politics.
certainly not least, throughout the chapter there has been

Returning to "The Matrix," recall that Morpheus' offer to Neo of a choice between the red pill (of liberatory
knowledge) or the blue pill (to remain mired in Willful Blindness and Defiant Ignorance) is one that only

this book is addressed

to those who have elected to take the red pill, who are open to the complexity and
nuance that are rarely in evidence throughout most of our current
public discourse. For those of us interested in and committed to
justice, the causal complexity of our political context is not
something that can be avoided in the 21st century. Attention to
intersectionality provides a structured way to engage this
complexity without being as reductionist as past approaches. We will see
Neo can make for himself; it cannot be impressed upon him. Similarly,

this attention to complexity throughout the rest of the chapters.

Biopolitical
Identity political movements are biopolitical --- constrains
freedom by forcing people to conform to norms
Hayward and Watson 10 - Associate Professor of Political Science at
Washington University in St. Louis; doctoral student in Political Science at
Washington University in St. Louis,(Clarissa Rile, Ron, The Politics of Identity
after Identity Politics: Identity and Political Theory, January 2010, 33 Wash.
U. Journal of Law and Policy,
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy) //AD
identities constrain freedom - because they
define "others" whose exclusion they can promote and at the same
time legitimize - "the mobilization of identity categories for the
purposes of politicization always remains threatened by the
prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one
opposes." 93 Hence the Foucaultian emphasis on genealogizing and
more generally on " refusing" identity , rather than urging states to recognize it via
B. Identity's Burdens Still, because

group rights, accommodations for minority cultures, or "external" protections. As our discussion in Part III
suggests, the Foucaultian focus is the cost of identification: its burdens, more so than its benefits. [*30]
What is worth underscoring, however, is that neither strong multiculturalists nor liberal theorists of
recognition quarrel with the claim that, very often, collective identities have costs. To the contrary, both
sets of theorists acknowledge that groups exclude, and that groups often limit the freedom of members.
Both acknowledge that some forms of recognition, because they give those who are dominant within
groups power over those who are subordinate, can promote coercion and enable the restriction of freedom.
It is this worry that drives Taylor's insistence that states protect minority group members' "fundamental
rights," such as their rights to habeas corpus. 94 It is this worry that informs Kymlicka's claim that states
should only rarely allow "internal restrictions" by groups. 95 Practices of restricting religious freedom, or of
discriminating against female group members, Kymlicka writes, "are inconsistent with any system of
minority rights that appeals to individual freedom or personal autonomy." 96 They "cannot be justified or
defended," he continues, "within a liberal conception of minority rights." 97 The principal differences
between the multiculturalist and the Foucaultian positions are, first, their emphases - multiculturalists
stress the benefits of identification, Foucaultians the burdens - and, second, their assumptions about the
likely effects of state recognition. Multiculturalists underscore that well-being is closely bound up with a
sense of collective belonging. The costs of identity, they suggest, are well worth the goods identity
provides. As long as "fundamental rights" are protected, as long as protections are "external," rather than
restrictions on important rights and freedoms, people gain more than they lose when states recognize

The Foucaultian claim, by contrast, is that identity's

substantial harms outweigh its benefits . Even those identities which
liberals view as entirely beneficial - namely, the identities of autonomous, rational
modern selves - subject, and they discipline human beings. Because people never
perfectly fit any identity-category, and because efforts to make them
fit are a kind of violence, state recognition, even when [*31] it promotes
solidaristic feelings of trust and belonging, always also fosters
exclusion and nontrivial forms of unfreedom .
identity-constituting collectivities.

Diverts focus
Making the debate about identity politics diverts attention
from structural inequalities makes oppression inevitable
because it uses a flawed starting-point
Smith 13 intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist (Andrea, The
Problem with Privilege, August 2013,
http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-problem-with-privilege2013.html) //AD

This kind of politics then challenges the notions of safe space often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States. The concept of

once we have confessed our

gender/race/settler/class privileges, we can then create a safe space
where others will not be negatively impacted by these privileges. Of
course because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white
supremacy, settler colonialism or capitalism, these confessed
privileges never actually disappear in safe spaces. Consequently,
when a person is found guilty of his/her privilege in these spaces,
s/he is accused of making the space unsafe. This rhetorical
strategy presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make
the space unsafe as if everyone isnt implicated in
heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and
capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make
the entire world unsafe, to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of unsafe
safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege. That is,

is also levied against people of color who express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space unsafe because
of their raised voices. The problem with safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible. By contrast, instead of thinking of

safe space is not

an escape from the real, but a place to practice the real we want to
bring into being. Making power models follow this suggestion in that they do not
purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create
the world they would like to live in now . To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color
safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests that

Against Violence, organized, we questioned the assumption that women of color space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to
articulate that women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not assume alliances with each other,
but we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than presume that we were acting nonoppressively, we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of white supremacy/settler
colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where we would educate
ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include: disability, anti-Black

in this space, while

we did not ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we
developed action plans for how we would collectively try to
transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the
dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead,
we presumed we are all implicated in these structures of oppression
and that we would need to work together to undo them.
Consequently, in my experience, this kind of space facilitated our
ability to integrate personal and social transformation because no
one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be
targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who would need to
publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles
racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many others. However,

of loving rather than punitive accountability. Conclusion The politics of privilege have made the
important contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute who we are as persons. However, as the rituals of
confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building
social movements for global transformation to individual selfimprovement. Furthermore, they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist
notion of a subject that can constitute itself over and against others
through self-reflexivity. While trying to keep the key insight made in activist/academic circles that personal and social
transformation are interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on
privilege and more the structures that create privilege . These new
models do not hold the answer, because the genealogy of the
politics of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/ intellectual
projects of liberation must be constantly changing. Our imaginations
are limited by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all ideas
we have will not be perfect. The ideas we develop today also do not have to be based on the complete
disavowal of what we did yesterday because what we did yesterday teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we think
not only beyond privilege, but beyond the sense of self that claims
privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot
imagine now for the future.

Exclusion
Identity politics based movements fail they serve to retrench
violence and foster exclusion
Hayward and Watson 10 - Associate Professor of Political Science at
Washington University in St. Louis; doctoral student in Political Science at
Washington University in St. Louis,(Clarissa Rile, Ron, The Politics of Identity
after Identity Politics: Identity and Political Theory, January 2010, 33 Wash.
U. Journal of Law and Policy,
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1064&context=law_journal_law_policy) //AD
Stated crudely, political

theorists like Wendy Brown58 and William

Connolly,59 cultural theorists like Judith Butler,60 and legal theorists
like Richard Thompson Ford61 draw on Foucaultian insights about
subjectification to highlight the harms identities produce.62 Collective
identities, their claim isnot only those of cultural minorities, but also those of the racial, ethnic,
gendered, sexual, and other groups that stand at the center of identity politics
exclude at their boundaries, and internally, they normalize. What is more,
working together, the universe of recognized identities defines what counts
as intelligible ways of living and being, thus rendering unintelligible
those who fall within no identity-category. For people who conform,
identities serve as mechanisms of power that constrain freedom . For
people who do not, they are mechanisms of power that legitimize
violence and coercion. Of those who contribute to this third line of political theorizing about
identity, William Connolly is the most explicit about its ontological presuppositions. Against strong
multiculturalists, who assume that recognizing authentic identities
promotes well-being, and against liberal multiculturalists who assume that fostering practices
of autonomy, or promoting state neutrality vis--vis conceptions of the good, does the same, Connolly
makes the case for regarding all identitarian practices as
ambiguous goods.63 Humans need identity, he agrees with Taylor and other
multiculturalists.64 Yet it may be the case, he underscores, that they do not fit
naturally and perfectly into any actual or, for that matter, any
conceivable identity-category. If so, then every identity, every form
of subjectivitynot excluding that of the modern, autonomous self
creates others whose exclusion and/or whose normalization it
legitimizes. In Connollys words, If humans are not predesigned, and if they therefore are ill suited
to fit neatly into any particular social form, then any set of enabling commonalities is
likely to contain corollary injuries, cruelties, subjugations,
concealments, and restrictions. . . . 65 Consider, again, Charles Taylors insight that, for
moderns, misrecognition can be an important harm.66 Connolly and other theorists in this third group

pressure to conform to naturalized and other

deeply entrenched identities constitutes a separate, and a no less
significant, harm. Such pressure harms, first of all, people who do
not perform their ascribed identities well: people who fail to conform
to identitarian norms, and as a result, are excluded or marginalized
might respond by arguing that

or otherwise sanctioned. Richard Ford illustrates with the example of

a strong and assertive woman who fails to perform well her
gendered role on the dance floor.67 She will be encouraged by dance instructors,
parents, potential partners, and friends to conform to the female role: [to] learn to accept the guidance of
the male, [and to] develop grace at the expense of strength. If she does not conform, her friends will
sanction her by telling her that she could get a date easily if she were a bit nicer or more feminine.
Men will silently punish her by refusing to ask her to dance. If she wants to dance, she will conform.68

pressure to conform to collective identities harms those who

do fit, theorists writing in this tradition emphasize or rather, those who
seem, based on their behavior and observable patterns of action, as
if they fit. It harms those people, that is, who live their lives more or
less as established identities prescribe. Imagine a woman who,
unlike the woman in Fords example, performs her gender identity in
an exemplary fashion. She exhibits niceness and grace and
femininity. She fails to develop her strength, or at least she hides it. She is rarely, if ever assertive.
This woman is not obviously better off, the claim is, than the woman
who refuses her gendered role. Granted, the conforming behavior wins her social
approbation, along with the rewards that accompany a good performance. But still, the cost is
nontrivial. Normalizationdiscipline, that is (including self-discipline), which aims
at conformity to social normsis an important loss of freedom.69
Conformity to collective identities damages that in the self that is
resistant to definitions of normal individuality and/or
harmonious community.70 Third and finally, pressure to conform to
collective identities harms those who do not fit identity categories at
all. Judith Butlers autobiographical illustration of this third point is worth quoting at length: I grew up
Second,

understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically
anomalous body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an institute in the Kansas prairies;
gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own
tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and
homes.71 Constructed

norms defining the identities female/feminine and

male/masculine fuel violence, not only to those who perform their identities poorly (and
those who perform them well), but also to thosehere gays, the intersexedwhom norms define out of

Social actors construct identities, by this third view.

The identities they construct never neatly fit the human beings they
claim to describe. Still, people essentialize identity. They experience
it as the root cause of traits, behaviors, dispositions, and desires: a
deep truth about the self, rather than a set of norms and standards
that might be otherwise. This essentialization depoliticizes identity.
In Wendy Browns words, differences that are the effects of social power
are neutralized through their articulation as attributes.72 Hence, on
balance, state recognition of identities does not promote well-being and
freedom. It does not prevent violence and cruelty. Instead, it
exacerbates normalization and coercive subjectification. What is worse,
constructed categories altogether.

recognition lends the authority of the state to those who police identity. According to Brown: While the
effort to replace liberalisms abstract formulation of equality with legal recognition of injurious social
stratifications is understandable, what such arguments do not query is whether legal protection

for a certain injury-forming identity discursively entrenches the

injury-identity connection it denounces.73 Might such protection
codify within the law, Brown asks, rhetorically, the very

powerlessness it aims to redress? Might it discursively collude with the conversion of

attribute into identity, of a historical effect of power into a presumed cause of victimization?74 In
recognizing identity, in fighting for identitys affirmative
acknowledgment by agents of the state, the worry is we risk invitingthe
construction of a plastic cage, which reproduces and further
regulates the very subjects it claims to protect, while remaining (unlike
Webers iron cage) quite transparent to the ordinary eye.75 Hence, the
poststructuralist emphasis on what many argue is the politically
urgent and potentially liberating task of destabilizing identities:
drawing attention to their constructedness and fluidity, and opening
up possibilities for new ways of living and being. Foucault urged not the
recognition but the refusal of identity.76 Many contributors to this third strand of
theorizing about identity politics view his archaeological and genealogical methods as key means to that
end.77 Many advocate as well the promotion of agonistic engagement, or contestation, among constructed
identities.78 The value of new social movements, by their view, is less the securing of recognition for
(authentic or autonomy-promoting) identities, than the unsettling of prevailing definitions of who we are.

Fracture
Identity politics causes fracturing and cedes the political
Gitlin 93 American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural
commentator (Todd, The Left, Lost in the Politics of Identity, Harpers
Magazine, September 1993, http://harpers.org/archive/1993/09/the-left-lostin-the-politics-of-identity/3/) //RGP
the
consequence of a transformation in the core idea of the left: the
weakening, even breakdown, of the ideals of a common humanity
that have animated it for more than two centuries. Some, though not all, of the
rights attacks are disingenuous. For example, we hear much from the right about the
dangerous politicization of English and womens studies, but no
complaint when it comes to economics or business. But this shouldnt obscure
The continuing dispute over political correctness in the academy is, in significant part,

a troubling irony: the right, traditionally the custodian of the privileges of the few, now speaks in an
apparently general language of merit, reason, individual rights, and virtue that transcends politics,

much of the left is so preoccupied with debunking

generalizations and affirming the differences among groupsreal as
they often arethat it has ceded the very language of universality
that is its birthright. Instead, the left in recent years has had trouble going
beyond what has come to be called identity politicsa politics that
is rooted more in group self-assertion than in attempts to create
broad alliances. Of course, oppressed groups must always struggle to overcome their second-class
status; equality demands no less. But what began in the late 1960s as an
assertion of dignity by various groups, a remedy for exclusion and
denigration and a demand by the voiceless for representation, has
developed its own habits and methods of silencing. At the extreme, in the
academy but also outside it, standards and traditions are now viewed as
nothing more than camouflage for particular interests. Many a
dispute is premised on the idea that there is a fundamental
difference between X (women, say, or people of color) and Y (white males); that X has
been oppressed or silenced by Y and should therefore be hired,
promoted, and specially represented on reading lists and at
conferences. The precursors of todays advocates of identity politics were those scholars who, in the
whereas

1960s, were active in the civil-rights and antiwar movements-movements predicated on the universal
values of equality, justice, and peace. These political campaigns and their underlying universalist
assumptions shaped the work of these scholars in the early 1970smaking womens history and literature
legitimate, bolstering labor studies, rethinking slavery and the slaughter of the Indians, opening up the

most of todays
young academics had no political experience in mass movements for
general change and, for that matter, no contact with a successful
left-of-center Democratic Party. For them, fighting over appropriate language, symbolic
canon to hitherto silenced traditions. But unlike this generation of professors,

representation (whether in the syllabus, curriculum, or faculty), affirmative action, or even musical styles is
an end in itself, the principal way of claiming their politics. These p ost-Sixties

radicals found
universalism empty orworsea cover for white, straight, male
power. The intensification of identity politics is inseparable from a
fragmentation of what I will call commonality politicsa frame of
understanding that acknowledges difference but sees it against

the background of what is not different, what is shared among

groups. In large measure, things fell apart for the left because the center
could not hold. For chronologically, the breakup of commonality politics predates the thickening of
identity politics. The centrifugal surge, on campus and off, is obviously, in part, a product of the last
quarter century of American demographic trends: growing immigration from Latin America, Asia, and
Africa; white flight from cities; the integration of campuses in the wake of civil-rights victories; growing
competition for scarce resources. These upheavals have taken place within the longer history of
emancipatory politics that has snaked forward through the West since the revolutions of 1776, 1789, and
1848. During the last two centuries, believers in a common humanity clustered around the two great
progressive ideals: the liberal ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and, later, in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens; and the radical ideal that crystallized as Marxism. Such
legitimacy as the left enjoyed in the West rested on its claim to a place in the story of universal human
emancipation. Whatever its immense failures, defaults, and sins, the left aspired to address itself not to
particular men and women but to all, in the name of their common standing. Whether liberals or socialists,
reformers or revolutionaries, the men and women of the left aimed to persuade their listeners to see their
common interest as citizens. Liberals emphasized the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happinessideals that, however trampled in practice by those who were white and male and propertied,
nevertheless could at least in principle be appealed to by oppressed groups. Marx, too, framed his politics
in universal terms, arguing that a universal class, the workers, were destined to overcome their particular
differences and realize a common identity: the human being as maker, realizing his species being in the

the intellectual radicalism of the

early 1960s can be seen as a search for a universalist politics that
might take the place of a Marxism that by then had lost its
legitimacy. The left turned to participatory democracy and civil rights. But participatory democracy,
course of transforming nature. From this point of view,

though theoretically available to everyone, was in practice tailored to students who had the time and
energy to spend at endless meetings. And the civil-rights movement, initially framed in universalist terms,
could unify the left only until legal segregation was defeated in 196465. Once integration and voting
rights had been secured, at least on paper, the alliance between liberals and radicals, integrationists and
separatists, was strained to the breaking point. Blacks began to insist on black leadership, even sometimes
on exclusively black membership in the movement. Soon, too, the pioneers of womens liberation rose

One grouping after another demanded the

recognition of its difference. Difference came to be felt more acutely
than commonality. The crack-up of the universalist new left was inevitable, though it was muted
against male supremacy.

for a while by the exigencies of the Vietnam War and the commonalities of youth culture. If there seemed
in the late 1960s to be one big movement, it was largely because there was one big war. But the divisions
of race and then gender and sexual orientation proved far too deep to be overcome by any language of
unification. There was a lingering rhetorical style of universalist radicalism, but the political passion broke
up into separate caucuses. The resulting identity politics deserves credit for inspiring powerful studies in
history, literature, and all manner of ideas. It has also proved more exciting and more energizing to
activists than the politics of commonalityespecially in the 1980s, with fights over hiring, requirements,
curricula, and so forth taking place during a time of increasingly scarce resources, For the participants in
these post-Sixties movements, the benefits of identity politics have been manifold: they provide
experiences of solidarity and belonging, and remedies for specific injustices, along with ready-made
reservoirs of recruits. As advertising, marketing, cable TV, and popular music have grown more and more
specialized, dividing the mass audience into progressively narrower segments, so has university politics.

The lefts attention is now paid to group self-assertion rather than,

say, campaigns against poverty or the bankrupting of public
education. As once-excluded territories have been recognized in the academy, any lingering
aspiration for the universal has been largely abandoned . Whatever
universalism now remains is based not so much on a common humanity as on a common enemy=-the
notorious White Male. While defenses of group rights often have a powerful logic, the idea of a common
America and the idea of a unified left, both great legacies of the Enlightenment, have lost their force. As a
result, we find ourselves today in a most peculiar situation: the left and right have traded places, at least

Unable to go
beyond the logic of identity politics, the disparate constituencies of
the cultural left have ceded much political high ground to the right.
with respect to the sort of universalist rhetoric that can still stir the general public.

Today, here and there on the left, one hears a half-whispered recognition that, beyond necessary demands
for racial representation, feminist principles, gay rights, and so on, some common ground must be found:

in campaigns for more economic equality and against poverty, unemployment, ecological depredation, and
educational erosion. Ronald Reagans genius lay in his ability to demarcate common ground on the right.

Unless it learns to speak its own language of commonality, the

shards of the left will be condemned to their separate sectors ,
sometimes glittering, sometimes smashed, and mostly marginal .

their attempt to strengthen identity politics backfires - ethnic

division fail to recognize whiteness as an identity
Lipsitz 6 - Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the Univeristy of
California, Santa Barbara (George, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,
Temple University Press, ebrary, pg. 66-69) //AD

Unity and Division We live in an age of painful contradictions. Mass communication and mass migration
bring the people of the world closer together in unprecedented ways, uniting diverse populations through
common participation in global markets, investments, and mass media. Yet the practices and processes
that affect everyone do not affect everyone equally. At the very moment that we find the people of the
world becoming more united, we also find that economic inequality, cultural insecurity, and ethnic,

racial rivalries renew old antagonisms and engender new

conflicts, leaving us paradoxically more divided than even before. Ethnic
divisions and racial conflicts have a particularly poisonous presence at the present
religious, and

moment. From Bosnia to Belfast, from Rwanda to Russia, from East Timor to Tel Aviv, we see the
destructive consequences of ethnic antago- nisms everywhere. It is understandable that under these
circumstances people might be wary of any kind of identity politics in which racial, religious, and ethnic
identities become the basis for political solidarity and cultural practice. Writers arguing from a variety of
political perspectives have critiqued identity politics as encouraging allegiance to group interests rather
than a sense of civic responsibility extending across racial and ethnic lines, as an assault on the traditions
and values most responsible for human progress, and as a diversion from real social problems that have
nothing to do with social identities. Alarmist articles in major news magazines bemoan the erosion of a
common culture in the United States, while neoconservatives sneer about the emergence of victim
studies in academia. Critics attack minority artists and intellectuals as guilt-mongering whiners
demanding special privileges and seeking to elevate inferior works in order to elevate their own selfesteem. On a broader front, ambitious politicians demagogically dismantle the antidiscrimination mechanisms established as a result of the civil rights movement, mislabeling antiracist remedies as instruments
of reverse racism. All around us, we see evidence of a fundamentally new era for the possessive

once we remember that

whiteness is also an identity, one with a long political history, contemporary
attacks on identity politics come into clear relief as a defense of the
traditional privileges and priorities of whiteness in the face of critical and political
projects that successfully disclose who actually holds power in this society and what has been done
investment in whiteness, fueled by ferment over identity politics. Yet

with it. Contrary to the claims of neo- conservatives that they stand for universal interests, the politics of
whiteness as exemplified by attacks on immigrants and on affirmative action amount to little more than a
self-interested strategy for preserving the possessive investment in whiteness, a politics based solely on
identity. Conversely,

the best ethnic studies

scholarship, cultural production, and community

organizing aims at opening up an understanding of ethnicity as hybrid ,

heterogeneous, and multiple (in the eloquent formulation of Lisa Lowe)as a political project aimed at
creating identities based on politics rather than politics based on identities. These projects rely on
egalitarian politics and struggles for social justice to counter the identity politics of whiteness that
generates identities based on the defense and perpetuation of inequality.28 Different ethnic groups have
different histories and experiences; as long as that is the case, organizing along ethnic lines will always
ma.ke sense. Yet ethnic groups stil.l must decide which things bring them together and which things divide
them, which groups offer them useful alliances and which do not. Mobilizing around a common group
identity does not preclude forming strategic and philosophical alliances with other groups. Under current
conditions, defending immigrants requires solidarity among Asian, Latino, and Caribbean communities.
Attacks on linguistic diversity cre- ate opportunities for coalitions between Latinos and Asians, while
incidents of racially motivated police brutality bring together immigrants and citizens. Ef- forts to organize

trade unions among low-wage workers require coalitions that include African Americans, Latinos, Asian
Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans. The Committee against Anti-Asian Violence in New
York defends Asian victims of vigilante violence and police brutality, but it also unites with the National
Congress for Puerto Rican Rights to stage a Racial Iustice Day rally and march, while publicizing the
activities of Project REACH, a multicul- tural organization established to provide drop-in centers that offer
safe havens to gay and lesbian youths, support HIV-positive youth, help women defend themselves against
sexual assaults, and train youth leaders.29 Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland,
California, brings together second- and third-generation Asian American women united in their
commitment to help empower Asian immigrant women working in the electronics, hotel, and gar- ment
industries. AIWAs members come from different national backgrounds, speak different languages, and
belong to different classes, yet their shared con- cern about the l.ives of low-wage women workers from
Asia leads them to political actions that address the class problems that women face as workers, the gender problems they confront as women, the legal problems they experience as immigrants, and the racial
problems they encounter as members of racial.ized groups.3 Organizing efforts among Latino workers at
the New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles have drawn upon ethnic solidarity in Mexican and Salvadoran
communities, but they have also fused a strategic alliance with Korean veterans of Iapanese slave labor
camps with longstanding grievances against the hotels Iapanese owner, the Kajima Corporation, for its
role in Iapanese imperialism during Wvorld War II.31 The Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles
originated in problems with public transportation in the city that affect all ethnic groups. Yet the groups
analysis showed that the transportation routes favored by inner-city residents gener- ated funds for the
transit system that subsidized the commuter trains used by suburban residents. Arguing that
neighborhood race effects accounted for the disproportionate resources made available to commuters
from mostly white suburbs, the union brought suit against the transit authority on civil rights grounds. In
this case, the 10 to 20 percent of white bus riders in the inner city experienced violations of their civil
rights because they relied on services utilized disproportionately by minorities. The Bus Riders Union
reached an impressive settlement with the transit authority Their strategy demonstrated the centrality of

mobilized a struggle that did not

revolve around racial identities, but rather one that united members
of all races in a common struggle for social justice. 32 Action within and across
race in determining access to public services, yet they

ethnic groups in these struggles is made possible by what the participants know, not who they are. Their
situated knowledges, historical experiences, and current struggles with power give their ethnic iden- tities
their determinant meanings. Li.ke scholars in Chicano studies and other ethnic studies fields, their
knowledge comes from their experiences, their strate- gic insights from the ways in which having less
power than your enemies makes it important to know the truth and dangerous to deny reality. Political
struggle, social analysis, and social theory are mutually constitutive; each is better when linked to the
other. As Iames Baldwin pointed out years ago, People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not
impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a

people under the necessity of creating themselves

must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water. A
people still held in bondage must believe that lk shall know the truth, and the truth shall make yefreejm

Intersectionality
Individual differences block identity politics effectiveness
intersectionality proves
Minow 96 - Professor of Law, Harvard Law School (Martha, Not Only for
Myself: Identity, Politics, and Law, The Colin Ruagh Thomas O'Fallon
Memorial Lecture, University of Oregon School of Law, 3-7-96, 75 Or. L. Rev.
647, Fall 1996) //AD
The second, related difficulty is the tendency of identity politics to
neglect "intersectionality ." 21 This notion refers to the way in which
any particular individual stands at the crossroads of multiple groups.
All women also have a race; all whites also have a gender; and the individuals stand in different places as

the meanings of gender are

inflected and informed by race, and the meanings of racial identity
are similarly influenced by images of gender. Black women have confronted male
gender and racial politics converge and diverge. Moreover,

violence and white domination in ways quite different from the experiences of either white women or black

Black women and black men have different experiences and

interests, argues Kimberle Crenshaw. She provides vivid illustrations with black women's responses to
men. 22

the obscenity prosecution of the music group 2 Live Crew and to the Senate's treatment of Anita Hill during

Men who are black may

experience racial discrimination while also participating in
harassment or discriminatory practices toward women. Women who
are white may experience gender discrimination while
simultaneously participating in exclusionary practices against blacks
and Hispanics. 24 Neither gender nor racial identity groupings alone
[*656] can describe common experiences, standpoints, and relationships with others. 25 Is
the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. 23

it adequate, then, to identify a group representative who shares a race with other members, but a gender
only with some of them, or a gender with other members but a race with only some of them? What about

The challenge to a conception of

representation based on one shared trait compounds with the
recognition of further intersections . Individuals manifest not only
race and gender but also other bases for potential group
membership, such as age, disability, religion, immigrant status, and sexual orientation. Then
political affiliation, music preferences, favored sports, and other
commitments further bisect and realign groups . Some of the
intersections seem to invite new "identity groupings," such as black women,
sharing a gender but not a religion?

Chicana lesbians, and male bikers. They may also expose and perhaps solidify the self-affirmations of other

recognizing
intersectionality threatens to complicate identity politics with a
proliferation of new , and old, identity groupings .
intersectional groups, such as "white men" or "married women." 26 At a minimum,

Oppression Olympics
Oppression Olympics entrench injustice and discrimination
only intersectionality can break the trend

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Exactly one week after well-known "shock

Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team
"nappy-headed hos," he was fired by CBS News Radio. The
controversy, which simultaneously characterized the women in sexist
and racist terms, targeted a team that was runner up in the 2007 NCAA women's basketball
CHAPTER 1: INTERSECTIONALITY TO THE RESCUE
jock" Don

championship. That Scarlet Knights team included eight women of color and two white women.

Women's rights and civil rights organizations immediately came to

the Scarlet Knights' defense. National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy joined
civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to stand in solidarity with the National Congress of

This
moment of convergence - the simultaneous attention to race and
gender - produced solidarity instead of the Oppression Olympics and
its attendant Leapfrog Paranoia, Willful Blindness, Defiant
Ignorance, Movement Backlash or Compassion Deficit Disorder.
Demonstrating the best of coalition politics, leaders of both
communities acknowledged the dual causes of this episode - racism and
sexism; sexism and racism. This analysis allowed for people who believe in
either form of equality to join in a unified effort to oust Imus. This
moment of convergence, produced in part by the recognition of Categorical Multiplicity, a
term I define below, represents a taste of what intersectionality can bring
to our public discourse about race, gender, class and sexual
orientation in American politics. Unfortunately, Imus' period of contrition included a $20
Black Women and the National Council of Negro Women to demand termination of Imus' radio show.

million contract settlement and a new contract with ABC Radio only months later. Clearly, Categorical
Multiplicity is necessary but not sufficient to turn the page for good. Likewise, the call for attention to

intersectionality
doesn't end there. This chapter will outline five aspects of an intersectional
approach to politics that can thwart the lure of the Oppression
Olympics. In contrast to the debilitating Oppression Olympics,
intersectional approaches provide new ways for the privileged to
stand in solidarity, foster egalitarian coalition building among
groups and enhance our attention to complexity in politics. We will return
Categorical Multiplicity is a long-standing part of intersectionality research - but

to these prongs in the case study chapters to come. Most Americans recognize that race and class are
socially defined concepts with little to no biological meaning. Gender and sexual orientation, on the other
hand, remain categories with presumptions of biology implicated as justifications for how people are
treated/ Intersectionality scholars analyze all four categories as social constructions that retain political
influence far beyond any actual meaning of the biological, phenotypical and chromosomal differences
among us. Many scholars recognize this claim as a constructivist one - based on the conviction that
humans cognitively construct the world around them in order to best navigate a complex society. While

intersectionality starts with this constructivist premise, it recognizes the material

reality that these social constructions impose on us. Despite our best efforts we
learn norms of racialized, gendered, classed and sexualized behavior as children through observation and
imitation of the adults to whom we are exposed, whether directly or virtually through the media.

Although we live in a nation with a strong commitment to individual

freedom, these norms interact to produce a web of patterned rewards
for norm- conforming behavior and punishments for behavior that
doesn't. While we might want that patterned reward system in place for criminal justice purposes,
extending them beyond that domain socializes Americans into an acceptance of
injustice and discrimination. Think of these intersecting behavioral norms as analogous to
the threat that Morpheus and Neo discuss when they first meet in the movie "The Matrix:"" Morpheus: Do
you believe in fate, Neo? Neo: No. Morpheus: Why not? Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in
control of my life. Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here
because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire
life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in
your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking
about? Neo: The Matrix? Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all
around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on
your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is
the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus:
That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you
cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind....iii In the movie the matrix rewards Willful Blindness

an Oppression
Olympics orientation attempt to force people to pretend that race,
gender, class and sexual orientation don't exist when individuals,
groups and institutions interact with each other as if they do. iv
Intersectionality adds a daunting but critical layer of complexity: the
categories themselves interact with each other, teaching us how to
overlook invisible norms and spotlight what is different as normatively dysfunctional. This
chapter illuminates a path through the matrix by revealing the intellectual roots of
intersectionality. v "To combine gender with race, language, sexual
orientation, concrete interpersonal relations, and a host of other
dimensions of identity is no easy or uncomplicated thing. But it is
from the recognition of this complexity and these contradictions that
we must start.vi Categorical Multiplicity: The Foundation of Intersectionality As I noted in the
introduction, the idea that only the marginalized dimensions of
categories matter and the bias towards compartmentalizing
categories as mutually exclusive for political purposes both
contribute to the Oppression Olympics. For example, the AfricanAmerican women on the Rutgers team aren't Black on MondayWednesday-Friday, and female on Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. What
would they do about Sunday? Yet most analyses of American politics proceed
as if this is the case. This allows the privileged dimensions of
categories to which people belong to remain invisible norms, as we saw
and Defiant Ignorance. From a 21st century political perspective, so too does

in the cases of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Certainly, the mainstream sexism we
observed in the 2008 election must be addressed. But we must also recognize the racism, classism and
homophobia within the gender equality community. Moreover we must also address the sexism, classism
and homophobia in the civil rights communityvii By acknowledging the role of Categorical Multiplicity,

intersectionality scholars draw upon two of the most useful

contributions of multicultural feminist theory: that multiple
categories are significant and due to the multiplicity of such

categories, there are multiple sites of power that need to be

reformedviii The "intersectional turn" builds on cross-disciplinary work by feminist scholars and
activists of color around the world. The impact of an intersectional approach to race,
sexual orientation, gender, and class as analytical categories has emerged from over 50
years of scholarship/* Originally formulated as a personal identity-laden theory, early on
intersectionality theory focused solely on the identities of women of color. African American feminist
theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Joy James, bell hooks and many others articulated a both/and identity
to locate Black women's sociopolitical situation as one that is, variously, "doubly bound" or featuring
"multiple jeopardies." This claim, evident across numerous disciplines of Black women's studies evolved
from the both/and claims of 18th and 19th century writers such as Maria Miller Stewart and Anna Julia
Cooper. Latina and Asian American feminists have also made similar claims about the multiplicity of
identity and claimed an inseparability of race, gender, sexuality and class in the lives of women of color.
Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga have similarly talked about the categorical multiplicity of Latinas' lives

A related focus on hybridity has similarly

energized European approaches to intersectionality as a paradigm
that shapes analyses of public education, social welfare policy, and
immigration studies. These convincing claims in the U.S. context have been joined by
in a racialized context of hybridity termed mestizaje.

post-colonial feminists who add the importance of North-South identity as a politically relevant category of

The impact of this work has been

tremendous, filtering into more generalized academic and
international human rights work. International feminist and UN NGO forums have
analysis for women's international movements.x

gradually put issues of intersectionality more centrally on their agenda.xi Since then equality legislation in
many countries as well as the EU has moved from focusing on single category approaches to intersectional
approaches. As well, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of
Destiny (2006) recognizes the role of multiple identities in civil wars and contexts of ethnic violence.xii

The multicultural feminist claim of multiple jeopardies has

traditionally been interpreted to mean that some women have a
larger number of multiple marginalized categorical memberships
that therefore deserve a larger share of the policy solutions. I call
this logic the additive oppressions argument,xiii and it is easy to see where this
logic leads - directly to the Oppression Olympics question of "Who
has it toughest?" In addition to the normative concerns about the desirability or usefulness of
such a debate, two specific problems emerge from the additive argument.

Oppression Olympics gets commodified by the legal system

only intersectionality can work within the law to achieve social
justice

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Categorical Intersection: The Central Metaphor of Intersectionality I've mentioned twice that

categories of race, gender, class and sexual orientation all present

equal but not identical threats to our democracy as one nation with liberty and
justice for all. Work produced by intersectionality researchers has
characterized the relationship between categories in a variety of
ways. Faced with the incompatibility of the additive oppressions approach with existing civil rights

legal theorists like Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, xviii Mari Matsuda,

Adrien Katherine Wing, Patricia Williams and Margaret Montoya identified
numerous gaps in the American legal framework left unaddressed
after mid-20th century movement activism on behalf of women and
racial/ethnic minorities. Within the legal domain, these women
argued that a gap persists between the lived experience of women
of color and the opportunity for legal remedy against discriminatory
pay structures, work rules or protection from domestic violence. Their convincing
explanations of a relationship among political categories of
difference such as race, class and gender preserved the claims for justice based
on Categorical Multiplicity, but on substantively different grounds than
multicultural feminist theory. Categorical Intersection emphasized the
invisibility of women's lived experiences in a legal system that
constructed race and gender as mutually exclusive. Characterizing
the relationship between categories as intersectional rather than additive
turned these scholars away from the Oppression Olympics and
toward the possibilities for transformative politics. Crenshaw ,
jurisprudence,

recognizing this "tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and

coined the metaphor of intersecting streets to describe the

legal location of women with multiple marginalized identities. This
analysis,"xix

formulation has been encapsulated in the law by Canadian courts.xx Each category is taken to be an
intersecting "vector" and society occurs at the point of intersection for all people.xxi Figure 1 displays the
original metaphor, herein called "Content

Intersectionality" because of its emphasis on

three central categories of difference as substantively, not simply analytically critical to
U.S. politics. More specifically, each of the categories in figure 1 has the same color because ,
particularly in the legal arena due to the role of signals and spillover
across movements, each category has been construed to require not simply equal, but
more importantly identical legal remedies.xxii Content intersectionality has focused primarily on
rendering the invisible visible - that is, enlightening the world about the lives of people (primarily women
to date) who politically, socially, and/or legally exist at the intersection of race, class and gender. Yet as
intersectionality as an analytical framework has gained popularity, two central shifts have emerged, based
on a deep theoretical and jurisprudential engagement with Crenshaw's original metaphor. ** Figure 1 About
Here ** In the 20+ years since the landmark interventions of multicultural feminists like Gloria Anzaldua,
Patricia Hill Collins and Crenshaw's original metaphor,xxiii intersectionality research has progressed to
more explicitly include class and sexual orientation along with the initial categories of race and gender
identified by Crenshaw and others.xxiv The two-dimensional intersecting street metaphor must now
accommodate this change in Categorical Multiplicity. We might first want to just add more streets - instead
of a two-street intersection, we'd presume more of a British-style roundabout. Unfortunately this move is
flawed because it violates the spirit of Crenshaw's original formulation, which emphasizes the indivisibility
of multiple categories in our lives - by removing the intersections completely. It is indeed impossible to be
only white on Mondays, only gay on Tuesdays, and so forth. So how might we capture the power
relationships that exist along the North-South spectrum in international or transnational contexts? How
might we account for religion or disability as categories of difference? In her forthcoming article and recent
book, Rita Dhamoon quite helpfully walks through the multiple images and metaphors that have emerged
from the serious consideration of additional categories, and cites several standards for selecting the
relevant categories within any particular political context for study. Table 1 lists several of them. ** Table 1
about here ** Dhamoon notes that all of the standards of choice are driven by the analysis and critique of

While this step of selecting which intersections

to study allows us to incorporate previously ignored categories, it
also potentially dislodges the hegemony of the race-gender-class
triumvirate of categories that have dominated intersectional scholarship
for decades. Some scholars question this turn as a move to
delegitimize race as a central component of the intersectional
how power operates and its effects.xxv

approach (others have said similar things about gender). Dhamoon reminds us that
however unsatisfactory this possible outcome might seem, "there are no universal
grounds on which to know which interactions should be studied." xxvi It
is important to note that the absence of universal grounds does not give us
license to engage in Willful Blindness, Defiant Ignorance or even
Compassion Deficit Disorder but instead recognizes that as political
contexts vary, so too does the relevance of certain categories. To talk
about race in India, for example, might not be nearly as legible as talking about caste. Further, to
assume that caste is simply a proxy for race in India also presents a
host of problems (whether methodological, in terms of validity or theoretical, in terms of
conceptual clarity) for research design or policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, the
central benefit of content intersectionality is its ability to make the
"invisible" visible. It produces historically, politically, and
socioeconomically accurate information that has several benefits.
Canadian public health scholar Olena Hankivsky argues that intersectionality has
"the potential to.. .in the final analysis, contribute an important conceptual
advancement in expanding policy discourse in relation to social
justice."xxvii In this regard, we can think of intersectionality as a
justice- oriented analytical tool. If we are committed to that part of our pledge of
allegiance to the flag that says, "with liberty and justice for all," then in addition to our focus on the
invisible - overcoming Willful Blindness, Defiant Ignorance, and Compassion Deficit Disorder in the process

By
reframing the intersection as a dynamic center of both invisibility
and hypervisibility, we can expand intersectionality's utility as an
antidote to the Oppression Olympics. Visibility for marginalized
groups and individuals, particularly from a political or public policy perspective, is contingent
and mediated by what I have elsewhere called a "politics of disgust." Welfare
recipients, undocumented immigrants, prison populations, and
terror suspects are usually identified with often disturbing inaccuracy by
authorities based on their memberships in multiple intersecting
categories: single poor black mothers, Latino/a working class Spanish speakers, Black and brown
working class men, young Arab American men. The perversion of democratic
attention in a politics of disgust involves elites using a warped
version of such populations' public identity as an ideological
justification for outrageously invasive public policies. Second, among these
subsets of larger groups, elites' power in a communicative context of gross
inequality - their bigger microphones and megaphones - make
contestation and the relationships with logical allies difficult to the
point of impossibility. Most ironically, for these intersectionally
disadvantaged groups, sometimes the best one can immediately
hope for is invisibility. The panopticon of surveillance, to use Foucauldian
terms, often feature egregious and intense Movement Backlash . Consider
the following examples: The 1960s and 1970s activism of the National
Welfare Rights Movement led a 1980s President Ronald Reagan to lay the
economic ills of the United States at the feet of the Cadillac-driving
"welfare queens" - a fabricated image. The successful push for the
Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was countered by
- we must also attend to Movement Backlash, another aspect of the Oppression Olympics.

states like California, which passed Proposition 187 in 1994 after

immigrants were targeted as the cause of California's recession.
While sadly scapegoating is nothing new, the idea that such groups
are intersectionally identified through a justice-oriented focus on
power is new and such efforts have met with varying levels of
success. In his recent analysis of intersectional court claims, Francisco
Valdes found that among nine different categories of intersectional
claims, only those that exclusively involved protected classes got
relief from the courts. The remaining challenge for advocates is the larger set of cases
where claimants were members of both protected and unprotected
classes. In such situations the court's logic subsumed claimants' protected
status (e.g. one's race) under their unprotected status (e.g. their class). Valdes'
finding is a clear example of how the legal structure fosters or
facilitates Willful Blindness to a claimant's own privilege (a clear link to the
final dimension of intersectionality discussed below). In matters of legal strategy,
claimants are incentivized to downplay or ignore their privilege. Valdes
contends that while this juxtaposition reveals the continuing dysfunction
of the U.S. legal system, it also provides a road map for future
strategic litigation.

Links

Me-search link
Their form of politics fractures any meaningful change the
atomization of social movements has created a form of mesearch rather than research which makes the affs impacts
inevitable

Chandler, 9 - Professor of International Relations at the University of

Westminster (David, Questioning Global Political Activism, What is Radical
Politics Today Edited by Jonathan Pugh, 81-82)//jml
politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still
gives us a sense of social connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to
many of our lives. It is just that the nature and practices of this politics are different. We are less
likely to engage in the formal politics of representation - of elections and
governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is
much less division between the private sphere and the public one and
much less division between national, territorial, concerns and global ones. This type of politics
is on the one hand global but, on the other, highly individualised: it
is very much the politics of our everyday lives the sense of meaning we get
However,

from thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish
out for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the
ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to

when we do politics nowadays it

is less the old politics, of self-interest, political parties, and
concern for governmental power, than the new politics of global
ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global
Greenpeace and Christian Aid. I want to suggest that

approach to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social
political engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1)
global post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its concerns are free-floating and in
many ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are

the practice
of global politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not
subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties and are
more likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an
issue, as an end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or
ethicality in the face of an increasingly confusing, problematic and
alienating world our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in Marxs words, of the
private and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3)

heart in a heartless world or the soul of a soulless condition. The practice of doing politics as a form of

this is
politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change
at the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I
want to argue that global ethical politics reflects and institutionalises our
sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in
irrational and unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate
religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the opium of the people -

my points by briefly looking at the practices of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political
activism, government policy making and academia. Radical activism People often argue that there is
nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march,
anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005,

these new
forms of protest are highly individualised and personal ones - there
involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree;

is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that

theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal
statements of awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. This is illustrated by the

It is as if people are more

concerned with the creation of a sense of community through
differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or
collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really
concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with
overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences
would be quite important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence
of guns and other weapons? It would seem important to debate reasons , causes
and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give those political differences an
organisational expression if there was a serious project of social
change. Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism
celebration of differences at marches, protests and social forums.

today is a form of social disengagement expressed in the anti-war marchers slogan of Not in My Name,
or the assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as

it seems that political activism is a practice

which isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal
commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging
with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brainwashed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of the practice of this type of global politics
engaging in political debate. In fact,

are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their
idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing awareness of themselves and by giving
political meaning to every personal action. Global ethics appear to be in demand because they offer us a
sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time giving us the freedom to construct the
meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of responsibilities for

While
the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack
of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its
rejection of any form of social movement or organisation . Strange as it
acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box.

may seem, the only people who are keener on global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since
the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended
to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian
intervention, healing the scar of Africa, the war on terror and the war against climate insecurity. Tony
Blair argued in the Guardian last week that foreign policy is no longer foreign policy (Timothy Garten Ash,
Like it or Loath it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for, 26 April 2007), this is certainly
true. Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policymaking, no longer seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth
Office where people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and
provides more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in
good causes. This shift was clear in the UKs attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s an
approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of
Britains caring and sharing identity. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of
demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people
on the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the valuebased interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blairs recent Foreign Affairs article, A Battle for Global
Values, 86:1 (2007), pp.7990). Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top
of the political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global
sphere the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international
institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme
to the ambitious assertion of global causes saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just
ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone
can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more
responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into
concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the civilised world,
NATO or the EU are on the line in wars of choice from the war on terror to the war on global warming lack

traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of Realpolitik than the

Governments feel the consequences of

their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals;
it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or cohere
political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection to the represented
narcissistic search for meaning or identity.

masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the Emperor with no clothes (In the
Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this lack of shared social
goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald Rumsfeld stated about
the war on terror, there are no metrics to help assess whether the war is being won or lost. These wars
and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and interests of others, are
demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible practices and policies.
Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics the ethics of conviction to the ethics of
responsibility in his lecture on Politics as a Vocation. The desire to act on the international scene without
a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from the Balkans to Iraq and to the
moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership requirements. Today more and
more people are doing politics in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International
Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the
attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom
in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests
and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a
product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realisms ontological
focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in.
Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not
be as concerned with what is as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community.
Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the
practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which
have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problemsolving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of

Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful

thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing
that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and
biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world
affairs. This becomes me-search rather than research. We have moved a
thinking about the world.

long way from Hedley Bulls (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to

The inward-looking
and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned
with our reflectivity the awareness of our own ethics and values
than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR
put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.

students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and
Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of
power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their
choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and
engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical

Politics has become a religious

activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less
and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of
ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in
radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a
one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a
one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because
when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in
the external consequences of our political acts. What matters is the conviction
understanding of engagement in global politics.

or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide
idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of
globalisation theory the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a
complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our

The more we engage in the new politics where there is an

unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global
issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world , and
actions.

the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and
organisation.

Shared experience link

Their form of politics fails to recognize the diversity within
groups linked fate empirically fails

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Diversity Within Following Don Imus' statement, Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer held a press conference
to introduce the world to the women Imus had impugned. Designed specifically to confront the
characterization of "hos," the women were dressed in business attire and spoke about their academic
pursuits, in an effort to take back their power to define who they were, instead of allowing Imus and his

Expanding upon the commonplace

idea that "not all stereotypes are true of all group members,"
intersectionality theory demonstrates the Diversity Within all groups
to combat both mainstream stereotypes from both outside and
within the group itself.xxxv More specifically, Diversity Within emphasizes
how intersecting categories produce subgroups within the groups,
who often have divergent political agendas. For example, within the group of
African Americans, no one would dispute that Oprah Winfrey and Michael
Jordan are not disadvantaged in the same way as unemployed
African Americans living on the south side of Chicago, based on the
intersecting category of socioeconomic class. Indeed scholars of
African American politics have long argued that African Americans
share a sense of "linked fate" that can transcend politically relevant
distinctions like class and gender in political attitudes and
behavior.xxxvi Yet while linked fate may persist among Black political
attitudes, it does not significantly affect Black political
participation.xxxvii Unfortunately, our political and public policy discourse is
not always sufficiently nuanced to capture this complexity. Thus
subgroups of populations remain disadvantaged with broad debate
focusing on why exactly such diverse outcomes exist, overlooking
the common sense reality that many longstanding policies were
designed to benefit a specific slice of a group (like middle class blacks or white
women) based on the assumption that what was good for this slice was
good for the entire group. xxxviii Building on the idea that there is no
pure victim, Diversity Within recognizes the differential power
relationships and multiple centers of power in American politics. The
late political theorist Iris Marion Young attempted to reconcile the recognition of
within-group diversity for practical politics, asking the question, on
what grounds, then, can women claim to speak for women as a group?
producer Bernard McGuirk to do it for them.xxxiv

This question has emerged over the past 20 years not simply in response to women of color charging
second-wave feminists with racism, but among conservative, independent, and moderate women who

We
can't always spin our wheels, Young concludes, searching for what we have
state that the feminist movement doesn't speak for them. So it's more than an idle question.xxxix

in common, because there will always be the chance that someone

will be excluded.xl But if that's the case, then how do we form groups to get
things done politically? Young recommends we think of race or
gender categories as "serial collectives."xli When we think of women
as a serial collective, there is no requirement that we must all have
something in common beyond a relationship to a material object and
the social practices in relationship to it.xlii If we think in terms of
serial collectives, we set aside the paralyzing question of what we must
have in common before we can speak and focus instead on what we
can do to change our world. Drawing upon the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Young highlights
the way in which politically, we can think of women as analogous to
commuters taking the bus. Commuters need not all be a specific
race, gender, class or sexual orientation, of course, but they do
share a relationship to the commuter busxliii and the practices that
are associated with it - including its route (over which they have little direct
control), whether it's on time (something they may or may not have some control of), and
how far they choose to ride (something they have more but not complete control over).
Surveying the variety of cars and buses and other forms of transportation, we can envision the degree to

individuals forming groups is a matter of choice and opportunity ;

where individuals have embarked and have elected to follow the journey of the bus itself. Prior to
embarking, potential riders represent a serial collective - a collection of
which

individuals with the potential for group action. Once embarked, however, the individuals have elected to
"link their fate"xliv with those of their fellow passengers, however temporarily, episodically or contingently

The members of this collective

may spend most days never actually thinking of themselves as a
"group," until something very specific happens - like the bus has an
accident or doesn't show up at its scheduled stop one day. There may then be a
specific block of time where commuters join together to address
some specific task (like finding an alternate route to work or school).
Intersectionality's commitment to addressing Diversity Within focuses our attention
on the process by which the task gets defined and achieved. Too
often, a small subset of the serial collective decides among
themselves what the task at hand should be, under the assumption
that their decision sufficiently covers the entire group. Yet this
agenda-setting process falsely assumes that what's good for them is
what's good for the entire group. Intersectionality scholars have
proposed new and different ways to set the agenda for the
collective.xlv Once that associated task is completed, they can then elect to dissolve the collective
(e.g. solely for the purposes of arriving at a destination).

(and return to daily life as an individual commuter) or they may choose to remain together as a nonpolitical entity (socially saying hello, playing card games on the bus during the ride) or as a formally

the
future of the group is to be set by more than the privileged members
of the collective. At any particular time some, one or all may attempt to veer "off-road" in order to
organized political entity (forming a Straphangers Campaign or Bus Riders Union).xlvi Again

reach their intended destination. The final aspect of intersectionality returns us to Crenshaw's new
metaphor of the Grand Canyon. It will focus on the seriality of categories like race, class, sexual orientation
and gender to examine the dynamic relationships across individual and institutional levels of analysis.

Standpoint epistemology link

Standpoint epistemology reinforces a type of insider
research that produces inaccurate understandings of the
world reject their starting point of identity

Innes, 9 - assistant professor in the Department of Native Studies at the

University of Saskatchewan (Robert, Wait a Second. Who Are You Anyways?"
American Indian Quarterly 33:4)//jml
Insider scholars, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, challenge the research conducted by outsiders for its
colonial nature, which ignores, silences, [End Page 441] and/or diminishes insider perspectives.3 This
critique originated with African American scholars in the 1960s and led to an emergence of what Robert
Merton describes as the "Insider doctrine," namely, that members of a particular group should research
their own group.4 Feminists, for example, advocate that women should research women's issues. As
Sherna Gluck and Daphine Patai state, it should be "by, for, and about women."5 The result of these
assertions has been the development and implementation of research methods designed for insider

scholars have
questioned what actually constitutes insider research, the validity of
the data obtained by insiders, and to what degree the insiders are , in
fact, insiders. Over thirty years ago sociologist Robert Merton addressed the research conducted by
insiders. According to Merton, the central notion of the insider doctrinethat
only members of a particular group possess the ability to undertake
research of their groupis "solipsistic." The solipsism of the insider
doctrine, Merton believes, "can be put in the vernacular with no great loss
in meaning: you have to be one to understand one."6 For Merton, a major
researchers, which, in turn, has generated discussion among scholars. Specifically,

shortcoming of this exclusiveness is that it leads to fragmentation, for groups necessarily contain

if only whites can understand whites, and blacks,

blacks, and only men can understand men, and women, women, this gives rise to the
paradox which severely limits both premises: for it then turns out , by
assumption, that some Insiders are excluded from understanding other
Insiders with white women being condemned not to understand white men, and black men, not to
additional subgroups: Thus,

understand black women, and so through the various combinations of status subsets.7 The issue of insider

Insider researchers'
bias has been a frequent target due to alleged close ties to the
research group. Insiders' close ties have led some scholars to point out "the dangers of overrapport." Over-rapport occurs when a researcher closely identifies with
the research group's perspectives and fails to approach research
situations in a critical manner.8 That is, as John L. Aguilar states, "the conduct of research
from home often inhibits the perception of structures and patterns of social and cultural life. [T ]oo
much is too familiar to be noticed or to arouse the curiosity essential
to research."9 Insider researchers' close relationship with the
researched group means that significant observation can "easily be
overlooked, including many taken-for granted assumptions about social behavior and the blindness
to common, everyday activities; these are hazards of intimate familiarity."10 Scholars have
additionally argued that insider researchers, unlike outsiders, are more
likely to have difficulty "intellectually and emotively" distancing
themselves from the research group .11 In contrast to insider researchers, outsider
research validity has also garnered much discussion among scholars.

researchers see themselves as being better equipped to provide objective accounts of the research
population. Merton cites Georg Simmel, who states that an outsider or stranger to the research group is
"freer, practically and theoretically. . . . [H]e surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are

more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent."
Merton adds, "It is the stranger, too, who finds what is familiar to the group significantly unfamiliar and so

While insider
researchers have to contend with obstacles that prevent them from
probing into some areas, outsider research "involves a comparative
orientation in which contrast promotes both perception and
curiosity. The researcher undergoes a kind of heuristic culture shock
that operates through curiosity as an impetus to understanding."13
is prompted to raise questions for inquiry less apt to be raised at all by Insiders."12

These views emphasize the idea that "only outsiders can conduct valid research on a given group; only
outsiders, it is held, possess the needed objectivity and emotional distance [and that] insiders invariably
present their group in an unrealistically favorable light."14 Some feminists have become critical of the
insider research favored by many feminist scholars. Melissa Gilbert's research experience led her to
question the feminist research methodology: "The fact that I was not doing my research in the 'Third World'
or in any other country, and yet felt like an 'outsider' suggests that we need to question the assumptions
underlying much of 'feminist' methodology." For Gilbert, "the insider/outsider dichotomy is not useful
because the very act of conducting research places an 'insider' in an 'outsider' position."15 Other insider
researchers like Gilbert have found that simply being a member of the researched community does not
guarantee insider status. Class, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, education, ethnicity, race, culture, [End
Page 443] level of familiarity, physical appearance, types of clothing, and lingering distrust of research
could all prevent insider researchers from obtaining the trust and credibility necessary for gaining access

Insider researchers have also identified physical

appearance as a barrier to gain insider status with some research
participants. These researchers found that, like outsider researchers, they went through
a period in which they and the research participants had to
negotiate their relationship, a period whereby the researcher had to gain the confidence of
to research participants.16

his or her participants.17 These researchers reached the same conclusion set out by Merton many years
ago: "We

are all, of course, both insiders and outsiders, members of

some groups and, sometimes derivatively, not of others; occupants
of certain statuses which thereby exclude us from occupying other
cognate statuses."18 Unlike Gilbert, however, these recent scholars maintain that their status as
an insider was not completely undermined by factors that made them an outsider. They were aware or
were made aware of these differences and had to navigate their way in a research relationship to enhance
their insider status so that their research participants accepted them and their differences.

Standpoint epistemology devastates coalition building

identity politics devolves into insularity

Kruks, 95 PhD, Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics (Sonia, Identity

Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance Vol.
10, No. 2 1995)//jml
As a political critique of global-difference feminism, identity politics is indubitably valid. Since women are
never women tout court, but are always situated also as members of a class, a race, an ethnic grouping, a
sexual orientation, an age grade, and so on, it is dangerous to assume that the inequities and power
relations that pertain to those other dimensions of social situation will not play out also between women.

in its attempts to refute falsely universalizing knowledge

claims, identity politics sometimes tends to replicate those aspects of
global-difference feminism which have stressed the radical incommunicability of women's
experience to men. Identity politics tends toward an excessive
particularization and partitioning of knowledge, but now along the lines of race
or ethnicity, for example, as well as gender. For such experience-based accounts of
knowledge imply an epistemology of provenance: that is, the claim that
knowledge arises from an experiential basis that is fundamentally
group-specific and that others, who are outside the group and who
However,

lack its immediate experiences, cannot share that knowledge . As a

corollary it is generally claimed that outsiders have no basis from which they can legitimately evaluate the
group's claims about its knowledge, or those political or moral positions that it takes on the basis of that
knowledge. In short, only those who live a particular reality can know about it; and only they have the right

Many groups that practice identity politics also advocate

a politics of alliance or coalition with other groups, invoking the
ideal of "bridging" differences once they are recognized and
respected.5 Commitments to coalition work, to alliance, to solidarity across groups are, I believe, vital
for any effective progressive politics in this day and age. However, the implications of an
epistemology of provenance, if consistently pursued, threaten to undercut
coalition politics or other forms of solidarity among women. The unintended end-point
of an epistemology of provenance can be an acute and politically
debilitating subjectivism, which belies the possibility of
communication and common action across differences. It is this apparent
to speak about it.

contradiction within identity politics (and other forms of multiple-difference feminism) that concerns me in
this essay. Some identity politics has tended to assert global identities for a particular kind of women,
arguing for example that all black women share culture, experience, and ways of knowing (Collins 1990;
Brown 1988). However, such assertions tend in turn to be challenged as falsely universalistic.

There is

thus a tendency for identities increasingly to subdivide. For

example, many lesbian women of color have come to identify
themselves as having an identity distinct from that of other women
of color and of other lesbians. Or, within the lesbian community, those who accept sadomasochistic practices proclaim themselves to have a different identity from those who do not (Phelan

Since no woman can avoid living a plurality of

identities, a central dynamic of identity politics is to move toward
ever-shrinking identity groups, for which the logical terminus would have to be not merely
subjectivism but solipsism, since no one person's set of experiences is identical to another's.6 Identity
politics, as an epistemological position, thus threatens to leave us without the
possibility of having the kind of common knowledge, or forming the
kind of collective judgments, necessary for the development of
broadly organized, feminist coalition politics such as its adherents often advocate. To
1989, esp. Chap. 6).

exemplify: some consistent end-points of an epistemology of provenance would be to say, among other
things, that those who do not experience domestic violence, or incest, or rape, or unwanted pregnancy, or
even unequal pay, have no experiential basis from which to evaluate and speak about such issues.
Statements such as these, which I think very few feminists would want to endorse, are not of a different
propositional order than the statements, commonly heard today, to the effect that white women have no
basis or right to discuss the issue of sexism in black heterosexual relationships, or that Western women
should take no position on clitoridectomy in Africa or the Middle East.

The challenge identity

politics now presents us with is this: to find a way to recognize the
power-laden dangers of global-difference feminism and to affirm the
importance of the existence of radical experiential differences, but
to do so without embracing an epistemology of provenance. The problem
is to find a way of acknowledging the claims to knowledge of particular identity groups without thereby
wholly evacuating claims for a more general basis for knowledge, or more general visions and projects of
emancipation.

Starting point link

Beginning discussion with identity is essentialist even if they
acknowledge identitys fluidity, identity as a starting point
lapses into essentialism. They also over-determine autonomy
which ignores group conditions that arent predicated upon
individualism

Mowbray, 10 - PhD, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University and Co-Director,

Sydney Centre for International Law (Jacqueline, Autonomy, Identity and Selfknowledge: A New Solution to the Liberal-Communitarian Problem?
January 2014 Sydney Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No.
14/02)//jml
The problem of identity In bridging the gap between liberal and communitarian positions with the concept

the recent literature assigns a critical role to identity, of

which self-knowledge is to be gained. My concern with this approach is that taking
identity as a starting point for discussion results in a tendency to
essentialise identity. In other words, the relevant literature tends to
assume that identity is an object of some sort, with a fixed content,
which we are capable of discussing and discovering. In fact, however, work
in many fields has shown identity to be fluid, dynamic, negotiated
and contested. Psychologists and psychoanalysts from Freud onwards have deconstructed our
of self- knowledge,

notion of the self to demonstrate the way in which our identity is shaped by our life experiences.
Sociolinguists have shown that we construct our identity, at least in part, through language.12
Anthropologists have shown that ethnic identity is not fixed or primordial, but is constructed as a result of
social interactions with other groups. 13 As Judith Butler concludes in her book, Gender Trouble, identity is

Identity is not, therefore,

something pre-existing or given, which we can then discover, but something
which is constructed and subject to change. Of course, the recent literature which
a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience.14

I am discussing does not deny this. In fact, to some extent, it specifically acknowledges the uncertainties
associated with identity. Hague, for example, in arguing that autonomy should be the process by which we
develop our identity, treats the multiple and changing15 nature of identity as the basis for an argument

while the
literature acknowledges the complexities associated with the
concept of identity, in taking identity as the starting point for
discussion, it inevitably tends to lapse back into an essentialist
treatment of the concept. Arguably, this tendency to essentialism was
inherent also in the earlier communitarian view, given the central role played by
the concept of identity within communitarian thought. However , the early communitarian
literature was less prone to critique on this basis, as that literature
focused on what we might term objective aspects of identity
unchosen aspects of identity, such as gender and ethnic origin. In seeking to
overcome the gap between autonomy and identity by including more
individual, chosen aspects of identity within the concept, the
recent literature leaves itself more open to questions about the
objective existence of the identity with which it is concerned. In other
words, by constructing identity as the concrete, tangible creation of
individual choice, the literature invites questions about whether
identity in this sense really exists. This highlights another aspect of
that individuals need to take control of that identity themselves. Nonetheless,

identity which is, I think, inadequately accounted for in the recent

literature, namely that identity has not only individual but also group
elements. And group identity is not constructed solely by
autonomous individuals, but by social dynamics over which
individuals may have little control. The recent literature of course acknowledges the
importance of collective identities. However, in seeking to bridge the gap between
autonomy and identity, it focuses largely on the fact that individuals
can choose between the various collective identities available to
them. The implicit or explicit argument here is that, as put so elegantly by Sen: The same person can
be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a
liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance-runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist,
a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis
fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in
outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English). ... Given our inescapably plural
identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any

this account again risks simplifying the concept of

identity, in that it tends to position the individual as ultimately in
control of his or her identity. In fact, as noted above, identity is highly
contingent, and this is particularly the case when we are concerned
with group identities, which emerge and evolve as a result of social
interactions with other groups, and within the group itself. 17
particular context.16 But

Survival strategies link

Focus on individual survival strategies brackets off collective
questions and is used to justify structural violence

Giroux, 3 (Henry, Pedagogies of Difference, Race, and Representation:

Film as a Site of Translation and Politics Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking
Education for Social Change, p. 95-96)//jml
public pedagogy would have to analyze
the largely privatized and individualized analysis that shapes this film and how it
resonates with the ongoing privatization and depoliticization of the public sphere. As neoliberalism has
gained momentum since the 1980s, one of its distinguishing features has
been an assault on all those public spheres that are not regulated by
the language of the market. Under the onslaught of neoliberal ideology and its tum toward free market
Any attempt to address Baby Boy as a form of

as the basis for human interaction, there is an attempt to alter radically the very vocabulary we use in describing and

Individuals are now defined largely as

consumers, and self-interest appears to be the only factor capable of
motivating people. Public spaces are increasingly displaced by commercial interests, and private utopias
become the only way of understanding the meaning of the good life. It gets worse. As public life is
emptied of its own separate concerns -importance of public goods, civic virtue, public debate,
collective agency, and social provisions for the marginalized-it becomes increasingly more
difficult to translate private concerns into public considerations. The
Darwinian world of universal struggle pits individuals against each
other while suggesting that the misfortunes and problems of others
represent both a weakness of character and a social liability . Within such a
system, the state gives up its obligations to provide collective safety
nets for people and the ideology of going it alone furthers the myth
that all social problems are the result of individual choices. Unfortunately,
appraising human interest, action, and behavior.

Baby Boy not only refuses to challenge the myth of individual motivation and pathology as the source of unemployment,

it actually
reinforces this well rehearsed stable of conservative ideology. It
does so by suggesting that collective problems can only be
addressed as tales of individual survival, coming of age stories that chronicle either
violence, welfare dependency, bad housing, inadequate schools, and crumbling infrastructures,

selfishness, laziness, and lack of maturity or individual perseverance. By suggesting that Jody 's life is colonized by the
private, cut off from larger social, economic, and political issues, Baby Boy both renders hope private and suggests that
communities in struggle can only share or be organized around the most private of intimacies, removed in large part from
the capacity to struggle over broader issues. Dependency in this film is a dirty word, and seems to ignore the ways in
which it resonates with right wing attacks on the welfare state and the alleged perils of big government. Granted, Baby
Boy is supposedly about the refusal of immature African-American youth to grow up, but the film 's attack on dependency

it supports this
ideology, in part, by refusing to acknowledge how dependency on
the welfare state has worked for those millions for whom it has
"made all the difference between wretched poverty and a decent
life."41 Similarly, if Jody 's dreams are limited to the demands of the traditional family structure and the successes
is so one-sided that it reinforces the myth that social safety nets simply weaken character, and

associated with the market ideology, there is no room in Baby Boy to recognize democracy, not the market, as a force of
dissent and a relentless critique of institutions, as a source of civic engagement, or as a discourse for expanding and
deepening the possibilities of critical citizenship and social transformation. In the end, Baby Boy fails to offer a space for

it reinforces rather
than ruptures those racially oppressive trends in American society
that disfigure the possibility of racial justice, democratic politics,
and responsible citizenship.
translating how the private and public mutually inform each other; consequently,

Alternative

Analytical categories alt

Reject their focus of identity in place of analytical categories
identity-based politics forego the possibility for institutional
change

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

*we do not endorse ableist language

aspects of what
I term "Paradigmatic Intersectionality". Only when brought together do all
five aspects of intersectionality effectively address the dilemmas posed by the
Oppression Olympics. ** Figure 3 about here ** Intersectionality takes
seriously race, gender, sexual orientation and class as analytical
categories rather than just as identities/" Why? If we focus solely on race
as an identity, we are limited to identity-based policy solutions that
get bogged down in debates about the legitimacy and humanity of
the individuals themselves, which ignores the role of institutions in
shaping politics. The previous section on Individual-Institutional Interactions, however, taught us
that we can't simply focus on the structure in response. Intersectionality's approach to
politics can illuminate new ways to think about longstanding
debates such as affirmative action and multiracial identity. Focusing
on gender, race, class and sexual orientation as identities ushers in
the reification of lived experience^" which often leads to paralyzing
claims of "uniqueness," "incommensurability," and the dreaded
Oppression Olympics. Using sexual orientation, gender, class and
race as analytical categories accepts the lived experience of people
without making it a condition of group formation, epistemology, or
agenda setting, further opening opportunities for deep political
solidarity. This expansion beyond the limits of identity politics in no way
dismisses identity as irrelevant or downright pernicious, as some advocates of
colorblindness would do. Instead the work opens up space for the first benefit
of intersectionality: creating diverse coalitions that are non-identity
based but may still generate identity-based benefits. Intersectional
approaches neither eschew identity nor remain mired in it. Multiple
planes of interaction (the organizational, intersubjective, experiential and representational)liv
and Categorical Multiplicity open up avenues of agency without ignoring the
role of Individual-Institutional Interactions. Take , for example, the news
media's longstanding overdependence on single black mothers as
prototypes of welfare recipients.lv Intersectional analyses can certainly
describe this problem, but it can also offer innovative solutions. A 20th
century identity politics-laden solution might be civil rights driven: getting
Analyzing American Politics From an Intersectional Perspective Figure 3 shows all five

more Black faces in our newsroom to counter this overdependence. Not only is
that a very indirect solution to this particular problem, one strategy to achieve
it, affirmative action, has been eviscerated by the Supreme Court in
recent years, thanks in part to Movement Backlash. A 20th century approach to this
problem would pour most resources into defending and attempting to resuscitate the rollbacks of
affirmative action programs at the state and federal levels. A noble effort, perhaps, but is it the most

A 21st century
intersectional analysis instead comprehensively attends to Time
Dynamics and Individual-Institution Interactions in order to identify
an unlikely and previously unidentified site of action for welfare
activists: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose
decisions about consolidation of media ownership can dramatically
affect the diversity of images portrayed of women on welfare. lvi Here
they might encounter new and largely counterintuitive allies in an
effort to more accurately represent their stories and change the size
of their microphone relative to the very large ones carried by
political elites. This kind of simultaneous attentiveness to Time Dynamics and Individualappropriate allocation of resources for this particular challenge?

Institutional Interactions follows in the footsteps of many scholars, including Iris Marion Young in her
thinking of categories as serial collectives. Unfortunately Young followed 20th century practice by
discussing only one category, gender, in depth. Intersectionality integrates all of the analytical categories
as interlocking categories of difference. lvii Returning to the example of the Rutgers University Scarlet

Black female athletes endure a tremendous amount of

surveillance and pressurelviii to conform to a "Black Lady" public
imagelix that is simultaneously liberating (from the "nappy-headed hos" stereotype)
and constraining (preventing complete autonomy of personal expression, including its
Knights,

heterosexism). Significantly such athletes experience that pressure from coaches who are themselves

Time Dynamics improves Young's original formulation

by acknowledging the accrual of power over time by multiple centers
of power, and Diversity Within recognizes the multiple centers of
power as sites of struggle for the power of self-definition. Whether
through U.S. census categories, discriminatory policies like
segregation, detention and internment, or incentive-driven policies like
affirmative action, government and its agents play a significant role
in the access we have to freedom of identification and equality of
opportunity in the United States. One final example of the
relationship among the five prongs of intersectionality can
illuminate the need for all five aspects in American political
discourse. Millennial-generation driven identity movements like the
Multiracial Movement have sought complete freedom of selfidentification in all aspects of their lives. From the perspective of
Categorical Multiplicity and Time Dynamics it is important to recognize the
politically charged practice of "passing" and its legacy as part of the
resistance to the idea of a multiracial identity and its goals.
often Black women.

Solidarity alt
Our alternative is solidarity internalization of affect is key to
break down the us/them dichotomy

Ananth 14 writer, activist, and trauma-therapist currently living in

Toronto [Sriram, M.S. in Public Health and Geography from Johns Hopkins
University, completing PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota,
Conceptualizing solidarity and realizing struggle: testing against the
Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel, Interface, November 2014, JSTOR,
Accessed 7/23/15]//schnall

where orthodox Marxism (and many other strains of left thought) faltered,
transnational feminist thought valiantly endeavored to advance.
Political solidarity, identity, and difference Feminist thought continues to critically
define and call for egalitarian modes of political engagement,
especially with regard to understanding the notion of political
solidarity while concurrently juxtaposing it against other ideas like sisterhood. Most importantly,
this notion of solidarity has crucially brought understandings of
differential privilege and power within solidarity-based movements
to the fore. This is something that Marxist trends failed to do, as their notions of classBut

solidarity/internationalism were predicated on a homogeneous class narrative. No matter, because a brief

Dean calls for a

reflective solidarity that acts as a "bridge between identity and
universality" defined as "the mutual expectation of a responsible
orientation to relationship" (Dean, 1996: 3). Dean models solidarity as
interaction involving three actors in two moments of action, where
one is asked to "stand by [another] over and above a third". This is not
examination of a few feminist thinkers quickly addresses this problem. Jodi

unlike calls for workers-solidarity and proletarian internationalism where workers are asked to stand in

Dean, however, further expands

on this by stating that "rather than presuming the exclusion and
opposition of the third, the ideal of reflective solidarity thematizes
the voice of the third to reconstruct solidarity as an inclusionary
ideal for contemporary politics and society." She goes on to state that
reflective solidarity provides for difference "because it upholds the
possibility of a universal, communicative 'we'" rather than one that
is "conceived of oppositionally, on the model of 'us vs. them'" and
indeed anchored in a mutual respect for difference (Ibid.: 8. 16). Listing
the problems of conventional solidarity as that of time, exclusion,
accountability, and questioning critique, she posits reflective
solidarity as a step forward, one that "take[s] seriously the historical conditions of value
solidarity with each other over and above the forces of capital.

pluralism, the ever present potential for exclusion, the demands of accountability, and the importance of

In calling for
reflexivity, the solidarity we see being talked about above has a strong affective
moment in it that brings engaging with difference in an open,
empathetic manner without ultimately aiming for "sameness" (Gray,
critique" through ties that are "communicative and open" (Ibid.: 21-30).

2004: 415, 422-426). Sandra Bartky pointedly asks whether there is some "special affective repertoire
necessary for the building of solidarities across lines of race and class that is not necessary when these

Marxist calls for

internationalism have equally affective moments in them , slogans like "workers of
the world unite!" for instance, but the emotive aspect of the call is not
acknowledged because of an assumption of class homogeneity.
There is a difference, however, between an affective call to solidarity
(which Marxist calls for internationalism produce), and affect as utilized by feminist
calls to solidarity. I would like to write a couple of lines on this "affective repertoire" in building
solidarity, as the importance of it is often unacknowledged, much more so in Marxism than feminism. In
Marxist calls, the affective element is rendered to make the actual
call based on common material conditions, rather than one that is
meant to (also) work affectively. The assumption is that workers of the
world indeed can and should unite based on a fundamentally
common material relationship to the modes of production , and hence what
is in fact a very affective call, is seen as a universal truth. In other words, affect is used to
make the call, but the way in which that call can produce affective
results among those the call is being made to is ignored. This is unlike many calls for
political solidarity made by feminist thinkers, who see the affective
element in them as one of the key ways of engaging with difference.
Bernice Johnson Reagon comes to mind here. Chandra Mohanty states that Reagon's notion of
coalition, transnational or cross-cultural, "underscores the significance of the
traditions of political struggle, what she calls an 'old-age
perspective'.forged on the basis of memories and counter narratives, not on an
lines are not crossed?" (Bartky, 1997: 180) It is important here to state that

ahistorical universalism" (Mohanty, 2003: 117). This also shows how the notion of internationalism is not
just a Marxist deployment, but a feminist one as well, albeit in very different ways.

It is a more

heterogeneous internationalism that is being called for rather than a homogeneous one.
Feminists do it by acknowledging difference, often through engaged
affective moments, rather than subsuming them. In acknowledging
that difference, reflexivity is the manner that Dean chooses to
address the differences between actors in solidarity with one
another, and it can be seen that she writes this specifically for those actors
who are in a significantly more privileged socioeconomic position
than those they might be in solidarity with.

Solidarity is transformative BDS movement proves

Ananth 14 writer, activist, and trauma-therapist currently living in

Toronto [Sriram, M.S. in Public Health and Geography from Johns Hopkins
University, completing PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota,
Conceptualizing solidarity and realizing struggle: testing against the
Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel, Interface, November 2014, JSTOR,
Accessed 7/23/15]//schnall

On July 9 th, 2005, an unprecedented coalition of

Palestinian civil-society organizations, activists, academics,
intellectuals, and trade-unions called for the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) of the state of Israel . They urgently requested the
The Palestinian call for BDS

international community "in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency, and resistance to

injustice and oppression" to implement this call "until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the
Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of
international law by: 1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; 2.
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab- Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3.
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and
properties as stipulated in UN resolution ^."(Palestinian United Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
against Israel, July 2005) The call for BDS was endorsed by over 170 Palestinian organizations, collectively
referred to as "representatives of Palestinian civil society" within the Occupied Territories of West Bank and

This was reminiscent of and derived

directly from the solidarity-calls issued by South African antiapartheid activists calling for the boycott of apartheid-era South
Africa, which were in turn derived from Gandhian civil disobedience
and strategic non-violence aimed at gaining the moral high ground
in resistance to British colonialism. The Palestinian call for BDS was taken up by
Gaza as well as the national territory of Israel.

numerous Palestine-solidarity movements, primarily in the Global North, to implement campaigns that

the BDS movement represents, and is

calling for, is a transformative political praxis of emancipatory
resistance that matches the evolving socio- spatial apparatus of
structural oppression. This structural oppression is identified as the Israeli state which is
struggled for the boycott of Israel. What

strongly supported by numerous international allies, the United States being the most powerful of them,
and a large Israeli lobby outside the national territory of Israel that constantly works on bolstering

The call
understands that the political-economic sources of this oppression
exist beyond the specific geographic boundaries of the state of Israel and the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, and thus is an attempt to overcome the
particular socio-spatial apparatus of Israeli oppression through emergent
solidarities. The call thus represents an urgent attempt, among many
others, to create an alternative socio-spatial imaginary that strives to
match and struggle against that oppression through a call for
solidarity. This alternative socio- spatial imaginary is framed in the
three demands shown above that the call clearly states, with the
idea that solidarity-based BDS measures must be implemented until
the demands are met. At play in the Palestinian call for BDS are two
clear notions of solidarity. One, it defines the Palestinian people as a
single cultural-national entity against a tripartite structure of
oppression consisting of colonialism, racist apartheid and military occupation that has
been suffered by them as a cultural-national entity. This is not unlike, say, frameworks of
black liberation struggles in the United States (Shelby, 2005). Two, in lieu of this
historic injustice, it makes an emotive call for solidarity from clearly
defined "international civil society organizations and people of
conscience all over the world" outside of that cultural-national
entity, to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel until the oppression ends with the implementation of
continued support for Israel, resulting in the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.

their three demands. This includes a specific invitation to "conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the

Thus there are three entities - an oppressed

people defined, an oppressor institution identified and everyone else
called to stand in solidarity with said oppressed people. Yet it is not without
sake of justice and genuine peace".

contradictions as it is a movement whose success is primarily predicated on a perceived solidarity

The call emerges from

Palestine but it is focused on garnering solidarity from those
occupying positions of immense socio-economic privilege over
emerging from the traditional power-centers of the Global North.

Palestinians, i.e. people and institutions that are not directly

impacted by that specific form of oppression. Most of the key BDS movements
that have emerged out of this call are in places like New York, Toronto, London, San Francisco and other
major cities of the Global North , and organized by residents of these areas who do not face the oppression
that Palestinians face. Further, there is a homogeneous notion of "Palestinians" themselves in the call that

these
points don't make the call any less viable for a transformative political praxis
based on solidarity, but they offer spaces for further examination. Both of
the contradictions are strategic for it can certainly be argued that voices from the Global
North in solidarity with Palestinians could play a huge role in making
interventions in mainstream discourse in the Global North and,
does not take into account the differences of class, gender, and so on among Palestinians. Both of

furthermore, that it might not make any political sense (at least for now) to explicitly talk about differences
among Palestinians in a solidarity-call that is issued in support of their collective liberation. It is in the

this call offers the richest points for further

exploration of the socio-spatial politics of solidarity and the
possibilities it offers. While in-depth research into the BDS collectives/groups that are
emerging from this call is beyond the scope of this paper, I discursively utilize the call
itself to examine questions of solidarity and transformative political
work by juxtaposing it against selected Marxist and Feminist threads on the same.
spaces of these contradictions that

--Solves cap
Solidarity overcomes capitalism

Ananth 14 writer, activist, and trauma-therapist currently living in

Toronto [Sriram, M.S. in Public Health and Geography from Johns Hopkins
University, completing PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota,
Conceptualizing solidarity and realizing struggle: testing against the
Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel, Interface, November 2014, JSTOR,
Accessed 7/23/15]//schnall

The idea of solidarity is a powerful one. Often symbolized, bodily and

it is an idea that travels across many
seas, crosses many borders, results in countless actions and, when
realized effectively, can help bring down the most oppressive of forces. It is
an idea that has produced inspiring chapters in human history that
defy the assumption of individual self-interest capitalism insists
we're all motivated by, and instead brings to bear the more
sustainable notion of our collective liberation, forcing us to
understand that one is not free until all are free. Of course, there is always an
Introduction

illustratively, with the quintessential raised fist,

attached romanticism to the idea of solidarity that is rarely realized in actual struggle. Many have explored

The idea of solidarity and its

potential in liberatory struggles has been intensely debated in
feminist thought for at least a couple of decades now (Dean, 1996; hooks, 2000; Mohanty,
2003). Feminist debates on solidarity have frequently centered around
questions of identity, difference, and location. These debates have
derived from understandings of gender and sexuality that reject
essentializing notions of a universal feminist identity (Whelehan, 1995;
Butler, 1995). Transformative political work infused with an abiding sense
of solidarity usually takes place via coalitions and alliances , among other
how and why. This paper seeks to give it a shot as well.

forms of struggle . Solidarity and its complexities when realized in struggle has been theorized in much
feminist thought, especially those strands which strenuously adhere to understanding gender against

Prior and unrelated to these debates, a

specific notion of solidarity and proletarian internationalism was
espoused by Marxist political trends assuming class (i.e. ones relationship to
the modes of production) under a universalizing logic of capital as the
material basis for the same (Marx and Engels, 1848, 1872). Marxist notions of
solidarity/internationalism were perceived under a unitary historical
narrative of capital as an ultimately universalizing force producing
the two broad subjects of proletariat and bourgeoisie with some
complications therein (such as the lumpen proletariat, national bourgeoisie, labor aristocracy
and so on). The solidarity espoused thus often subsumed other forms of oppression such
as gender, race etc. into class-solidarity, which was theorized as the most important
path of struggle under rapidly universalizing capitalist modes of
production that was assumed, for the most part, to determine social
relations. The relationship between commonality of experience or
material conditions and the politics of solidarity has been quite
multiple contours of oppression like race, class etc.

fundamental, albeit in very different ways, to both Marxist and feminist debates. While
the recurrent theme in Marxist examinations on solidarity is its
emphasis on class, the recurrent theme in feminist thought (and specifically the texts I examine)
has been an emphasis on identity and difference. However, despite the widespread implications and

the scope of these themes has rarely

been systematically explored in the context of real-life struggles ,
which lends greater theoretical rigor to understanding the
relationship between solidarity and transformative political work. I
take a first step in doing that by putting selections from two bodies of literature that have
applications of these two strands of thought,

specific discussions surrounding solidarity in conversation with each other, along with a few others that
provide some helpful additions. The selections of these texts have been made keeping in mind two things.

specifically take up the notion of solidarity, and two, they have

been written with transformative political work in mind. The texts that I
One, they

take up have been primarily from writers situated in the Global North. This is in part due to my own
position as an activist and writer based in the Global North, which determines the texts that I have primary
access to, but also because I believe these texts offer rich explorations on solidarity, in addition to

they focus on
coalitions/alliances across difference resulting from solidarity. Finally
and very crucially, as with any selection of literature, they are texts that have, to varying degrees,
played a role in influencing my own evolution in political thought and
praxis (barring a couple that were suggested as part of the peer-review process for this paper).
pertinence for the specific case study on the Palestinian BDS call, since

Time dynamics alt

Our alternative is time dynamics their refusal of progress
made precludes the possibility of progress becoming only the
alternative reconciles the past with the future to generate a
new form of politics and coalition building

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Along with Hankivsky and Dhamoon's work, Valdes' analysis demonstrates that Categorical Multiplicity and
Categorical Intersection are by now the most well-known aspects of intersectionality theory among

emerging from the latest

intersectional research. The first of these is attention to Time Dynamics. Time
Dynamics In a recent keynote speech, Crenshaw adjusted her metaphor
from a pair of intersecting streets to a consideration of how the
Grand Canyon evolved. Instead of streets, rivers have flowed in such a way
as to craft the Grand Canyon, and rivers still flow, but not as they
did thousands of years ago. The "intersectionality canyon," as it were,
includes both the dynamic, time-oriented aspects embodied by the
rivers that run through it and the institutional rock formations that
change ever slowly based on the rivers' flow. Time Dynamics focuses on the riverbased aspects of the metaphor. Intersectional attention to Categorical Multiplicity
revealed in the introduction that there are no pure victims. Therefore we
must acknowledge both where disadvantage yet remains and where
privilege has emerged. Acknowledging the changing demography of the United States in the
21st centuryxxviii, Time Dynamics refers to the idea that the membership
of the privileged group and the disadvantaged group are not static
throughout United States history. Unlike pluralism, which assumes
that everyone has an equal chance at any point in history to land in
the privileged or disadvantaged group, the Time Dynamics aspect of
intersectionality recognizes the changes in the river's path over the
course of time and humans' ongoing complicity in such changes at
any point in time. In light of the critiques of standpoint theory, scholars have argued
for a more fluid, contingent approach to thinking about categories of
race, gender, class and sexual orientation. As we learned in the introduction, everyone is not
either black or white;xxix moreover by 2025 more than half of all
families will be multicultural.xxx A more fluid approach to race as a
category is needed in the 21st century. Theorist Cristina Beltran also argues for
scholars. However, three additional tenets are

greater attention to time-based contingencies in race and sexual orientation categories: "Put another way,

theorists of mestizaje must retain an attentiveness to historical

specificity and inequality in tandem with an increased awareness
that all human subjectivity is plural, contradictory, socially
embedded and mutually constitutive." (emphasis mine)xxxi Time Dynamics

recognizes: first, that tremendous progress has been made by

excluded groups in American politics. If no progress had been made,
Movement Backlash wouldn't exist. If the chance for additional progress didn't exist in
2010, Leapfrog Paranoia would never emerge. Thus the second, more controversial
claim of Time Dynamics, directly challenges the Defiant Ignorance
practiced by excluded groups: pretending such progress hasn't
occurred, whether rhetorically or strategically, is false and
disingenuous. The third, less controversial but equally important recognition confronts the Defiant
Ignorance of groups with power: evidence of progress made does not necessarily
equal all of the progress that needs to be made. Together the two
claims suggest that pre-existing policies may have outlived their
usefulness and need to be replaced with a better mousetrap to
accurately reflect a 21st century political reality. Time Dynamics
breaks down Defiant Ignorance on all sides of the political
community, which makes it more difficult and controversial than Categorical Multiplicity or
Categorical Intersection, because entrenched elites on opposing sides of policy
debates have to let go of the "pretending not to know" posture.
Chapters two, three and four will wade directly into this controversy by calling
for a shift from calls for public service to a call for "deep political
solidarity." This aspect of intersectionality contributes directly to the
potential for counterintuitive coalitions that are egalitarian and have
the power to transform politics. Instead of asking whether the other position is right
according to your side's standards, the question instead is "How is the other side right?"xxxii At that point
dropping the Defiant Ignorance can slowly, carefully, begin. Figure two reflects the shift from content
intersectionality in its more static, limited form, to a more dynamic, process-oriented image of

This aspect of intersectionality theory also addresses the

pragmatic reality of generation gap politics in the 21st century by
acknowledging the dynamic nature of privilege and disadvantage
without ignoring the role of either historical patterns or humans'
ability to intervene in their own lives. The political ramifications of the
current generation gap emanate from the dually troublesome
overestimations made by each end of the generational divide : the 60's
intersectionality.

Generation, who tend to overestimate the importance of history,xxxiii holding on tightly to it as the reason
for political action or inaction; and the Millennial Generation, who overestimate the irrelevance of history,
dismissing the old ways as dust that can be swept out of the house without making anyone sneeze

Time Dynamics is possibly the most

difficult but also potentially productive aspect of intersectionality
theory.
[consider an example of living feminism here].

Tranversalism alt
Their identity politics necessitates exclusionary essentialism
that forecloses the search for truth the alternative is a
transversal politics of intersectional dialogue

Yuval-Davis 12 Director of the Centre for Research on Migration,

Refugees and Belonging at University of East London [Nira, has written
extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of intersected nationalisms,
racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender
relations in Settler Societies, Professor in Gender and Ethnic Studies, former
President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic
Relations) of the International Sociological Association, founder member of
the international research network of Women In Militarized Conflict Zones,
Dialogical EpistemologyAn Intersectional Resistance to the Oppression
Olympics, Gender & Society, pp. 50-53, February 2012, Sage Journals,
Accessed 7/20/15]//schnall

TRANSVERSAL DIALOGICAL POLITICS Similarly to Collinss construction of Black feminist thought,

transversal politics has been developed as an alternative to the

assimilationist universalistic politics of the Left on the one hand and
to relativist identity politics on the other. The first has proved to be
ethnocentric and exclusionary (Balibar 1990), assuming a Westocentric
commonality of interests and viewpoint. Identity politics was a result
of resisting such politics. However, in their turn, they proved to be
essentialist, reifying boundaries between groups and, via
homogenizing and collapsing individuals into collective identities ,
undemocratic within groups. Transversalism, on the other hand , as
Guattari (1974) envisioned it, was about the politics of the construction of a
radical political group as a collective subject, in which there is a
constant flow of communication both horizontally and vertically hence
the name transversalismwithout such processes of reification taking place.
Bolognas tradition of transversal politics expanded it beyond the
boundaries of the political group and developed it into a more
general politics of dialogue and cooperation. Transversal politics is
based, first, on a dialogical standpoint epistemology, the recognition
that from each positioning the world is seen differently, and thus
any knowledge based on just one positioning is unfinished (to
differentiate it from invalid) (Collins 1990, 236). Thus, the only way to approach the
truth is by a dialogue between people of differential positionings,
and the wider the better. Second, transversal politics follows the
principle of the encompassment (Dumont 1972) of difference by equality
(Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999), the recognition, on one hand, that differences are
important but, on the other, that notions of difference should be
encompassed by, rather than replace, notions of equality. Such
notions of difference are not hierarchical and assume a priori

respect to others positioningswhich includes acknowledgement of

their differential social, economic, and political power. Third, transversal politics differentiates
both conceptually and politicallybetween positioning, identity, and values. People who identify
themselves as belonging to the same collectivity or category can be
positioned very differently in relation to a whole range of social
divisions (class, gender, ability, sexuality, stage in the life cycle, etc.). At the same time,
people with similar positioning and/or identity can have very
different social and political values. Several implications can be drawn from this. First,
feminists and other community activists cannot (and should not) see
themselves as representatives of their constituencies (unless they
were democratically elected and are accountable for their actions ).
Rather, they are advocates, working to promote their cause. However,
even as advocates, it is important that the activists should be
reflective and conscious of the multiplexity of their specific
positionings, both in relation to other members in their constituencies and in relation to
the other participants in the specific encounter. One of the problems
with both identity politics is that such activists and community leaders too
often become the authentic voice of their communities. This is
often harmful to women and other marginal elements within these
communities (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis [1992] 2001). The second implication is that such
advocates do not necessarily have to be members of the
constituency they advocate for. It is the message, not the
messenger, that counts. This avoids the necessity to construct fixed
and reified boundaries to social categories and groups. It does not
mean, of course, that it is immaterial who the messenger is, but it
does avoid becoming involved in exclusionary politics. Feminists in Bologna
introduced the concepts of rooting and shifting to aid in explaining how this could be done (letter of
invitation to the conference in Bologna of Israeli and Palestinian feminists, December 1990). The idea is

each such messenger and each participant in a political

dialogue would bring with them the reflective knowledge of their
own positioning and identity. This is the rooting. At the same time, they
should also try to shiftto put themselves in the situation of
those with whom they are in dialogue and who are different . This follows
the same principle of Elsa Barkley Brown (1989, 922), quoted by Collins (1990, 236), that all people
can learn to center in another experience, validate it, and judge it by
its own standards without need of comparison or need to adopt that
framework as their own. It is here where situated imagination is
especially important to be acknowledged as a necessary complement
to situated knowledge in dialogical politics. Transversal politics ,
nevertheless, does not assume that the dialogue is boundary-less , and that
each conflict of interest is reconcilablealthough, as Jindi Pettman points out (1992, 157), There
are almost always possibilities for congenial or at least tolerable
personal, social and political engagements. Similar, compatible values
can cut across differences in positionings and identities. The
struggle against oppression and discrimination might (and mostly does)
have a specific categorical focus but it is never confined to just that
category. Transversal politics, unlike rainbow coalitions, however,
that

depends on shared values rather than on specific political actions, as

differential positioning might dictate prioritizing different political
actions and strategies. Transversal politics encompasses difference by equality and, while
continuously crossing collectivity boundaries, the transversal solidarity is bounded by sharing common

While politics of solidarity can be directed by care and

compassion to defend any victim of racialization, discrimination, inferiorization, and
exclusion, transversal solidarity is an alliance of mutual trust and
respect, recognizing but transcending decentered differential
positionings of power. Transversal dialogical political solidarity does
not fall into the trap of oppression olympics (Hancock 2011), in which
contested unidimensional constructions of oppression compete with
each other, but rather uses dialogical collective knowledge , imagination
and judgment, aided by intersectional analysis, in its ongoing political
struggles. Collinss work has been a guiding light to such kind of politics.
values.

Intersections are complex and nuanced the alternative solves

Yuval-Davis 12 Director of the Centre for Research on Migration,

Refugees and Belonging at University of East London [Nira, has written
extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of intersected nationalisms,
racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender
relations in Settler Societies, Professor in Gender and Ethnic Studies, former
President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic
Relations) of the International Sociological Association, founder member of
the international research network of Women In Militarized Conflict Zones,
Dialogical EpistemologyAn Intersectional Resistance to the Oppression
Olympics, Gender & Society, pp. 48-50, February 2012, Sage Journals,
Accessed 7/20/15]//schnall

Various intersectional axes of social, political, and economic power

have been identified by different theorists and social movements. 3
Class, gender, ethnicity, and race have been the most common ones,
although sexuality, ability, and stage in the life cycle , for instance, have
also often been mentioned. The debate, both sociological and epistemological, about
whether or not, or to what degree, knowledge and meaning are bound to
particular social locations can be perceived both in relation to
systems of power and in relation to traditions and genealogies of
meanings and culture: Sandra Harding (1997, 385) also mentions differences among women
that were not initially centred [sic] in standpoint logics and epistemologies of mere differencethe

cultural differences that would shape different knowledge projects even

where there were no oppressive social relations between different
cultures. However, even more than many other central concepts in the social sciences, the
definition and meaning of the term culture has been contested. Over
the past decades, under the influence of both Gramsci and Foucault, cultures
have become conceptualized increasingly as dynamic social
processes operating in contested terrains in which different voices
are more or less hegemonic in different times, highlighting selectively different elements

from the rich resources that various cultural traditions and customs offer (Bhabha 1994; Bottomley 1992;
Friedman 1994; Yuval-Davis 1997, chap. 3; 2011, chaps. 3 and 4). To the two dimensions Harding relates to
we need to add a third, which is not necessarily implied in either of the other two: Alison Assiters (1996,
2000) notion of epistemic

communities, in which political values, rather

than location along intersecting/intermeshed axes of power or cultural perspectives,
become the unifying factors. Such epistemic communities shape their access
to knowledge collectively rather than individually. Such collective
access to knowledge can be carried out in a variety of ways. Assiter talks about
relations of teachers and pupils, artisans and apprentices. Other feminists (such as those
who have developed the notion of transversal politics; cf. Cockburn and Hunter 1999; YuvalDavis 1994, 1997) put the emphasis more on the dialogical process that is
required in order for participants in the epistemic community who
are positioned differentially to establish common narratives. Before
discussing this further, however, it is important to point out that there is an
element that is missing in the various discussions on standpoint
theory: there is little discussion as to how the transitions from
positionings to practices, practices to standpoints , knowledge, meaning,
values, and goals actually take place. In my earlier work (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002),
it is argued that one of the central ways in which these transitions and transformations take place is by
various processes of imagining. Feminist epistemology has to extend the discussion of (situated)
knowledge to include also the notion of the (situated) imagination . At the same time, imagination itself
needs to be understood as situated as much as knowledge does. Such a notion would be closely related,
first , to Castoriadiss (1994) notion of the imagination as creative of both the category society itself
and of the processes through which we perceive and know of it. Crucially, the imagination in this context is
not straightforwardly a faculty of the individual but it is (also, or even primarily) a social faculty. Second ,
the situated imagination also encompasses Adornos (1978) concept of fantasy that preserves the wish
and the (bodily) impulses in thought and knowl - edge. In Adornos concept, we see a reflection of a line of
thought that reaches back via Freud ([1911] 1958) to Spinoza ([1670] 1989). This tradi - tion rejects the
one-sided rationalist elimination of fantasy from mental processes and sees its epistemological importance

The emphasis on the

concept of imagination thus allows for an additional critical
perspective on epistemology that should be particularly relevant to
feminist discussions on corporeality and criticisms of one- sided,
abstractly rational notions of understanding. It is in this double
sense that our (creative) imagination is situated. Such an
epistemological approach is assumed in transversal politics of
solidarity.
as a gateway to the body on the one hand and society on the other.

at: Permutation
The permutation is just adding on that doesnt access the
thesis behind intersectionality

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

The multicultural feminist claim of multiple jeopardies has

traditionally been interpreted to mean that some women have a
larger number of multiple marginalized categorical memberships
that therefore deserve a larger share of the policy solutions. I call
this logic the additive oppressions argument,xiii and it is easy to see where this
logic leads - directly to the Oppression Olympics question of "Who
has it toughest?" In addition to the normative concerns about the desirability or usefulness of
such a debate, two specific problems emerge from the additive argument. First, "adding on" race or
other categories to claims of gender oppression falsely limits our attention to
matters of quantity, ignoring the way that incorporating race, class
or gender into a single analysis qualitatively changes the
characteristics of subordination.xiv Second, those steeped in the
quantitative approach have expressed serious concerns about the
infinite quantity of possible categories and combinations thereof .
Slicing the group of women or men into ever thinner, more politically isolated slivers is of
particular concern in majoritarian political systems where numbers
matter.xv The additive oppressions argument creates significant obstacles
to framing claims in a way that brings people together rather than
drives them apart. In contrast, intersectionality theory uses
Categorical Multiplicity as a way to recognize that race, class,
gender and sexual orientation all can represent equal but not
identical threats to the values of freedom and equality embraced by
all Americans. For example, earlier I mentioned the role of biology in constructions of gender and
sexual orientation. Interestingly, these biological justifications have cut both ways - to thwart gender
equality (women are "naturally" weaker and more nurturing) and to promote LGBT equality (LGBT identity
is genetic, not a choice). This example clearly demonstrates the assumption that multiple categories
function identically isn't tenable under all circumstances; we will address this reality in subsequent

the question isn't is America more racist or

more sexist, which leads us to Leapfrog Paranoia and Willful Blindness. Instead
intersectional approaches to categorical multiplicity focus on
illuminating the ways in which categories emerge as politically
relevant based on processes operating at multiple levels - the self, the
group and government / society. This conceptualization changes, in other words, the
first order question. How do racism, sexism, classism and
homophobia interact and emerge to threaten our democracy in 2010?xvi
We will return to this point when we discuss Time Dynamics. Intersectionality research has
dimensional discussions below. So

stepped away from the assumption of a priori equal quantitative

weight of the categories in research outcomes without stepping
away from the central belief that such categories must be addressed
in empirical research.xvii Yet as we saw in the case of the response to Don Imus mere
recognition of multiple categories is necessary but not sufficient for
substantial societal transformation. Beyond identity politics, beyond the
number of categories we discuss, the character of the relationship among these
categories is also important. Intersectionality theory has expanded beyond late 20th
century multicultural feminist theory to address this political reality.

at: Youre privileged

Knowledge from the center is a precondition for social
movements identifying their social position as uniquely key
colludes with hegemonic surveillance

Yuval-Davis 12 Director of the Centre for Research on Migration,

Refugees and Belonging at University of East London [Nira, has written
extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of intersected nationalisms,
racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender
relations in Settler Societies, Professor in Gender and Ethnic Studies, former
President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic
Relations) of the International Sociological Association, founder member of
the international research network of Women In Militarized Conflict Zones,
Dialogical EpistemologyAn Intersectional Resistance to the Oppression
Olympics, Gender & Society, pp. 46-48, February 2012, Sage Journals,
Accessed 7/20/15]//schnall

I first met Patricia Hill Collins in Vienna during a conference in the 1990s, which happened to be
her first trip outside the United States. However, I had already met her years earlier when I
discovered her wonderful book Black Feminist Thought (1990). Patricia Hill
Collins the woman proved to be even more wonderful than her book, and weve continued since
to interact in a sporadic way, especially whenever we are in the same corner of the globe, with
overlapping interests in racism, feminism, citizenship, motherhood, belonging, and
intersectionality. In this short piece, however, I want to focus on the
crucial importance that Collinss writing has had on my thinking
concerning standpoint theory, situated knowledge and imagination, and
transversal politics of solidarity. 1 I quote Collins from two of her writings. In Black
Feminist Thought, she says, Each group speaks from its own standpoint
and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each
group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished
[my emphasis]. . . . Partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard; individuals and groups
forwarding knowledge claims without owning their position are deemed less credible than those who

Dialogue is critical to the success of this epistemological

approach. Neverthelessresisting power inequities must be addressed . . . [and] decentering the
do. . . .

dominant group is essential. (1990, 236-37) And in her comment on Hekmans article on standpoint

she comments, Although it is tempting to claim that Black

women are more oppressed than everyone else (. . .), this simply may
not be the case. (1997, 74) In these two quotes, Collins establishes the
ontological basis for a dialogical standpoint theory as well as an
intersectional analytical framework that resists what Ange-Marie Hancock
(2011) calls the oppression olympics, both of which are a necessary, although not sufficient,
basis for transversal dialogical politics of solidarity. DIALOGICAL STANDPOINT THEORY One of the
cornerstones of feminist theory, in all its varieties, has been its challenge to
positivist notions of objectivity and truth. There is a large variety of
positions among feminists concerning these issues, starting from in Sandra Hardings term
theory,

feminist empiricists (Harding 1993, 51), who do not intend to challenge or reinvent the framework of

science as such but rather to do a better job in the existing one, up to post-modernist theorists like Jane

have all
challenged the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere (Haraway
1991, 189) as a cover and a legitimization of a hegemonic masculinist
positioning. Among those feminist theorists who did not reject
completely any notion of truth as such, standpoint theories were
developed that claim, in somewhat different ways, that it is vital to account for
the social positioning of the social agent. This accounting of the
situatedness of the knowing subject has been used
epistemologically in standpoint theories in at least two different
ways. One claims that a specific social situatedness (that in itself has been
constructed in several different ways) endows the subject with a privileged access
to truth. The other, developed among others in Collinss as well as my own work,
rejects such a position and views the process of approximating the
truth as part of a dialogical relationship among subjects who are
differentially situated. In virtually all variations of standpoint theory,
however, the reduction of knowledge to a simple reflection of its
social basis has been rejected. Experiences, social practices, social values, and the ways
Flax (1990), who rejected any notion of objectivity and truth. Despite their differences, they

in which perception and knowledge production are socially organized have been seen as mediating and

The standpoint that

expected to emerge from a specific positioning has sometimes, especially
in earlier versions of standpoint theory, been expected to provide a
privileged access to liberating insight, while the more common
positionmore modest and closer to the general academic debate on
sociology of knowledgeseems to be that it produces merely
different insights. The stronger claim, as it has sometimes been
made in the context of identity politics, has been (polemically)
summed up by Collins as saying that the more subordinated the
group, the purer its vision (Collins 1990, 207). Some standpoint
feminists, such as Zilla Eisenstein (1993), recommended, for example, specifically taking
the positioning of women of color and their multiple oppression as
an epistemological starting point. This, however, was not intended
to imply that only those who share a certain marginal or oppressed
positioning would be able to really understand it (and therefore only
women should study women, only Blacks should study Blacks, etc.),
or even enjoy thereby a privileged access to understanding society
as a whole. The ethnocentrism of such a position has been
rejected by Harding (1993, 59): The claim by women that womens lives
provide a better starting point for thought about gender systems is
not the same as the claim that their own lives are the best such
starting point. (1993, 58; emphasis added) Harding points out that Hegel was not a
slave, 2 Marx and Engels not proletarians. She and other feminist theoreticians
advocated that people from the center use marginalized lives as better
places from which to start asking causal and critical questions about
the social order (1993, 59). However, as valuable as this exercise is in imagining oneself into
facilitating the transition and transformation of situatedness into knowledge.
is

what one believes is the worst conceivable social positioning, two problems remain. First, as Collins rightly
comments (in the second quote above),

the one worst positioning simply does not

exist. She rejects any mechanistic construction of hierarchies of

oppression and her resulting call for a dialogue of people from different positionings as the only way
to approximate truth. Second, even prioritizing nonhierarchically the view
from the margins might lead to underestimating the relevance of
the knowledge of the dominant center. Although the view from the
margins produces other kinds of knowledge that are valuable (and often also more
attractive to study), it is crucial for any emancipatory movement to
understand the hegemonic center and the ways people situated
there think and act. After all, it is this most powerful position from
which most political decisions affecting the largest number of people
in society come. Not surprisingly, however, access to the study of hegemonic
positions of power is the most difficult to attain. Emphasis on the
importance of the lives of the most marginal elements in society can
sometimes collude with the attempts of hegemonic centers to
remain opaque while at the same time maintaining the surveillance
of marginal elements in society.

Just because we are privileged does not mean we cant engage

in this conversation taking personal experience as
undeniable fact is precisely the problem with status quo
identity politics because it makes it impossible to make
generalizations that can guide courses of action we should
listen to particular experiences but that cannot be an excuse
to avoid argumentation
Reilly-Cooper 15 Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at PAIS; BA in Politics
from the University of Leeds; MA and PhD in Political Theory from the
University of Manchester (Rebecca, INTERSECTIONALITY AND IDENTITY
POLITICS, More Radical With Age, 4/15/2013,
http://moreradicalwithage.com/2013/04/15/intersectionality-and-identitypolitics/) //RGP
this desire to listen to oppressed peoples testimonies and
respect their particular experiences, although motivated by only good intentions,
often seems to lead to a wholly counterproductive and self-defeating
approach to politics that cant offer any practical guidance, and cant
do anything to make oppressed peoples lives any better. Listening to
But

peoples stories is important. But if it is to have any value, besides satisfying peoples desire to be heard,

we need to do more than listen. We need to be able to generalize

from those stories to more abstract principles, which then inform
our action and guide policy. Particular experiences and personal
testimonies are of political importance because they can help to illuminate general principles; they
cannot trump those general principles. Suppose two women disagree
about whether a certain action is sexist or not one experiences it as
then

discriminatory or oppressive, while the other does not feel this way about it. While it is useful to know how
they feel about it, it doesnt get us very far in deciding how to judge that action and whether to allow it or
not.

If we want to do more than satisfy peoples desire to be listened

to if we actually want to eradicate unjust practices then we need to determine who

is right and who is wrong. The two women presumably dont think they are merely
expressing their personal preferences about the action in question, in the way they might express a
preference for tea over coffee. They both believe there is a right answer about whether the action is sexist,

They cant resolve this by reference to their

personal testimonies and experiences alone. They will inevitably
have to appeal to some beliefs they share, some general principles
about what makes an action sexist. And as soon as they do this, they are
having a discussion that anyone can contribute to, including men . They
and that the other is mistaken.

are appealing to abstract considerations and invoking a general argument that is in principle available to

Once were doing that, men can

contribute to a conversation about whether something is sexist,
white people can contribute to a conversation about whether
something is racist, cisgendered people can contribute to a
conversation about whether something is transphobic and they
wont necessarily be wrong, just because they lack personal
experience of these forms of oppression. Some intersectionality
advocates seem to jump from the reasonable and probably true premise that people are best
placed to recognize their own oppression to the unreasonable and clearly false premise
that people can never be mistaken about their own oppression. It may
anyone, regardless of their personal experience.

well be true that women are best placed to define and recognize sexism, and that non-white people are

What is clearly not true is that women can never

be mistaken about whether a particular phrase or action is sexist or
not, or that whenever a non-white person thinks she has been the
victim of racism, then she has. I may be accused here of erecting a strawman argument,
best placed to identify racism.

that no intersectionalist actually thinks this. And yet in practice, I see this assumption at work all time,
when men who question whether something is sexist are dismissed as mansplainers, or when accusations

The
danger with this line of thinking is that it really does lead to an
Oppression Top Trumps, where we have to preface all our arguments
with extensive details of our identities and past experiences to
prove our oppression credentials before we are entitled to an
opinion, and where personal feelings and experience trump abstract
arguments and general principles. While we ought to begin with listening to peoples
of racism are believed without evidence because it is a person of colour making the accusation.

stories, we cannot stop there, for on their own, peoples stories tell us nothing about what we ought to do,

the logic of the intersectionalists identity

politics tells us that we must stop at listening to peoples
testimonies, because to do any more would be oppressive and unjust
in itself. As soon as we start to abstract away from those stories, and
form general principles, we risk oppressing the people who would disagree
with those principles because they dont quite fit with their own experience. But this is a totally
fruitless and nihilistic approach to politics. On this logic, we couldnt implement laws
against sexual assault, for example, as all victims of assault will
experience the harm of it differently, and indeed some victims might not experience it
what policies we ought to prefer. And yet

as harmful at all. On this logic, we couldnt have a rule that punished breaking someones leg more
severely than pinching someones arm, because there may be some people who find arm-pinching as

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, in this vision of

politics there could be no room for movements like feminism at all .
For feminism assumes some degree of commonality among women,
distressing as a broken leg.

which the logic of this identity politics must deny . As soon as you call yourself a
feminist, you are identifying yourself as part of a movement that speaks for and represents others. And

yet these others are all radically and irreducibly different, from you
and from each other. Its not obvious to me why speaking for others is inherently oppressive.
Perhaps it would be better if all people could clearly and accurately express their views and experiences.

For some
especially weak and vulnerable people, it may be physically
impossible for them to speak for themselves . And crucially, its inevitable that
But some people are always going to be more skilled at doing that than others.

some people are going to be better than others at highlighting the relevant connections between different
stories, at drawing out the general features of peoples experiences that will enable us to construct our
principles and guide our action. While one person may well have the best understanding of her own

its possible that others will be in a better position to draw

general conclusions from those experiences about what we ought to
do. Recognizing that there are multiple and interacting forms of
oppression, and wanting to work to eradicate the negative effects of
this on the most oppressed people, can and must divorce itself from
this incoherent, self-defeating, nihilistic identity politics. It we are going to
do anything to make peoples lives better, we have to be able to draw general
conclusions from peoples experiences, and be allowed to represent
those who cannot represent themselves. The implication of this is that
sometimes, we may have to tell an oppressed person that they are
mistaken in their judgement about particular cases of injustice. But
the payoff is a vision of politics that allows us to do more than just
listen to peoples stories, but actually implement policies and
engage in action that makes peoples lives better.
experiences,

Pain centrism

Wounded attachments

1NC
Narratives of suffering reinscribe oppression - exclude anyone
who does not fit the model
Brown 96 - Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is CoDirector of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. (Wendy, The University of Chicago Law School, Roundtable,
1996) //AD

If, taken together, the two passages from Foucault we have been considering call feminists to account in our compulsion to put everything about
women into discourse, they do not yet exhaust the phenomenon of being
ensnared 'in the folds of our own discourses.' For if the problem I have been
discussing is easy enough to see--indeed, largely familiar to those who track
techniques of co-optation--at the level of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it
is altogether more disquieting when it takes the form of regulatory discourse
in our own sub- and counter-cultures of resistance . . . when confessing injury
becomes that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and
prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than injured. In an
age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally
significant--gender, race, sexuality, and so forth--confessional discourse, with
its truth-bearing status in a post-epistemological universe, not only regulates
the confessor in the name of freeing her as Foucault described that logic, but
extends beyond the confess- ing individual to constitute a regulatory truth
about the identity group. Confessed truths are assembled and deployed as
"knowledge" about the group. This phenomenon would seem to undergird a
range of recurring troubles in feminism, from the "real woman" rejoinder to
post-structuralist deconstructions of her, to totalizing descriptions of women's
experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor
stories. Thus, for example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited,
violated and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the truth about
sex work; as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the truth about women
and math; as eating disor- ders have become the truth about women and
food; as sexual abuse and viola- tion occupy the knowledge terrain of women
and sexuality. In other words, even as feminism aims to affirm diversity
among women and women's ex- periences, confession as the site of
production of truth and its convergence with feminist suspicion and
deauthorization of truth from other sources tends to reinstate a unified
discourse in which the story of greatest suffering becomes the true story of
woman. (I think this constitutes part of the rhetorical power of MacKinnon's
work; analytically, the epistemological superiority of confes- sion substitutes
for the older, largely discredited charge of false consciousness). Thus, the
adult who does not suffer from her or his childhood sexual experi- ence, the
lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily
or "correctly" identify with her marking as such--these figures are excluded as

bonafide members of the categories which also claim them. Their status
within these discourses is that of being "in denial," "passing" or being a "race
traitor." This is the norm-making process in feminist traditions of "breaking
silence" which, ironically, silence and exclude the very women these
traditions mean to empower. (Is it surprising, when we think in this vein, that
there is so little feminist writing on heterosexual pleasure?)But if these
practices tacitly silence those whose experiences do not parallel those whose
suffering is most marked (or whom the discourse produces as suffering
markedly), they also condemn those whose sufferings they record to a
permanent identification with that suffering. Here, we experience a temporal
ensnaring in 'the folds of our own discourses' insofar as we identify ourselves
in speech in a manner that condemns us to live in a present dominated by
the past. But what if speech and silence aren't really opposites? Indeed, what
if to speak incessantly of one's suffering is to silence the possibilities of
overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it?
What if this incessant speech not only overwhelms the experiences of others,
but alternative (unutterable? traumatized? fragmentary? inassimilable?)
zones of one's own experience? Conversely, what if a certain modality of
silence about one's suffering--and I am suggesting that we must consider
modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and discourse--is to
articulate a variety of possibilities not otherwise available to the sufferer?

Identity politics recreates the politics of resentment

Bhambra and Margree 10 U WarwickANDVictoria Margree

School of Humanities, U Brighton (Gurminder K, Victoria, Identity politics and
the Need for a Tomorrow, academia,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomo
rrow_) //AD

2 The Reification of Identity We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politicsthat can be best described as the problem of

the reification of politicised identities. Brown (1995) positions herself within thedebate about identity
politics by seeking to elaborate on the wounded character of politicised
identitys desire (ibid: 55); thatis, the problem of wounded attachments whereby
a claim to identity becomes over-invested in its own historical suffering
and perpetuates its injury through its refusal to give up its identity claim.
Browns argument is that where politicised identity is founded upon an experience of
exclusion, for example, exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the
continuance of that identity. In such cases, group activity operates to maintain
and reproduce the identity created by injury (exclusion) rather than and indeed, often in
opposition to resolving the injurious social relations that generated
claims around that identity in the first place. If things have to have a history in order to have
af uture, then the problem becomes that of how history is con-structed in order to make the future. To the extent that, for
Brown, identity is associated primarily with (historical) injury, the future for that
identity is then already determined by the injury as both bound to the

history that produced it

and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history (ibid 1995: 73). Browns suggestion that as it is not possible to undo the past, the focus back- wards entraps the identity in reactionary practices, is, we believe,too stark

Politicised identity, Brown maintains, emerges and obtains its

unifying coherence through the politicisation of exclusion from an
ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion (ibid: 65). Its continuing
existence requires both a belief in the legitimacy of the universal ideal (for example,
ideals of opportunity, and re- ward in proportion to effort) and enduring exclusion from those ideals. Brown
draws upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identi-ties, produced in reaction to
conditions of disempowerment andinequality, then become invested in their
own impotence through practices of, for example, reproach, complaint, and revenge.
These are reactions in the Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or
can be seen as negative forms of action. Rather than acting to remove
the cause(s) of suffering, that suf-fering is instead ameliorated (to some
extent) through the estab-lishment of suffering as the measure of
social virtue (ibid 1995:70), and is compensated for by the vengeful
pleasures of recrimi-nation. Such practices, she argues, stand in sharp distinction to in fact,
provide obstacles to practices that would seek to dispel the conditions
of exclusion. Brown casts the dilemma discussed above in terms of a choicebetween past and future, and adapting Nietzsche,
and we will pursue this later in the article.

exhorts theadoption of a (collective) will that would become the redeemer of history (ibid: 72) through its focus on the possibilities of creating different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thingthat the will cannot exert its power over is the past, the it was.Confronted with
its impotence with respect to the events of thepast, the will is threatened with becoming simply an angry spec-tator mired in bitter
recognition of its own helplessness. The onehope for the will is that it may, instead, achieve a kind of mastery over that past such that,
although what has happened cannotbe altered, the past can be denied the power of continuing to de-termine the present and future. It is
only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a future in the face of human frailties and injustices that spares us
from a rancorous decline into despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment that is, by suffering caused by past events can only break
outof the cycle of slave morality by remaking the present againstthe terms of the past, a remaking that requires a forgetting of that past.
An act of liberation, of self-affirmation, this forgettingof the past requires an overcoming of the past that offers iden-tity in relationship to
suffering, in favour of a future in whichidentity is to be defined differently. In arguing thus, Browns work becomes aligned with a posi-tion that
sees the way forward for emancipatory politics as re-siding in a movement away from a politics of memory (Kilby 2002: 203) that is
committed to articulating past injustices andsuffering. While we agree that investment in identities prem-ised upon suffering can function as
an obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering, we believe that Browns argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby

we share a concern about any turn to the future that is figured as a

complete abandonment of the past. This is because for those who have suffered
oppression and exclusion, the injunction to give up articulating a pain that is still felt
may seem cruel and impossible to meet. We would argue instead that the turn to the future
that theorists such as Brown and Grosz callfor, to revitalise feminism and other emancipatory politics, need not be
conceived of as a brute rejection of the past. Indeed, Brown herself recognises the problems
(2002),

involved here, stating that [since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves suchintegral elements of the pain inscribed in most
subjugated identities[then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructedNietzschean form, seems inappropriate if not cruel (1995:
74). She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in painmay be no more than the demand to exorcise that pain throughrecognition:
all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognised intoself-overcoming, incited
into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing itself (1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of
remembering painful historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of remembering pain is to enable its release . The
challenge then, according to her,is to create a political culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own

this may be a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche

sake. Indeed, if Brown feels that

(1995: 74), then Freud may be a more suit-able companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freuds writ-ings have suggested the (only

remember-ing is often a condition of forgetting. The hysterical

patient, who is doomed to repeat in symptoms and compulsive actions a past
she cannot adequately recall, is helped to remember that trau-matic past in
order then to move beyond it: she must remember inorder to forget and to
forget in order to be able to live in the present. 7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for
apparent) paradox that

thedilemma articulated by both Brown (1995) and Kilby (2002),insisting as it does that forgetting (at least, loosening the holdof the past, in
order to enable the future) cannot be achieved without first remembering the traumatic past. Indeed, this wouldseem to be similar to the
message of Beloved , whose central motif of haunting (is the adult woman, Beloved, Sethes murderedchild returned in spectral form?)
dramatises the tendency of theunanalysed traumatic past to keep on returning, constraining, asit does so, the present to be like the past, and

in order
to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attach-ments that are hurtful, we must
first bring them into the realm of political action (2004: 33). We would add that the
thereby, disallow-ing the possibility of a future different from that past. As Sarah Ahmed argues in her response to Brown,

task of analys-ing the traumatic past, and thus opening up the possibility of
political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals on their own, but
that this, instead, requires a community of participants dedicated to the serious epistemic
work of rememberingand interpreting the objective social conditions that made up thatpast and continue in the present. The pain
of historical injury is not simply an individual psychological issue, but stems
from objective social conditions which perpetuate, for the most part, forms of
injustice and inequality into the present. In sum, Brown presents too stark a choice between past andfuture.
In the example of Beloved with which we began thisarticle, Paul Ds acceptance of Sethes experiences of slavery asdistinct from his own,
enable them both to arrive at new under-standings of their experience. Such understanding is a way of partially undoing the (effects of) the
past and coming to terms with the locatedness of ones being in the world (Mohanty 1995). As this example shows, opening up a future, and
attending to theongoing effects of a traumatic past, are only incorrectly under-stood as alternatives. A second set of problems with Browns
critique of identity poli-tics emerge from what we regard as her tendency to individualise social problems as problems that are the possession

the problems associated with identity

politics can be overcome through a shift in the character of political
expression and politi-cal claims common to much politicised identity (1995: 75). She defines this shift as one in which
identity would be expressed in terms of desire rather than of ontology by
supplanting the lan-guage of I am with the language of I want
this for us (1995:75). Such a reconfiguration, she argues, would create an opportu-nity to rehabilitate the memory of desire
within identificatory processesprior to [their] wounding (1995: 75). It would fur-ther refocus attention
on the future possibilities present in the identity as opposed to the
identity being foreclosed through its attention to past-based
grievances.
and theresponsibility of the wounded group. Brown suggests that

Tuck and yang

1NC
Beginning with a politics of pain centered research is
dangerous the academy displaces marginal populations by
including their narratives of pain but not their subjectivity

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
educational research and much of social
science research has been concerned with documenting damage, or
empirically substantiating the oppression and pain of Native communities, urban
communities, and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered
researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in
which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that
reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and
sovereign adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change1 as both
colonial and flawed, because it relies upon Western notions of power
as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires disenfranchised
communities to posi- tion themselves as both singularly defective
and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that won reparations rarely
Elsewhere, Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that

become reality, and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.
Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has exhibited in

Academes
demon- strated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of
pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive
implacability. Imagining itself to be a voice, and in some
disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis
in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and
related fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to
reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an
eliciting pain stories from com- munities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight.

intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in
recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have cho- sen to pursue other lines of inquiry

novice researchers emerge from

doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects
because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to
do social science. The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of
than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines,

such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is
about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the

No need to hear your voice when I can talk

about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear
your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way.
academy to those on the margins as thus:

Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author,

Hookss
words resonate with our observation of how much of social science
research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed
authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343)

voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through

pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researchers voice is
constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the
margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story
of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible
differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to

the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also

say, Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that
space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an
unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of a politics of
tell their stories. Yet

recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman,

rec- ognizing the

personhood of slaves enhanced the power of the Southern slaveowning class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White,
1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997) discusses how

well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In
response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, making personhood coterminous with injury (Hartman,
1997, p. 93), while simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges as a legal

Recognition
humanizes the slave, but is predicated upon her or his abjection.
You are in pain, therefore you are. [T]he recognition of humanity
require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits
of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the
slaves person (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes
person only when seen as criminal or a violated body in need of limited forms of protection (p. 55).

slave-as-agent as criminal. Applying Hartmans analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret Garner or Nat Turner can
only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated
violence of the state to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, Is it possible that such recognition effectively
forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of

many social science

disciplines emerged from the need to provide justifications for social
hierarchies undergirded by White supremacy and manifest destiny
subjugation and pained existence? (p. 55). As numerous scholars have denoted,

(see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has explored how the contoured logic of
settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces the roots of

The origins of many

social science disciplines in maintaining logics of domination , while
sometimes addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or
inauspi- cious beginningsmuch like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous peoples that
psychology to the need to sci- entifically prove the supremacy of the White mind.

afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an unfortunate byproduct of the birthing of a new and

amnesia is required in settler colonial societies, argues

Lorenzo Veracini, because settler colonialism is characterized by a
persistent drive to supersede the conditions of its operation, (2011, p. 3);
that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without ori- gin (and without end),
and inevitable. Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of
great nation. Such

their operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins of

We are struck by the pervasive silence on

questions regarding the contempo- rary rationale(s) for social
science research. Though a variety of ethical and procedural protocols require researchers to compose
the disciplines that we attend to now.

statements regarding the objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt reflection upon the

The rationale
for conducting social science research that collects pain narratives
seems to be self-evident for many scholars, but when looked at more
closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and some- what flimsy .
underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often go unexplored or unacknowledged.

Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted.
Why do researchers collect pain narratives? Why does the academy want them?

Desire is a particular and contextual refusal of settler

colonialism this space of refusal creates new ways to
approach epistemology

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
refusal is
particular, meaning refusal is always grounded in historical analysis
and present conditions. Any discussion of Simpsons article would need to attend to the
At this juncture, we dont intend to offer a general framework for refusal, because all

significance of real and representational sovereignty in her analysis and theorizing of refusal. The
particularities of Kahnawake sovereignty throb at the center of each of the three dimensions of refusal

We caution readers against expropriating Indigenous notions of

metaphorizing sovereignty in a way that
permits one to forget that struggles to have sovereignty recognized
are very real and very lived. Yet from Simpsons example, we are able to see
ways in which a researcher might make transparent the coloniality of
academic knowledge in order to find its ethical limits, expand the
limits of sovereign knowledge, and expand decolonial representational territories. This is in addition to questions her work helpfully raises about who the
described above.

sovereignty into other con- texts, or

researcher is, who the researched are, and how the historical/ representational context for research

One way to think about refusal is how desire can be a

framework, mode, and space for refusal. As a framework, desire is a
counterlogic to the logics of settler colonialism. Rooted in
possibilities gone but not foreclosed, the not yet, and at times, the
not anymore (Tuck, 2010, p. 417), desire refuses the master narrative that
colonization was inevitable and has a monopoly on the future. By
refusing the teleos of colonial future, desire expands possible
futures. As a mode of refusal, desire is a no and a yes. Another way to think about refusal is to
matters.

consider using strategies of social sci- ence research to further expose the complicity of social science

There is much need to employ

social science to turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge,
as opposed to uni- versal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without
horizon. This form of refusal might include bringing attention to the
mechanisms of knowledge legitimation, like the Good Labkeeping Seal of Approval
disciplines and research in the project of settler colonialism.

(discussed under Axiom III); contesting appropriation, like the collection of pain narratives; and publicly
renouncing the diminishing of Indigenous or local narratives with blood narratives in the name of science,
such as in the Havasupai case discussed under Axiom II.

Standpoint epistemology bad

Including identity and standpoint epistemology into the
academy replicates academic domination and settler
colonialism any radical potential of the affirmative is
domesticated by the academy

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
Though one might read these cases as instances of misconduct with which only those in the biomedical or
biological sciences must be concerned, it is important to point out that the misuse of human cells, blood,
or tissue is not only about the handling of such materials, but also about the ways in which those materials
are used to construct particular stories and narratives about an individual, family, tribe, or community. The

Academe is very much

about the generation and swapping of stories, and there are some
stories that the academy has not yet proven itself responsible
enough to hear. We are writing about a particular form of
loquaciousness of the academy, one that thrives on specific
representations of power and oppression, and rarefied portrayals of dysfunction and
misconduct is in the fabrication, telling, and retelling of stories.

pain. One might ask what is meant by the academy, and by the academy being undeserving or unworthy
of some stories or forms of knowledge. For some, the academy refers to institutions of research and higher
education, and the individuals that inhabit them. For others, the term applies to the relationships between
institutions of research and higher education, the nation-state, private and governmental funders, and all

When we invoke the academy, or academe, we are

invoking a community of practice that is focused upon the
propagation and promulgation of (settler colonial) knowledge. Thus,
involved individuals.

when we say that there are some forms of knowledge that the academy does not deserve, it is because

we have observed the academy as a community of practice that, as a

whole: x Stockpiles examples of injustice, yet will not make explicit a commitment
to social justice x Produces knowledge shaped by the imperatives of the
nation-state, while claiming neutrality and universality in knowledge production x
Accumulates intellectual and financial capital, while informants give a part of
themselves away x Absorbs or repudiates competing knowledge systems ,
while claiming limitless horizons Like the previous axioms question Why collect narratives
of pain?we ask nonrhetorically, what knowledges does the academy
deserve? Beyond narratives of pain, there may be language,
experiences, and wisdoms better left alone by social science . Paula Gunn
Allen (1998) notes that for many Indigenous peoples, a person is expected to know no more than is
necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place (p. 56). To apply this idea to the
production of social science research, we might think of this as a differentiation between what is made

Not everything, or even most things, uncovered in a research

need to be reported in academic journals or settings. Contrasting
Indigenous relationships to knowledge with settler relationships to knowledge, Gunn Allen remarks, In
the white world, information is to be saved and analyzed at all costs .
It is not seen as residing in the minds and molecules of human
beings, but asdare I say it? transcendent. Civilization and its attendant virtues of
public and what is kept sacred.
process

freedom and primacy depend on the accessibility of millions of megabytes of data; no matter that the data

the white world has a

different set of values [from the Indigenous world], one which requires learning
all and telling all in the interests of knowledge, objectivity, and
freedom. This ethos and its obversea nearly neurotic distress in the presence of secrets and mystery
has lost its meaning by virtue of loss of its human context . . .

underlie much of modern American culture (p. 59) As social science researchers, there are stories that
are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us because research is a human activity, and we make

At times we come to individuals

and com- munities with promises of proper procedure and
confidentiality-anonymity in hand, and are told, Oh, were not
worried about that; we trust you! Or, You dont need to tell us all that; we know you
will do the right thing by us. Doing social science This is not just a question of getting
permission to tell a story through a signa- ture on an IRB-approved participant consent form.
Permission is an individualizing discourseit situates collective
wisdom as individual property to be signed away . Tissue samples, blood draws,
meaningful rela- tionships with participants in our work.

and cheek swabs are not only our own; the DNA contained in them is shared by our relatives, our
ancestors, our future gen- erations (most evident when blood samples are misused as bounty for

power is protected by such a

collapse of ethics into litigation-proof relationships between
individual and research institution. Power, which deserves the most careful
scrutiny, will never sign such a permission slip . There are also stories
that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are
really in peoples lives. Though it is tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these
stories are not simply y/ours to take. In our work, we come across stories, vignettes,
biopiracy.) This is equally true of stories. Furthermore,

moments, turns of phrase, pauses, that would humiliate participants to share, or are too sensationalist to
publish. Novice researchers in doctoral and masters programs are often encouraged to do research on

People who are underrepresented in the

academy by social locationrace or ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, or ability
frequently experience a pressure to become the n/ Native
informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy perceive them as a route
what or who is most available to them.

of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded researchers. Doctoral programs,
dissertations, and the masters thesis process tacitly encourage novice researchers to reach for lowhanging fruit. These are stories and data that require little effortand what we know from years and years
of academic colonialism is that it is easy to do research on people in pain. That kind of voyeurism
practically writes itself. Just get the dissertation or thesis finished, novice researchers are told. The
theorem of low- hanging fruit stands for pretenured faculty too: Just publish, just produce; research in the

This is how the academy reproduces its own

irrepressible irresponsibility. Adding to the complexity, many of us also bring
to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of
having been researched. As the researched, we carry stories from
grandmothers laps and breaths, from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets,
from exclaves. We carry the proof of oppression on our backs, under our
way you want to after tenure, later.

fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance (Vizenor, 2008) in our photo boxes, our calluses, our

These stories, too, are not always ours to give away, though
It needs to be said that we are not arguing
for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately,
wombs, our dreams.

they are sometimes the very us of us.

especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such knowledge is
often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as
social science research. It is enough that we know them. Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson asks the
following questions of her own ethnographic work with members of her nation: Can I do this and still come
home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? (2007,
p. 78). These questions force researchers to contend with the strategies of producing legitimated
knowledge based on the colonization of knowledge. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of Native

education have queried the dangers of appropriation of Native knowledge by mainstream research and
peda- gogical institutions (e.g., Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Richardson,

Indigenous
knowledges are included into even overtly anti- Indian spaces such
as boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children.
Indigenous knowledge is made harmless to settler colonial
pedagogies by relegat- ing it to the safety zone of the margins . Troy
2011). Lomawaima and McCarty (2006) describe the safety zone as ways in which

Richardson extends this analysis by discussing inclusion as enclosure (2011, p.332), the encircling of
Native education as part of a well-intentioned multiculturalist agenda. Such gestures, he contends, reduce

some narratives
die a little when contained within the metanarrative of social
science. Richardson (2011) theorizes Gerald Vizenors concept of trickster knowledge and the play of
the Indigenous curriculum to a supplement to a standard curriculum. Moreover,

shadows to articulate a shadow curriculum that exceeds the material objects of referencewhere much
meaning is made in silence sur- rounding the words, where memories are not simply reflections of a
referent experi- ence but dynamic in themselves. The shadow is the silence that inherits the words;
shadows are the motions that mean the silence (Vizenor, 1993, p.7). Extending Richardsons analysis of
Vizenors work, beneath the intent gaze of the social scientific lens, shadow stories lose their silences, their
play of meaning.

The stories extracted from the shadows by social science

research frequently become relics of cultural anthropological
descriptions of tradition and difference from occidental cultures.
Vizenor observes these to be the denials of tribal wisdom in the literature of dominance, and the morass

the academy as an
apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates,
denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge. It too refuses. It
sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic Jameson (1981) writes,
of social science theories (Vizenor, 1993, p. 8). Said another way,

[H]istory is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as
collective praxis (p. 102). For Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and
totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress .

The
relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who find
themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative. History
as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and histories of
all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilitie s, their
expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves . Academic knowledge is
particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and
common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits
to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through
erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and its own
imperceptibility. Jamesons observation also positions desire as a counterlogic to the history that
hurts. Desire invites the ghosts that history wants exorcised, and compels us to imagine the possible in
what was written as impossible; desire is haunted. Read this way, desire expands personal as well as
collective praxis.

--Turns case
Damage-centered politics allows violent interventions into
communities turns the aff

Tuck and Yang, 14 *PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of

Educational Foundations, and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York **Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies (Eve, and
K.W., R-Words: Refusing Research, In Humanizing research: Decolonizing
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities academia.edu)//jml
As long as the objects of research are presumably damaged
communities in need of intervention, the metanarrative of social science
research remains unchallenged: which is that research at worst is
simply an expansion of common knowledge (and therefore harmless), and that
research at best is problem solving (and therefore beneficial). This
metanarrative justifies a host of interventions into communities, and
treats communities as frontiers to civilize, regardless of the specific
conclusions of individual research projects. Consider, for example, well- intended
research on achievement gaps that fuels NCLB and testing; the docu- mentation of youth violence that
provides the rationales for gang injunctions and the expansion of the prison industrial complex; the
documentation of diabetes as justification for unauthorized genomic studies and the expansion of anti-

by making the settler colonial metanarrative the

object of social science research, researchers may bring to a halt or
at least slow down the machinery that allows knowledge to facilitate
interdictions on Indigenous and Black life. Thus, this form of refusal
might also involve tracking the relationships between social science
research and expansions of state and corporate violence against
communities. Social science researchers might design their work to call attention to or interrogate
power, rather than allowing their work to serve as yet another advertisement for power. Further, this
form of refusal might aim to leverage the resources of the academy
to expand the representa- tional territories fought for by
communities working to thwart settler colonialism.
Indigenous theories. Instead,

Habitus alt
Our alternative is to conceptualize identity through the frame
of the habitus this allows a more particular understanding
of identity and avoids the essentialism of the aff

Mowbray, 10 - PhD, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University and Co-Director,

Sydney Centre for International Law (Jacqueline, Autonomy, Identity and Selfknowledge: A New Solution to the Liberal-Communitarian Problem?
January 2014 Sydney Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No.
14/02)//jml
One possible approach is to conceptualise identity along the lines of
what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed the habitus. Bourdieu uses
the term habitus to refer to the set of social and cultural dispositions
which incline individuals to act in particular ways (for example, to speak a
particular language, to wear particular national dress, to comply with certain social customs).19 As a result

the dispositions which form the habitus, we tend to reproduce the

same social and cultural attributes and behaviour which we have
experienced in the past. However, at the same time, we remain free to act
otherwise, and will do so in response to changes in external
conditions economic, social, political or otherwise or changes in our own
perception and understanding of the social world. The concept of the
habitus thus covers those things which we intuitively understand as
intrinsic to our identity: our values, beliefs, social and cultural
allegiances, and behaviours. But it requires us to describe and
analyse the various elements of this identity with greater
particularity, by reference to the specific dispositions which shape
our ideas and actions, our different ways of being in the world . This
prevents us from viewing identity in monolithic or essential terms . At
of

the same time, analysing identity in terms of habitus allows us to give some relatively stable content to

it
allows for processes of construction and change, because the
habitus can be altered in response to different factors, including the
individuals experiences in different social and cultural fields. Understanding
identity along the lines of the habitus therefore offers a more
nuanced framework for discussions of autonomy and identity , one
which avoids the dangers of essentialising identity, while also
recognising that identity has some fixed content and meaning for
individuals. In the rest of this chapter, I therefore adopt this approach to the concept of identity as a
the concept of identity, because the habitus tends to endure and to reproduce ideas and behaviour. Yet

basis for exploring and questioning the identity-related issues raised in the recent literature.

Self-knowledge and self-creation constrain the possibility for

subject formation understanding identity as habitus is
necessary to reformulate our relationship towards autonomy

Mowbray, 10 - PhD, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University and Co-Director,

Sydney Centre for International Law (Jacqueline, Autonomy, Identity and Selfknowledge: A New Solution to the Liberal-Communitarian Problem?

January 2014 Sydney Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No.
14/02)//jml
Assuming that we can give
some relatively stable, meaningful content to the concept of
identity, the next question I want to raise is whether self-knowledge of that identity is possible. In
other words, can we treat our identity as an object of study, or is it
inextricably part of us, such that we cannot truly know it as a
separate object of inquiry? Is it possible for the one individual to be both the inquiring
subject and the object of that inquiry? Understanding identity in terms of habitus
is helpful in exploring this issue, as Bourdieus work is particularly enlightening on the
mechanisms by which the habitus operates to shape our consciousness and behaviour. For Bourdieu, the
habitus is a set of dispositions which operate at a subconscious or
preconscious level. The habitus functions at the level of practical
sense20 or a feel for the game,21 that is, a sense of what behaviour is appropriate or expected in
particular circumstances. It is not something we consciously choose, but is
part of our general framework of subjectivity. As a result of the
dispositions which form the habitus, therefore, we tend to act in ways
which are socially and culturally similar to those which we have
experienced in the past, because the habitus conditions our understanding of the possibilities
for action. Our identity, our habitus, therefore shapes the very way that
we see the world. As a result, it is not possible to have objective
knowledge of the world, or of oneself, free from the constraints of
the habitus. And the dispositions which constitute the habitus are particularly difficult to discover, as
Is self-knowledge, and self-creation, of identity possible?

they generally seem self-evident to the holder of them. This suggests that, contrary to the way in which it
is characterised in some of the recent literature, the process of gaining self-knowledge is not a simple

because there is no one,

simple truth about our identity, and because it is not open to us to
discover the dispositions of the habitus. Nor is the process of gaining
self-knowledge simply a matter of overcoming false consciousness,
stepping outside the dispositions of the habitus to gain a clear understanding of oneself. For the
factors which shape our identity do not operate at the conscious
level. As Bourdieu noted in his now famous interview with Eagleton, the world doesnt work in terms of
consciousness; it works in terms of practices, mechanisms, and so forth .22
This highlights a further impediment to individuals gaining selfknowledge of their identities, namely the social mechanisms by which knowledge itself is
constructed. The categories and terms by which we understand and make
sense of our identity are not pre-existing or natural, but are social
constructs. We think of ourselves in terms of being homosexual, Christian, Australian and so on
matter of uncovering the truth about oneself. This is both

because social processes have created these categories of identity. Yet they appear to have a natural or
pre-given status; they seem self-evident. This is what Bourdieu terms doxa: propositions and ideas which
are arbitrary or constructed, but which appear as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice.23

These ideas and values are assumed and taken for granted by
all,24and affect the ability of individuals to gain unmediated knowledge of themselves and of the world.
In Bourdieus terms, [b]y using doxa we accept many things without knowing them.25 The operation of
doxa, like the habitus, influences our view of the world (and of our own identities) without us being aware

self-knowledge, in the sense of conscious

is, if possible at all, severely constrained by the
subconscious mechanisms of the habitus and doxa. This undermines the idea,
of it. Bourdieus analysis therefore suggests that
understanding of our identity,

central to much of the recent literature, of the autonomous individual, consciously gaining knowledge of

if self-knowledge of our identity is

constrained by the operation of the habitus and principles of doxa, so too are
the possibilities for self-creation of that identity. Since the
dispositions which constitute the habitus operate at a subconscious
or preconscious level, our ability to shape them would seem limited.
Further, on Bourdieus account, the habitus tends to be self-perpetuating and
self-reproducing. And changes in the habitus result from interactions
between the habitus and the social world, rather than as a result of the conscious
his or her identity. Taking this a step further,

determination of an autonomous individual. At the same time, doxa shapes and constrains individuals
ideas about possible identities and the appropriateness or otherwise of creating new identities for

the extent to which there is choice in relation to

our identities is much more limited than is suggested by much of the
recent literature on identity and autonomy. This analysis reveals
that it is not only the concept of identity itself , as discussed in the previous
section of this chapter, but also the concepts of self-knowledge and selfcreation of that identity which are problematic. Bourdieus insights undermine
themselves. This suggests that

the idea, central to much of the recent literature, of the autonomous, knowing individual, who has

Self-knowledge and
self-creation of identity, if possible at all, have a much more limited
scope of operation than the recent scholarship assumes.
knowledge of his/her identity and the means to control its development.

Self-creation through the process of habitus allows an

examination and understand of the contingencies of identity
while avoiding the essentialising tendencies of self-knowledge

Mowbray, 10 - PhD, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University and Co-Director,

Sydney Centre for International Law (Jacqueline, Autonomy, Identity and Selfknowledge: A New Solution to the Liberal-Communitarian Problem?
January 2014 Sydney Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No.
14/02)//jml
I have raised a number of concerns with
recent scholarship which seeks to bridge the gap between
autonomy- and identity-based accounts of human rights with the concept of
An alternative formulation Thus far,

self-knowledge. While this body of work suggests that self-knowledge is necessary both to remain faithful

I
have challenged this by interrogating the concept of identity;
questioning the possibilities for self-knowledge and self-creation of
that identity; and suggesting that self-knowledge is not, in fact, necessary for
the acts of self-creation which constitute an autonomous life. Does this
to ones identity and to engage in the acts of self-creation which constitute the exercise of autonomy,

mean that recent attempts to bridge the gap between autonomy and identity, or, more fundamentally,
between liberal and communitarian views, are ultimately flawed? Not necessarily. By returning to Bourdieu,
I want now to suggest an alternative way of bridging the gap between these two positions that builds on

I want to draw on the ideas of

self-knowledge and self-creation, which this literature positions as central, and to
reformulate the relationship between these two concepts in what I
believe may be a more productive way. Throughout this chapter, I have interrogated
some of the insights of the recent literature. In particular,

the concept of identity, and the possibilities for self-knowledge and self-creation, and I have suggested that
these phenomena are more complex than is acknowledged in the recent literature. In particular, I have
raised concerns about the fact that this literature tends to essentialise the concept of identity, and thus not

identity is of
central importance in the lives of individuals. And while true selfknowledge and self- creation may be impossible, human nature is
still to strive towards these ideals. Is it possible, then, to approach
these concepts in a different way, so as to recognise their value but
without falling into the trap of essentialising them ? I have suggested a partial
to account for the difficulties associated with self-knowledge and self-creation. Yet

answer to this question above, in that I argue that identity can be usefully reconceived along the lines of

selfknowledge and self-creation can be thought of as processes, in

terms of individual efforts towards these ideals. This approach
involves acknowledging the difficulties associated with selfknowledge and self-creation, while nonetheless recognising the
significance of these processes to individuals. Adopting such an
approach overcomes many of the problems with the recent literature
identified above. Yet the problem of the relationship between self-knowledge and self- creation
Bourdieus habitus, not as a fixed entity but as a process of construction. Similarly, I think

remains. The relevant scholarship seeks to bridge the gap between autonomy- and identity-based
accounts of human rights by arguing that self-knowledge opens up the possibilities for self-creation, a
proposition I have questioned above. But what if the link between self-knowledge and self-creation is more

identity, in the form of the habitus, is

shaped by social processes, by our past actions and experiences,
which shape our understanding of the possibilities for action in the
future. For present purposes, there are two critical points which flow from this. The first is that the
habitus is continually open to change: identity is a process , shaped
both by the social world and by the actions of individuals in
engaging with that social world. This being the case, the process of seeking selfknowledge is ultimately also an act of self-creation: if the habitus is shaped by our past
actions and experiences, then our actions in seeking self-knowledge
themselves shape the habitus. Self-knowledge and self-creation are
thus inextricably connected; they are part of the same process by which the individual
encounters the social world. The second critical point here is that the habitus is shaped by
social processes. It is in the interaction between the individual and
social fields that the dispositions of the habitus are reinforced or,
conversely, challenged and changed. The habitus is a social
phenomenon, and knowledge of the habitus cannot therefore be obtained by engaging in solitary
acts of introspection, but only by gaining an understanding of concrete social processes. So acts of
self-creation, which require engagement with the social world, will enhance an
individuals self-knowledge, for it is in the concrete interaction
between the habitus and the social field that the dispositions of the
habitus, which generally operate at a subconscious or preconscious level, are open to be revealed.
Once again we see that self-knowledge and self-creation are part of
the same process: there is no logical progression from one to the
other, rather, they are intertwined. Self-knowledge and self-creation
are thus inextricably connected. In seeking self-knowledge, individuals also, in many
ways, create the self they are seeking to discover. And engaging in acts of self-creation
will inevitably enhance self-knowledge. This being the case, the liberal and
fundamental? For Bourdieu, as we have seen,

communitarian approaches have more in common than first appears. The liberal view favours autonomy
and self-creation, while the communitarian view favours identity and self- knowledge. But if the processes
of self-knowledge and self-creation are connected, then the purpose of human rights, on both views, is the
same: to protect individuals ability to seek self-knowledge and self-creation. This insight reveals the true

potential of the recent literature on autonomy and identity to bridge the gap between these different views
of human rights. And it suggests how this new literature can make a real contribution to the old liberalcommunitarian debate.

Referendum Ks

Impacts

Agency
Using the ballot as a referendum on identity cedes agency to
the sovereign, which recreates the violence against social
movements that they kritik

Campbell, 98 - Professor of International Politics at the University of

Newcastle (David, Performing Politics and the Limits of Language 1998)//jml
Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses
assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it
constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts
upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based
upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign
power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative
understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as
injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor

This idealization of the speech act as a

sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the
idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and
forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state
has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then
reemerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to
protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign
power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded
in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when
understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible)
even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political
problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to
this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law
requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we
accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific
conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own
the offending words, and punish the speaker:

admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state
is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical
account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the
state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests
that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively
produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the
speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential

The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus

linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it
seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its
power in relation to that subject at the very moment its
phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the
resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social
movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)
demarcation" (77).

Cant refute it
We should not be forced to refute the content of their personal
experience because its impossible for us to do so people are
victimized, the core question is what do we do?

Subotnik 98 Professor of Law at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center at

Touro College, holds a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law(Daniel,
What's Wrong With Critical Race Theory?: Reopening The Case For Middle
Class Values, 1998, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (7 Cornell J. L. &
Pub. Pol'y 681), Spring, Lexis-Nexis) //AD

Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the
strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with
outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests, the central CRT message is not
simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or even that individuals out
there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist for the
academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and
hurts badly.
An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly
enterprise now comes into focus. What can an academic trained to [*694]
question and to doubt n72 possibly say to Patricia Williams when effectively
she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't hurt"?
"Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly "What do you expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the
majority were perceived as having the well- being of minority groups in mind,
these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead
to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned
within the invisible privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of
precarious connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74
"Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses only
from fools and sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection,
disconcert and disunite others. "I hurt," in academic discourse, has three
broad though interrelated effects. First, it demands priority from the reader's
conscience. It is for this reason that law review editors, waiving usual
standards, have privileged a long trail of undisciplined - even silly n75 destructive and, above all, self-destructive arti cles. n76 Second, by
emphasizing the emotional bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I
hurt" discourages fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their
pain in order to gain perspective on their condition. n77
[*696] Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and
structured conversation with others. n78 [*697] It is because of this
conversation-stopping effect of what they insensitively call "first-person
agony stories" that Farber and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of

academic civility hamper readers from challenging the accuracy of the

researcher's account; it would be rather difficult, for example, to criticize a
law review article by questioning the author's emotional stability or veracity."
n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the scholar's experience on
the table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience
to the same level of scrutiny.
If through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting
academic debate, why do they not have greater influence on public policy?
Discouraging white legal scholars from entering the national conversation
about race, n80 I suggest, has generated a kind of cynicism in white
audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse effect of that
ostensibly desired by CRATs. It drives the American public to the right and
ensures that anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected.
In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course,
it is difficult to be sure what reasons they would give for not having rallied
behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First, the kinds of issues raised
by Williams are too important in their implications [*698] for American life to
be confined to communities of color. If the lives of minorities are heavily
constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of the majority
elements in society, it would seem to be of great importance that white
thinkers and doers participate in open discourse to bring about change.
Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the community of legal
scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the highest
scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more
generally, the streets and the airwaves.

Commodification
The claim that oppression should be the basis for winning a
debate round commodifies the ballot the round devolves into
oppression olympics

Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The

Violence of Victimhood, 28-30) //AD *we dont endorse ableist langauge
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective
appealing, and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women,
in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual
work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more
subject to systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this
mainstream group must not speak for other women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as
I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an insidious
competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in situations

otherness
discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to
the resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to embarrassed privilege
of conflict where the stakes are much higher.

We witness here a twofold appeal:

exposes the operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in

The guilt of those who feel

themselves deeply implicated in and responsible for imperialism merely
reinforces an imperialist benevolence, polarizes us unambiguously by
locking us into the categories of victim and perpetrator, and blinds
us to the power and agency of the other. Many fail to see that it is
embarrassing and insulting for those identified as victimized others
not to be subjected to the same critical intervention and held to the
same demands of moral and political responsibility . Though we are
by no means equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we
are all collectively responsible for the world we inhabit in common.
the developing world, or white women from women of color.

The condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral responsibility. I will return to this point

Mohanty's perspective ignores the possibility that

one can become attached to one's subordinated status, which
introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of much recent interest in the injury caused
repeatedly throughout this book.

by racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave

ressentiment itself becomes creative and

gives birth to values. 19 The sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his
suffering a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering someone on whom he can vent
his affects and so procure the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of
injury. The motivation behind ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the desire to deaden, by means
morality, the revolt that begins when

of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to
drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an affect
as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy

ressentiment acts as the righteous critique of power

from the perspective of the injured, which delimits a specific site of blame for
Brown argues that

suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social

Identities are fixed in an economy of perpetrator and

victim , in which revenge, rather than power or emancipation, is
sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21 30 Such a concept is
subordination.

useful for understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized.
Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of

the triumph of a morality rooted in

ressentiment is the denial that it has any access to power or

contains a will to power. Politicized identities arise as both product of
and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a substitute for action
an imaginary revenge, Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social virtue at the
same time that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto
another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in
its own subjection not only through its discovery of someone to
blame, and a new recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the
satisfaction of revenge . 22 The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference
and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness the further reification
reification of the very oppositions in question and a simple reversal of
the focus from the same to the other. This observation is not new and has been made
by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no serious impact on mainstream feminist
scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the eagerness to rectify the

the other has been

uncritically exalted, which has led in turn to simplistic designations of marginal,
othered status and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach
mistakes of white, middle-class, liberal, western feminism,

has led to a new moral code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western
woman, while moral immunity is granted to the victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation

the reification of the other

has produced separate ethical universes in which the privileged
experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized, crippling
resentment. The only overarching imperative is that one does not
comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out
to be a nonresponse. 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational feminism,

Discursive militarism
Tying pedagogy to our identities reinforces discursive
militarism

Jay and Graff, 95 - * Professor in the department of English at University

of Wisconsin ** professor of English and Education at University of Illinois at
Chicago (Gregory and Gerald, Critique of Critical Pedagogy Higher
Education Under Fire, p. 207-9)//jml
The premise that teachers should unmask the ideologies of their
studentsor that they should teach them how to unmask the ideologies of everyone elsehas
disturbing ethical and political consequences. One consequence is to
efface or trivialize the status of personal agency . According to Morton,
"persons" must be "distinguished from their 'discourses' " (82) so that
those discourses can be effectively critiqued. This distinction
removes the critique of discourses from the realm of the ethical , where
relationship between persons require attitudes such as tolerance, respect, responsibility sympathy, justice,

Most students will not readily perceive a distinction

between the professor's contempt for their discourse and contempt
for their person, as many women and people of color can testify. By treating persons
as discourses, critical pedagogy applies poststructuralist theory in a
reducing manner that is shallow theoretically and harmful
strategically. By depersonalizing critique and pedagogy, oppositional theorists underestimate the
emotional and psychological ties that individuals have to knowledge and power. The connection
of persons to discourses is an ethical one that cannot be reduced to
ideology. The person takes responsibility for negotiating the relationship between discourses and
and humility.

institutions of knowledge and power, on the one hand, and the experience of the individual on the other.
An ethic, like a discourse, is precisely a set of principles that is not coincident with the person, but rather
something he or she embodies only imperfectly and individually. Keeping the connection of persons to
discourses is vital to an effective theory of agency and a coherent view of injustice and responsibility.

The kind of alienation effect produced by oppositional pedagogy

overstates the determination of persons by discourses, and so opens
the way both to irresponsibility and social fragmentation. A
relentless critique of every student's and every teacher's bad faith
leads to contempt for the idea of community. Real political
opposition and change cannot be accomplished by isolated
individuals or random acts of critique. Unlike critique, politics is a social enterprise. It
requires that persons form communities based on some degree of trust and faith and mutual respect-even
for those will whom one is ideologically at odds. It is just such notions of respect, trust, and faith that
critical and oppositional pedagogies reject, usually out of a fear of being "co-opted" by the dominant social
institutions. A political community depends upon mutual recognition of common interests, which must be
understood in part by testing discourses against persons and ideas against experiences. It is difficult to
imagine how the students in an oppositional classroom are to form a bond with each other, much less with

Critique can succeed only by resorting to

persuasion, and persuasion has no chance unless it is willing to
respect the resistances of those who are not yet converted. At some
those who oppose their point of view.

point, critique has to turn into a positive program that those not yet persuaded will find intellectually
satisfying, emotionally desirable, and ethically acceptable. In the end, then an ethical pedagogy, which
poses questions about the relationship between individual good and social good, and between personal
character and potential action, will be more helpful in orienting a way through and beyond opposition.
Persuasion is political because it aims to address a community about problems and interests that are vital

to how people conduct themselves towards each other. Persuasion recognizes the social nature of human
life and the necessity of attending to the improvement of the organization of society. Persuasion accepts
the plurality of goods, that is, the existence of many different notions of the good life among its audience.
Politics is not the implementation of a single truth, but the process of structuring the negotiation between
differing truths in a manner that respects their claims as much as possible. We grant that critical pedagogy
has its place at the level of individual teaching practices, at least when it is willing to respect the
resistance of students. But as long as education is an institution in an overlapping system of democratic
processes, the school cannot and should not enforce a program that commits everyone to a predetermined
worldview, however just we may believe it is. Theorizing the practice of entire institutions of higher
education means thinking from the viewpoint of conservatives, liberals, and others with whom we work,

This calls for a model of education in which

we engage with those who hold the "wrong" politics and will not
take our assumptions for granted, that is, a model in which
ideological opponents not only coexist but cooperate . This in turn means
not just from the viewpoint of radicals.

thinking of models beyond that of the single classroom with the single instructor, the model that still

If educational
institutions hope to be true communities of intellectual inquiry,
reforming them will require models that respect the ethical and
political dimensions of community life. This means respecting those
with the "wrong" politics, and even accepting the risk that they may
change us.
dominates critical pedagogy, in spite of its unorthodoxy in other respects.

Solipsism

Solipsism
their argument re-entrenches oppression by precluding a goaloriented strategy doesnt allow coalitions

Bridges 01 - Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East

Anglia (David, The Ethics of Outsider Research, 200 1, Journal of Philosophy
of Education, Vol. 35, No. 3) //AD
it is argued that only those who have shared in, and have been part of, a
particular experience can understand or can properly understand (and perhaps
`properly' is particularly heavily loaded here) what it is like. You need to be a woman to understand
First,

what it is like to live as a woman; to be disabled to understand what it is like to live as a disabled person
etc. Thus Charlton writes of `the innate inability of able-bodied people, regardless of fancy credentials and
awards, to understand the disability experience' (Charlton, 1998, p. 128). Charlton's choice of language
here is indicative of the rhetorical character which these arguments tend to assume. This arises perhaps
from the strength of feeling from which they issue, but it warns of a need for caution in their treatment and
acceptance. Even if able-bodied people have this `inability' it is difficult to see in what sense it is `innate'.
Are all credentials `fancy' or might some (e.g. those reflecting a sustained, humble and patient attempt to
grapple with the issues) be pertinent to that ability? And does Charlton really wish to maintain that there is
a single experience which is the experience of disability, whatever solidarity disabled people might feel for
each other? The understanding that any of us have of our own conditions or

experience is

unique and special, though recent work on personal narratives also shows that it is itself multi-layered
and inconstant, i.e. that we have and can provide many different understandings even of our own lives
(see, for example, Tierney, 1993). Nevertheless, our own understanding has a special status: it provides
among other things a data source for others' interpretations of our actions; it stands in a unique
relationship to our own experiencing; and no one else can have quite the same understanding. It is also
plausible that people who share certain kinds of experience in common stand in a special position in terms

However, once this argument is

applied to such broad categories as `women' or `blacks', it has to
deal with some very heterogeneous groups; the different social, personal and
situational characteristics that constitute their individuality may well
outweigh the shared characteristics; and there may indeed be greater
barriers to mutual understanding than there are gateways. These
arguments, however, all risk a descent into solipsism: if our individual
understanding is so particular, how can we have communication with
or any understanding of anyone else? But, granted Wittgenstein's persuasive
of understanding those shared aspects of experience.

argument against a private language (Wittgenstein, 1963, perhaps more straightforwardly presented in

we cannot in these circumstances even describe or have

any real understanding of our own condition in such an isolated
world. Rather it is in talking to each other, in participating in a
shared language, that we construct the conceptual apparatus that
allows us to understand our own situation in relation to others, and this
is a construction which involves understanding differences as well as similarities. Besides, we have
good reason to treat with some scepticism accounts provided by
individuals of their own experience and by extension accounts provided by members of
a particular category or community of people. We know that such accounts can be riddled
with special pleading, selective memory, careless error, self-centredness,
myopia, prejudice and a good deal more. A lesbian scholar illustrates some
of the pressures that can bear, for example, on an insider researcher in her
own community: As an insider, the lesbian has an important sensitivity to offer,
yet she is also more vulnerable than the non-lesbian researcher, both to the pressure from
Rhees, 1970),

the heterosexual world--that her studies conform to previous works and describe lesbian reality in terms of

to pressure from the inside, from within the

lesbian community itself--that her studies mirror not the reality of that
community but its self-protective ideology. (Kreiger, 1982, p. 108) In other words, while
individuals from within a community have access to a particular kind of
understanding of their experience, this does not automatically
attach special authority (though it might attach special interest) to their own
representations of that experience. Moreover, while we might
acknowledge the limitations of the understanding which someone from
outside a community (or someone other than the individual who is the focus of the research)
can develop, this does not entail that they cannot develop and present
an understanding or that such understanding is worthless .
Individuals can indeed find benefit in the understandings that others
offer of their experience in, for example, a counselling relationship, or when a researcher adopts a
its relationship with the outside-and

supportive role with teachers engaged in reflection on or research into their own practice. Many have
echoed the plea of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (in `To a louse'): O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To
see oursels as others see us!3 --even

if they might have been horrified with

what such power revealed to them. Russell argued that it was the function of philosophy
(and why not research too?) `to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from
the tyranny of custom . . .It keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar
aspect' (Russell, 1912, p. 91). `Making the familiar strange', as Stenhouse called it, often requires the
assistance of someone unfamiliar with our own world who can look at our taken-for-granted experience
through, precisely, the eye of a stranger. Sparkes (1994) writes very much in these terms in describing his
own research, as a white, heterosexual middleaged male, into the life history of a lesbian PE teacher. He
describes his own struggle with the question `is

it possible for heterosexual people

to undertake research into homosexual populations?' but he concludes that
being a `phenomenological stranger' who asks `dumb questions'
may be a useful and illuminating experience for the research subject in that they
may have to return to first principles in reviewing their story. This could, of course be an elaborate piece of
self-justification, but it is interesting that someone like Max Biddulph, who writes from a gay/bisexual

People from
outside a community clearly can have an understanding of the
experience of those who are inside that community. It is almost
certainly a different understanding from that of the insiders. Whether it is of any value
standpoint, can quote this conclusion with apparent approval (Biddulph, 1996).

will depend among other things on the extent to which they have immersed themselves in the world of the
other and portrayed it in its richness and complexity; on the empathy and imagination that they have
brought to their enquiry and writing; on whether their stories are honest, responsible and critical (Barone,
1992). Nevertheless, this value will also depend on qualities derived from the researchers' externality: their
capacity to relate one set of experiences to others (perhaps from their own community); their outsider
perspective on the structures which surround and help to define the experience of the community; on the
reactions and responses to that community of individuals and groups external to it.4 Finally, it must surely
follow that if we hold that a researcher, who (to take the favourable case) seeks honestly, sensitively and
with humility to understand and to represent the experience of a community to which he or she does not
belong, is incapable of such understanding and representation, then how can he or she understand either

The
argument which excludes the outsider from understanding a
community through the effort of their own research, a fortiori excludes the outsider from that
that same experience as mediated through the research of someone from that community?

understanding through the secondary source in the form of the effort of an insider researcher or indeed

the point can only be maintained by insisting that a

particular (and itself ill-defined) understanding is the only kind of
understanding which is worth having. The epistemological argument
any other means. Again,

(that outsiders cannot understand the experience of a community to which they do not belong)

becomes an ethical argument when this is taken to entail the further proposition that they

this argument
is based on a false premise. Even if the premise were sound, however, it
would not necessarily follow that researchers should be prevented or
excluded from attempting to understand this experience , unless it could be
ought not therefore attempt to research that community. I hope to have shown that

shown that in so doing they would cause some harm. This is indeed part of the argument emerging from

III OUTSIDERS IMPORT

DAMAGING FRAMEWORKS OF UNDERSTANDING Frequent in the literature
about research into disability, women's experience, race and homosexuality is the claim that
people from outside these particular communities will import into their
research, for example, homophobic, sexist or racist frameworks of understanding,
disempowered communities and it is to this that I shall now turn.

which damage the interests of those being researched. In the case of research into disability it has been
argued that outsider researchers carry with them assumptions that the problem of
disability lies with the disabled rather than with the society which frames and defines disability. `The
essential problem of recent anthropological work on culture and disability is that it perpetuates outmoded
beliefs and continues to distance research from lived oppression' (Charlton, 1998, p. 27). By contrast: `a
growing number of people with disabilities have developed a consciousness that transforms the notion and
concept of disability from a medical condition to a political and social condition' (Charlton, 1998, p.17).
Charlton goes on to criticise, for example, a publication by Ingstad and Reynolds Whyte (1995), Disability
and Culture. He claims that, although it does add to our understanding of how the conceptualisation and
symbolisation of disability takes place, `its language is and perspective are still lodged in the past. In the
first forty pages alone we find the words suffering, lameness, interest group, incapacitated, handicapped,
deformities. Notions of oppression, dominant culture, justice, human rights, political movement, and

Discussing the neocolonialism of outsider research into Maori experience, Smith extends this
type of claim to embrace the wider methodological and metaphysical framing of
outsider research: `From an indigenous perspective Western research is more than just research
selfdetermination are conspicuously absent' (Charlton, 1998 p. 27).

that is located in a positivist tradition. It is research which brings to bear, on any study of indigenous
peoples, a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space
and subjectivity, different and competing theories of knowledge, highly specialized forms of language, and
structures of power' (Smith, 1999, p. 42).5

This position requires, I think, some

qualification. First, researchers are clearly not immune from some of the damaging and prejudicial
attitudes on matters of race, sexuality, disability and gender which are found among the rest of the
population, though I might hope that their training and experience might give them above-average
awareness of these issues and above-average alertness to their expression in their own work. Even where
such attitudes remain in researchers' consciousness, this intelligent self-awareness and social sensitivity
mean on the whole that they are able to deploy sufficient self-censorship not to expose it in a damaging
way. Researchers may thus remain morally culpable for their thoughts, but, at least, communities can be
spared the harm of their expression. It is also a matter of some significance that researchers are more
exposed than most to public criticism, not least from critics from within these disempowered communities,
when such prejudices do enter and are revealed in their work. If they employ the rhetoric of, for example,
anti-racist or anti-sexist conviction, they are at least in their public pronouncements exposed to the
humiliation of being hoisted by their own petard. It is difficult to see the fairness in excluding all outsider
researchers on the a priori supposition of universal prejudice. It is better, surely, to expose it where it is
revealed and, if absolutely necessary, to debar individuals who ignore such criticism and persist in using
the privilege of their research position to peddle what can then only be regarded as damaging and

it is plainly not the case that Western research

is located exclusively (as is implied) in a positivist tradition, even if this
tradition has been a dominant one. Phenomenology, ethnography,
life history, even, more recently, the use of narrative fiction and poetry as forms of
research representation, are all established ingredients of the educational research
prejudicial propaganda. Secondly,

worlds in the UK, USA or Australasia. Contemporary research literature abounds with critiques of positivism

I have placed much weight in these

considerations on the importance of any research being exposed to
criticism--most importantly, perhaps, but by no means exclusively by the
people whose experience it claims to represent. This principle is not
as well as examples of its continuing expression.

simply an ethical principle associated with the obligations that a

researcher might accept towards participants in the research, but it is a
fundamental feature of the processes of research and its claims to
command our attention. It is precisely exposure to, modification
through and survival of a process of vigorous public scrutiny that provides
research with whatever authority it can claim. In contemporary
ethnographic research, case-study and life-history research, for example, this expectancy of
exposure to correction and criticism is one which runs right through
the research process. The methodological requirement is for
participants to have several opportunities to challenge any prejudices which
researchers may bring with them: at the point where the terms of the research are first negotiated
and they agree to participate (or not); during any conversations or interviews that take place in the course
of the research; in responding to any record which is produced of the data gathering; in response to any

engagement with a researcher provides any group with what

a richly educative opportunity: an opportunity to open their
eyes and to see things differently. It is, moreover, an opportunity which
any researcher worth his or her salt will welcome. Not all researchers
or research processes will be as open as are described here to that educative
opportunity, and not all participants (least of all those who are self-defining as `disempowered') will
feel the confidence to take them even if they are there. This may be seen as a reason to
set up barriers to the outsider researcher, but they can and should
more often be seen as problems for researchers and participants to address together
in the interests of their mutual understanding and benefit. Notwithstanding these
draft or final publication. Indeed,
is potentially

considerations, one of the chief complaints coming out of disempowered communities is that this kind of mutual interest and benefit is precisely what is lacking in their
experience of research. It is to this consideration that I shall now turn. IV OUTSIDERS EXPLOIT INSIDER PARTICIPANTS IN THE COMMUNITIES THEY RESEARCH Ellen describes
how fieldwork has become `a rite of passage by which the novice is transformed into the rounded anthropologist and initiated into the ranks of the profession'a ritual by
which `the student of anthropology dies and a professional anthropologist is born' Ellen, 1984, p. 23). This is a reminder that research can carry benefits to the researcher
which go beyond those associated with the `pure' pursuit of understanding. As participants in research become more aware of this, their attitudes towards research and
researchers can, understandably, change. The following observation was made by a woman from a community that had experienced several waves of enthusiastic
researchers: The kind of behaviour researchers have towards locals tells us that they just want to exploit them and take from them their ideas and information. It also tells
us that they don't really care at all. They want the information to use in front of a group of people at home, so that they can be seen as clever academics. Then in the end
they publish books, reviews, articles etc in order to spread their popularities. So what is this, and what is research really about? Not all researchers are exploiters, but most
are, and I think it is time up now for this, and that these researchers should also be exploited by local people. Florence Shumba, quoted in Wilson, 1992, p. 199)
Researchers who are sensitive to this issue typically look for ways to counter the imbalance of benefit. They will sometimes discuss with participants ways in which the
research could be designed to benefit all parties, by, for example, ensuring that it addresses issues on which the participants need information as well as the researchers
or by providing data that the research participants can use independently and for their own purposes. In the absence of any other perceived benefit, some schools in the
UK have responded to researchers' requests for access and time for interviews by proposing to charge by the hour for teachers' time. Of course sometimes participants will
be persuaded to participate on the grounds that some other people whose interests they care about pupils in schools, for example, or children currently excluded from
educationwill secure the benefit of the research, but there has to be the link between something which they perceive to be a benefit albeit altruistically) and the
commitment which they are asked to make. These illustrations of the terms of engagement between researchers and their participants present a picture of a trade in
benefit, the negotiation of a utilitarian equation of mutual happiness and, perhaps, pain, though one in which higher satisfactions e.g. new insights and the improvements
to the future education of children) have a place alongside lower ones a bit of self-publicity or cash in the school fund). Questions of exploitation, in Kantian terms of
treating people as means rather than ends see Kant, 1964)6 come in if, as is sometimes alleged, researchers use their positions of authority or their sophistication to
establish relationships in which the benefits are very one-sided in their favour. This distinction between the utilitarian principle and the Kantian one is crucial here. The
utilitarian principle might require us to measure in the scales a much wider community of benefit. If, for example, the researcher could show that, even though the Maori
community he or she was researching experienced the inconvenience of the research without the benefit, thousands of other people would benefit from it, then the
utilitarian equation might provide justification for the research. But this is precisely one of the weaknesses of the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness of the
greatest numberat least when it is applied with this sort of simplicity. It requires either a broader take on the utilitarian principle which might observe that a programme
of action which allocates all the benefits to one group and all the `pain' to another will not be conducive to the greatest aggregation of happiness) or the invoking of
something closer to the Kantian principle, which would demand that we do not exploit one group of people to the exclusive benefit of another. Researchers seeking
collaboration with participants in disempowered communities have essentially two forms of appealto their self-interest or to their generosity. Either they need to see
some benefit to themselves which is at least roughly commensurate to the effort that is required of them or in some cases the value of what they have to offer); or they
need knowingly to contribute out of their own benevolence towards the researcher or others whom they believe the research will benefit. In this second case, the
researcher is placed in something of the position of the receiver of a gift and he or she needs to recognise consequently the quite elaborate ethical apparatus that
surrounds such receipt. There is a particular `spirit' in which we might be expected to receive a gift: a spirit of gratitude, of humility, of mutuality in the relationship. There
may also be a network of social expectations, which flow from such givingof being in thrall to the giver, of being in his or her debtbut on the whole anyone contributing
to an educational research project would be naoEve to assume that such `debts' might be repaid. Most of the time, researchers are in fact inviting the generosity of their
participants, and perhaps there is something more ethically elevated in responding to such generosity with a true spirit of gratitude and a recognition of the mutuality of
relationship which binds giver and receiver, than in seeking to establish a trade in dubious benefits. Smith 1999) provides a wonderful picture of the combination of spirit
and benefits that might be involved in establishing this relationship as well as a whole new angle on the notion of `empowerment'!) when she outlines the range of issues
on which a researcher approaching a Maori community might need to satisfy them: `Is her spirit clear? Does he have a good heart? What other baggage are they carrying?
Are they useful to us? Can they fix up our generator? Can they actually do anything?' Smith, 1999, p.10). Perhaps all educational researchers should be required to satisfy
participants on these questions. I conclude that the possibility that outsider educational research may be conducted in an exploitative manner is not an argument for
obstructing it comprehensively, but it is an argument for requiring that it be conducted under an appropriate set of principles and obligations and in a proper spirit.
`Qualitative researchers', argued Stake, `are guests in the private spaces of the world. Their manners should be good and their code of ethics strict' Stake, 1998, p.103).
Any community may legitimately reject a researcher insider or outsider) who fails to establish and conduct relationships under these requirements. In this field, ethics is
never far removed from politics. This essay has focused on the relationship between educational researchers and communities that are self-defined as `disempowered' but
has not really addressed the issue of power. At the heart of the objections to outsider research is a view that such research, far from challenging and removing such
disempowerment, operates to reinforce it. It is this argument which I shall now address. V OUTSIDERS' RESEARCH DISEMPOWERS INSIDERS At least one of the arguments
against outsider research into self-defined `disempowered' sections of the population is made independently of the measure of sensitivity and care, which the outsider
researchers demonstrate in its conduct. `If we have learned one thing from the civil rights movement in the US', wrote Ed Roberts, a leading figure in the Disability Rights
Movement DRM), `it's that when others speak for you, you lose' quoted in Driedger, 1989, p. 28). Roberts' case is in part that for so long as such groups depend on
outsiders to represent them on the wider stage, they will be reinforcing both the fact and the perception of their subordination and dependency as well as exposing
themselves to potential misrepresentation. They have to break the vicious circle of dependencyand that means taking control for themselves of the ways in which their
experience is represented more widely: The DRM's demand for control is the essential theme that runs through all its work, regardless of political-economic or cultural
dierences. Control has universal appeal for DRM activists because their needs are everywhere conditioned by a dependency born of powerlessness, poverty, degradation,

and institutionalisation. This dependency, saturated with paternalism, begins with the onset of disability and continues until death. Charlton, 1998, p. 3) Outsider
researchers sometimes persuade themselves that they are acting in an emancipatory way by `giving voice to' neglected or disenfranchised sections of the community.
Their research may indeed push the evident voice of the researcher far into the background as he or she `simply presents', perhaps as large chunks of direct transcription
and without commentary, what participants have to say. But, as Reinharz has warned, this is by no means as simple as it might appear: To listen to people is to empower
them. But if you want to hear it, you have to go hear it, in their space, or in a safe space. Before you can expect to hear anything worth hearing, you have to examine the
power dynamics of the space and the social actors . . . Second, you have to be the person someone else can talk to, and you have to be able to create a context where the
person can speak and you can listen. That means we have to study who we are and who we are in relation to those we study . . . Third, you have to be willing to hear what
someone is saying, even when it violates your expectations or threatens your interests. In other words, if you want someone to tell it like it is, you have to hear it like it is.
Reinharz, 1988, pp. 1516) Even with this level of self knowledge, sensitivity and discipline, there is a significant temptation in such situations to what is sometimes
called ventriloquy: the using of the voice of the participant to give expression to the things which the researcher wants to say or to have said. This is a process which is
present in the selection of participants, in the framing of the questions which they are encouraged to answer, in the verbal and visual cues which they are given of the
researcher's pleasure or excitement with their responses, and, later, in the researcher's selection of material for publication. Such ventriloquy, argues Fine, disguises `the

The
argument that insiders within `disempowered' communities (or any other
communities for that matter) should be researching and, where appropriate, giving public
expression to their own experience is surely uncontroversial . In a context
usually unacknowledged stances of researchers who navigate and camouflage theory through the richness of ``native voices''' Fine, 1994, p.22).

in which insider research has been negligible and hugely subordinated to waves of outsider research,

there is a good case for taking practical steps to correct that balance
and spare a community what can understandably be experienced as an increasingly
oppressive relationship with research. There are, however, at last three
reasons in principle for keeping the possibility of outsider research
open: (i) that such enquiry might enhance the understanding of the
researcher; (ii) that it might enhance the understanding of the
community itself; and (iii) that it might enhance the understanding of a
wider public. There is no doubt a place for researching our own experience and that of our own
communities, but surely we cannot be condemned lifelong to such social
solipsism? Notwithstanding some postmodernist misgivings, `There is still a world out
there, much to learn, much to discover; and the exploration of
ourselves, however laudable in that at least it risks no new
imperialistic gesture, is not, in the end, capable of sustaining lasting
interest' (Patai, 1994, p. 67). The issue is not, however, merely one of satisfying curiosity. There is
a real danger that if we become persuaded that we cannot
understand the experience of others and that `we have no right to
speak for anyone but ourselves', then we will all too easily find
ourselves epistemologically and morally isolated, furnished with a
comfortable legitimation for ignoring the condition of anyone but
ourselves. This is not, any more than the paternalism of the powerful, the route to a more just society.
How, then can we reconcile the importance of (1) wider social understanding of the world of
`disempowered' communities and of the structures which contribute to that disempowerment, (2) the
openness of those communities and structures to the outsider researcher, and (3) the determination that
the researcher should not wittingly or unwittingly reinforce that disempowerment? The literature (from
which a few selected examples are quoted below) provides some clues as to the character of relations
between researcher and researched which `emancipatory', `participatory' or `educative' research might

we need to re-examine the application of the notion of

`property' to the ownership of knowledge. In economic terms, knowledge is
not a competitive good. It has the distinctive virtue that (at least in terms of its educative function) it can
be infinitely distributed without loss to any of those who are sharing
in it. Similarly the researcher can acquire it from people without denying
it to them and can return it enriched. However, it is easy to neglect the processes of
take. To begin with,

reporting back to people and sharing in knowledge and the importance which can be attached to this
process by those concerned. For Smith, a Maori woman working with research students from the
indigenous people of New Zealand, `Reporting back to the people is never a one-off exercise or a task that
can be signed off on completion of the written report'. She describes how one of her students took her
work back to the people she interviewed. `The family was waiting for her; they cooked food and made us
welcome. We left knowing that her work will be passed around the family to be read and eventually will
have a place in the living room along with other valued family books and family photographs' (Smith,
1999, pp. 1516).

For some, what is required is a moving away from

regarding research as a property and towards seeing it as a dialogic

enquiry designed to assist the understanding of all concerned:
Educative research attempts to restructure the traditional relationship between researcher and `subject'.

Research
encourages a dialogic process where participants negotiate meanings at
the level of question posing, data collection and analysis . . . It . . . encourages
participants to work together on an equal basis to reach a mutual
understanding. Neither participant should stand apart in an aloof or
judgmental manner; neither should be silenced in the process. (Gitlin
Instead of a one-way process where researchers extract data from `subjects', Educational

and Russell, 1994, p. 185)

Their strategy limits politics to the personal doesnt assume

difference in experiences and increases oppression
Scott 92 - Harold F. Linder Professor at the School of Social Science in
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Joan W, Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Identity October 1992, Vol. 61, The Identity in
Question, p. 16-19) //AD
The logic of individualism has structured the approach to
multiculturalism in many ways. The call for tolerance of difference is
framed in terms of respect for individual characteristics and attitudes;
group differences are conceived categorically and not relationally, as distinct entities rather than
interconnected structures or systems created through repeated processes of the enunciation of difference.
Administrators have hired psychological consulting firms to hold diversity workshops which teach that
conflict resolution is a negotation between dissatisfied individuals. Disciplinary codes that punish "hatespeech" justify prohibitions in terms of the protection of individuals from abuse by other individuals, not in
terms of the protection of members of historically mistreated groups from discrimination, nor in terms of

The language of
protection, moreover, is conceptualized in terms of victimization; the
way to make a claim or to justify one's protest against perceived
mistreatment these days is to take on the mantle of the victim. (The socalled Men's Movement is the latest comer to this scene.) Everyone-whether an insulted
minority or the perpetrator of the insult who feels he is being unjustly
accused-now claims to be an equal victim before the law. Here we have not
only an extreme form of individualizing, but a conception of individuals
without agency. There is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with teaching
individuals about how to behave decently in relation to others and
about how to empathize with each other's pain. The problem is that difficult
the ways language is used to construct and reproduce asymmetries of power.

analyses of how history and social standing, privilege, and subordination are involved in personal behavior

Mohanty puts it this way: There has been an erosion

of the politics of collectivity through the reformulation of race and
difference in individualistic terms. The 1960s and '70s slogan "the personal
is political" has been recrafted in the 1980s as "the political is personal." In
other words, all politics is collapsed into the personal, and questions of
individual behaviors, attitudes, and life-styles stand in for political
analysis of the social. Individual political struggles are seen as the only
relevant and legitimate form of political struggle.5 Paradoxically, individuals then
entirely drop out. Chandra

generalize their perceptions and claim to speak for a whole group, but
the groups are also conceived as unitary and autonomous. This
individualizing, personalizing conception has also been be- hind some of the recent identity politics of
minorities; indeed it gave rise to the intolerant, doctrinaire behavior that was dubbed, initially by its
internal critics, "political correctness." It is particularly in the notion of "experience" that one sees this

current usage of "experience," references to structure and

history are implied but not made explicit; instead, personal testimony of
oppression re- places analysis, and this testimony comes to stand for the experience of the
whole group. The fact of belonging to an identity group is taken as authority
enough for one's speech; the direct experience of a group or culture-that is,
membership in it-becomes the only test of true knowledge. The exclusionary
implications of this are twofold: all those not of the group are denied even
intellectual access to it, and those within the group whose experiences
or interpretations do not conform to the established terms of identity
must either suppress their views or drop out. An appeal to
"experience" of this kind forecloses discussion and criticism and turns
politics into a policing operation: the borders of identity are patrolled for signs of
operating. In much

nonconformity; the test of membership in a group becomes less one's willingness to endorse certain
principles and engage in specific political actions, less one's positioning in specific relationships of power,

than one's ability to use the prescribed languages that are taken as
signs that one is inherently "of" the group. That all of this isn't recognized as a highly
political process that produces identities is troubling indeed, especially because it so closely
mimics the politics of the powerful, naturalizing and deeming as
discernably objective facts the prerequisites for inclusion in any group .
Indeed, I would argue more generally that separatism, with its s trong insistence on an
exclusive relationship between group identity and access to specialized
knowledge (the argument that only women can teach women's literature or only African-Americans
can teach African-American history, for example), is a simultaneous refusal and
imitation of the powerful in the present ideological context. At least in
universities, the relationship between identity- group membership and access to specialized knowledge
has been framed as an objection to the control by the disciplines of the terms that establish what counts
as (important, mainstream, useful, collective) knowledge and what does not. This has had an enormously
important critical impact, exposing the exclusions that have structured claims to universal or
comprehensive knowledge. When one asks not only where the women or African-Americans are in the
history curriculum (for example), but why they have been left out and what are the effects of their
exclusion, one exposes the process by which difference is enunciated. But one of the complicated and
contradictory effects of the implementation of programs in women's studies, African-American studies,
Chicano studies, and now gay and lesbian studies is to totalize the identity that is the object of study,
reiterating its binary opposition as minority (or subaltern) in relation to whatever is taken as majority or
dominant.

Links

Autobiographies bad
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies
ones identity when autobiographical narrative wins, it
subverts its own radical intentions

Coughlin 95 associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School (Anne,

REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER
SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229) //AD
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks
made by strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it
comes to reflection on her relationship with her readers and the
material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned
for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as
readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's
condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their publication secured her - we detect yet another
contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's

autobiography is a lucrative
commodity. In our culture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal
stories , n197 which surely explains why first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market
outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it records, an
autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form of
"property in a moneyed economy" n198 and into a valuable intellectual
[*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199 Accordingly, we must be
skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid publication
record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their endeavor .
characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that

n200 Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and

While
writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for the
individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture.
Indeed, the transformation of outsider authors into "success stories"
subverts outsiders' radical intentions by constituting them as
exemplary participants within contemporary culture, willing to market even
themselves to literary and academic consumers. n203 What good does this transformation
do for outsiders who are less fortunate and less articulate than middle-class
law professors? n204 Although they style themselves cultural critics, the [*1284]
storytellers generally do not reflect on the meaning of their own
commercial success, nor ponder its entanglement with the cultural
values they claim to resist. Rather, for the most part, they seem content simply to
take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, " to have your
dissent and make it too." n205
academic renown. n201 As one critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202

Alternatives

Whatever being alt

Our alternative is whatever being this rejects the ballot as
a referendum on inclusion and exclusion and rather blurs the
distinction between inclusion and exclusion

Shimakawa, 4 PhD in English literature from U of Washington (Karen,

The Things We Share: Ethnic Performativity and "Whatever Being" 2004)//jml
"whatever being" offers a possible alternative way to
conceive of (communal) subjectivity that does not depend on stable
political identity categories for its integrity, without requiring one to
dispense with categories altogether. Unlike the common English parsing of whatever,
Agamben's use of the term is differently nuanced: "[whatever being] is not 'being, it
does not matter which,' but rather 'being such that it always
matters'" (Agamben 1993, 1).3 The impulse to include/be included is
retained, though not assigned to a particular or stable grounds of
inclusion: "such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or
that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the
French, the Muslims)and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the
simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for
belonging itself" (1-2, emphasis in original). Belonging itself, according to Agamben, is
a state of being that acknowledges the (social and affective efficacy of the) desire
for inclusion while, at the same time, resisting the concretization of static
categories (defined racially, nationally, sexually, religiously, or otherwise) that would afford
not only inclusion, but also exclusion. What would it mean, Agamben asks, to
Giorgio Agamben's

acknowledge the [End Page 151] desire to belong to identity categories as that which binds us across the
boundaries of such categories? To define subjectivity as "being as such," that is, at the level of the impulse
to belong (belonging itself), rather than at the point of inclusion in an established social
category/community?4 It is important to emphasize that

Agamben does not advocate a

dissipation of belonging per sehis is not a dismantled universalist/humanist leveling

program. "It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community," he writes; "[whatever being] is neither

whatever being constitutes a

mode of (prospective) subject formation that achieves some of Kristeva's deject's ends (that
is, the rough articulation of a subject position) without producing a concretized,
jettisoned abject; and for those who might otherwise find
themselves on the "wrong" side of that (nationalizing/racializing) abjection
equation, perhaps Agamben's conception of "being as such" describes a strategic response to
abjection that does not simultaneously reaffirm its logic; that is, it offers an alternative to
abjection that does not result in simply "claiming a place" at the
dejects' table. Indeed, Agamben articulates "whatever being" in terms that are provocatively
complementary to Kristeva's: whereas Kristeva's abject is "simply a frontier," Agamben situates
whatever being precisely at the border or "threshold" between
inside and outside, "a point of contact with an external space that
must remain empty" since, in order to locate a recognized "outside"
one must claim (even if only implicitly) a particular "inside," the zone/community in/to
which one belongs (and from which an "outside" is distinguishable). Rather, he argues, " the outside
is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space ... it
is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself" (68). By locating
apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation" (10), Instead,

subject's formation in whatever being, that is, in the impulse to belong, he

creates a concomitantly concretization-resistant zone of notbelonging. That is, just as Kristeva's abject is less a particular object/concept than a function (i.e.,
explusion/differentiation), so Agamben's "outside" is simply that which is implied by whatever
being/belonging itself: the impulse to not-belong otherwise/elsewhere (always resisting the temptation to
locate that otherwise/elsewhere in concrete terms). "Whatever, in this sense," Agamben writes,"is the
event of an outside" (67, emphasis in original).

Other

Islamophobia K

1NC
Resistance to islamophobia reifies essentialism of Muslims
the opposition between West and Muslim portrays Islam as a
single, unifying characteristic that effaces a multiplicity of
identities

Halliday, 99 - professor of international relations at the London School of

Economics (Fred, Islamophobia reconsidered, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 22, Number 5 Taylor and Francis)//jml
No subject in contemporary public discussion has attracted more
confused discussion than that of relations between Islam and the
West. Whether it be the discussion of relations between Muslim states and non- Muslim countries, or
that of the relations between non-Muslims and Muslims within Western countries, the tendency
has on both sides been, with some exceptions , towards alarmism and
simplification. Alarmism has concerned the threat which, from one
side, Islam poses to the non- Muslim world, and on the other, which
the West poses to Muslims. Non- Muslim simplification involves
many obvious issues: terrorism as if most Muslims are terrorists or most terrorists are
Muslims; the degree of aggressiveness found in the Muslim world and the responsibility of Muslims for this;
the willingness of Muslims to allow for diversity, debate, respect for human rights. It is not only the
sensationalist media, but also writers with an eye to current anxieties of the reading public, such as V. S.

Muslim simplification
is itself two-sided: on the one hand, a stereotyping of the West; on
the other, the assertion of a unitary identity for all Muslims, and of a
unitary interpretation of text and culture. The core simplification
involves these very terms themselves: the West is not a valid
aggregation of the modern world and lends itself far too easily to monist, conspiratorial
presentations of political and social interaction. But nor is the term Islam a valid
shorthand for summarizing how a billion Muslims, divided into over
fty states, and into myriad ethnicities and social groups, relate to
the contemporary world, to each other or to the non-Muslim world. To get away from such
Naipaul and Samuel Huntington, who reinforce such misrepresentation.

simplifications is, however, virtually impossible, since both those opposed to Islam and those invoking it
adhere to such labels. Moreover, as much of this literature shows ,

those who are most

intent on critiquing standard Western prejudices about the Muslim
world themselves fall back on another set of simplifications . Instead of
fearing or hating anti-Muslim stereotypes, we are now invited to respect,
understand, study Islam. Islamophobia, Eurocentrism, stereotyping The literature under
review here ranges across several aspects of this question. The Runnymede and Wilton Park reports
identify misinterpretations, above all in the West, of the Muslim world and advocate a more tolerant,
informed, relation to the Muslim world. They reect an approach derived, on the one hand, from race
relations and, on the other, from inter-faith dialogue. They both set current frictions in the context of the
long historical relations between Muslims and the Christian world, both identify the role of the media in

Most
significantly, perhaps, they accept the term Islam as a
denomination of the primary identity of those who are Muslims; they
avoid discussion of the diversities within Muslim societies, on ethnic
grounds or on the interpretation of the Muslim tradition and on its
application to the contemporary world.
reinforcing stereotypes, both advocate greater discussion between communities.

Centering their movement on islamophobia obscures other

causes of oppression and marginalization this recreates
oppression by essentializing experience into the category of
islamophobia

Malik, 5 Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, history, and philosophy of

science at Imperial College (Kenan, The Islamophobia Myth,
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/prospect_islamophobia.html)//jml
Pretending that Muslims have never had it so bad might bolster
community leaders and gain votes for politicians, but it does the rest
of us, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, no favours at all. The more that the threat
of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims
come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It
helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment,
and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more
open to religious extremism. Muslim leaders constantly warn that Islamophobia is
alienating Muslims and pushing many into the hands of extremists. However, it's not
Islamophobia, but the perception that it blights lives, that is often
the bigger problem. In making my Channel 4 documentary I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims
across the country about their experience of Islamophobia. Everyone believed that police harassment was
common though no one had been stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife,

What is being created here is a

culture of victimhood in which 'Islamophobia' has become one-stop
cause of the myriad of problems facing Muslims. Take, for instance, the social
though few had been attacked or knew anyone who had.

problems which beset Muslim communities. The figures are truly appalling. Bangladeshis and Pakistanis
(who comprise most of Muslims in this country) are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed
than are whites. Average earnings among Muslim men are 68 per cent that of non-Muslim men. 65 per
cent of Bangladeshis are semi-skilled manual workers compared with 23 per cent among other ethnic
minorities and 15 per cent among white Britons. Fifty four per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi homes
receive income support. In 2000, 30 per cent of Pakistani students gained five or more good GCSEs,

It has become common to blame

all of this on Islamophobia. According to the Muslim News, 'media reportage and public
compared with 50 per cent in the population as a whole.

discourse on Islam and Muslims have a huge impact on Muslim labour market performance'. Islamophobia
shapes 'how Muslim children are treated in schools', the 'self-esteem on Muslim children' as well as 'their
educational achievements'. Unemployment, poverty and poor educational standards is not, however, a
new phenomenon in Muslim communities in this country. And the causes are myriad. Racism certainly
plays a part. So does class. The social profile of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is closer to that of AfroCaribbeans than it is to Indians or Chinese. That is because while the latter are often from middle class
backgrounds, most Banglandeshis, Pakistanis and Afro-Caribebans originally came from poor working class

Class
plays as important a role as race or religion in explaining the poor
performance of Muslims. Indeed, Indian Muslims tend to be far better of than those from
or rural, with few resources, especially to combat the intense racism they faced in this country.

Bangladesh or Pakistan - and conversely Bangladeshi and Pakistani non-Muslims tend to be worse off.

Some also point the finger at cultural practices within some Muslim
communities. 'By and large', the journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown acknowledges, 'the lowest
achieving communities in this country are Muslim. When you talk to people about why
this is happening the one reason they give you, the only reason they
give you, is Islamophobia.' It's not an argument that Alibhai Brown accepts. 'It is not
Islamophobia that makes parents take 14 year old bright girls out of school to marry illiterate men, and the
girl has again to bring up the next generation who will again be denied not just education but the value of

education.' Alibhai Brown disagrees with me about the extent of Islamophobia, believing that it is a major

it has also become 'a convenient label, a

a reason that is so comfortable for Muslims whenever they have
to look at why they aren't in the places that they have to be. All too often
force shaping Muslim lives. But, she adds,
figleaf,

Islamophobia is used as an excuse in a way to kind of blackmail society.' What all this suggests is the need
for an open, frank debate about Muslims and their relationship to wider British society. There is clearly
prejudice and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed and attacked because of their faith. At
the same time the degree of hatred and discrimination is being exaggerated to suit particular political
agendas, stoking up resentment and creating a victim culture. The likelihood of such a frank, open debate

'Islamophobia' has become not just a description of

anti-Muslim prejudice but also a prescription for what may or may
not be said about Islam. Every year, the Islamic Human Rights Commission organises a mock
is, however, not very high.

awards ceremony for its 'Islamophobe of the Year'. Last year there were two British winners. One was the
BNP's Nick Griffin. The other? Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. Toynbees defence of secularism and
womens rights, and criticism of Islam, was, it declared, unacceptable. Isn't it absurd, I asked the IHRC's
Massoud Shadjareh, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader of a neo-fascist party.
Not at all, he suggested. 'There is a difference between disagreeing and actually dismissing certain
ideologies and certain principles. We need to engage and discuss. But theres a limit to
that.' It is difficult to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim figures
seem unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist attacks.

Beginning with Islamophobia is inaccurate it suggests fear of

islam as a religion and not fear of the people who follow islam.
A discourse of anti-muslimism is necessary

Saeed, 7 - Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at University of

Sunderland (Amir, Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of
Islam and Muslims in the Media, Sociology Compass Volume 1, Issue 2, p.
443-462)//jml
a distinction must be made between
Islamophobia and anti-Muslimism. The tone of this rhetoric is often
alarmist, and encompasses racist, xenophobic and stereotyping
elements. The term anti-Muslimism is used here to signify such a
diffuse ideology, one rarely expressed in purely religious terms but usually mixed in with other
rhetoric's and ideologies ... It involves not so much hostility to Islam as a
religion ... But hostility to Muslims, to communities of peoples whose
sole or main religion is Islam and whose Islamic character, real or invented,
forms one of the objects of prejudice. In this sense anti-Muslimism often
overlaps with forms of ethnic prejudice, covering peoples within which there may be
Halliday (1996, 160), however, notes that

well a significant non-Muslim element, such as Albanians, Palestinians or even Caucasians. In short, it
appears that what Halliday is arguing is that anti-Muslimism is almost a new form of racism that
discriminates not only on physical traits but also religious characteristics. For Halliday,

the term

Islamophobia is inaccurate because it is too uniform. Halliday (1999) points

out that usage of this term implies that there is only one Islam and that all Muslims are homogenous. In

Islamophobia as a term suggests fear of

Islam as a religion not fear of the people who follow Islam.
short, Halliday (1999, 898) is proposing that

2NC cards
The conception of islamophobia is problematic it
essentializes and leads to unpractical results

Halliday, 99 - professor of international relations at the London School of

Economics (Fred, Islamophobia reconsidered, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 22, Number 5 Taylor and Francis)//jml
Use of the term Islamophobia may also convey two other, misleading associations. One is that the term reproduces the distortion, already
discussed, that there is one Islam: that there is something out there
against which the phobia can be directed. This serves not only to
obscure diversity, but also to play into the hands of those, within the
Muslim com- munities, who wish to reply to this attack by offering their own
selective interpretation of the tradition, be this on women, rights of free speech, the right to
renounce religion or anything else. Islamophobia indulges conformism and
authority within Muslim communities: one cannot avoid the sense, in regard to work
such as the Runnymede Report, that the race relations world has yielded, for reasons of political

Use of the term Islamophobia also challenges the

possibility of dia- logue based on universal principles. It suggests , as
the Runnymede and Wilton Park reports do, that the solution lies in greater
dialogue, bridge- building, respect for the other community: but this
inevitably runs the risk of denying the right, or possibility, of
criticisms of the practices of those with whom one is having the
dialogue. Not only those who, on universal human rights grounds, object to elements in Islamic or
convenience, on this term.

other traditions and current rhetoric, but also those who challenge conservative readings from within, can

The advocacy of a dialogue, one that

presupposes given, homogeneous, communities places the emphasis
on understanding the other, rather than on engaging with the ways
in which communities, national and religious, violate uni- versal
rights. The danger in these reports is that they are dened, if not monopolized, by representatives of
more easily be classed as Islamophobes.9

religious bodies, and of community organizations, who apply to them the conventions of inter-faith dialogue:10 the churches have a role, in educating their own people about the faith, but also about the
everyday lives and political grievances, of other faiths, Muslims included. This cannot and should not be at
the expense of a critical examination of how these religions treat their members. Islamophobia

may also have confusing practical results. The griev- ances voiced by Muslims in
any society may relate directly to religious matters: of school curriculum, dress, diet, observance of

But much of what is presented as the Islamic critique of

the West has little or nothing to do with religion: it is secular, often
nationalist, protest and none the less valid for that. Support for Palestine,
ceremonial days.

denunciations of Western hegemony in the oil market, solidarity with Iraq, opposition to Soviet
involvement in Afghanistan, denunciations of cultural imperial- ism, protests at double standards on
human rights these are all part of the Muslim indictment of the West, but are not necessarily religious in
icontent, or specic to the Muslim world. The Chinese denunciation of Western human rights

It has little to
do with belief, and a lot to do with political power in the
contemporary world. Similarly, within Western society, issues of immigration, housing,
interference, on the ground that it violates sover- eignty, is the same as the Iranian.

iemployment, racial prejudice, anti-immigrant violence are not spec ically religious: the British term
Paki can, in a racist attack by white youth, as easily denote a Hindu, a Sikh or a Christian from Tamil Nadu
as a Muslim.

Their politics is neither anti-racist or anti-imperialist it's

essentialist Muslim history and differences within islam

Plummer, 13 PhD from Cornell, historian whose research includes race

and gender, international relations, and civil rights (Brenda Gayle, "Reviews:
Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and
Black Freedom beyond America," Journal of American Studies, Volume 47.
Issue 03, pp 839-840)//jml
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam (NOI) dominate much of the book, and they are made to stand in for the
Muslim challenge to the West as a whole. Drawing heavily on the work of Melani McAlister, Daulatzai traces
how the NOI and its most noted orator stood the moral geography and symbolism of Christendom on its
ear to craft oppositional discourses and practices that provided alternative pathways to personal and
collective emancipation for African Americans. He recuperates the Nations use of the term Asiatic black
man, explaining that blacks should not limit themselves to Africa as the exclusive site of what is actually a

These sweeping claims, however, bury as much history as

they reveal. We learn very little of the substantial history of Islam in
America before the NOI, nor are the black American Muslims who did not belong to the Nation or who
global identity.

disagreed with its tenets acknowledged or described. It is also odd that the author sees little contradiction
in bequeathing Louis Farrakhan, a lethal enemy of Malcolm X, the mantle of Malcolms internationalist
energy and commitment. No specific examination of Farrakhans views is found in this account. Farrakhans
opportunism is forgotten, and he is praised for making peace among various hip hop artists and for being

Black Star, Crescent Moon could use less of the authors

irritatingly essentialized appeals to the Muslim International and
the Muslim Third World. While the author describes the former as a parallel space to the
state, the Muslim Third World is never defined. It includes variously Saudi
cited in their lyrics.

Arabia and the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, although neither of the two leading

If the Muslim
International and the Muslim Third World are meant to connote
spaces of anti-imperialist popular resistance, the inclusion of certain
polities is indeed puzzling. Are people who grew up in refugee camps or confront brutal
conference luminaries, Nehru and Zhou Enlai, were Muslims or represented Muslims.

Israeli apartheid policies to be conflated with those who secretly tipple fine scotch in Jeddah mansions? In

reality there is no neat equation between Islam as currently

practiced and anti-imperialism and antiracism. Just as Islam has
been the principal religion in some revolutionary regimes that
resisted domination, in other places it has proven compatible with
slavery, racism, and exploitative capitalism, now as in the past . The
same may be said for all of the universal religions.

Essentialism turns the aff and is anti-Muslim

Hassan, 9 - Associate Research Fellow and a PhD research student at the

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore (Muhammad Haniff, Interpreting Islam and Plural
Society www.iais.org.my/icr/index.php/icr/article/download/248/241)//jml
One ought to be
careful with ideas that generalise Muslims or non-Muslims as one
monolithic or homogeneous group. Such ideas are often reflected in
a form of binary vision, which sees this complex phenomenon
through a black-and-whiteor us-versus-them perspective only . Such
generalist views also do not fit with the teachings of the Quran because they produce
stereotypes which portray all non- Muslims as inherently hostile , which
The overall message of the Quran essentially leads us to one important point:

Prejudice of this kind is not different from the

misconception among some non-Muslims that all Muslims are
terrorists or fanatics. It therefore is contradictory for Muslims to
complain of being discriminated against by non-Muslims when the
former, on the other hand, stereotype non-Muslims as being villainous.
Such double standards not only expose Muslims to criticism, but,
more importantly, negate the very principles of justice and equity in
Islam. It is also important to understand both verses by
understanding the particular context of their revelation. Al-Qurtubi and alis forbidden (49:12).

Tabari cite a view from Mujahid that the verse [Your enemies] will not cease to fight against you [...]
(2:217) was revealed with regard to the Quraysh of Mecca and their extreme hostilities towards the
Muslims.12 In other words, the verse has to be seen in the light of the historical contexts of the time. Thus,
verses in the Quran that call upon Muslims to disdain non-Muslims ought to be interpreted as referring to
only non-Muslims opposed to the formers faith, as indicated in the verse O ye who believe! Take not my

From the perspective of Islamic

hermeneutic methodology, the blanket view towards non-Muslims is
arguably flawed because of its over-reliance on generalities (ammah)
found in the Quran, on the hadiths and the failure to observe the rule of takhsis (specification)
as required and observed by Muslim exegetes. A maxim commonly held by Muslim scholars says there
is no generality without exception (la ammah illa wa huwa makhsus).13 Thus,
Muslim scholars suggest that no generalities (ammah) in the Quran and the
hadiths should be applied as the basis of a ruling or judgment before
making an exhaustive search for other verses that could qualify its
interpretation.14 By following this methodology, scholars would be able to determine the limits
enemies and yours as friends (or protectors) (60:1).

with regard to the scope in which such verse is to be applied. Consequently, a verse so qualified would
have to be interpreted within that scope only. This is what the proponents of the previous category have
emphatically failed to do.

Their scholarship essentializes islam

Semati, 11 Professor of Communication in the Department of

Communication at Northern Illinois University (Mehdi, Communication,
Culture, and the Essentialized Islam Communication Studies Vol. 62, No. 1,
JanuaryMarch 2011, pp. 113126)//jml
to engage religion and religious identity by
scho- lars in communication and cultural studies are undoubtedly
welcome. However, with rewards for addressing religion come
difficulties and pitfalls. In this article, I argue that a major pitfall in this
endeavor is the problem of essentializing religion, parti- cularly
Islam. On the one hand, there has been a tendency by some scholars to
embrace Islam as an overriding explanatory framework. This is the
case of what we might call a positive essentialism. On the other hand, there
Against this backdrop, attempts

has emerged a tend- ency by some scholars to vilify religion and to attribute to it a whole gamut of issues
that are not supported by empirical evidence or a careful scrutiny of the analysis that produce such an
attribution. This is the case of negative essentialism, and it is most troubling when exercised by a scholars

what is
important about this development is the logic that structures such a
discourse: A logic that insists on cultural and religious distinctions in
order to bestow on Islam the status of an onto- logical category . This is
foray into the religion and society of an other without the requisite diligence. In either case,

a characteristic of the writings by Orientalists on the right (e.g., Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes) and right
wing media pundits (e.g., Pamela Geller). In this article, I focus on a book by James Lull as an illustrative

example. What is unique about Lulls writing is that he seems to be writing from a liberal and a progressive
point of view. Relying on popular wisdom, utilizing popular writ- ings on controversial popular authors such
as Irshad Manji, and failing to acknowl- edge the counterarguments to the writings of Orientalists render

there is little to no
mention of international politics, political Islam, or the history of
Euro-American involvement in the affairs of these countries in the
Middle East. In this article, I will argue there is no Islam that can be
recuperated outside representation. The task for critical scholarship is to see what the
Lulls work a polemic. Although Lull wants to explain globalized Islam,

terms of this representation are and who benefits from such representation.

Misc K stuff

Cap root cause

Prejudice is founded not on race but economic inequality a
historical analysis that results in redistribution of resources is
key

Hollinger 8 Preston Hotchkis Professor of History emeritus at UC

Berkeley [David, former president of the Organization of American Historians,
Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic
Future, Callaloo, pp. 1034-1037, 2008, JSTOR, Accessed 7/20/15]//schnall

To understand why the immigrant-originating blackness of Obama is so significant, we need to view it in

That well over one-third of African Americans

doubt that the black population of the United States is any longer a
single people was revealed in a November 2007 report by the Pew
Research Center. Although the gap in values between middle-class and
poorer African-Americans was the focus of the study, black
immigrants and their children are especially likely to be identified as
middle-class. A study by the Princeton University sociologist Douglas S.
Massey and his collaborators shows that black immigrants and their children
are overrepresented by several hundred percent among the black
freshmen at Ivy League colleges. Such statistics are common at
many other institutions, including Queens College of the City University of New
York, a public university whose campus is located near a large population of
African-Americans. Many studies tell us that black immigrants and
their children do better educationally and economically than do the
descendants of American slavery and Jim Crow. These studies
demonstrate that educational and employment opportunities can be
available to black people, even in the context of continued white
racism. This reality calls into question the credibility of blackness as
our default standard for identifying the worst cases of inequality,
and for serving as the focal point of remedies. [italics in original
text] Slavery ended in the British Caribbean three decades before it ended in the United States, and
black Caribbeans experienced a better postemancipation
educational system than did most black people in the U nited States.
Perhaps the force keeping so many black Americans down is
operative not so much in the eye of the empowered white beholder as in that legacy of slavery and
Jim Crow, in the form of diminished socioeconomic capacity to take
advantage of educational and employment opportunities? To proceed
down the theoretical and policy roads offered by this idea is not to
doubt the power of white racism, but to locate more precisely its
harmful effects. Our colleges and universities and our remedies for employment discrimination
relation to other happenings.

have generally assumed that white prejudicea legacy, indeed, of slavery and Jim Crowis the problem.

That black people face prejudice today is beyond doubt , and numerous
studies show that darker-skinned black people are more likely to be mistreated than those with lighter skin.

But skin color does not tell the whole story. If it did, the immigrant /
non-immigrant distinction within the black population would not

have shown itself to have such striking consequences.

The African-American
descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a
multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypodescent racialization ("one drop of blood" makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white
marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under
constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a
member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming the presidential nominee of one of
the nation's two major political parties is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an
indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of

To be sure, many immigrants from the

Caribbean have slave ancestors, too, and slavery also has a history
in Africa itself. Other groups have been mistreated in other ways, in this country and in the
countries of origin of many immigrants. But the segment of the African Diaspora
enslaved under American constitutional authority has a unique
history, the awareness of which was vital in creating the political will in the 1960s and early 1970s to
structural inequality in the United States.

deploy federal power against racism in general, and to produce the concept of affirmative action in

The differences in history and circumstances among various

descent groups were largely ignored during the era when our
conceptual and administrative apparatus for dealing with inequality
was put in place. As John D. Skrentny, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego,
has shownin his important 2002 book, The Minority Rights Revolution conflating AsianAmericans, Latinos, and American Indians with African-Americans
was a largely unconscious step driven by the unexamined
assumption that those groups were "like blacks"; that is, they were
functionally indistinguishable from the Americans who experienced
slavery and Jim Crow. Such conflation was officially perpetuated as late as 1998, when
particular.

President Clinton's Initiative on Race, One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future,

burying statistics
that disproved the all-minorities-are-alike myth, and by fashioning more than
systematically and willfully obscured those differences. That was done by

fifty recommendations to combat racism, not a single one of which spoke to the unique claims of black

If we are now going to recognize that even some black people

people like Obamaare not "like blacks," how can Mexican-Americans and
Cambodian-Americans be "like blacks"? Can the latter be eligible for
entitlements that were assigned largely on the basis of a "black
model" that suddenly seems not to apply even to all black people? If black people with
immigrant backgrounds are less appropriate targets of affirmativeaction and "diversity" programs than other black people, a huge issue can no
longer be avoided: What claims for special treatment can be made
for nonblack populations with an immigrant base? Can the genie of the
people.

immigrant/nonimmigrant distinction be put back in the bottle, or are we to generate new, group-specific

That prospect is an intimidating one,

trapping us by our habit of defining disadvantaged groups
ethnoracially Employers and educators are asked to treat the Latino
population as an ethnoracial group, yet the strongest claim that
many of its members have for special protections and benefits is
specific to economic conditions. The history of mistreatment of Latinos by Anglos is well
theoretical justifications for each group?

documented, but the instances most comparable to antiblack racism predate the migration of the bulk of

One need not deny the reality of prejudicial

treatment of Latinos to recognize another reality as more salient:
immigration policies and practices that actively encourage the
today's Latino population.

formation of a low-skilled, poorly educated population of immigrant

labor from Mexico and other Latin American nations. As the recent debates
over immigration confirm, the United States positively demands an underclass of
workers and finds it convenient to obtain most of them from nearby
Mexico. But the service institutions obliged to deal with the needs of
that population are held accountable on the basis of ethnoracial
rather than economic classifications. Colleges and universities are routinely asked to
recruit more Latino students and faculty members, and are accused of prejudice if they do not. People who
are encouraged to immigrate to this country, legally or illegally, because they are poorly educated, willing
to work for low wages and likely to avoid trade unions, do have a powerful claim on our resources, but it is

In the Latino case, more than any other,

ethnorace is widely used as a proxy for dealing with economic
inequality The widely debated issue of whether Latinos ought to be regarded as a separate "race"
an economic, not an ethno-racial claim.

would lose much of its point if the economic circumstances of this immigration-based population were
confronted honestly rather than through an ethnoracial proxy. The Asian-American section of our colorconscious system is even more anachronistic. There are historical reasons for the relatively weak class
position of immigrants from Cambodia and the Philippines, but our category of Asian-American conceals
the differences between those groups and those who trace their ancestry to Korea, whose adult
immigrants to the United States are overwhelmingly college graduates. Institutions eager to assist the
poorest immigrants sometimes do so through the hyper-ethnic step of breaking down the Asian category,
enabling them to establish programs for Cambodians but not for Japanese. For example, the
undergraduate-admissions forms for the University of California system will soon ask Asian and Pacific-

a
historical approach to understanding the dynamics of inequality in
American life has much to recommend it. Obama himself pointed in this direction in
Islander applicants to classify themselves in 23 ethnic categories. These considerations suggest that

his epochal speech on race, delivered in March of 2008 in the wake of publicity given to the inflammatory
sermons of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. "Many of the disparities that exist in the AfricanAmerican community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that
suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," Obama declared in a crucial turn in that speech.
Before taking that turn, Obama surprised many people by alluding sympathetically to white workers who,
damaged by economic turndowns, tended to blame affirmative action for their problems. Even while
describing his own childhood pain upon hearing his white grandmother articulate negative stereotypes
about black people, Obama turned the spotlight for a few minutes on whites. Obama offered sympathy and
legitimacy to a variety of group-specific complaints without fostering an oppression Olympics, and without

Obama at once urged

Americans to look upon inequality in historical terms, and reached
out across the black-white color line, confirming his image as a black
politician who did not offer a black-centered message. Yet we can expect
that circumstances will push Obama back and forth between images of
"more black than we thought" and "not as black as we thought." When,
indulging the sentimental falsehood that all pains are equal. Hence

prior to Wright's having persisted in outrageous public behavior, Obama defended Wright's ministry, there
was some buzz that he was farther to the black side of the color spectrum than his previous image had
been. Once he renounced Wright, exited from Wright's congregation, and increased the frequency with
which photographs of his white grandparents were displayed, there was some buzz that he was farther on

oscillations do not mean

that Obama is lacking in authenticity; they mean that once his blackness
is destabilized, it can intensify or diminish in a variety of contexts, including trivial ones. Does
the analysis sketched here mean that blackness is no longer
relevant to the dynamics of mistreatment in the United States, and
is no longer an appropriate basis for solidarity? Of course not. Black
people have plenty of reasons to look to each other for mutual
support, and to form enclaves strategically, while refusing to have
their lives confined by color. The central postethnic principle, after all, is affiliation by
the white side of that spectrum than some had supposed. These

But attention to skin color alone will not carry the

United States very far toward diminishing the inequalities for which
the extraordinary overrepresentation of black men in American
prisons is a commanding emblem. A new, more realistic way to
distribute resources and energies, calculated to diminish even those
inequalities that owe much to a history of prejudice and violence, is needed. Whether it can be
revocable consent.

created remains to be seen. The Obama phenomenon makes a real conversation more possible than ever
before. The United States is still a long way from the cosmopolitan society that I sketched as an ideal
thirteen years ago in my book Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. I have written this essay in
response to many suggestions that I address the Obama phenomenon in the context of my ideas about

Today we are closer than before to engaging inequalities

that are too often understood in ethnoracial rather than economic
terms. The energies and ideas flourishing around the Obama
presidency may promote a long overdue breakthrough. Obama's illustration
in his own person of the contrast between immigrant and nonimmigrant
black people, and of the reality of ethnoracial mixing, presents a
compelling invitation to explore the limits of blackness especially, but
also of whiteness, and of all color-coded devices for dealing with
inequality in the United States. In the long run, the fact that Obama is the son of an
postethnicity.

immigrant may prove to be almost as important as the fact that he is the son of a black man and a white
mother. Obama's destabilization of color lines will be hard to forget.

United States will never be the same again.

Identity politics in the

Psycho
The symbolic structures oppression language dictates our
subject positions in the world but simultaneously makes
completeness impossible however, this social order is neither
natural nor inevitable individuals produce the social order
through language and by imagining that it exists and
conforming to its rules
Edkins 3 Professor of International Politics, MA St Annes College,
University of Oxford, MSc The City University, London, BA The Open
University, PhD University of Wales, Aberystwyth (Jenny, Trauma and the
Memory of Politics, p. 11-14)
the subject is formed around a lack, and in the face of
We become who we are by finding our place within the social
order and family structures into which we are born . That social order is
produced in symbolic terms, through language. Language does not just name
things that are already there in the world. Language divides up the world in
particular ways to produce for every social grouping what it calls
'reality'. Each language - each symbolic or social order has its own way of doing this. Crucially, none
of these are complete; none of them can find a place for everything .
In the psychoanalytic account
trauma.

This is a logical limitation, not a question of a symbolic or social order being insufficiently developed.

Completeness or closure is impossible. There is always, inevitably,

something that is missed out, something that cannot be symbolised,
and this is one part of what psychoanalytic theory calls 'the real' . In
its birth into the symbolic or social order, into language , the subject is
formed around, and through a veiling of, that which cannot be symbolized the traumatic real. The real
is traumatic, and has to be hidden or forgotten, because it is a
threat to the imaginary completeness of the subject. The 'subject'
only exists in as far as the person finds their place within the social
or symbolic order. But no place that the person occupies as a mother, friend, consumer,
activistcan fully express what that person is. There is always something more. Again, this is not a question
of people not fitting into the roles available for them and a call for more person-friendly societies. Nor does
it concern multiple or fragmented identities in a postmodern world. It is a matter of a structural
impossibility. If someone is, say, a political activist, there is always the immediate question of whether they
are sufficiently involved to count as an activist: don't activists have to be more committed, to take part in
more than just demonstrations, shouldn't they stand for office? On the other hand, are they perhaps more
than an activist does that description do justice to what they are, to their role in the party? There is always

we choose on the whole to

ignore this - to forget this impossibility, and to act as if
completeness and closure were possible. We hide the traumatic real, and stick with
an excess, a surplus, in one direction or the other. However,

the fantasy of what we call social reality. As I have argued elsewhere, the political is that which enjoins us
not to forget the traumatic real but rather to acknowledge the constituted and provisional nature of what
we call social reality. Politics refers to the sphere of activity and institutions that is called 'politics' as

Politics is part of what we call social reality. It

exists within the agendas and frameworks that are already accepted
within the social order. The political, in its 'properly traumatic dimension', on the other hand,
opposed to 'economics' or 'society'.

concerns the real. It refers to events in which politics of the first sort and its institutions are brought into
being. This can be the day-to-day production and reproduction of the social and symbolic order. This
continual process has to take place;

the social order is not natural, it doesn't

exist unless it is produced continually. The political also takes place at moments when
major upheavals occur that replace a preceding social and legal system and set up a new order in its
place. At such points, the symbolism and ideology that concealed the fragile and contingent nature of
authority collapse altogether and there is a brief interregnum before the new order imposes a different
form of concealment. The way that time figures in the psychoanalytic account is interesting. A certain nonlinearity is evident: time no longer moves unproblematically from past through present to future. In a

subjects only retrospectively become what they already are they only ever will have been. And the social order too shares this
retroactive constitution. The subject and the social order in which
the subject finds a place are both in a continual process of becoming .
Neither exists as a fixed entity in the present moment , as the
common-sense view in western culture mightlead us to expect . Both are
always in the process of formation. This is because the two are so intimately related. The person is
formed, not through a process of interaction with the social order
(since that would mean thinking of the social as already there), but by imagining or
supposing that the social order exists. This supposing by the individual is what brings
sense,

the social into being. We have to imagine that others will respond to us before we speak, but it is only our

supposing that the social exists

does not only produce the social order, it also, simultaneously,
brings the individual into existence too. When our speaking elicits a response, we
speaking, of course, that enables them to respond. But

recognise ourselves as subjects in that response. This recognition is belated when viewed through the lens
of a linear temporality: it is not at the moment we decide to speak that we see who we are, but only a
moment later, when we get a response. The response tells us not who we are now, since we are no longer
that - we have already changed. It tells us who we were, at the moment when we spoke. This is the sense
in which we never are, we only ever will hazy been. Like the distant stars, whose past we know from the
light that has taken millions of years to reach us but whose present we can only guess at, we can only
know what we were, not what we are. And even that is also a guess, of course. In a similar way, when we
listen to a sentence being spoken, we can predict what is being said, but we cannot be sure we were right
until the sentence is completed and over. Some forms of speech - rhetoric and jokes for example - play on
that unpredictability. The uncertainty and unpredictability that this involves can be unsettling. In the
rational west, we tend to seek certainty and security above all. We don't like not knowing. So we pretend
that we do. Or that if we don't we could, given sufficient scientific research effort and enough money. We
forget the uncertainties involved and adopt a view that what we call social reality - which Slavoj Zizek calls
social fantasy -- is basically knowable. We adopt an ontology a view of being and the nature of things that depends on a progressive linear notion of time. Things can 'be' in our modern western sense only in
the context of this temporality. They 'are' because they have a history in time, but they are at the same

The
fantasy is only convincing if, once it has been put in place, we can
forget that it is a fantasy. What we are forgetting some would say
deliberately - is the real, that which cannot be symbolised , and that which
is produced as an excess or surplus by any attempt at symbolisation. We do not remember
the trauma that lies at the root of subjectivity, the lack or gap that
remains, even within what we call social reality. This position leads
to a depoliticisation. We forget that a complete, non-antagonistic
society is impossible. We strive for completion and closure, often at
any price. There are a number of ways in which this is done, according to Zizek.'' The first is
time separate from that history. But central to this solution to doubt is forgetting, as we have seen.

communitarian attempts to produce a close homogeneous society arche-politics. Political struggle

disappears because everyone agrees on everything. 'The second, most common in the liberal west, Zizek
calls para-politics. Here the political is replaced by politics. Standardised competition
takes place between accepted political parties according to pre-set rules, the prize being a turn at
executive control of the state bureaucracy. Politics has become policing or managerial control. In the third
meta-politics, political conflict is seen as a shadow theatre, with the important events taking place in
another scene, that of economic processes. Politics should be cancelled when economic processes have
worked themselves out (as scientific materialism predicts) and matters can be decided by rational debate

political struggle becomes

warfare, and the military are called in. There is no common ground
for debate and politics is militarised. If we are to resist such
attempts to 'gentrify' or depoliticise the political we have to recall
the constituted, provisional and historically contingent nature of
every social order, of every ontology. This position, which Zizek calls 'traversing
the fantasy', 'tarrying with the negative' or fidelity to the ontological crack in the universe, is
uncomfortable." It involves an acceptance of the lack of trauma at the
centre of the subject and the non-existence of any complete, closed
social order.
and the collective will. Finally, we have ultra-politics, where

Performance bad

Abstraction
Privileging performance detracts from substantive action
devolves into theoretical abstraction
Simpson 2 English @ UC Davis (David, Situatedness, Why We

Keep Saying Where Were Coming From, p. 218-221) //AD

The Persistence of Ethics The assertions of belonging that inform
declarations of situatedness can then be read partly as wish fulfillments - for
how else could their reiteration be so effectively ensured? Michael Sandel has specified the potential of the
"multiply-situated" selves that he sees us to be to collapse into "formless, protean, storyless selves, unable
to weave the various strands of their identity into a coherent whole" (Democracy's Discontent, p. 350). The
maximizing of personal opportunities for some is shadowed by the melancholy of a lost or vanishing
community even among those able to profit from flexible subjectification procedures. Others are
presumably consigned to pure insecurity or to the imagined consolations of residual traditional groups of
the sort that tend to go by the name of communities. Such groups as we do belong to or affiliate with are
themselves insecure both as experienced and in their relation to anything identifiable as a general history.
Lukacs may have been one of the last to believe that the "self-understanding" of a group, which was in this
case a class, the proletariat, could also be "simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of
society," so that all conscious furtherance of class-specific aims was also the truth of history (History and
Class Consciousness, p. 149). A more common contemporary experience is the declaration of group
interests as ... group interests, and those of groups to which one only partly or temporarily belongs

the debate over the feminist "standpoint epistemology" that was derived
rapidly acknowledged the problem of there being no visibly
coherent groups, or too many of them, to belong to.20 Postmodern theory can
anyway. So

from Lukacs

sometimes declare itself comfortable enough with the predicament of fractured identity as itself a source
of knowledge and oppositional energy, making a virtue of the condition that so concerns Michael Sandel.

still many of us who punctuate the narrative with regular

declarations of situatedness, obeying an ethical mandate not to be a
mere individual by way of a hoped-for connection with some
interpersonal or impersonal identity-forming principle. Which leads us, at last, to the
matter of ethics, and to a discussion I have withheld until now. What is at work in these
assertions of the determining power of situatedness - positive for Benhabib and
But there are

Sandel, and also for Hollinger when rendered subject to revocable consent-seems to be an instance of
what Glen Newey has described as "the major

project in modern liberalism ... to use ethics to

contain the political." 21 What is actually going on in these addresses to the
current condition, in other words, is an ethics, or an exhortation to certain sorts of ethical
behavior, largely on the part of individuals. What is being said is not that I am in some clearly
explicable sense situated here or there or then or now, but that l should or should not be so situated, in
order to authorize what I am saying as the property of something beyond just myself. And that i n

being
thus situated I am not responsible for what I am saying or doing: the
responsibility is collective. And that in challenging or denying me in what I
affirm or desire, you are opposing not just me but a group that I
represent, which is an unethical thing for you to do. The claims and assumptions
are muddled, even to the point of appearing by some definitions quite unethical (for this is hardly the
Kantian subject doing rigorous justice on itself): notice that it is mostly a virtue to situate oneself but a sort

ethical argument that

often pops up to fill the space abandoned by epistemology: what we
of diminishment or accusation to ask someone else to do the same. But it is

cannot know for sure is supplanted by what we ought to be or do. So in

the Goldhagen case the central hypothesis is about choice: how the Germans could have refused (without
fear of reprisal) to kill Jews, but killed them anyway. In the exposition of the history standards, the gaps in
our knowledge that come from the sheer proliferation of possible knowledges are filled by encouraging
students to make moral choices. The scientism of The Bell Curve hardly conceals its address to the
question of whether we should be in the business of maintaining (racial) preferences. And the Littleton
summit and its ongoing rehearsal have a good deal to do with what we call in the last commonplace
instance family values and community standards. It is for good reasons that Alain Touraine has
characterized us as giving up on "scientism" in favor of a "return to moralism."
22 Touraine himself seems quite happy with this. Notwithstanding his rigorous critique of identity crisis as
a social-historical phenomenon, it is to another such category, that of the creative subject, to which he
turns for solace: "If we are to defend democracy, we must recenter our social and political life on the
personal subject ... hence the growing importance of ethics, which is a secularized form of the appeal to

ethics as a "historically
outmoded system of positioning the individual subject" and as "the sign
of an intent to mystify" by way of the "comfortable simplifications of a
binary myth." 24 These remarks are even more timely now than when they were first recorded, and
Jameson himself has again recently reminded us that ethical speculation is "irredeemably
locked into categories of the individual" and that "the situations in which it
seems to hold sway are necessarily those of homogeneous relations
within a single class." 25 This need not be always and in principle the case, and one would
the subject." 23 It is now twenty years since Fredric Jameson wrote about

hardly wish to discourage attention to questions that are ethical in the broadest sense: questions about
how one should act, how one might best live one's life, how one might limit the damages one does to

ethics for most of

means subjective meditation.26 The return to or persistence
of ethics is a form of what Jameson has called "pastiche," which is "the blank and non-parodic
reprise of older discourse and older conceptuality, the performing of the older
philosophical moves as though they still had a content, the ritual
resolution of 'problems' that have themselves long since become
simulacra, the somnambulistic speech of a subject long since extinct" (p. 99). This could be said too of
the "problem" of the subject that the rhetoric of situatedness is designed both to
repackage and to "resolve." Those of us in the habit of situating
ourselves on a regular basis might stop to investigate the peculiar
feeling of virtue we have as we do so, and ponder whether we have deserved it by any
others. But my very use of the impersonal pronoun here indicates the problem: that
us most of the time

active connection with anything (some of us of course can pass this test, but not all of us). Niklas Luhmann
has written of the tendency whereby ethical prescriptions apply to others rather than to oneself: "One can
formally subject oneself to them, but self-application is not an option because of the lack of any
consequential authority for action." He sees them as symptoms of an "irritation" in the social sphere that

turning
from "cognitive to normative" ethics then becomes itself "an unethical
kind of doping" (pp. 91, 94) whereby one confesses one's own limits - itself
a form of authority ("let me tell you where I am coming from")-only in
order to expose everyone else's. The imperative to situate oneself is
perceived as ethical even as (or perhaps because) it is usually devoid
of critical content and without consequences beyond the moment of
utterance. Meanwhile the ethics of situatedness promises to restore to the
individual a satisfaction that in its profound loneliness it can no longer derive
can only take the form of pure "communication" (Observations on Modernity, p. 78). In its

from the metaphysics of individuality itself.

Queer Theory K

1NC Ruffolo
Queer theory has reached its peak its supposedly radical
opposition to binaries has created a dyad wherein queerness is
meant to challenge heteronormativity. This binaristic
opposition stagnates queer theory and precludes its fluid
potential

Ruffolo, 9 - professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

University of Toronto (David, Post Queer Politics Department of Theory and
Policy Studies in Education)//jml
Queer has reached a political peak. Its theoretical movements have
become limited by its incessant investment in identity politics and its
political outlook has in many ways attained dormant status due to its narrowed interest in
heteronormativite. This is, of course, not to suggest the end of queer but instead a
potential deterritorialization of queer as we know it today . Over the past
two decades, a significant body of work has contributed to what is referred to as queer studies. Queer
theorizations are at the heart of this anti-canonical genre where the
intersection of bodies, identities, and cultures continue to be a
central focus.1 Although queer theory informs much of this work vis-vis the queering of theory and the theories of queer, important feminist,
postcolonial, and ability theorizations have more recently informed
the body of queer studies. So while I consider queer studies and theories to be
interconnected (and at times interchangeable), the theoretical and philosophical movements of queer

What remains consistent

amongst these various theorizations, however, is a shared politics
embedded in significations, representations, and identifications
where language has become somewhat of a unified trajectory for
thinking through experience. These important works without question continue to offer
studies are certainly not restricted to or by queer theories.

many insightful ways to account for the intersection of bodies, institutions, cultural practices, social
traditions, political movements, and economic initiatives. Michael Warners introduction of
heteronormativiy in the early 1990s monumentally framed the ways in which we think about how subjects
are subjected to the normative discourses of heterosexuality and in doing so created the important spaces

As a result of this and many other

significant contributions, queer theory has become almost
exclusively interested in challenging heteronormative ideologies by
to challenge and reimagine these productivities.2

examining and exposing how subjects come into being through discursive interactions. It offers a critical

Most
notable, perhaps, is bringing to light how subjects become
intelligible through binary identity categories such as male/ female,
masculine/feminine, and straight/gay.3 It queersdisturbs, disrupts,
and centerswhat is considered normal in order to explore
possibilities outside of patriarchal, hierarchical, and
heteronormative discursive practices. We see this, for instance, in the works of Butler
politics for thinking about how subjects are constituted through heteronormative discourses.

(1990), Fuss (1995), and Mufloz (1999) as they explore a shift from identities to (dis)identifications. I
outline elsewhere (Ruffolo 2006a) how such readings confront binary identities so as to appreciate third
spaces: fixed and stable identities are reconfigured as mobile and fluid identifications, where the I is no

Queer theory
critically redefines the relationships amongst bodies, identities, and
longer determined by the Other but is discursively negotiated through others.

culture through a particular commitment to subjectivity as seen

through significations, representations, and identifications . The vigor of
queer is its commitment to disrupt ideologies, practices, concepts, values, and assumptions that are
essentially normal in order to expose what is normatively essentialized. Having said this, what, you might
ask, are my post-queer intentions? In the Fall-Winter 2005 issue of Social Text, David Eng, Judith
Halberstam, and Jos Esteban Munoz ask a necessary question of queer studies today: Whats queer
about queer studies now?4 In the introduction, Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz provide an overview of queer
that sets a foundation for my critique of queer: Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It
was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male
or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to
interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and
sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple
social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. (1)

By

asking the question whats queer about queer studies no this edition
explores the purpose and value of queer in a time of global
economics marked by a post-9/ 11 politics embedded in war and
terror. It offers a critical comparison between the broad social concerns of queer studies in the past
with the more intensely interconnected focus of queer studies in the presentwork interested in theories
of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of
diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics (2). PostQueer Politics engages Eng, Halberstam, and Munozs call for a renewed queer studies by taking into

It is
well known that queer theory is interested in challenging binaries
through an interrogation of heteronormative practices using queer
as a verb (a radical process of disruption) rather than a noun (an umbrella term encompassing
consideration the various interconnections amongst the wide range of contributors of this edition.

multiple identities). My introductory comments on the peaking of queer are situated in this relationship

that the
queer/heteronormativity dualism is unproductive considering the
contemporary complexities of neoliberal capitalism and globalization.
PostQueer Politics is primarily interested in challenging the queer/heteronormative dyad
that has informed much of the theorizations of queer and the queering
of theories over the past few decades. I consider the peaking of
queer as a plateau that negotiates contemporary queer theories and
post-queer theorizations. Post-Queer Politics is interested in examining the current politics of
between queer and heteronormativity. I make the argument here and throughout this book

queer and the queering of politics through a renewed sense of queer that is differentiated from queers
current implications in subjecdvity Its vision is twofold: to consider what something post might do for queer
and what queer might do for something post. I am interested in the doings of post-queer rather than the
beings of it so as to avoid unnecessary binaries that have resulted in the current desire for something post.

This project is about the politics around post- and queer rather
than a post-identitarian landscape that would situate post- and
queer as binaries. Despite my explicit intention to avoid a reading of post- as a definitive
time and space that come after something, I must draw a somewhat stark delineation here: the post- of
post-queer is in many respects post-subjectivity. I say this not because queer is subjectivity and post-queer

in the plateaus
that follow, notions of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and dialogism (Bakhtin)
can speak to the creativities and potentialities of contemporary
politics that can not be accounted for in the representations,
significations, and identifications inherent to subjectivity . I am
therefore not suggesting that post-queer comes after subjectivity
but that it functions within a creative terrain of potentialities that
functions quite differently from subjectivity of which the queer/
heteronormative dyad is a part of. In other words, the current politics of
is not. This, of course, would produce an unnecessary binary. Rather, as I will argue

queer, as seen through its relations to subjectivity, are limiting for the future of
queer studies because of its unequivocal commitment to the
queer/heteronormative binary where the politics of such discourses
are restricted by the endless cycle of significations that reposition
subjects on fixed planesbodies that are either resituated in
predetermined significations (moving from one identity category/ norm to another) or
are represented through differentiated significations (new representations
that differ from already emerged significations). My use of bodies extends beyond the
ways in which queer theories think about the body, embodiment,
corporeality, and flesh in terms of subjectivity where, for instance, movement is often accounted for

These readings more often than not limit bodies to

physical or abstract binary representations. Consequently, my use of
bodies reaches the virtualities of politics through a consideration
of bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, institutional
bodies, bodies of thought, systemic bodies, and cultural bodies. I am
through resignifications.

not so much arguing for the desire to maintain or favor the terms body and bodies, but instead to
challenge how these terms are read through significations, representations, and identifications and
therefore the overall privileging of subjectivity.

Our alternative is a deterritorialization of politics this is not

an a priori opposition to any structure but rather creates new
lines of flight to escape the affirmatives territorialization of
identity

Ruffolo, 9 - professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

University of Toronto (David, Post Queer Politics Department of Theory and
Policy Studies in Education)//jml
Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather
than inwards. The continuous flows of dialogical-becomings- -_-the
indefinite breaks and connectionsare always moving forward where something
new is always created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject
that is directed inwards, rhizomatic dialogical-becomings are always
deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of becoming a
body without organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines
described above persistently strive to become a BwO as their
connections try to reach pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to
consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogical-becomings. It does not encapsulate desiring-

The BwO is a
fundamental aspect of post- queer politics because it speaks to the
production of intensities that emerge when the flows of desiringmachines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or binary
oppositions. They offer an important strategy for contemporary
politics because they do not directly oppose a structure (such as the
queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system through
creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer and post-queer). We can think of the
BwO as a limit that continuously seeks to deterritorialize without
ever reterritorializing (even though, as you will see belo reterritorializations are often coupled
with deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: Think of the body without organs
machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines.

as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in
its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential,
or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on the way from one determinate
state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as
virmality but a lower level of virtuality, because only the potential
states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the
next are effectively superposed in the threshold state . (1992, 70) The
BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is instead in
a constant tension with them. The term itselfBody without Organs
is not in opposition to the organism . It is against what the organism
stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all
meaning refers back to a central core and all movement corresponds with a central tendency. The
BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but also
works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does
not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and connections) but desires continuous flows.
Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language structures or discursive

the BwO is pure intensity: The body without organs is

nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in
realms,

the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body
without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains

it has nothing whatsoever to do with

the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without
an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced,
in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the
process of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8) We can think of the BwO
as a plane of immanence rather than stratification.3 It may seem as if
of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection;

desiring-machines and BwO are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same

It is
through the tension that they share that every production becomes
an anti-production because dialogical-becomings, for instance, can
not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines and are unable to
fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are schizo. Capital is perhaps the
most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is the becoming-BwO of
capitalism that creates the illusion that everything is produced
through it. Although capital can be transformed into something concrete (i.e., money can purchase
principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the productions of productions of life.

goods) it can not do anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the desire for a

the BwO deterritorializes the

organization of capitalism by opting for flows and smooth spaces. The
BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines:

capitalist machine transforms desiring- machines into BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that
plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the
decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs (35). The capitalist-schizo
becomes the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO is
unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: You

never reach the Body

without Organs, you cant reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is
a limit (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened awareness of the self, nor is it a fully
embodied self. Unlike in significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at
all. In fact, the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity. The tension
between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations) works within a different
realm than, say, the subjective limits of identities categories where subjects become intelligible through
their associations with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and BwO is pure difference. The

intensities involved in such a relationship are before the coding structures of subjectivity that stratify

It is the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer

politics so creative because they challenge the structured
organization of organs and biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines
subjects.

and BwO offer a new language for thinking about life itself without reducing the experiences of such

The creativity of post-queer dialogicalbecomings rests in the potential to deterritorialize stratified

structures that limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO
existing prior to the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis and discursive norms, this
certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer
strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for through
representations, significations, and identifications. We can, for example,
think of the various codings of subjectivity that have permeated
identity politics and subsequently the queer/heteronormative dyad
as territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO .
Stratifications, or strata, take hold of intensities by territorializing them.
For instance, they appropriate the BwOs flows of pure difference by
organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms.
The strata codes and territorializes such becomings but the BwO
constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations.
Despite queers interest in a politics of identity that seeks to
consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these movements can never
escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are
always in relation to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization
relationships to the stratification of language.

of bodies that are directed inwards. Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think
through the territorializations of the queer/heteronormative dyad: the organism, signifiance, and sub
jectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signiflance and interpretation, and the point of
subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body
otherwise youre just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpretedotherwise
youre just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a
subject of the statementotherwise youre just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes
disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the
operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving,
even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
159) This call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just get rid of the subject or cut the body
from stratification. We recall from above that the

BwO and all its intensities comes

before the subject and the organization of the body as an organism
and so a politics of becoming calls for a return to these productive
flows of desire: opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits,
conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and

Post-queer dialogicalbecomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that

territorialize life through significations, representations, and
identifications. This project is but one line of flight that can plateau subjugated sub jectivities. Its
intent is to map various intensities so as to smooth these
assemblages by moving towards a plane of immanence. The first
step is to identify the strata involved and then consider the
assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the organism codes
an aboreal life by creating various assemblages that define what it
means to be human; sigmflance codes meaning through discourse where language has
deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor (160).

become the primary means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding

them through social norms. The purpose of this is to locate flows of intensitiesnot by discovering a BwO

The
queer/heteronormativity dyad has resulted in an arboreal dyad . The
extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that supports the whole tree. The
queer/heteronorrnative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge
from it. Post-queer rhizomatic politics, in contrast, do not strictly
move or extend from a main root such as the queer/heteronormative
dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by
plateauing it through its rhizomatic connections that can spout from
any point. The arboreal organization of queer/heteronormativity
prohibits a politics of becoming because movement stops when
there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words, the
queer/heteronormative dyad halts queer politics when the politics of
queer is predominantly concerned with disrupting heteronormative
structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing
politics itself rather than opposing an a priori structure. This project is one
line of flight amongst many that can remap contemporary politics as we know it today. Despite
queers keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through
mobilities and fluidities, its politics can only go so far because of its
arboreal references to heteronormativity. Let me be clear that I am not
demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata
for, as we recall from above, this can result in further
territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I
disputing the important developments that queer politics have made. I am instead calling for
the production of different lines of flight and new assemblages that
can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural
organizations.
but by creating one in the process of deterritorializing the strata.

Munoz
Queerness is not something one can necessarily be rather, it
is an ideality that propels us into a positive future

Muoz, 9 professor and chair of performance studies at NYU (Jos

Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity)//jml
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are
not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet
queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the
past and used to imagine a future. The future is queernesss domain.
Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that
allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here
and now is a prison house. We must strive in the past of the here and nows totalizing rendering of reality
to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we
must never settle for minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways

Queerness is a longing that propels

us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the
present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is
not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse
the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the
aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially, the queer aesthetic, frequently contains
blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity . Both the ornamental
and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turing to the aesthetic
in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social
realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations.
Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but
a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about
the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or
concrete possibility for another world.
of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.

Signifiers bad

1NC
The affirmatives identification with specific identity categories
paradoxically reinforces the dominance of existing power
structures race and gender are not pre-determined but
instead are social constructs rather than building identities
around these constructs we should interrogate the existence
of those categories in the first place
BatTzedek 99 MFA in poetry at Drew University, Feminist critic and activist
(Elliot, Identity Politics and Racism: Some Thoughts and Questions, Rain
and Thunder Issue #5, Winter Solstice 1999, http://www.feministreprise.org/docs/iprace.htm) //RGP
II) Identity Politics: Structural Flaws Yet--and a very large "yet" it is-from here and now, my mid-30's in the

Identity Politics (at least the versions I learned and lived within): we
messed up, at the beginning, first by choosing to reify identities as
they were already defined in the world, and then by describing these
identities as if they were inherent to us in some way instead of as
descriptions of positions within extremely hierarchical, preexisting
social structures of power. "Woman," for example, was one of the main identities of IP, as a
late 90's, I know this about

statement of biology. "Of color" was another main category, with groups dividing around the racial
categories recognized within the US. at the time,

as if those categories were physical

features and not a colonial classification system. "Class" was another group,
although its boundaries were never as tightly guarded because it couldn't be treated only as a physical or
inherited "true" self. "Jewish" was a group; "Muslim" should have been, too, as people "oppressed by the
tyranny of X-tianity," but there was only silence around the different but overlapping categories of Muslim
and Arab women.(3) "Lesbian," as opposed to "heterosexual," was the other main identity of Feminist IP,
although not until after years of skirmishes around defining "lesbian" as a statement of feminist politics,
when it settled into being a "sexual orientation" or a "sexual identity" determined in early childhood or at

So what was wrong with these categories, since all of them do

describe who we are in the world? What they describe are places
within a broader society which, at its very foundation, uses gender
and racial categories to establish and maintain a small powerful
elite. The problem with them is that simply restating the categories ignores the
deeper truth that all of these categories are a creation and
expression of social power. Race and gender aren't pre-existing
reality; they are socially constructed categories.(4) By choosing to
build identities around these constructions instead of choosing to
attack the ways the categories had been constructed, IP from the outset
seemed destined to be more concerned with establishing new
boundaries than with eliminating the establishment . From this initial
choice has grown years of skirmishes around defining those preestablished categories. If you've worked within Feminist and Lesbian groups, you know what
birth.

I'm talking about. Who exactly is or isn't a woman of color? Are Jewish women "of color," or are we white?
Is a woman with a Latina mother and white father, who was raised as white in a white world with no Latina

these questions felt

like life and death issues, felt like we were defending thin
boundaries of Radicalness. But looking back, I have to ask what ultimate change was served
culture an "authentic" woman of color? And on, and on, and on. Within IP,

by dividing into "white" and "of color" when the social meaning of "white" was rarely explored, and both
identities were treated as if they were actually about the color of skin? (5)

Imagine, instead, if we

had taken all that insight and work and decided to explode "race" as
a category. Not to ignore it, to be "color-blind," but to no longer
honor definitions that grew from and continue to uphold colonialism ?
(6) What if we had been doing thousands of workshops that went
beyond saying that racism is learned to saying that race itself is
learned? What if we pushed white people not only to try to stop being racist, but to try to stop being
white, to actively become race resistors and race traitors? But Identity Politics wasn't
willing to say that race itself either is learned or is a social
construction. Activists within the world of IP relied instead on seeing race, gender, and
other identities as inherent, immutable categories from which to
wage a battle for a place at the table of power in broader U.S.
society. Even groups that were mainly or entirely Separatist from their onset used this understanding,
because, I think, it was the most successful strategy anyone had seen in a long time. Such a position was a

granted a position from which to fight

while taking away our best weapons - questions. As long as we could ask
strong base for fighting, but in the end,

questions about how power around us was constructed, we stood a chance of cracking open the

after we began to think of our social positions as

identities that were "real" or "'inherent," the question of how they
were built, or why, became unnecessary, maybe even unthinkable. Once
Identity Politics became the organizing structure of our social
change groups and communities, the question of how whiteness
could be taken apart all but disappeared. Anyone reading this knows without
foundation. But

thinking about it that racism is learned, and can cite at least a hundred racially offensive words, phrases,
or ideas, but could we, together, list more than five things we might do to actually stop Whiteness? I know
that Rain and Thunder, like other Feminist journals, is likely to get few or no articles in response to their
call for contributions for an issue about fighting racism. Our entire dialogue around racism has become
anthologies of women writing almost exclusively about individual racist words or actions directed at them.
These are valuable, both for the women writing for them and for those of us who are always struggling to
understand more about racism's details and women's lives. But the profusion of detail should not be
confused with having new ideas about what to do. Another important problem created by Identity Politics

If we were going to argue that social

categories of race and gender were inherent identities, what in the
world were we going to do about maleness, whiteness,
heterosexuality? To talk about these "identities" within the framework of IP would be to say either:
was what to do with "oppressor" categories.

1) those people were also born that way, inherently flawed or 2) those people were not born that way. The
first option wasn't going to work 100%, because then the ultimate answer to social wrongs would be to get

for those of us who like to

fantasize about a world without men, this answer was too genocidal,
too ugly, and too simplistic. For those of us who are white feminists, this argument was
rid of all of the members of certain categories. Even

particularly ironic, unless we actually believed that only white men ever benefited from racism and that it
would die with them, thus preventing us from being the next on the list to be destroyed in the name of
ending oppression. The second option would, of course, lead to revealing IP identities as socially
constructed, undermining the very base IP was built on. Because either option would lead to uncomfortable
questions, I think that IP simply chose not to engage with these "oppressor" identities at all.(7)

In the

years that Identity Politics was being constructed, white men

dropped out of political activism in droves, and white women either
invested heavily in a universal view of womanhood or choose to talk
about themselves only as victims of gender oppression .

This investment in the signifiers of [x identity] versus [y

identity] is an essentialist categorization that is pre-condition
for domination
Newman 1 British political theorist and central post-anarchist thinker (Saul,
From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, p.
3-4)
Essentialist
ideas seem to govern our political and social reality. Individuals are
pinned down within an identity that is seen as true or natural.
Essentialist identities limit the individual, constructing his or her
reality around certain norms, and closing off the possibilities of
change and becoming. There is, moreover, a whole series of institutional
practices which dominate the individual in a multitude of ways, and
which are brought into play by essentialist logics. One has only to
look at the way in which social and family welfare agencies and
correctional institutions operate to see this. The identity of the
delinquent, welfare dependent, or unfit parent is carefully
constructed as the essence of the individual, and the individual is
regulated, according to this essential identity, by a whole series of
rational and moral norms. The changes that have taken place on a global scale seem only to
have denied the individual the possibility of real change. Not only does essentialist
thinking limit the individual to certain prescribed norms of morality
and behavior, it also excludes identities and modes of behavior
which do not conform to these norms. They are categorized as
unnatural or perverse, as somehow other and they are
persecuted according to the norms they transgress. The logic of
essentialism produces an oppositional thinking, from which binary
hierarchies are constructed: normal/abnormal, sane/insane,
hetero/homosexual, etc. This domination does not only refer to individuals who fall outside
However, the problem of essentialism is broader than the problem of nationalism.

the category of the norm [homosexuals, drug addicts, delinquents, the insane, etc]; it is also suffered by
those for whom certain fragments of their identityfor identity is never a complete thingwould be

We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, under

this tyranny of normality, this discourse of domination which insists
that we all have an essential identity and that that is what we are. We
condemned as abnormal.

must not think, though, that this domination is entirely forced upon us. While this is no doubt true to a
certain extentthink of prisons, mental institutions, the army, hospitals, the workplace an

essentialist identity is also something that we often willingly submit

to. This mode of power cannot operate without our consent, without
our desire to be dominated. So not only will this discussion examine the domination
involved in essentialist discourses and identitiesthe way they support institutions such as the state and

we participate in our own

domination. The problem of essentialism is the political problem of
our time. To say that the personal is the political, clichd and hackneyed though
it is, is merely to say that the way we have been constituted as
subjects, based on essentialist premises, is a political issue. There is
really nothing radical in this. But it is still a question that must be addressed.
Essentialism, along with the universal, totalizing politics it entails, is the modern place of power. Or
the prison for exampleit will also look at the ways in which

is something around which the logic of the place of power is

constituted. It will be one of the purposes of this discussion to show how essentialist
ideas, even in revolutionary philosophies like anarchism, often reproduce
the very domination they claim to oppose. Modern power functions
through essentialist identities, and so essentialist ideas are
something to be avoided if genuine forms of resistance are to be
constructed and if genuine change is to be permitted. The changes
of recent times, dramatic as they were, were still tied to these
essentialist ways of thinking, particularly with regard to national
identity, and to forms of political sovereignty like the state . They did not
at least, it

at all challenge or disrupt these categories, often only further embedding them in political discourse and
social reality.

This use of geo-paradigmatic borders results in racial and

sexual purging the failure of identity politics is attributed to
scapegoats that are endlessly excluded in order palliate the
desire for change
BatTzedek 99 MFA in poetry at Drew University, Feminist critic and activist
(Elliot, Identity Politics and Racism: Some Thoughts and Questions, Rain
and Thunder Issue #5, Winter Solstice 1999, http://www.feministreprise.org/docs/iprace.htm) //RGP
VI) What all of this has taught me about how NOT to deal with oppression There are many kinds of
boundaries around groups. Some are physical: our land goes from the mountain to the river. Some are

With the arrival of the

nation-state, boundaries became geo-political: invented lines on
maps which states enforced with armies. Without state power, nor a common
culture, nor physical boundaries, Identity Politics used what I call geo-paradigmatic
borders, ideology-based but still clear and enforced boundaries
around groups which are defined by their political and theoretical
approaches. These new boundaries were built upon the pre-existing
chaos of our lived experience of identity: a crossroads of social meaning, personal
meaning, personal and social history, and spiritual, emotional and theoretical understandings. Having
boundaries tidied the chaos, gave us a clear sense of purpose and a
way to tell "us" from "them." As Douglas explains, "Rituals of purity and impurity create
cultural: our people are the ones who dress and speak like us.

unity in experience ... [I]deas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have
as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience." Out of the chaos of our lives
rose answers based in our experience, explanations for what happens to us, suggestions for gaining our

this process of separating came with a strong need

to defend boundaries, for two reasons: 1)the chosen identity categories
really aren't inherent, but are built on the lies of existing social
power, and 2) many of the identities were mainly defined by what
they were not, so didn't have a strong center. Because these underlying,
own kinds of power. But

organizing structures were not to be spoken of, calling them into question in any way was sure to invoke

all challenges and transgressions

were met with intense boundary-setting and defending, including
separating out and/or purging those seen as a threat. This drive
pollution behavior. As part of this pollution behavior,

toward purity and punishment almost always happened in the name

of addressing "oppression," of eliminating 'bad" knowledge and
attitudes and replacing them with the "truth" which would , as the saying
goes, set us free. But is achieving ideological purity and conforming within well-defended boundaries
the same thing as having equality and freedom? Did all of our purging of "oppressive"
people and ideas change anything? From the window into my own culture offered by
considering pollution behavior, I've been thinking about how I've seen charges of being "oppressive"

tension builds
within the group, sometimes around an actual problem, but usually , I
think, around leadership and position within the group pecking order .
Everyone in the group has the feeling that something is wrong. Then someone who either has
power within the group or is trying to gain power names the
problem. Within Leftist/Feminist IP groups, the problem is often identified as
"racism." Racism is, after all, an easy target because the effects of racism are always present,
function within IP groups. This is the scenario played out time and time again:

because theorists of color have worked so hard to make visible its working, and because we do honestly

classism, anti-Semitism, ageism, etc also

no matter the charge, whether or not it is taken seriously
is more about the social status of the accuser within the group than
about the presence or absence of discrimination. Now, sometimes, when the
want to be anti-racist. Of course, charges of
work. However,

charge is leveled, the point is to actually describe and interrupt racism or classism, or whatever the
problem at hand is. When this is the case, and the accusation isn't about defining personal or group power,
positive change can actually happen. I saw this in effect at the "Intersections and Parallels" anti-racism
conference in Iowa in the late 80's, when the established social norm was that we would all make mistakes,
and that doing so did not prove you weren't dedicated to ending racism. In this setting, I watched as a
Jewish daughter of immigrants sang the song 'We all came over on different boats, but we're on the same
boat now," and Native women raised a completely justified complaint. Because there was no power to be
gained by purging anyone, the singer had social space to say, "You're absolutely right. I hadn't thought
about," the Native women had a chance to educate everyone, and no one left the conference in tears only
to be written up in national Feminist press as a "danger to Feminists." However - and this is a BIG However

too often these rituals are about establishing or maintaining power

within a group. Often, the exact nature of what "racist" thing has
happened is not clear. Or, if it is, the "degree" of the problem becomes
defined by how much status the accuser has in the group; not all women of
-

color are granted equal authenticity, so some can stop a festival with a sentence, while others are simply
ignored. Regardless,

it is not the clarity of oppression that matters, but

rather the sheer fact that the "problem" has been named at all . If the
charge is granted power, the group must act to fix the problem; members must choose a path, either
changing something within the group or within group members, or by identifying the source of the "threat"

some
marginal person-someone who never quite "fit" in the group anywayor some outsider, is identified as the "racist" one and is publicly
purged. "Ah, triumph" the group then sighs with relief, "see, we've
addressed racism!" Or, if the accuser doesn't have power within the group, she herself is
and purging it. The former can happen, bringing real change. But usually the latter happens;

purged, as a way of "proving" that the accusation wasn't real. Sheer pollution behavior, this is. If all of this

we
have endless re-enactions of the scapegoat ritual, except that in this actual
ritual, the group members knew that they were putting their "sins"
onto the goat and sending it into the wilderness; they didn't pretend that the
goat itself was the source of "sin" in the community. Within the boundary-defending
war games of IP, where our social group is our inherent identity, it is
far too easy to confuse the "sins" and the goat. This confusion has cost us
purging was ever actually about solving the problem of racism, it would be long since solved. Instead

precious time, over and over again, as we've used pollution rituals to make the group feel better without

Purging has
actually kept us, time and time again from being able to challenge
oppression and exploitation by focusing on one person's "bad" words
or action instead of asking questions about power. Purging has also cost us our
actually addressing racism or race, or age, or ability, or economic privilege.

most precious resource--women of good intention who actually do want a different, more just world. The
point of a purging ritual as we've enacted it is not only to make the group feel clean, but to make the
"guilty" party believe in her guilt. If, for example, a lesbian group could only get Susie to admit that she
was, in fact horribly oppressive and would leave for the good of the group, then the lesbians who remain
never have to question themselves about their relationship to oppression or their role in banishing Susie.
She admitted to the charge, so off with her head and everything is peachy again.(11) Getting someone to
confess and withdraw is the ultimate signal that pollution behavior is in full force for, as Douglas writes:
"Pollution rules, by contrast with moral rules are unequivocal. They do not depend on intention or a nice
balancing of rights and duties. The only material question is whether a forbidden contact has taken place
or not."(12) If Susie confesses to being oppressive, the problem of "oppression" is solved, clearly and
absolutely, with no left-over, messy issues of intention or meaning. "A polluted person" Douglas writes, "is
always in the wrong." Even if she doesn't confess, a public campaign against her can work to convince
everyone that she is the source of the pollution, so that no one has to look any further upstream. Once
Susie has been identified and purged, she is gone forever, there is no way for her to become "ritually pure"
again. This is another function of IP's denial that it is engaging in pollution behavior. In societies with
conscious pollution rituals, there were clear rules for how the ritually impure person could re-enter. Within
Hebrew tribal laws as described in Leviticus, for example, people who had become impure would wait
outside of the camp until nightfall (that is, the beginning of a new day by the Hebrew calendar), do ritual
cleansing with water, and then return, understood by all to no longer be polluted. Within our Feminist and
Lesbian communities, where we leave all of this unspoken, there is no way back in for Susie once she's
been labeled as racist or classist or ableist. Her status of polluted will follow her from community to
community, long after anyone cares to remember what happened, as if she personally had the power to
bring social, economic, and spiritual oppression to any place she enters. Nothing she has ever done, or will
ever do, to bring justice into the world will matter to her status as impure. And so we have lost women,
one at a time or in groups, sending them into the wilderness bearing what should be our responsibilities.
We've done this for years, then we wonder why there are so few of us left in "the fight," blaming those who
are gone for having "sold out." VII) And in Conclusion, as such.... So, where does all of this leave us? I don't
have a solution to offer, clear actions to take. I see a direction to go, toward more action and less searching

We have to start scheming about how to disrupt the

meaning AND power of Whiteness; we have to figure out how to be at least as
courageous in the face of white as we have been in the face of male. We need to become
deeply focused on how we think and talk about race and other
oppression: do we understand difference and privilege as a source of
inevitable conflict, or do we see the chance to learn something new,
to work together with other wonderful creative women to find new pathways out
of the trap of who we were raised to be? For those of us who are white-are we willing,
for a purity of form.

in the name of forming bonds across divides of race or class or age, to be in spaces with women who don't
share all of our answers or opinions, or will we roll our eyes, laugh to one another about them, or feel the

what I'm asking, as

much of myself as of anyone else, is whether we're willing, finally, to
let our dream of a just and safe world be bigger than the little
kingdoms of our identities. And, if we are willing to do this, can we do
so in a way that has nothing to do with feeling ourselves
compromised and everything to do with a life of integrity .
need to "confront" them about their use of word X or image Y? Maybe

Vote negative to endorse a mode of subjectivity that is no

longer tied to identity categories

Bryant 14 professor at Collin College (Levi, Three Models of the

Subject, 1/16/2014, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/threemodels-of-the-subject/#more-7537)
the category of subject has shifted register.
Subject is no longer thought primarily as an epistemological
category, as a knower, but as a political category. The negative thought of the
In these discussions, its clear that

subject, the subject that must be deconstructed, is here a site of illusion where we mistake ourselves
for sovereign agents possessed of an essence (as man or woman or African-American or straight or gay,
etc) that fails to recognize how, even in the exercise of its alleged agency, it is in fact enslaved; an effect
of power, a subjected being, that is both trapped in a prison of social forces it does not recognize and that
actually contributes to the reinforcement of the iron threads of this spider web of power through enacting
these impersonal scripts. Subject must here be deconstructed so as to reveal the real mechanisms of
power so that genuine emancipation rather than illusory emancipation might be possible. Alternative ly,
following Heidegger, subject is a figure of mastery and domination that subjugates being and persons,
enframing them so as to transform them into beings of standing-reserve available for further control
and mastery. Subject here must be deconstructed to put an end to this nihilistic and destructive will to
power premised on mastery. In the

contemporary wave of thought, subject

is once again

a political rather than epistemological category, but is now conceived in positive terms.
Exemplified by the work of thinkers such as Zizek, Badiou, Johnston, perhaps Ranciere, and a number of

subject is now no longer an illusion and an effect, but is rather a site of truth,
signifying the possibility of emancipation, functioning as the seat of
agency, and marking the condition for the possibility of rupture with
oppressive systems. In the Enlightenment frame, subject is the site
of the problem of knowledge. In the post-structuralist frame, subject is the site of the
others,

problem of the site of subjugation arising as a result of something akin to ideological misrecognition. In

subject is the site of the problem of emancipation. If

our identities are formed through anonymous social forces that exceed
the contemporary phase,

any individual agency whether in the form of power as conceived by Foucault, ideology as conceived by
Althusser, the cultural structures of language or economy or something else besides, then how as any

If the very stuff that we are is formed by these social

forces, how does our agency do anything but reproduce these very
structures of subjugation? I italicize identities above advisedly, for the desuturing of the
emancipation possible?

equivalence between subject and identity is the key move of contemporary political thought regarding the

Subject will no longer denote an identity, a substance, but rather denotes that
which breaks with any identity and which is therefore a capacity to
break with technologies of subjectivization. Setting aside the Enlightenment
subject.

conception of subject as seat of the problem of knowledge, we thus get two distinct concepts of subject: 1)
The Post-Structuralist Concept of Subject: Subject is an identity, a series of different identities, produced by
social forces that mistakes itself for being a seat of agency and believes that it has an essence as man,
woman, white, black, straight, gay, etc.; when, in fact, this agency is an effect of an impersonal social
agency of subjugation. Subject therefore must be deconstructed if we are to get at the real sources of
subjugation and not merely reproduce these forces. But who does this if we are but an effect of these
social forces. Ergo 2) The Contemporary Concept of Subject: Subject names, like the number zero, that
which is non-identical to itself a sort of void, emptiness, or negativity for which no predicates (of identity)
ever fully lodge, for which every predicate of identity is a sort of dishonesty or lie. We could call this
subject the Lacano-Sartrean-Hegelian concept of subject (I realize many will object to including Sartre in
this series, but as my good friend Noah Horwitz once observed to me, theres a way in which the Zizekian
subject is a sort of crypto-Sartrean or existential subject). This is the subject for whom the epithet I am
what I am not and I am not what I am holds. I am not the predicates with which I identify e.g., if I say I
am depressed theres already a sort of bad faith or dishonesty in this self-description yet I am also these
very predicates. I am the perpetual inability to be what I take myself to be and to not be this. Subject then
names something that is in excess of all predication, something off of which all predicates slide, and

therefore something for which there is never any substantiality. In short, subject is the intrinsic failure of all

subject is a sort of void

or nothingness, that nonetheless can be marked or that has a sort
of quasi-being. Subject would thus also be a name for the ineluctable
failure of every technology of subjectivization precisely because
predicates of subjugation necessarily fail (as Miller tries to demonstrate in his own
way in Suture). In response to the post-structuralist question of who
deconstructs the subject of identity (subject^i), the contemporary phase
of thought seems to say no-thing and no-one. Yet this nothing and
noone is nonetheless marked, is nonetheless an excess, that marks
the ruin of any identity, interpellation, subjectivization, or
predication opening a space of resistance and and contestation
where emancipation might be possible. Subject as void (subject^v)
becomes the site of freedom, resistance, agency. It marks the space
of an agency that is not overdetermined by the field of social
structure, social forces, or power, precisely because it is that which
necessarily evades all of these forces and technologies; precisely
because it is that which is in excess of all subjectivization .
identity as discussed by the post-structuralists. And for this reason,

Binaries link
Returning to bodily marks to understand identity creates a
binaristic opposition between different forms of identity that
reproduces violence

Hsaio, 10 - Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National

Taiwan University, Taiwan (Li Chun, Color (Un)conscious: Psychoanalysis,
Resistance, and the Specter/Spectacle of Race* Concentric: Literary and
Cultural Studies 36.1 159-187)//jml
As mentioned above, Fanons excruciating self-analysis of the racial drama played out throughout Black Skin, White
Masks, particularly in the chapter titled The Fact of Blackness, reveals that the radical intellectual and revolutionary is
more profoundly petrified by the biological fact of his blackness, as an immutable work of nature, upon finding himself
rendered a spectacle of blackness under the white gaze, than he is by the idea that others have of me, which is to say
those myths of white supremacy and black inferiority that he may judge to have been sufficiently challenged and
debunked through his work and actions. It is an impasse that extends well beyond the sight of his immediate presence
under white eyes and leaves virtually no sign of escaping, as Fanon recounts: When people like me, they tell me it is in
spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the
infernal circle (116). Without trivializing the anguish Fanon and any black person of his time (or even in our time) must
have experienced under a racist gaze, nor taking lightly the extreme difficulty in coping with such a visual violence, I
would nonetheless elaborate on the theoretical implications of psychoanalysis that have been misrecognized by Fanon or
might not have been available to him in his efforts of understanding race and racism in psychoanalytical terms. In the

Fanon derives from Lacans notion of the mirror

stage an image of the Other which is caught up in the Manichean
black/white opposition. If the Other for the white has to be the black ,
and vice versa, and if otherness is to be perceived and accentuated on the
level of the body image which demonstrates the absolute incommensurability and unassimilability of
the terms of the duality (black vs. white), then this conception of the Other can be
faulted, on Lacanian grounds, by its positing an all-too-concrete Other, one that lacks
the enigma of the Other, namely, the lack in the Other which is the necessary
precondition for the constitution of the subject. Pervasive in the racial drama
long footnote quoted earlier,

depicted by Fanon is the omnipresent gaze of the Other, understandably conceived as white, from whose confirmation of

Yet in Lacanian theory, the gaze of the Other is

not the all-seeing, panoptical perspective that film theory, as Joan Copjec points out,
misrecognizes and appropriates by reading Foucault into Lacan (see Chapters 1 and 2 of Read My
Desire). The gaze, as established earlier, is the problematic object of race (objet a) that
enables the regime of visibility by its localization in a series of bodily
marks. If the gaze is cast by the omniscient, panoptical Other, forestalling
every sign of resistance and defining the meaning of the subjects each move, then the fate of the
raced subject is either to identify with and thus coincide with the
gaze, or to assume a total alienation of the raced subject from its
Other. The theoretical consequence of both scenarios is the
annihilation of the subject. Based on Lacans well-known formulations in the second section of
Seminar XI (entitled Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a), Copjec elucidates that the Lacanian gaze is the
point (in the field of vision) at which something appears to be invisible ..
something appears to be missing from representation. This point of
the gaze marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable
point, not . . . because it figures an unrealizable ideal but because it
indicates an impossible real (Read 34-35; original italics). Not only can the
subject not occupy nor be located at the point of the gaze which would spell
its very annihilation (Read 35)but the Other does not possess the gaze either. For
the fact of blackness Fanon suffers.

the horrible truth revealed in Lacans anecdotal telling of his personal encounter with a character named Petit-Jean

(Seminar XI 95), as well as his theoretical speculations on the gaze, is that the gaze does not see you (Copjec 36).

Contrary to the panoptical gaze of the Other who is supposed to know, who is posited
by the subject as consisting in certainties, determinants, and sources of confirmation, the gaze of the
Other in the Lacanian sense is characterized by the impossibility of
any ultimate confirmation from the Other, which , however, is crucial to
subject constitution (Copjec 36). Owing to such a constitutive impossibility, the reticence of the Other,
asking a final confirmation from the Other is essentially impossible,
because it is something the Other cannot give. The trap of race as a
regime of visibility is that this impossibility is now visualized and
localized on the body image, as an effect of nature, thereby
promising to fulfill the raced subjects ultimately unrealizable desire
for racewhich is to say, for the erasure of race, since whiteness functions as a signifier without signified, as a
result of its disavowal of being one term of the signifying chain, a disavowal correlative to whiteness disavowing of its

Under a racist regime where the

raced subject perceives itself to be in antagonistic relation with the
Other, to demand recognition from the gaze of the Other as the
precondition for the subjects subjectivity is already to presuppose
that the Other takes up the point of the gaze it cannot occupy .
Furthermore, recognizing the Others confirmation of racial difference by
accepting, even if in protest and with reluctance, the taxonomy of race (black, colored, etc.) as
biological fact is to tantamount to conceding to the Other something
it does not have, hence something it cannot grant: It is an
impossibility the raced subject is doomed to seek after in its
enterprise of desiring whiteness. Its secret lure lies precisely in the
fact that the prospect of accessing the jouissance of the Other is
within reach, as it were, due to the visibility of racial difference as
given, pre-discursive; the catch, however, is that the moment the raced subject
encounters the objet a of race (as bodily marks) is also the moment it is to
experience the case of racial anxiety, as discussed earlier, because the hole in
the Other (constitutive impossibility) is now filled and the lack is lacking.
own historicity that Seshadri-Crooks points out (21, 45).

Their dichotomies of progress and accountability entrench the

status quo only the alternative can dismantle systems of
oppressions and revive political movement

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Crenshaw's original intersecting streets

metaphor was deeply American in the sense that it was tied to a
modernist sense of "progress" that is deeply deterministic and
limiting. Using streets as proxies suggests that only two directions, forwards and backwards, exists,
Individual - Institutional Interactions

with little attention to where the road begins or ends. Theoretically, this limitation highlights the need to
add the Time Dynamics dimension for historical specificity.

Pragmatically, limiting politics

to either forward progress or backward regress facilitates the

entrenchment of political positions, making compromise and
bipartisanship ever less likely in the 21st century. What if we could
create a space for moving sideways instead of simply backwards and
forwards? Luckily the intersectionality canyon metaphor alleviates
some of these issues without losing the central points that remain
so valuable to a 21st century political context. Whether intersecting streets or
rivers crossing, intersections are sites of motion. Those who might get "stuck" in the
intersection may be able to turn around and go home or return to the riverbank, but far too
frequently their ability to act on such a choice is constrained. The Individual
Institutional Interactions dimension of intersectionality allows for the idea that race, gender, class and
sexual orientation are constructed and enacted at multiple levels - the individual, the group, and the

institutions are the rock formations created

within the Grand Canyon by the rivers. They are created by the
rivers, worn away after decades and centuries, and created in such a
way that anyone traveling down or across the river must avoid
colliding with them. From a pragmatic political point of view, this
dimension also gives a more accurate sense of the amount and
duration of effort required to completely dismantle systems of
oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia and classism without
rendering them ahistorical phenomena. The complexities of these Individual
institutional. In other words, the

Institutional Interactions occur on multiple political planes: the organizational, intersubjective, experiential

If we continue to use Crenshaw's metaphor and

place a justice-seeking group in a craft to navigate the river, we can
embrace both the serial collective agency that Young embraces , as each
person has in some way elected to get on the boat (in however contingent a manner), but in doing
so they recognize the route, the presence of rock formations (which we
and representationalxlvii

can suggest represent political institutions) and the presence of other vehicles (which we can suggest
represent other groups both similar to and distinct from our focus group) are three semi-permanent and
dynamic forces with which those in our original rivercraft must contend, a fact largely out of their control.
In other words agency exists in embarkation and throughout the journey ,
but in ways that carry risks of close calls, crashes and confrontations with other passengers and rock
formations. I've deliberately used the word "craft" rather than specify a type of vehicle to indicate the
mutually constitutive roles of both Diversity Within and Time Dynamics in traversing the river in any

While some may have access to either a yacht or a

jetski to get from point A to B, others may only have a piece of
driftwood or a river raft to navigate the same journey. What is an open
particular direction.

question and subject for politics, however, is which craft will best navigate that section of the rivers'

This new metaphor allows us, therefore, to contend

with the ways in which individuals and groups contend with multiple
centers of political power and institutions. Most recent intersectional work
recognizes that the categories of race, class, gender and sexual orientation
shape both individuals' relative locations within political systems
and macro-level phenomena such as international human rights
compliance standards as well.xlviii This move to embrace a full
commitment to the focus on Individual-Institutional Interactions
sheds light on the organization of political power more generally.
xlix Thus political power is not presumably located in either
structures or individuals, and it flows in multiple directions instead
crossing and for whom.

of remaining static. Unlike prior approaches to race, gender, class,

and sexual orientation, intersectionality recognizes that power
should not be conceptualized in a zero-sum framework. The zerosum framework contributes to the Oppression Olympics. Intersectionality's
focus on relational power highlights the dynamic interactions and distributions of power within and
between individuals and groups, institutions and nation states/ The Individual-Institutional Interactions
element of intersectionality theory also avoids thinking of the structure as undifferentiated power that

All too often in U.S. politics,

opposing debates of public policy are grounded in disagreement
concerning the locus of power and therefore accountability in
government policies and practices (aka structure) or in citizens' individual
behaviors. One common area where such discussions focus either on systemic or on individual
completely dominates the individual's ability, or vice versa.

explanations is the role of fathers in poor households. Liberals focus on the systemic causes of absentee
fathers - unemployment, poor education and poor availability of a social safety net more generally. On the

If
we were to set aside Defiant Ignorance in an intersectional
framework, we would acknowledge that there is an interaction
between individuals and institutions that points us toward reform of
both elements, rather than just one or the other. Yet without setting
aside Defiant Ignorance, there is no room for this higher-order
conversation in our broader American political discourse . The
complex interactions between individuals (as both individuals and members of
groups) and the institutional practices, norms and structures produce the culture in
which we live. More often than not this interaction is neither neat
nor unidirectional in its influence. As we know, cultural production is a
dynamic process that involves elements of opportunity for liberation
and oppression at multiple levels of analysis. It is in fact possible that even as
individuals are exercising their freedom to participate in American
cultural discourse the cultural impact at the group or institution
level reinforces the oppression of their compatriots. This tension
continues to haunt our political discourse, which tends toward the
reductionist and the polarizing rather than toward complexity and
nuance. For example, presenting oneself as the "anti-nappy-headed ho"
plays into multiple dominant norms of respectability and uplift ideology that disciplines women
athletes of color into cookie-cutter images pre-designed for them.li We will continue this
other hand, conservatives focus on the role of personal responsibility among the fathers themselves.

discussion of complexity in the next section's examples.

Multiracialism link
Status quo conceptions of multiracialism get co-opted by the
black-white binary intersectionality is key

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Recent research on multiracial identity laments the hegemony of the

African American and white parentage as a dominant prototype used
to define the agenda of all multiracial individuals, a troubling legacy
of the black-white paradigm's dominance of race-relations discourse.
Clearly there is Diversity Within the multiracial community, which must
be acknowledged in building models of identity development,
agendas for political action and egalitarian coalitions. What is perhaps most
relevant to the discussion here is that an intersectional analysis that attends to
both Time Dynamics and Diversity Within better helps the movement
than a unitary model. Fuller recognition of Diversity Within and Time Dynamics
by the movement itself might counter the image of the movement as one
seeking its own share of white privilege, reducing the likelihood of
sparking the Oppression Olympics. Without an intersectional
analysis, much of the complexity required for full consideration of
these issues drops out. Each political debate - representations of
welfare recipients and the multiracial census movement - gains
deeper clarity from the five dimensions of intersectionality theory.
The intersectional approach can be applied to policy debates of all
kinds, as we will see in chapters three, four and five. But before analyzing each case study, let's
examine the benefits of the 21st century intersectional approach.

at: Trigger warnings

Their framing destroys educational spaces creates a chilling
effect that precludes dialogue necessary to foster democracy

Kipnis 15 professor in the department of radio, television, and film at

Northwestern University [Laura, My Title IX Inquisition, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, May 29, 2015, ProQuest, Accessed 7/17/15]//schnall
*Laura Kipnis has been cleared of wrongdoing in the two Title IX
investigations discussed in this essay.

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my

university's Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had
filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and
"subsequent public statements" (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an
outside investigator to handle the complaints. I stared at the email, which was under-explanatory in the
extreme. I was being charged with retaliation, it said, though it failed to explain how an essay that
mentioned no one by name could be construed as retaliatory, or how a publication fell under the province
of Title IX, which, as I understood it, dealt with sexual misconduct and gender discrimination. Why Colleges
Are on the Hook for Sexual Assault When Congress passed a gender-equity law more than 40 years ago, no

Title IX was enacted by

Congress in 1972 to deal with gender discrimination in public education -one expected it to make colleges responsible for responding to rapes.

athletics programs were the initial culprits -- and all institutions receiving federal funds were required to be
in compliance. Over time, court rulings established sexual harassment and assault as forms of
discrimination, and in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education advised colleges to "take immediate and

colleges have been

scrambling to show that they're doing everything they can to
comply, but still, more than 100 of them are under federal investigation for violating Title IX policies.
Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention
can easily leverage the system. I should pause to explain that my essay
included two paragraphs about a then-ongoing situation on my
campus involving a professor who was himself the subject of two
sexual-harassment investigations involving two students. This
professor subsequently sued university officials and one of the students for
defamation, among other things. The charges had occasioned a flurry of back-and-forth
lawsuits, all part of the public record, which had been my source for the two paragraphs. My point in
citing this legal morass was that students' expanding sense of
vulnerability, and new campus policies that fostered it, was actually impeding their
educations as well as their chances of faring well in postcollegiate life,
where a certain amount of resilience is required of us all. The email from
effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence." Since then,

the Title IX coordinator provided a link to information about our university's Title IX policies, which brought
me to a page containing more links. Clicking around, I found information about the rights of accusers and
what to do if you've been harassed, though I couldn't find much that related to me. I did learn that

Title

IX protects individuals who've reported sexual misconduct from

retaliation -- characterized as "intimidation, threats, coercion, or discrimination" -- but I failed
to see how I could have retaliated against anyone when it wasn't me
who'd been charged with sexual misconduct in the first place. I wrote
back to the Title IX coordinator asking for clarification: When would I learn the specifics of these
complaints, which, I pointed out, appeared to violate my academic freedom? And what about my rights --

was I entitled to a lawyer? I received a polite response with a link to another website. No, I could not have
an attorney present during the investigation, unless I'd been charged with sexual violence. I was, however,
allowed to have a "support person" from the university community there, though that person couldn't
speak. I wouldn't be informed about the substance of the complaints until I met with the investigators.
Apparently the idea was that they'd tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits,
interrogate me about them. The term "kangaroo court" came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in
writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions. What I very much wanted to
know, though there was apparently no way of finding it out, was whether this was the first instance of Title
IX charges filed over a publication. Was this a test case? From my vantage point, it seemed to pit a
federally mandated program against my constitutional rights, though I admit my understanding of those
rights was vague. A week later I heard from the investigators. For reasons I wasn't privy to, the university
had hired an outside law firm, based in another Midwestern city an hour-and-a-half flight away, to conduct
the investigation; a team of two lawyers had been appointed, and they wanted to schedule "an initial
interview" the following week. They were available to fly in to meet in person -- the phrase "billable hours"
came to mind -- or we could videoconference. The email contained more links to more Title IX websites,
each of which contained more links. I had the feeling that clicking on any of them would propel me down
an informational rabbit hole where I'd learn nothing yet not re-emerge for days. I replied that I wanted to
know the charges before agreeing to a meeting. They told me, cordially, that they wanted to set up a
meeting during which they would inform me of the charges and pose questions. I replied, in what I hoped
was a cordial tone, that I wouldn't answer questions until I'd had time to consider the charges. We finally
agreed to schedule a Skype session in which they would inform me of the charges and I would not answer
questions. I felt the flush of victory, though it was short-lived. I said I wanted to record the session; they
refused but said I could take notes. The reasons for these various interdictions were never explained. I'd
plummeted into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn't
supposed to tell anyone about it. Because I strongly believe that the Title IX process should be far more

Both
complainants were graduate students. One turned out to have nothing whatsoever to
do with the essay. She was bringing charges on behalf of the university
community as well as on behalf of two students I'd mentioned -- not by name -- because the
essay had a "chilling effect" on students' ability to report sexual
misconduct. I'd also made deliberate mistakes, she charged (a few small errors that hadn't been
transparent than it is, let me introduce some transparency by sharing the charges against me.

caught in fact-checking were later corrected by the editors), and had violated the nonretaliation provision

The other complainant was someone I'd mentioned

fleetingly (again, not by name) in connection with the professor's lawsuits.
She charged that mentioning her was retaliatory and created a
hostile environment (though I'd said nothing disparaging), and that I'd omitted
information I should have included about her. This seemed
paradoxical -- should I have written more? And is what I didn't write really the business of Title IX?
of the faculty handbook.

She also charged that something I'd tweeted to someone else regarding the essay had actually referred to

Please pause to note that a Title IX charge can now be brought against a
professor over a tweet. Also that my tweets were apparently being monitored.
Much of this remains puzzling to me, including how someone can
bring charges in someone else's name, who is allowing intellectual disagreement to
her. (It hadn't.)

be redefined as retaliation, and why a professor can't write about a legal case that's been nationally
reported, precisely because she's employed by the university where the events took place. Wouldn't this
mean that academic freedom doesn't extend to academics discussing matters involving their own
workplaces? Since the investigators had refused to provide the charges in writing, and I can often barely
read my own handwriting, I'd typed notes during the Skype session, though I'd wondered if they'd object to
that, too -- could they? The extent of their powers was mysterious to me. (I'd briefly considered furtively
recording the session despite the ban but decided against it -- I'm a law-abiding type, I realized to my
chagrin.) I made what sense I could of my wildly mistyped notes and emailed the investigators a summary,
adding that I'd answer only questions related to the charges I'd been informed about .

I wrote up a
peevish statement asserting that the essay had been political
speech, stemming from my belief, as a feminist, that women have
spent the past century and a half demanding to be treated as
consenting adults; now a cohort on campuses was demanding to

relinquish those rights, which I believe is a disastrous move for

feminism. I used the words "political" and "feminist" numerous times. Let me interject that I don't
think my university necessarily wanted to be the venue for a First Amendment face-off -- indeed, the
president himself had recently published an op-ed in defense of academic freedom. As I understand it,

any Title IX charge that's filed has to be investigated, which

effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and
expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for
attention can quite easily leverage the system. And there are a lot of grudges these days. The reality
is that the more colleges devote themselves to creating "safe
spaces" -- that new watchword -- for students, the more dangerous those
campuses become for professors. It's astounding how aggressive
students' assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few
years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material
injury, and all injuries have to be remediated. Most academics I know -this includes feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer -- now live in
fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster .
After the essay appeared, I was deluged with emails from professors
applauding what I'd written because they were too frightened to say
such things publicly themselves. My inbox became a clearinghouse
for reports about student accusations and sensitivities, and the
collective terror of sparking them, especially when it comes to the dreaded
subject of trigger warnings, since pretty much anything might be a
"trigger" to someone, given the new climate of emotional peril on
campuses. I learned that professors around the country now routinely
avoid discussing subjects in classes that might raise hackles. A wellknown sociologist wrote that he no longer lectures on abortion. Someone who'd
written a book about incest in her own family described being confronted in class by a student furious with

A tenured professor on my campus wrote about

lying awake at night worrying that some stray remark of hers might
lead to student complaints, social-media campaigns, eventual job
loss, and her being unable to support her child. I'd thought she was
exaggerating, but that was before I learned about the Title IX
complaints against me. My Midwestern Torquemadas were perfectly pleasant at our onher for discussing the book.

campus meeting -- they'd indeed flown to town to meet in person -- so pleasant that I relaxed and became

There I was, expounding on

my views about power and feminism; soon I was delivering a miniseminar on the work of Michel Foucault. Later, replaying the two-and-a-half-hour
session in my mind, I thought, "You chump," realizing that I'd probably dug a hundred
new holes for myself. They'd asked endless questions about particular sentences in the essay,
overvoluble, stupidly gratified by their interest and attentions.

the sources for my ideas and claims, and what I'd meant in that fateful tweet. They didn't record any of it,
nor was there a stenographer. One of the lawyers typed notes on her laptop; they'd send me a summary of
my remarks, they said, which I could correct or add to, if I chose. I found these procedures utterly

What's being lost, along with job security, is the liberty to publish
ideas that might go against the grain. Toward the end, I asked how the
complainants could possibly know that my essay had created a
"chilling effect" on campus. One of them, I was told, had provided the
lawyers with the names of students and staff members who'd testify
that the essay had chilled them. I, too, could supply names of witnesses to interview, if I
mystifying.

liked. That was our only face-to-face meeting, though there were numerous phone calls, emails, and

requests for further substantiation, including copies of emails and tweets. I tried to guess what all this was
costing -- two lawyers flying back and forth to conduct interviews of the complainants, myself, and an
expanding list of witnesses, review the sources for a 5,200-word article, adjudicate their findings, and
compose a thorough report. I'm no expert on legal fees, but I was pretty sure the meter was ticking in
$10,000 increments. I'd been asked to keep the charges confidential, but this became moot when,

shortly before my campus meeting with the investigators, a

graduate student published an article on a well-trafficked site
excoriating me and the essay, and announcing that two students had filed Title IX
retaliation complaints against me. She didn't identify her source for this information or specify her own
relationship to the situation, though she seemed well versed on all the inside details; in fact, she knew

She also
excoriated our university's president for his op-ed essay on
academic freedom, which, she charged, was really a veiled
commentary on the pending Title IX charges against me and thus
subverted the process by issuing a covert advance verdict in my
favor. (He'd obliquely mentioned the controversy over the essay, among other campus free-speech
issues.) She didn't seem particularly concerned that she herself was
subverting the process by charging that the process had been
subverted, and by revealing the complaints in the first place. She was also surprisingly unconcerned
more about the process than I did. It wasn't me alone on the chopping block.

about how effectively her article demolished its own premises about the asymmetry of institutional power.

If a graduate student can publicly blast her own university's

president, mock his ideas, and fear no repercussions, then clearly the
retaliatory power that university employment confers on anyone -from professors to presidents -- is nil. Nor had my own essay exactly had a chilling
effect on anyone's freedom of expression. An academic friend and I disagreed
about whether the graduate student's article would be seen as a good career move on her part (a
courageous example of "punching up") or a self-wounding one ("collegiality" is still a factor considered by
hiring committees; no one wants a high-drama potential colleague). He thought the former; I wasn't so
sure, though we agreed that given the shifting political winds on campuses these days, it was impossible

At the end of the interrogation, the investigators asked if I

wanted to file my own retaliation complaint against the student
who'd revealed the charges. I said that I believed all parties involved were using the
process for political purposes. I declined to press charges against anyone. They'd
to call.

issue a report on their findings within 60 days, they said, though on what basis I had no idea. The standard
that applied was "preponderance of evidence," they'd explained -- "more likely than not" as opposed to
"beyond a reasonable doubt" -- but that seemed pretty vague. Note that I was never actually presented
with any of this evidence. Given that the investigators doubled as judge and jury, and the extralegal nature
of the proceedings, I wished I'd been more ingratiating. The Title IX bureaucracy is expanding by the
minute. A recent emailed update from my university announced new policies, programs, hires, surveys,
procedures, websites, and educational initiatives devoted to sexual misconduct. What wasn't quantified is
how much intellectual real estate is being grabbed in the process. It's a truism that the mission of
bureaucracies is, above all, to perpetuate themselves, but with the extension of Title IX from gender
discrimination into sexual misconduct has come a broadening of not just its mandate but even what
constitutes sexual assault and rape. Ambivalent sex becomes coerced sex, with charges brought months or

Title IX officers now adjudicate an

increasing range of murky situations involving mutual drunkenness, conflicting stories,
and relationships gone wrong. They pronounce on the thorniest of philosophical
and psychological issues: What is consent? What is power? Should power
even years after the events in question.

differentials between romantic partners be proscribed? Should eliminating power differences in

relationships even be a social goal -- wouldn't that risk eliminating heterosexuality itself? Nothing I say

My concern is that
debatable and ultimately conservative notions about sex, gender, and power
are becoming embedded in these procedures, without any public
here is meant to suggest that sexual assault on campuses isn't a problem. It is.

scrutiny or debate. But the climate on campuses is so accusatory

and sanctimonious -- so "chilling," in fact -- that open conversations
are practically impossible. It's only when Title IX charges lead to
lawsuits and the usual veil of secrecy is lifted that any of these
assumptions become open for discussion -- except that simply
discussing one such lawsuit brought the sledgehammer of Title IX
down on me, too. Many of the emails I received from people teaching at universities pointed out
that I was in a position to take on the subjects I did in the earlier essay only because I have tenure. The
idea is that once you've fought and clawed your way up the tenure ladder, the prize is academic freedom,
the general premise being -- particularly at research universities, like the one I'm fortunate enough to be
employed at -- that there's social value in fostering free intellectual inquiry. It's a value fast disappearing in
the increasingly corporatized university landscape, where casual labor is the new reality.

Adjuncts,

instructors, part-timers -- now half the profession, according to the American Association of
University Professors -- simply don't have the same freedoms, practically speaking.
What's being lost, along with job security, is the liberty to publish ideas that
might go against the grain or to take on risky subjects in the first
place. With students increasingly regarded as customers and consumer
satisfaction paramount, it's imperative to avoid creating potential classroom
friction with unpopular ideas if you're on a renewable contract and wish to stay employed. Selfcensorship naturally prevails. But even those with tenure fear getting caught up in some
horrendous disciplinary process with ad hoc rules and outcomes; pretty much everyone now self-censors
accordingly. When it comes to campus sexual politics, however, the group most constrained from speaking
-- even those with tenure -- is men. No male academic in his right mind would write what I did. Men have
been effectively muzzled, as any number of my male correspondents attested. I suspect that most
Americans, if pushed, would go to the mat for the First Amendment, which is what academic freedom is
modeled on. You can mock academic culture all you want, and I've done a fair amount of it myself, but I

unconstrained intellectual debate -- once the ideal of

university life, now on life support -- is essential to a functioning
democratic society. And that should concern us all. I also find it beyond
depressing to witness young women on campuses -- including aspiring
intellectuals! -- trying to induce university powers to shield them from the
umbrages of life and calling it feminism. As of this writing, I have yet to hear the
also believe that

verdict on my case, though it's well past the 60-day time frame. In the meantime, new Title IX complaints
have been filed against the faculty-support person who accompanied me to the session with the
investigators. As a member of the Faculty Senate, whose bylaws include the protection of academic
freedom -- and believing the process he'd witnessed was a clear violation of academic freedom -- he'd
spoken in general terms about the situation at a senate meeting. Shortly thereafter, as the attorneys
investigating my case informed me by phone, retaliation complaints were filed against him for speaking
publicly about the matter (even though the complaints against me had already been revealed in the
graduate student's article), and he could no longer act as my support person. Another team of lawyers
from the same firm has been appointed to conduct a new investigation. A week or so earlier, the
investigators had phoned to let me know that a "mediated resolution" was possible in my case if I wished
to pursue that option. I asked what that meant -- an image of me and the complainants in a conference
room hugging came to mind. I didn't like the visual. The students were willing to drop their complaints in
exchange for a public apology from me, the investigators said. I tried to stifle a laugh. I asked if that was
all. No, they also wanted me to agree not to write about the case. I understand that by writing these
sentences, I'm risking more retaliation complaints, though I'm unclear what penalties may be in store (I
suspect it's buried somewhere in those links). But I refuse to believe that students get to dictate what
professors can or can't write about, or what we're allowed to discuss at our Faculty Senate meetings. I

the secrecy of the

process invites McCarthyist abuses and overreach. For the record, my
saying this isn't retaliation. It's intellectual disagreement . If more
complaints are brought, I suppose I'll write another essay about them. To my mind, that's what
don't believe discussing Title IX cases should be verboten in the first place --

freedom of expression means, and what's the good of having a freedom you're afraid to
use?

Trigger warnings teach a bad form of politics and risk

retaliation

Kipnis 15 professor in the department of radio, television, and film at

Northwestern University [Laura, My Title IX Inquisition, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, May 29, 2015, ProQuest, Accessed 7/17/15]//schnall
*Laura Kipnis has been cleared of wrongdoing in the two Title IX
investigations discussed in this essay.

students at my university had staged a protest over an

essay I'd written in The Chronicle Review about sexual politics on
campus -- and that they were carrying mattresses and pillows -- I was a bit nonplussed. For one thing,
When I first heard that

mattresses had become a symbol of student-on-student sexual-assault allegations, and I'd been writing
about the new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating. Also, I'd been writing as a
feminist. And I hadn't sexually assaulted anyone. The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent.

the mattress-carriers were marching to the

university president's office with a petition demanding "a swift,
official condemnation" of my article. One student said she'd had a
"very visceral reaction" to the essay; another called it "terrifying."
I'd argued that the new codes infantilized students while vastly
increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives,
and here were students demanding to be protected by university
higher-ups from the affront of someone's ideas, which seemed to
prove my point. The president announced that he'd consider the petition. Still, I assumed that
academic freedom would prevail. I also sensed the students weren't going to come
off well in the court of public opinion, which proved to be the case;
mocking tweets were soon pouring in. Marching against a published
article wasn't a good optic -- it smacked of book burning, something Americans generally
oppose. Indeed, I was getting a lot of love on social media from all ends of
the political spectrum, though one of the anti-PC brigade did suggest
that, as a leftist, I should realize these students were my own evil spawn.
According to our campus newspaper,

(Yes, I was spending a lot more time online than I should have.) Being protested had its gratifying side -- I
soon realized that my writer friends were jealous that I'd gotten marched on and they hadn't. I found
myself shamelessly dropping it into conversation whenever possible. "Oh, students are marching against
this thing I wrote," I'd grimace, in response to anyone's "How are you?" I briefly fantasized about running
for the board of PEN, the international writers' organization devoted to protecting free expression. Things
seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university's Title IX coordinator informing me that
two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and "subsequent public
statements" (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator
to handle the complaints. I stared at the email, which was under-explanatory in the extreme. I was being
charged with retaliation, it said, though it failed to explain how an essay that mentioned no one by name
could be construed as retaliatory, or how a publication fell under the province of Title IX, which, as I
understood it, dealt with sexual misconduct and gender discrimination. Why Colleges Are on the Hook for
Sexual Assault When Congress passed a gender-equity law more than 40 years ago, no one expected it to
make colleges responsible for responding to rapes. Title IX was enacted by Congress in 1972 to deal with
gender discrimination in public education -- athletics programs were the initial culprits -- and all institutions
receiving federal funds were required to be in compliance. Over time, court rulings established sexual

harassment and assault as forms of discrimination, and in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education advised
colleges to "take immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence." Since
then, colleges have been scrambling to show that they're doing everything they can to comply, but still,
more than 100 of them are under federal investigation for violating Title IX policies. Anyone with a grudge,
a political agenda, or a desire for attention can easily leverage the system. I should pause to explain that

my essay included two paragraphs about a then-ongoing situation

on my campus involving a professor who was himself the subject of
two sexual-harassment investigations involving two students. This
professor subsequently sued university officials and one of the students for
defamation, among other things. The charges had occasioned a flurry of back-and-forth
lawsuits, all part of the public record, which had been my source for the two paragraphs. My point in
citing this legal morass was that students' expanding sense of
vulnerability, and new campus policies that fostered it, was actually impeding their
educations as well as their chances of faring well in postcollegiate life ,
where a certain amount of resilience is required of us all.

Their hypersensitive climate suppresses education and kills

preparedness for the real world

Cooke 15 staff writer at the National Review [Charles, The New

McCarthyism Exists, but It Has Nothing to Do with Ted Cruz, National
Review, March 25, 2015, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415932/newmccarthyism-exists-it-has-nothing-do-ted-cruz-charles-c-w-cooke, Accessed
7/17/15]//schnall

Less than an hour elapsed between Ted Cruzs announcing that he

would be running for the presidency and the beginning of the oh-sopredictable McCarthy! taunts. On Twitter, the comedian Bill Maher sardonically
endorsed Cruzs candidacy, asking, Whats not to love about a guy who acts like Joe McCarthy and sweats
like Richard Nixon? On MSNBC, meanwhile, Chris Matthews revived his old critique, charging that Cruz
was deliberately channeling McCarthy again today. This, alas, is a line that has been trotted out before.

All is fair in love, war, and politics, and as illiterate as the comparisons to McCarthy may
be, I suppose I would almost be disappointed if someone, somewhere, did not choose to advance them.

But for the more serious-minded among us, it is truly peculiar to see
the specter of McCarthy dragged into quotidian party politics when
it is so desperately needed elsewhere. Certainly, Cruzs style can rub
the wrong way. Certainly, his debate-champion mien is occasionally
inappropriately deployed. But the truth is that if Arthur Miller were
writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in
effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more
modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to
disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media,
at our malleable speech codes, our self-indulgent safe spaces,
our preference for narrative over truth, and at our pathetic
appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned
illiberalism, and he would despair. Ted Cruz, frankly, wouldnt enter into his thinking. Over the
weekend, a Purdue-based doctoral student and teacher named Fredrik deBoer

took to Twitter to rail bitterly against the toxic climate that the
advocates of tolerance have created on his campus. Students, deBoer
wrote, are very quick learners, and they have realized that they can use our present hysteria to advance

far from helping to educate, deBoer added, our current

penchant for hyper-sensitivity is having a deleterious effect on the
quality of the critical training he is expected to provide. If you
question even the most obviously dishonest and self-interested
invocation of trauma/triggering/etc, deBoer lamented, you will be
criticized severely. And if you dont? Well, then the growing cast of
hecklers is permitted its intellectual veto. The chilling effect is very
real, deBoer confirmed in frustration, and I hear that from my very large
network of academic friends across the country. Its real and
powerful. How powerful? Certainly powerful enough that deBoer admits that he has taken
to self-censoring. The terrible job market leaves everyone in fear of accidentally giving
offense, he fretted, and so, afraid of losing his job, he now avoids teaching anything
that might be remotely triggering . . . like discussions of genocide,
racism, or historical violence. To sum up, then: Because his students insist
that they are not to be challenged in any way, deBoer is unable to
teach what he needs to teach for fear of losing his job. And he cant criticize
their interests. Indeed,

this arrangement because to criticize it is . . . to risk losing his job. Welcome to Salem, 1692. Writing
anonymously on the White Hot Harlots blog, a passionate leftist friend of deBoers painted a
disquietingly similar picture. Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy, he declared, is now

if you so much
as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you
face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe
professional consequences. You will note, perhaps, that it is not Ted Cruz who is causing
grounds for a firin. Indeed, even if you make a reasonable and respectful case,

these problems. Quite the opposite, in fact. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, our
anonymous friend insists. Rather, liberal students scare the shit out of me, for: all it takes is one slip

even momentarily exposing them

to any uncomfortable thought or imagery and thats it, your
classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your
office hours and theres a twitter petition out demanding you chop off
your hand in repentance. For a prime example of this tendency in action we need look no
further than the weekend edition of the New York Times, in which Judith Shulevitz offers up a
bizarre story about a Brown University senior named Kathryn Byron who sought
not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but

to involve the universitys authorities when she thought she might have to hear arguments that

When she heard last fall that a student group had

organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti,
the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that
Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term rape culture, Ms. Byron was
alarmed. Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate peoples experiences, she told
me. It could be damaging. Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a
contradicted her beliefs:

meeting with administrators. Not long after, Browns president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the
university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide research and facts about the role of

student volunteers put up posters

advertising that a safe space would be available for anyone who
found the debate too upsetting. Later in the piece, a fellow student of Byrons is
culture in sexual assault. Meanwhile,

shown condensing this peculiar attitude into an almost impossibly perfect sound bite. At college, she

complained, she was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that

really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs. Well, good?

These attitudes have funnily enough found their way into the real
world. In November of last year, Rolling Stone published an explosive investigative piece in which it
was alleged that a freshman student named Jackie had been brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat
party. At first, the story garnered an outpouring of outrage and sympathy. But then, slowly but surely, it all
began to fall apart. At first, observers began nervously to suggest that the details didnt quite add up, and
to ask skeptical questions of the sourcing and its corroboration. For their trouble, they were accused of
being rape apologists. Next, a number of conscientious reporters looked into the question, and they did
not like what they found. For this diligence, they were slammed as idiots and misogynists. And finally,
after the considerable interest in the case prompted the police to conduct their own investigation, it
became clear that there was no evidence that anything had happened at all. The Rolling Stone story,
declared an irritated Washington Post yesterday, is a complete crock built on a mix of naivet and
advocacy. And what, pray, was the reaction from those who had sold the story to this final piece of news?
Alas, it was precisely the same as was Kathryn Byrons: denial, dissembling, distraction. In the Guardian,
the tirelessly obtuse Jessica Valenti proposed pathetically that the story was ultimately likely to be fake but
accurate, and suggested that the confusion as to what happened ultimately falls at the feet of a culture
that fundamentally distrusts women rather than on the shoulders of the people who made up the lie. On
CNN, meanwhile, Sunny Hostin submitted that we should not be focusing on this particular question, but
on the broader rape statistics instead; and her co-host wondered irrationally whether the collapse of
Jackies story was in fact bad for other women. What seems to be really important in this case, Hot Airs
Noah Rothman wrote sarcastically yesterday, is not whether the accused are innocent or not in other

as
Kathryn Byron might have put it, what is important here is that we
do not permit reality to invalidate peoples experiences. At its root, The
words, the facts but the Greater Cosmic Truth that exists independent of objective truth. Or rather,

Crucible is such a terrifying and illuminating piece of work not because it involves witches and because
witches do not exist, but because it depicts the gradual victory of delirium over reason and of passion over

a putatively civilized community elects to

abandon the vital traditions that have been slowly built up over
centuries and to hand over its institutions to the transient anxieties
of an unruly and jealous mob. It were better that ten suspected witches should escape
truth. In the heat of a hysterical moment,

than one innocent person be condemned, warned Increase Mather, a critic of the trials. Not on your life,
replied the crowd; for we have some evils to spike.

Free expression? Damn you to hell.

Presumption of innocence? Hie thee to a monastery. All that we have held dear?
Abandon it now, for there are monsters at the gate, and they need
to be destroyed post haste. There is a McCarthyite panic in America ,
alright, and it is scouring the land at a frightening pace. But the virus has jumped
from Salems lips to Purdues ears directly and Ted Cruz has been nowhere to be seen.

Reject their framing protects a model of society in which the

privileged upper echelon frame themselves as suffering to
justify future acts of evil

Smith 15 writer at SMBIVA [Michael, Giddyup, Trigger, Stop Me Before I

Vote Again, May 8, 2015,
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2015/05/giddyup-trigger, Accessed
7/17/15]//schnall

Ovid tells his story, and a number of other equally appalling ones, in the Metamorphoses, a text continually
read and immensely loved since Ovids own day. Ovid is omnipresent in Dante, and Shakespeare, and

Mean old
Ovid, however, is too strong for the stomachs of certain sensitive souls
at Columbia University: During the week spent on Ovids Metamorphoses, the class was instructed
everywhere, really; or at least was, until the the fashion came in for illiterate writers.

to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual

assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, [a] student described being triggered while reading such detailed
accounts of rape [T]he student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the
splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text [T]he student completely disengaged from the class
discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. I feel very grateful to have
bailed out of Academe when I did. My idea of a classroom is one in which nobody ever feels safe least of

The piece linked above deploys just about every buzzword

associated with the current cult of hysterical hypersensitivity: safe, selfpreservation, triggered, survivor, share, concerns, offensive,
marginalize, identity, intervention, transgression (this one not at all in a good
sense, but an unambiguously bad one); insensitive, traumatize, silence, facilitate,
support, training, best practice, framing, engage, effective,
feedback, addressing (issues, not letters). The only one missing is
inappropriate. In general, the impression one receives is that Columbia
undergraduates are hagridden, traumatized, oppressed,
disadvantaged, suffering souls, shying from a trigger a minute like a skittish pony in
rattlesnake country; easily intimidated and silenced, and so distressed by the
coarseness of their teachers that they can barely force themselves
through the classroom door. I must say they do not make this impression
in the places, numerous in my neighborhood, where they customarily resort.
There, they comport themselves with an assurance bordering on
insolence, and a very conspicuous air of self-satisfaction and
entitlement. Perhaps initiatives like the one quoted above are best regarded as a kind of consumer
all, the teacher.

advocacy. The kids are shopping in the Columbia mall, and somebody is going to foot a pretty hefty bill for
it. There is therefore every reason why they shouldnt be inconvenienced or aggrieved by the clerks behind
the counter. The customer is always right. If they find Ovid yucky and out of date, they shouldnt have to

Columbia and all

the Ivies are very much in the business of credentialling the future
management cadre of the empire; these are people many or most of
whom will be dishing out a lot more shit in their future managerial or
professional lives than they will ever have to eat. No doubt theres
an element of self-absolution for them in seeing themselves as
suffering, ill-used victims.
read him. Of course its overdetermined. Theres also the elite-as-victim angle.

***Affirmative***

Identity politics good

Perm
Permutation do both incorporating identity into movements
does not preclude unity but rather is necessary to ensure
equality ignoring difference ensures racist and sexist
inequalities are reproduced
Alcoff 5 philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in
epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism (Linda, THE
POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY, 2005,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html) //RGP
maintaining unity requires a careful attending to
difference. For example, in a recent contract negotiation that I observed at a hospital in
Syracuse, New York, the issue of preferences for internal hiring or
in-house advancement came up for discussion among members of the SEIU bargaining
In my experience,

committee, each of whom was an elected representative from a particular sector of the hospital. In the
process of preparing the negotiating points that the union will put forward to management,

priorities

have to be set and some issues must be left aside, and the question on the
table was, how much of a priority would the union give the issue of in-house advancement in its
negotiations? The members of the professional tradeselectricians, plumbers, and so forth, who are almost
entirely white meninitially saw no reason to fight for this provision in the contract or to make it a priority.

an African American woman on the bargaining team spoke up

for the importance of in-house advancement, pointing out that
almost all of the minorities in the hospital worked at the relatively
lower skilled and lesser paid jobs. Given the difficulty minorities still have in entering the
trades, the outside hiring of minorities is a slim bet. It is much more likely that a
minority person will be hired into housekeeping or dietary
departments, for example, but be stuck in those departments unless
preferences are given for in-house hiring into the trainee positions available in the more
lucrative departments. In this particular bargaining sub-committee, if the tradesmen had
voted as a bloc against this woman's proposal, and if the mostly
white male union leaders had supported them, then the conditions
of work for nonwhite workers at that hospital would continue to be
unrelievedly at the bottom of the hierarchy during the next three or five year
However,

contract period. Fortunately, in this case the white workers united in supporting in-house advancement
because they came to recognize the relevance that racial difference made to union members' work lives.3

These kinds of discussions are an everyday occurrence in labor

organizing and contract battles. It is no accident that SEIU is today the largest union in
the United States, the fastest growing, and that it has the most pro-active policies in support of racial and

one cannot either imaginatively or practically

pursue "class demands" as if the working class has one set of united
and homogeneous material interests. It makes neither political or
theoretical sense to imagine an undifferentiated working class
demanding a larger share of the pie, to be divided among them with
the same ratios of remuneration as currently exist based on racism
and sexism. Just as black workers cannot stand in for the whole,
neither can skilled white workers. Each group is exploited in a specific manner, and to
different degrees. Certainly, there is a motivation for unity, but unity will have to be
negotiated in piecemeal terms, such as the bargaining committee in Syracuse discovered.
gender democracy. Thus,

Redistribution demands will either reproduce or subvert the inequalities among workers, or, what is often

neither class demands nor class identity can

be understood apart from the differences of social identity . The very
possibility of unity that Gitlin aims for will require that, for example, the
minority members of a union feel connected to it and feel that it is
addressing their conditions. But this requires the exploration and
recognition of difference, as well as making a space in union meetings for sometimes
extensive discussions about the different situation of the various workers, and accommodating
their different demands, interests, and needs.
the case, do some of both.4 Thus,

Agency
Identity politics is to key to agency and transformation

Alcoff et al, 6 - professor of philosophy at City College of New York and

Hunter College, PhD in philosophy from Brown University (Linda, Identity
Politics Reconsidered: Future of Minority Studies, 2006)//jml
While I harbor no illusions about transgressive identity politics, insofar as ultimately effecting

while I recognize that identity politics can

be manipulated by hegemonic forces, I will argue that a critical
politics of identity can play a part in political organizing and in
challenging hegemonic discourses, even if structural transformation is not the issue at
transformative social change, and

hand in the short term. Political agency, after all, can always sim- ply lead to the perpetuation of existing

without agency there can be no

emancipation. Structural social transforma- tion will require, then,
reflexivity and entail many battles along the way, of different types and at
structures (Bhaskar, 1993, 279). Yet,

different levels, that can prepare us for larger struggles. In todays stratified and divided context, I believe,

retaining a critical politics of identity makes political sense and is

strategically practical. There is, then, a strategic rationale for a
politics of identity and that is: developing critical political agency.

For
this reason we need to go beyond issues of inclusion/exclusion and an exaltation of difference as difference
to engage in an exploration of events, relations, and structures that have a con- stitutive role in identity

Identity, though discursive in nature, is ultimately grounded in social

reality, that is, social structures and relations; unfortunately in recent times, we
formation.

have in many instances boxed ourselves into a discursive corner, positing discourse as itself constitutive
over and above social structures.7 Is the word the medium in which power works as Stuart Hall affirms?8
I think that we need to look at this formulation closely and say that it is a medium but not the only one, for
power works at all levels of our social structures, including, but not exclusively, within the cultural terrain.

reality is most definitely not limited to the discursive

domain. Let us not incur, then, in the linguistic fallacy, confusing reality with our discourses about
By contrast,

reality. Nor should we define reality in terms of knowl- edgethe epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar, 1991, 33).

while recognizing that discourses mediate our knowledge and

intuition about the world, it is also important to bear in mind that
reality is not reducible to our discoursesor to our knowledge of itnor can any
Thus,

transformational social struggle be reduced to a negotiation over meaning.9 Reality is not, then, lim- ited
to the way we construct it or theorize it. We, although cognizant and sentient beings, are not the litmus
test of reality. What we call reality, as noted by Prigogine, is nevertheless revealed to us only through the
active construction in which we participate.10 And, yet, clearly we dont all par- ticipate in this process of
construction on an equal footing, an issue that, though crucial, is all but avoided by some knowledge

our knowledge of reality is itself

constantly changing; knowledge itself is productive and
transformative and conditions the emergence of new social
identities, that, by virtue of being constituted in tension with other
identitiesthat is, as non-identities, as differentiations always are already political.
Identity formation, then, takes place at a conjuncture of external
and internal, contingent and necessary, processes that interconnect
and emerge within specific historical conditions that are in good
measure not of our own making. It would be foolhardy, then, to explore identity formation
outside the complex web of social-structural rela- tions. What is needed is a critical
theory that is grounded in a fuller recogni- tion of how particular
social structures and relations condition a diversity of social and
theorists. Let us recall, furthermore, that

historical experiences and generate concrete social spaces that give

rise to social, political, and cultural identities. In turn, these social
spaces are themselves productive sites, enabling the construction of
new and potentially radical/transformative political subjects.

Intersectionality fails
Identity politics makes collective action impossible focus on
articulating differences between identity categories stagnates
politics and results in endless exclusions and divisions
Rectenwald 13 Ph.D., Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon
University, M.A., English Literature, Case Western Reserve University, B.A.,
English Literature, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA (Michael, Whats
Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to
Mark Fishers Exiting the Vampire Castle (And Its Critics) The North Star,
12/2/2013, http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411) //RGP
operating under the same schema as a more simplified identity
politics, intersectionality theory serves to isolate multiple and
seemingly endless identity standpoints, without sufficiently
articulating them with each other, or the forms of domination. The upshot in political
But

practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories, each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on
a field of one-downsmanship. While it may be useful for sociologists attempting to describe groups and

as a political theory, it is useless, or worse. This is

by ending with the identification and isolation of its various
constituencies, it in fact serves to sever the connections that it
supposedly sought to understand and strengthen. The practical upshot of
intersectionality theory is the perpetual articulation of difference, resulting in
fragmentation and the stagnation of political activity that Fisher bemoans.
their struggles with power,
because,

Theory as Historical Practice But theory like this, or any other, as the author of I am a Woman suggests,
does not appear out of thin air. Rather,

it is produced in relation to the social

relations of production and the overall social relations themselves:
There was no revolution in the US in 1968. The advances of Black Power, womens liberation, gay
liberation, and the movements themselves, have been absorbed into capital. Since the 1970s, academia
has had a stronghold on theory. A nonexistent class struggle leaves a vacuum of theoretical production and
academic intellectuals have had nothing to draw on except for the identity politics of the past. Identity
politics and its variants developed during a moment when the Marxist critique of capitalism had lost a
degree of credibility due to the fiascos of the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. Labor movements had
given way to the New Left movements that attracted students and others toward liberal variants of
political activism. Housed in the academy, theory became abstracted from social relations and the social
totality. In a field of free play, divorced from working class politics, it focused on various kinds of putative
determinations, including those of language, rationality, identity, power (vaguely conceived), and other
prison houses, as Frederic Jameson referred to the categories of poststructuralist containment. Identity
politics marked the limits of postmodern political engagement. But, identity politics has not since been
absorbed into capital, as suggested in the quote above. As forms of alienated labor, capitalist relations

By
treating such categories as ends in themselves, therefore, a politics
based on identities necessarily leads down the blind alley of
reification. That is, such politics, even when successful, necessarily
ends at the limits of identity itself. The problem is, while theoretically, we might all
have always determined them. They have been the products of capitalism from the outset.

wake up tomorrow to changed identities, or to changed conditions for our identities, we would still be
exploited under capitalism. Running the circuits of capital from production through consumption,

identity can only lead us back to the office, the factory, or the
streets, allowing at best our coalescence around particular consumer
cultures. Why is Identity Politics Individualistic? Finally, as I mentioned above, Fisher claimed that
while promising a politics of collectivities, identity politics is actually
individualistic. One might wonder how he arrives at such a statement, especially since he merely

because identity politics and

intersectionality focus on difference and its articulations, the
divisions are potentially endless, but necessarily extend to
differences not only between groups, but also between individuals .
Ones display of the characteristics becomes a requirement for the politics of identity. Identity
politics requires identification, which requires signaling of individual
membership by virtue of particular characteristics . The understanding and
asserts it rather than arguing it. He could have argued that

appreciation of individual difference is surely not a liability in itself, by any stretch. Nor does understanding

because
identity is the object rather than merely the starting point, the ends
rather than only the means of collectivity, identity politics
continually devolves into the articulation of the requirements for
group membership, and thus, to the individual. This individualism
extends to those whose privilege differentiates them from the
identity groups in question. That is, each encounter with the group
involves the articulation of the characteristics of the group, and the
evaluation of all comers on the basis of such characteristics . Whether or
and appreciation necessarily entail an individualistic ideological and political agenda. But

not this involves the imputation of guilt to non-members is a question of particular circumstances, and
likewise, cannot be generalized without qualification. But identity politics does involve a linguistic policing
around various identity formations, not only to determine eligibility for membership, but as importantly, to
guard against the ill treatment of said group and its members as representatives thereof. Of course, any
political movement on the left worthy of support will defend those subject to various forms of

in the case of identity politics, the defense is of

the group and its individual members as such, as particular
identities, for the maintenance and continuation of said identities,
and not for their liberation from the liabilities that all identities
necessarily entail. Thus, identity politics is exclusionary and divisive,
continually falling back on difference in order to establish group
identity and cohesion.
discrimination and abuse. But

Individual differences block identity politics effectiveness

intersectionality proves
Minow 96 - Professor of Law, Harvard Law School (Martha, Not Only for
Myself: Identity, Politics, and Law, The Colin Ruagh Thomas O'Fallon
Memorial Lecture, University of Oregon School of Law, 3-7-96, 75 Or. L. Rev.
647, Fall 1996) //AD
The second, related difficulty is the tendency of identity politics to
neglect "intersectionality ." 21 This notion refers to the way in which
any particular individual stands at the crossroads of multiple groups.
All women also have a race; all whites also have a gender; and the individuals stand in different places as

the meanings of gender are

inflected and informed by race, and the meanings of racial identity
are similarly influenced by images of gender. Black women have confronted male
gender and racial politics converge and diverge. Moreover,

violence and white domination in ways quite different from the experiences of either white women or black

Black women and black men have different experiences and

interests, argues Kimberle Crenshaw. She provides vivid illustrations with black women's responses to
men. 22

the obscenity prosecution of the music group 2 Live Crew and to the Senate's treatment of Anita Hill during
the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. 23

Men who are black may

experience racial discrimination while also participating in

harassment or discriminatory practices toward women. Women who
are white may experience gender discrimination while
simultaneously participating in exclusionary practices against blacks
and Hispanics. 24 Neither gender nor racial identity groupings alone
[*656] can describe common experiences, standpoints, and relationships with others. 25 Is
it adequate, then, to identify a group representative who shares a race with other members, but a gender
only with some of them, or a gender with other members but a race with only some of them? What about

The challenge to a conception of

representation based on one shared trait compounds with the
recognition of further intersections . Individuals manifest not only
race and gender but also other bases for potential group
membership, such as age, disability, religion, immigrant status, and sexual orientation. Then
political affiliation, music preferences, favored sports, and other
commitments further bisect and realign groups . Some of the
intersections seem to invite new "identity groupings," such as black women,
sharing a gender but not a religion?

Chicana lesbians, and male bikers. They may also expose and perhaps solidify the self-affirmations of other

recognizing
intersectionality threatens to complicate identity politics with a
proliferation of new , and old, identity groupings .
intersectional groups, such as "white men" or "married women." 26 At a minimum,

Solves oppression
Identity politics are key to accessing the valuable insights of
the oppressed negation of identity politics leads to racism
and precludes any positive hope of reform

Moya, 2 - cultural writer for the University of California Press (Paula,

Learning from Experience, The Epistemic Significance of Identity Politics,
2002, http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?
docId=kt8t1nd07c&chunk.id=ss1.16&toc.id=ch03&brand=ucpress)//jml
critics and activists alike often take for
granted that identity politics as such are essentialist , theoretically
retrograde, or even politically dangerous. I want to suggest that absolute dismissals of all
kinds of identity politics are prematureeven though such dismissals are frequently
motivated by political convictions similar to those that motivate my own arguments. (To reiterate: I
define identity politics as a social practice in which a person who
identifies or is identified with a recognizable group such as Chicana/os or
Within politically progressive circles today,

lesbians makes arguments or takes action with the purpose of affecting social, economic, or educational
policy relative to that group. Within this social practice, the identity of the political practitioner both

Without defending those

forms of identity politics that are predicated on the
disenfranchisement of others, and with full awareness that all identities are somewhat
reductive and potentially cooptable, I nevertheless contend that some forms of identity
politics that are undertaken by members of marginalized groups in
the service of creating economic, social, and political equity between
different groups are epistemically and morally justifiable .[28] 131
Embedded in my argument is the idea that identity politics cannot be an end in
themselves, but should be seen as a necessary step on the way
toward creating economic, social, and political equity between
different groups.[29] My reasons for defending the practice of identity politics by members of
motivates and is a central facet of the claim, argument, or action.)

marginalized groups are primarily epistemological. To the extent that we, as cultural critics, are interested

we must give greater weight

to socially marginalized identities and non-dominant perspectives . My
in gaining a more accurate understanding of our social world,

postpositivist realist defense of the principle of epistemic privilege draws on the idea, common to much
feminist and marxist theory, that the major obstacle to the achievement of objective knowledge is

Insofar as the
perspectives of people in positions of privilege and authority are
refracted through distorting lenses that naturalize the existing
social order, the epistemic norm of objectivity requires that such
partial and distorted perspectives be critically examined from the
standpoints of the subordinated. The idea here is not that subordinated people know
better about everything, but rather that their well-being (and sometimes even survival)
requires that they attend to the dynamics of the particular forces by
which they are subordinated. This is in contrast to people in
positions of privilege or authority, whose interest in maintaining the
status quo often fosters (moral and political) blindness with regard to those
institutional structures on which their privileges are based . What this
blindness regarding the epistemic consequences of social location.[30]

means is that, to the extent that we want to have a more objective understanding of the dynamics of

scholars, regardless of their

own particular identities, would do well to attend to the identities and
experiences of people who are located on the lower levels of a
socially and economically stratified society. Unless we have access to alternative
socially significant phenomena like racism, sexism, or heterosexism, all

perspectivesperspectives that are formed through interpretation of personal experiencewe risk being

Since identities are indexical

since they refer outward to social structures and embody social relations they are a
potentially rich source of information about the world we share.
arrested in the process of our intellectual and moral growth.

at: Fracturing/exclusion
Identity politics is not a form of special interest groups but
rather it is a method of exploring difference and personal
experience in order to find commonalities and linkages
between historical memory
Alcoff 5 philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in
epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism (Linda, THE
POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY, 2005,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html) //RGP
The notion that identities lead to separatism or mutually exclusive
political agendas seems to be based on the idea that identities
represent discrete and specifiable sets of interests . Identities, it is assumed,
must therefore operate on the model of interest group politics: a specific set of interests is represented by
lobbyists or movement leaders in order to advance that specific agenda. That agenda may, naturally,
come into conflict with other agendas put forward, or even with the "majority's interests," and thus there

The
notion of interest groups has gotten a very bad reputation in U.S.
political discourse, where "special interest groups" are viewed as
single-mindedly advancing one agenda and as incapable of
considering other points of view or a larger frame of reference in which the "common
will be a conflict that can be addressed through compromise but never completely resolved.

good" is considered. "Special interest groups" have particular pre-set agendas for the promotion of which
reason becomes attenuated to the instrumental calculation of advancing that cause, without the possibility
of calling the cause into question or of modifying it in light of larger public concerns. Minority
constituencies have often been characterized as like special interest groups in these ways. Social identities

that is not what identities

essentially are. On the basis of analyzing a wide sample of identity
based movements, sociologist Manuel Castells' describes identity as
a generative source of meaning, necessarily collective rather than
wholly individual, and useful as a source of agency as well as a meaningful
can and sometimes do operate as interest groups, but

narrative.(Castells 1997, 7). This account accords with the research by Cruz, Encarnacion, and Rosaldo as
well. In analyzing identity based political movements, Castells offers a typology of identity constructions
corresponding to a variety of political agendas and historical contexts. His work provides a model for the
kind of contextual analysis I called for earlier that would analyze the operation of concepts within contexts
rather than assuming that concepts operate uniformly across contexts. I will turn to Castells later on for
more help in developing an empirically adequate description of identity, but here it is enough to note that
Castells' work also strongly counters the view that identity politics always tends toward the same political

In a more
philosophical account based more in his readings of contemporary
literature, Satya Mohanty argues that identity constructions provide
narratives that explain the links between group historical memory
and individual contemporary experience, that they create unifying
frames for rendering experience intelligible, and thus they help to
map the social world.(Mohanty 1997) To the extent that identities involve meaning-making,
forms or that the political relevance of identity always is cashed out in similar fashion.

there will always be alternative interpretations of the meanings associated with identity, Mohanty explains,
but he insists that identities refer to real experiences. Of course, identities can be imposed on people from
the outside. But that is more of a brand than a true identity, or more of an ascription than a meaningful

Identities must resonate with and unify lived

experience, and they must provide a meaning that has some
purchase, however partial, on the subject's own daily reality . Supporting
characterization of self.

Dingwaney and Lawrence Needham

explain identity's lived experience as that which "signifies affective,
even intuitive, ways of being in, or inhabiting, specific cultures ....it is
Mohanty's realism about identity, Anuradha

perceived as experience that proceeds from identity that is given or inherited...but it is also, and more
significantly, mediated by what Satya Mohanty calls social narratives, paradigms, even

although experience is
sometimes group-related (and thus identity-related), its meaning is not
unambiguous. Dingwaney and Needham go on to say, following Stuart Hall, that: What we
have are events, interactions, political and other identifications,
made available at certain historical conjunctures, that are then
worked through in the process of constructing, and/or affiliating
with, an identity. However, to say that identity is constructed is not to say that it is available to
ideologies.'"(Dingwaney and Needham 1996, 21) In other words,

any and every person or group who wishes to inhabit it. The voluntarism that inheres in certain
elaborations of the constructedness of identity ignores, as Hall also notes... certain conditions of
existence, real histories in the contemporary world, which are not exclusively psychical, not simply
journeys of the mind'; thus it is incumbent upon us to recognize that every identity is placed, positioned,
in a culture, a language, a history.' It is for this reason that claims about lived experience' resonate with
such force in conflicts over what does or does not constitute an appropriate interpretation of culturally

This is an
account of identity that holds both that identity makes an epistemic
difference and that identity is the product of a complex mediation
involving individual agency in which its meaning is produced rather
than merely perceived or experienced. In other words, identity is not
merely that which is given to an individual or group, but is also a
way of inhabiting, interpreting, and working through, both
collectively and individually, an objective social location and group
history. We might, then, more insightfully define identities as
positioned or located lived experiences in which both individuals and
groups work to construct meaning in relation to historical
experience and historical narratives. Given this view, one might hold that, when I am
identified, it is my horizon of agency which is identified. Thus, identities are not lived as a
discrete and stable set of interests, but as a site from which one
must engage in the process of meaning-making and thus from which
one is open to the world. The hermeneutic insight is that the self
operates in a situated plane, always culturally located with great
specificity even as it is open onto an indeterminate future and a reinterpretable past, not of its own
different phenomena.(Dingwaney and Needham 20-21; Quoted from Hall 1987, 44-45).

creation. The self carries with it always this horizon as a specific location, with substantive contentas, for
example, a specifiable relation to the holocaust, to slavery, to the encuentro, and so on---but whose

The holocaust is one dramatic

example that not only exists as an aspect of every contemporary
Jewish person's horizon but also of every Christian European . But there
content only exists in interpretation and in constant motion.

will be a difference in the way that these two groups are situated vis-a-vis this narrative: the one as
knowing that he or she could have been the target of the "final solution," and the other as knowing that

Each must react to or deal

with this event in some way, but to say this does not presuppose any
pre- given interpretation either to the event or to its degree of
significance in forming a contemporary identity. There is even a vibrant debate
this event occurred within the broad category of their culture.

over the degree of significance the holocaust holds for Jewish identity today. But, obviously, for some time
to come, it will remain a central feature of the map of our collective Jewish and Gentile horizons.

Identity politics does not necessitate exclusion or separatism

theres zero empirical basis and studies go aff
Alcoff 5 philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in
epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism (Linda, THE
POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY, 2005,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html) //RGP
A More Realistic View The critique of identity politics is based on a certain picture of what
identity is, a picture that begins to become visible once from the three assumptions listed above. This

does not actually correspond to either the actual lived

experience of identity or its politically mobilized forms . In this section I will
picture, however,

begin to develop an alternative account of identity, and will further develop this in the following two
chapters. This alternative account will be used to show the inadequacy of the assumptions behind the

Let's start with the assumption that identities are

inherently exclusive and thus tend toward separatism. When one goes
beyond the anecdotal to the empirical, there is simply not sufficient evidence for
the absoluteness with which the critics of identity have assumed
that strongly felt identities always tend toward separatism . Of course
critique of identity.

there are problems with essentialist constructions of identity and overly narrow formulations of political
alliances, and there are serious problems with the view that identity itself constitutes innocence or

these
positions are the result of certain kinds of construals of identity
rather than the automatic effect of a strong sense of group solidarity
and group cohesiveness. In the National Black Politics Survey conducted
culpability or that only those sharing an identity can unite together in common cause. But

in 1993-1994, the first survey of mass political opinion among African Americans conducted in the United

one of the most striking findings was a very high degree of

belief in what political theorists call "linked fate": the belief that
what generally happens to people in your identity group , in this case your
racial group, will significantly affect your life .(Dawson 1994; Holliman and Brown1997)
States,

Researchers found that over 80% of respondents felt a strong sense of linked fate with African Americans

The idea of linked fate means that African-Americans will

tend to use group data as a kind of proxy to understand how a given
event might impact them or to predict how a given choice might
work out for them as individuals. A belief in linked fate has obvious political ramifications
for alliances, organizing, and one's ability to trust the analyses of political leaders. Yet researchers
also found that less than 40% of their respondents agreed with such
proposals as "blacks should control the economy in mostly black
communities," or "blacks should control the government in mostly
black communities." Even fewer than this (by about a third) agreed with the proposal that
"blacks should have their own separate nation." Thus, the very high level of group
identification that exists among African Americans showed no
evidence of having a correlation to a racially separatist political
approach or a tendency to reject coalition efforts.
as a whole.

at: Precludes reasoning

The idea that identity precludes effective reasoning is a
misunderstanding of identity politics knowledge claims are
necessarily shaped by social location we cannot attempt to
transcend identity instead we should understand identity as
a horizon from which to view the world this allows for
dialogue between differing identity categories that is
necessary for effective knowledge production
Alcoff 5 philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in
epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism (Linda, THE
POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY, 2005,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html) //RGP
There is also an important epistemic implication of identity , which
Mohanty describes as follows: "...social locations facilitate or inhibit knowledge
by predisposing us to register and interpret information in certain
ways. Our relation to social power produces forms of blindness just
as it enables degrees of lucidity."(Mohanty 1997, 234) On this account, identity
does not determine one's interpretation of the facts, nor does it
constitute fully formed perspectives, but rather, to use the hermeneutic
terminology once again, identities operate as horizons from which certain
aspects or layers of reality can be made visible. In stratified societies,
differently identified individuals do not always have the same access
to points of view or perceptual planes of observation. Two individuals may
participate in the same event, but have perceptual access to different aspects of that event. Social
identity is relevant to epistemic judgement, then, not because
identity determines judgement but because identity can in some
instances yield access to perceptual facts that themselves may be
relevant to the formulation of various knowledge claims or theoretical
analyses. As Mohanty and others have also argued, social location can be correlated with certain highly
specific forms of blindness as well as lucidity. This would make sense if we interpret his account as
correlating social identity to a kind of access to perceptual facts: to claim that some perceptual facts are

Social
identity operates then as a rough and fallible but useful indicator of
differences in perceptual access. This kind of hermeneutic descriptive account of social
visible from some locations is correlatively to claim that they are hard to see from others.

identities is more true to lived experience and more helpful in illuminating their real epistemic and political

As a located opening out onto the world, different identities

have no a priori conflict. Aspects of horizons are naturally shared across different positions,
implications.

and no aspect comes with a stable ready-made set of political views. What is shared is having to address in
some way, even if it is by flight, the historical situatedness and accompanying historical experiences of a
given identity group to which one has some concrete attachment. Because of this, and because identities
mark social position, the epistemic differences between identities are not best understood as correlated to
differences of knowledge, since knowledge is always the product in part of background assumptions and

the epistemic difference

is in, so to speak, what one can see, from one's vantage point . What
one can see underdetermines knowledge or the articulation of
interests, but the correlation between possibilities of perception and
identity mandates the necessity of taking identity into account in
values that are not always grouped by identity categories. Rather,

formulating decision making bodies or knowledge producing

institutions. Such an idea is implicit in the concept of representative government. The second
assumption at work in the identity critique that I listed in the last section was the idea that social identity is
inherently constraining on individual freedom because it is imposed from the outside. Judith Butler makes
this point in The Psychic Life of Power: "Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists [i.e.
continues as a subject] always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that
mark a primary alienation in sociality."(Butler 1997, 28) Western thought has developed two sharply

enlightenment calls
on individuals to think for themselves, and holds that autonomy and
thus the capacity of reason (which requires autonomy) necessitates that the
individual be able to separate from all that is externally imposed on
it in order to evaluate and consider these imposed ideas. To the extent that one has features that are
dependent on others, in the way Butler describes for example, this is necessarily a
weakening of the self and a loss of freedom. On the other hand, since
Hegel every major psychological account of the self has placed its
dependence on the other at the center of self-formation. For Hegel, one
conflicting lines of argument over the last 200 years. On the one hand, the

needs the Other to recognize one's status as a self-directing subject in order to create the conditions for
the self-directing activity; one's self image is mediated through the self-other relation not only in terms of
its substantive content but also in terms of the self as bare capacity. For Freud, the other is internalized to
become a central organizing principle for one's desire, one's needs, and one's life plans. Feminist and

on
the one hand freedom requires reason which requires the ability to
separate from the other, while on the other hand, the self is
ineluctably dependent on the other's interpellations . If both of these traditions
postcolonial theories have emphasized the deformations of the self in hostile environments. Thus,

are broadly correct, it would seem that we are doomed to unfreedom, because freedom is defined as
precisely that which we cannot have. I will look at these traditions in some detail in the next chapter. A

The Other is internal to the self's

substantive content, a part of its own horizon, and thus a part of its
own identity. The mediations performed by individuals in processes of self-interpretation, the
hermeneutic account again has advantages here.

mediations by which individual experience comes to have specific meanings, are produced through a foreknowledge or historical a priori that is cultural, historical, politically situated, and collective. In this sense, it

is less true to say that I am dependent on the Other---as if we are

clearly distinguishable---than that the Other is a part of myself .
Moreover, one's relation to this foreknowledge is not primarily one of negation; it makes possible the
articulation of meanings and the formulation of judgement and action. One's relation is better
characterized precisely as absorption, generation, and expansion, a building from rather than an
imposition that curtails preferred possibilities. Whether this fact about the self necessarily limits our
capacity for reason brings us to the final assumption I listed, that the capacity of reason requires a
transcendence of identity. One way to approach this would be to say that transcendence is simply
impossible, and there is abundant evidence that because reasoning in all but deductive arguments (and
even those have to start with a premise) involves phronesis or a judgement call which invokes background

The wholesale
repudiation of identity attachments is often itself a form of tribalism
under cover, as in Schlesinger's argument against multiculturalist "cults of ethnicity" on the grounds
assumptions and values, identity is always operative in reasoning.

of Europe's unique cultural values. When Teddy Roosevelt painted a contrast between "Americanness" on
the one hand, and polyglot hyphenated ethnic associations on the other, he failed to realize that his view

the very notion that

transcendence of identity is necessary for reason is itself a mistake .
Elshtain argues that social identities are and should be private, even though they are obviously
constructed largely through social relations. And she assumes that private identities
cannot follow rules of civility or pursue public ends but are reduced
to narrow self-interest group calculations. For Elshtain, the importance that
of "Americanness" was just as ethnic as those he opposed. However,

Lieberman attaches to his identity might well render him a problematic political candidate. But the

reason why identity is argued to be in conflict with reason is

because identity is conceptualized as coherent, uniform, and
essentially singular, as if what it means to be Mexican American is a
coherent set of attributes and dispositions shared by all members of
the group and essentially closed or stable. If this were the case, and to the extent there are
people who believe this to be the case and who act on that belief, there is indeed a conflict,
since the closed nature of such an identity will close one off to the new possibilities that rational

But once one understands identity as horizon,

an opening out, a point from which to see, there is no conflict . How
could there be reason without sight, without a starting place,
without some background from which critical questions are
intelligible? The mistake made by Richard Rorty and some others like him, who do accept
the importance of cultural identity in setting out background for thought, is to think that,
because horizons can be mapped onto identities, we are bereft of
communication across the expanse, doomed to incommensurable paradigms; in short,
deliberation can make evident.

we will never be able to understand one another, and therefore we will never be able to resolve conflict

This is simply a profound mis-characterization of culture

and of identity, as if they were closed systems with no intersections .
through dialogue.

Of course there will always exist some common ground from which to chart a disagreement. Of course
understanding across wide differences will never be complete, but of course it will always be partially
possible. Moreover, given the dynamic nature of identity, existing gulfs are not likely to remain forever.

The true route to understanding across difference is a literal

movement of place, which will require a change of social institutions
and structures. I have endeavored to make a case in this chapter that there is yet a case to be
made about the nature of identity and its political and epistemic implications. It is certainly not the case
that the work we need to do is finished; there are numerous "authentic" problems of identity that need
attending, but we don't need to overcome as much as to more deeply understand identity. Let me end with

the recognition of
the political relevance of identities is required for, rather than
opposed to, unity and effective class struggle. The attempt to form a
Labor Party in the U.S. in the 1990's was heralded by many of us who maintain hopes in
another example that illustrates the practical implications of my claim that

deconstructing the two-party bloc on U.S. electoral politics. But I decided not to work for the party for the
following reason. The national leadership organization of the party was being organized exclusively
through union membership. Thus, it would be composed only of representatives from unions.11 This might
appear to make sense for a party calling itself a Labor Party. But in reality, not only is it the case that less
than twenty per cent of U.S. workers are organized, but also, a number of nonwhite workers do not
necessarily see their union as the most reliable spokesperson for their needs. They may see the local
NAACP chapter, their church or other community organization based around a shared ethnic identity as

By refusing to seat such

groups at the top, the Labor Party was not effective in breaking from
the traditional white dominance of the Labor movement . By refusing
to recognize the salience of social identities like race and gender,
they undermined the possibility of unity and weakened class
struggle in the United States.
more reliable and also as a place where they have more of a voice.

at: Solidarity
Solidarity still has binaries

Ananth 14 writer, activist, and trauma-therapist currently living in

Toronto [Sriram, M.S. in Public Health and Geography from Johns Hopkins
University, completing PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota,
Conceptualizing solidarity and realizing struggle: testing against the
Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel, Interface, November 2014, JSTOR,
Accessed 7/23/15]//schnall

Yet it is not without contradictions as it is a movement whose

success is primarily predicated on a perceived solidarity emerging
from the traditional power-centers of the Global North. The call
emerges from Palestine but it is focused on garnering solidarity from
those occupying positions of immense socio-economic privilege over
Palestinians, i.e. people and institutions that are not directly impacted
by that specific form of oppression. Most of the key BDS movements that have
emerged out of this call are in places like New York, Toronto, London, San Francisco and other major cities
of the Global North , and organized by residents of these areas who do not face the oppression that

Further, there is a homogeneous notion of "Palestinians"

themselves in the call that does not take into account the
differences of class, gender, and so on among Palestinians. Both of
these points don't make the call any less viable for a transformative political praxis based on
solidarity, but they offer spaces for further examination. Both of the contradictions are
Palestinians face.

strategic for it can certainly be argued that voices from the Global North in solidarity with Palestinians
could play a huge role in making interventions in mainstream discourse in the Global North and,
furthermore, that it might not make any political sense (at least for now) to explicitly talk about differences
among Palestinians in a solidarity-call that is issued in support of their collective liberation. It is in the
spaces of these contradictions that this call offers the richest points for further exploration of the socio-

in-depth research into the

BDS collectives/groups that are emerging from this call is beyond
the scope of this paper, I discursively utilize the call itself to examine questions of solidarity
spatial politics of solidarity and the possibilities it offers. While

and transformative political work by juxtaposing it against selected Marxist and Feminist threads on the

It is crucial to frame the paper at this stage by acknowledging

the existence of potentially problematic binaries here in calls for
solidarity. However, the crucial point to derive from this is that
solidarity automatically means someone in solidarity with someone
else (first binary), "over and against a third" (second binary) as Jodi Dean theorizes (Dean,
1996: 3), and the Palestinian BDS call clearly categorizes. These binaries are important to
understand and acknowledge. They cannot be negated if one is to
understand and practice the idea of solidarity. Solidarity can rarely
be realized by hedging. One has to take a stand with the oppressed,
against the oppressor, often running counter to popular cultural
norms, accepted social practices, and hegemonic political structures.
It's not pure, it's never perfect, but it is the hard work of solidarity.
Nowhere are the imperfections of real-life solidarity work more
apparent than in orthodox Marxist understandings of the same.
same.

Specifically against capitalism, solidarity fails its essentialist

and nationalist

Ananth 14 writer, activist, and trauma-therapist currently living in

Toronto [Sriram, M.S. in Public Health and Geography from Johns Hopkins
University, completing PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota,
Conceptualizing solidarity and realizing struggle: testing against the
Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel, Interface, November 2014, JSTOR,
Accessed 7/23/15]//schnall

Nowhere are the imperfections of real-life solidarity work more

apparent than in orthodox Marxist understandings of the same. Classsolidarity, labor, and proletarian internationalism One of the earliest notions of classsolidarity from an organizational standpoint came with the first
International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) in 1864, declaring in its
General Rules that the need for solidarity was one of the reasons for
the founding of the International. G. M. Stekloff (also known as Yuri Steklov) was an
accomplished historian, journalist, and former high-ranking communist within the party in the Soviet Union.
Writing in 1928 (with likely little foresight that in about 10 years he was going to be killed during the

he saw solidarity as the driving force for the

International, stating that "in its intervention in strikes, the
International had two aims: first of all, to prevent the import of
foreign strikebreakers, and secondly, to give direct aid to all the
strikers by inaugurating collections and sending money." (Stekloff, 1928)
Marx and Engels end the Communist Manifesto they published in
1848 with the now famous slogan "Workers of the World Unite" - a
clarion call for class-solidarity many who haven't even seen the manifesto are likely to
Stalinist purges),

know about and also one that Marx would repeat 16 years later at the end of the inaugural address to the

Inherent in this Marxist notion of solidarity is a

fundamental predication on class, and an assumption that workers
across the world share (or will ultimately share) common material
conditions/interests (Pasture and Verberckmoes, 1998: 7). This was explicitly promoted by Marx
First International.

and Engels when confronting forces within the IWMA that were aligned with the more anarchist politics of

Contrary to the sectarian organization, with their vagaries and rivalries,

the International is a genuine and militant organization of the
proletarian class of all countries, united in their common struggle
against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organized in
Bakunin:

the state. The International's Rules, therefore, speak of only simple "workers' societies" all aiming for the
same goal and accepting the same program, which presents a general outline of the proletarian
movement, while having its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and
the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their
organs and Congresses. (Marx and Engels, 1872: Part IV) Indeed Marx and Bakunin stood on the same side
when it came to the primacy of class as the basis for revolutionary struggle, but differed in their

Class-solidarity as espoused by the

IWMA (which was to be the foundation for Marxist political trends from then on) was thus based
on an assumption of commonality of material interests,
interdependence and a larger goal of fighting for better material
conditions for workers worldwide (Baldwin, 1990: 24-25, 33; Johns, 1998: 255).
Identity outside of (and hence difference within) class-struggles was seen as
understanding and organizational implementation .

either reactionary or at best treated from a pragmatic or tactical

standpoint. Popular movements based on nationalist sentiments are one such case-in-point, which
were "supported when they assisted the socialist cause or were otherwise beneficial to it" especially
when they removed essential causes for discord between workers of different nationalities (Pasture and

national identity was seen as a form of difference

between workers that could lead to potentially pesky class-divisions,
and (like other identities) had to be negotiated with purely on strategic
terms, with the ultimate aim of erasing it. Though class-solidarity is spoken of as a
Verberckmoes, 1998: 3). Thus

singular type of solidarity, one can discern broadly two forms of solidarity in practice. The first is worker-toworker solidarity in the same production site. Here the commonality of material conditions is immediately
evident, with workers theoretically sharing largely similar collective interests (despite identity-based
differences) with regard to the betterment of their working conditions and their relationship to the holders
of capital in that site (Boswell et al, 2006: 4). This type of solidarity might also incorporate other identities
such as race or gender, but ultimately is based on collective interests as workers at that site (Penney,

proletarian
internationalism which assumes, ultimately, a commonality of interests for
workers worldwide and thus a common program for emancipation
resulting in solidarity that saw, for example, non-striking workers in one nation supporting
2006: 156-157; Dixon et al, 2004: 23-24; Hodson et al, 1993: 399-402). The second is

striking workers in another nation through sending aid and preventing foreign strikebreakers (Stekloff,

However, the collective material interests among those in

solidarity with each other are not as immediate but more abstract,
because they are based on a narrative of capital expansion, and as a
counter to bourgeois nationalism where "the working class and
socialism, and indeed internationalism, are effectively presented as
being synonymous" (Pasture and Verberckmoes, 1998: 7). This is all the more
evident when, as often happens, the immediate material interests of
workers in the same site or region trump long-term internationalist
solidarity or when such solidarity degenerates to a paternalistic "labor philanthropy" of northern
activists which runs afoul of true internationalism (Gill, 2009: 677). A crucial issue to add
when class-solidarity as enacted out organizationally is the fact that
"although they intersect and often coincide, the actors who do
battle...and [the] social classes in a more general sense are, in fact,
two different entities" (Baldwin, 1990: 11-12), with often little attention paid
by Marxists to the "organizational and ideological diversity of the
labor movement" (Pasture and Verberckmoes, 1998: 7). It is important to ask in this case when
1928).

class- solidarity is real, when it is manufactured by actors at the organizational helms, and when it

Shelby speaks of how Black Marxists

found it difficult "to get orthodox Marxists to take the black
experience seriously" and get them "to accept that there can be no
interracial working-class until there is racial justice" (Shelby, 2005: 6-8). A
possesses both in varying degrees. Tommie

sociological study on two union-drives with very similar structural locations and institutional paths had
vastly different results, with workers voting overwhelmingly for the union in one location and
overwhelmingly against in the other, primarily because "dynamic interplay between the conditions of work,
past cultural contexts, discourse, and collective action affected the way potential union supporters
understood the meaning of the movement, and whether or not the union made sense as a vehicle of
change" (Penney, 2006: 139, 157). Meredith Tax writes historically about alliances between various women
(a "united front") in the socialist movement periodically occurring in the late 1800s and early 1900s who
"knew there was a dialectical relationship between the movement for women's liberation and the labor
movement, and refused to give up on either," (Tax, 1980: 13-15) while Diane Balser argues that "Feminists
and working women's organizations need to work with the established labor movement...at the same time
that they need to maintain a parallel, independent women's base that will keep the Feminist vision clear
and will provide the external pressure necessary [emphasis mine] to motivate labor's organizing of
unorganized women" (Balser, 1987: 214-215). While it might seem like the above examples are recreating

divisions between the politics of labor and gender, or labor and race, which are certainly not fixed but
rather time/space- specific, what I wish to point out here is the well-understood issue of difference among
workers that a classical Marxist notion of class-solidarity either fails to account for or only does so with the
ultimate idea of subsumption under class struggle. Apart from socioeconomic difference among workers
that labor sociologists have dealt with in great detail, there is another crucial difference pertaining to classsolidarity, namely space, which has been taken up by labor geographers. Rebecca Johns in examining class
and space writes: Workers may have class interests that they share with workers across international
borders, and spatial interests that divide them. In reality, there is a conflict between these interests that
makes building a truly global movement problematic. The conflict between space and class arises because
workers in capitalism's areas of global development have come to expect a standard of living that
accompanies their place in the spatial structures of uneven development. (1998: 255) What all of the
above tells us is that an assumption of class-solidarity brings up the question of
socioeconomic and spatial difference within the working-class, usually resulting in the effacement of the

has deleterious implications both for workers solidarity on

the shop floor as well as the internationalism of labor movements.
Whether it be upholding xenophobic, and racist attitudes towards
migrant workers or aligning with nationalist sentiment, the failure to
address real difference drastically reduces the possibility for real
solidarity/internationalism and ultimately defeats any movement towards
bettering material conditions for workers. It remains consistent with
a class- based political analysis, to not only understand that the
effacement of difference (which can be done even when difference is acknowledged, but
without genuine political engagement) only ultimately weakens the workers
movement, but that, crucially, "respecting diversity does not mean
uniformity or sameness" (hooks, 2000: 58). It stands to reason that, while powerful
and important, there are many failings in such homogenizing
projections of class-solidarity. But where orthodox Marxism (and many other
strains of left thought) faltered, transnational feminist thought valiantly endeavored to advance.
same, which

--Census specific
Eliminating the census is the alt

Hancock 13 Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

at USC [Ange-Marie, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the
Oppression Olympics (The Politics of Intersectionality), Palgrave MacMillan,
December 5, 2013, http://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/2010/BTOO%20Chapter
%201.PDF, Accessed 7/22/15]//schnall

Black female athletes

endure a tremendous amount of surveillance and pressurelviii to
conform to a "Black Lady" public imagelix that is simultaneously
liberating (from the "nappy-headed hos" stereotype) and constraining (preventing
complete autonomy of personal expression, including its heterosexism).
Returning to the example of the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights,

Significantly such athletes experience that pressure from coaches who are themselves often Black women.

Time Dynamics improves Young's original formulation by

acknowledging the accrual of power over time by multiple centers of
power, and Diversity Within recognizes the multiple centers of power
as sites of struggle for the power of self-definition. Whether through
U.S. census categories, discriminatory policies like segregation ,
detention and internment, or incentive-driven policies like affirmative action,
government and its agents play a significant role in the access we
have to freedom of identification and equality of opportunity in the
United States. One final example of the relationship among the five
prongs of intersectionality can illuminate the need for all five
aspects in American political discourse. Millennial-generation driven
identity movements like the Multiracial Movement have sought
complete freedom of self-identification in all aspects of their lives.
From the perspective of Categorical Multiplicity and Time Dynamics it is
important to recognize the politically charged practice of "passing"
and its legacy as part of the resistance to the idea of a multiracial
identity and its goals. First, attention to Categorical Multiplicity,
Categorical Intersection and Time Dynamics would draw our
attention to the role of gender in this movement. When the mothers
of mixed race children in the United States were primarily slaves,
there was little if any activism to re-classify mixed race children as
"mixed" rather than as the legislatively-mandated "black." In the 20th
century, as greater numbers of White mothers have become involved in
the Multiracial Movement,lx the push for a "mixed," "biracial," or
"multiracial" identity choice has emerged from multiracial citizens
and their parents. This move has garnered resistance from
communities of color who envision the shift as a move to share in
the spoils of whiteness, like those who long ago passed into whiteness. Without a
significant commitment to antiracism, it is difficult if not impossible
for the Multiracial Movement to contest this belief, sparking a
closing of ranks to protect allocations of resources tied to the

census, like the 2000 and 2010 "Check the Black box" U.S. census campaigns targeting African
Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African immigrants.lxi Far from influencing just the interpersonal identity

the Multiracial Movement has successfully altered the

administration of the U.S. census for all Americans and shifted
Census-driven debates over allocation of resources toward a
discourse that accepts their perceived reality of who they are. My
point here is not to challenge multiracial people's agency to selfidentify but to reveal the institutional impact of their activism. In
conjunction with the Time Dynamics element of intersectionality theory, Individual-Institutional
Interactions focuses on the idea that just as history (whether recent or centuries ago) plays a
dynamic role in explaining the status quo, so too do government and
cultural institutions play a shifting role as well in the political
chances for new politics.
domain,

Misc aff answers

Strategic essentialism good

Strategic essentialism is good

Phillips, 10 - Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London

School of Economics (Anne, Whats wrong with essentialism?
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/30900/1/What's%20wrong%20with%20essentialism
%20(LSERO).pdf)/jml
Work on feminism and multiculturalism increasingly summons up for
criticism the spectre of cultural essentialism. This runs as a thread through the
essays in a recent collection on Sexual Justice/ Cultural Justice (Arneil et al, 2006). It figures in a mapping
of the terrain as the object of an entire school of post-colonial feminism (Shachar, 2007). And though I do
not much use (or like) the term, I have been willing enough to hear my own work on Multiculturalism

As its deployment in such

works confirms, essentialism is thought to be a bad thing. We do not, on
without Culture described as a critique of cultural essentialism.

the whole, say, that position is essentialist and thats why I like it; or, I have some sympathy with your
argument, but find it insufficiently essentialist. As Ian Hacking (1999:17) puts it, most

people
who use (essentialism) use it as a slur word, intending to put down
the opposition. Yet it is also commonly argued that we cannot avoid at least
some kind of essentialism: that it is a politically necessary shorthand ;
or even, in some arguments, a psychologically inevitable feature of the way
human beings think. Diana Fuss (1989) has argued that the essentialism/ constructionism
binary blocks innovative thinking, providing people with too easy a basis for unreflective dismissal. Gayatri
Spivak (1988) famously wrote of a strategic essentialism that could invoke a collective category like the
subaltern or women while simultaneously criticising the category as theoretically unviable. Though she

the
idea that we may have to take the risk of essence in order to have
any political purchase remains an important theme in feminist theory and
subsequently distanced herself from what she saw as misuses of the notion of strategic essentialism,

politics. From a different direction, it is sometimes said that while essentialist constructs are, in a sense,
category mistakes drawing the boundaries between peoples or things in the wrong place -

there is

not much point rubbishing them as analytically wrong , because once in

existence, they become part of our social reality. Anthropologist Gerd Baumann simultaneously criticises
and accommodates an ethnic reductionism that divided the population he was studying in Southall,
London, into five religio-ethnic groups: Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, African Caribbeans, and whites. The
categorisation was, he argues, seriously misleading, privileging one kind of group identity over others that
were more important, and obscuring the dynamic ways in which group boundaries are drawn and redrawn.
For many of his older interviewees, it was a particular region of the Indian sub-continent (the Punjab,
Gujarat, Bengal), or particular island of the Caribbean, that provided the key terms of self and other
identification; for some of the younger ones, a new Asian identity was being forged that cut across
distinctions between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The static five-way categorisation - widely employed by local
politicians and policy makers, but also by the communities it was describing - reduced or denied this
complexity. It mis-represented culture as an imprisoning cocoon or a determining force (Baumann,
1996:1), encouraged potentially racist stereotypes, and significantly underplayed the multiple and
imaginative ways in which people negotiate their cultural identities. For all his criticism, however,
Baumann does not consider it appropriate simply to dismiss folk reifications as falsely essentialised

Once they have entered into peoples self-definitions, they

assume a life of their own.i Some psychologists, meanwhile, have suggested that
essentialist thinking might just be part of the human condition , meaning
constructs.

that part of the way human beings process complex information is to seek out a deeper property what we
might then term an essence linking the things that look alike. If we conceptualise racist thinking, for
example, as the presumption that visible differences of skin colour or physiognomy indicate something
significant about other characteristics like intelligence or temperament, then maybe part of what sustains
racist thinking is an innate tendency within the way we process information. Drawing on studies of preschool children in Europe and the US, Lawrence Hirschfeld (1996) notes that children as young as four
understand racial types in terms of an underlying essence, attributing differences in skin colour to

something heritable and fixed at birth, while seeing differences in body shape or occupation as more
susceptible to change.ii Though stressing that the use of race markers as a basis for dividing people up
into different kinds may be specific to particular epochs and societies, he suggests that the tendency to
create human kinds, and attribute to at least some of these a nonobvious commonality that all members

He is not
saying it is impossible to eradicate notions of race from our mental
repertoires, but he makes the plausible point that telling children
race is unimportant (as in the advice that we are all the same inside) will not be the
most effective strategy if it fails to accord with a deeply rooted
tendency to think in terms of essentially differentiated groups. The
of the kind share (p196) (an essence, in other words) is built into our conceptual system.

particular features we employ to identify groups will be shaped by history; but the process of identifying a
group by some presumed essence may not be so. Even setting aside the still contested terrain of

it is clear that theoretical analysis depends on at least

some process of abstraction. This typically involves separating out something deemed core
conceptual systems,

from other things deemed peripheral, so appears almost by definition to involve claims about accident and
essence. Sociologists from the days of Max Weber have been encouraged to hone their analytical tools

Analytic philosophers characteristically

develop their arguments by stripping away misleading
contingencies in order to identify essential points. If we take
essentialism to mean the process of differentiating something
deemed essential from other things regarded as contingent, this can
appear as a relatively uncontroversial description of the very
process of thought.
through the construction of ideal types.

at: dng
Deleuzean resistance fails the BwO is opposed to binaries
and retrenches the logic they criticize

Mann, 95 - Professor of English at Pomona (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds,

PostModern Culture 5:3, Project MUSE)//jml
Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself

Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becomingruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The
exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being
shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them
most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's
critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, warmachines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations,
strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The
nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism
that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for
him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite
the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised .
And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean
figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this
from the order of fashion.

dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having
prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have

The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in

real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they
indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth
spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoreticalpolitical devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic,
delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an
instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between
criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a
sufficed in any case.

margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to
some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic
plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only
had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest
reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid,
colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace").

What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude

of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of
multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines
occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is
prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad,
rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its

It is this very fantasy, this very

narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new
spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an
order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To
pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost
critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise).

the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the

dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical
underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back
on itself.

Deleuzes philosophy ignores suffering and makes us inactive

only the aff can activate agency

Hallward, 6 Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European

Philosophy at Middlesex University, London (Peter, Out of This World:
Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, p. 161-162)
Now Deleuze understands perfectly well why most of the objections raised against the great philosophers
are empty. Indignant readers say to them: things are not like that []. But, in fact, it is not a matter of
knowing whether things are like that or not; it is a matter of knowing whether the question which presents
things in such a light is good or not, rigorous or not (ES, 106). Rather than test its accuracy according to
the criteria of representation, the genius of a philosophy must first be measured by the new distribution
which it imposes on beings and concepts (LS, 6). In reality then, Deleuze concludes, only one kind of
objection is worthwhile: the objection which shows that the question raised by a philosopher is not a good

Deleuze
certainly forces the nature of things into conformity with his own
question. Just as certainly however, his question inhibits any
consequential engagement with the constraints of our actual world .
question, that it does not force the nature of things enough (ES, 107; cC WP, 82).

For readers who remain concerned with these constraints and their consequences, Deleuzes question is
not the best available question. Rather than try to refute Deleuze, this book has tried to show how his

limitations of this philosophy of unlimited affirmation. First of all, since it

acknowledges only a unilateral relation between virtual and actual,
there is no place in Deleuzes philosophy for any notion of change,
time or history that is mediated by actuality In the end, Deleuze offers few
system works and to draw attention to what should now he the obvious (and perfectly explicit)

resources for thinking the consequences of what happens within the actually existing world as such. Unlike

Deleuzes constructivism
does not allow him to account for cumulative transformation or
novelty in terms of actual materials and tendencies. No doubt few
Darwin or Marx, for instance, the adamantly virtual orientation of

contemporary philosophers have had as an acute a sense of the internal dynamic of capitalism but
equally, few have proposed so elusive a response as the virtual war machine that roams through the
pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Like the nomads who invented it, this abstract machine operates at
an absolute speed, by being synonymous with speed, as the incarnation of a pure and immeasurable
multiplicity; an irruption of the ephemeral and of the power of metamorphosis (TP, 336, 352). Like any

By posing
the question of politics in the starkly dualistic terms of war machine
or state by posing it, in the end, in the apocalyptic terms of a new
people and a new earth or else no people and no earth the
political aspect of Deleuzes philosophy amounts to little more than
utopian distraction. Although no small number of enthusiasts continue to devote much energy
and ingenuity to the task, the truth is that Deleuzes work is essentially indifferent
to the politics of this world. A philosophy based on
deterritorialisation, dissipation and flight can offer only the most
immaterial and evanescent grip on the mechanisms of exploitation
and domination that continue to condition so much of what happens
in our world. Deleuzes philosophical war remains absolute and abstract, precisely, rather than
creating, a war machine consists and exists only in its own metamorphoses (T~ 360).

directed or waged [menee]. Once a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by

any distinctive space for political action can

only be subsumed within the more general dynamics of creation or
life. And since these dynamics are themselves anti-dialectical if not anti-relational, there can be little
the lines of flight running through it,

room in Deleuzes philosophy for relations of conflict or solidarity, i.e. relations that are genuinely between
rather than external to individuals, classes, or principles.